Smash Boats (Switch)

Relive the fun of playing with your tub toys as a kid with Smash Boats on the Switch.  Charge into other toy boats to sink them in water filled arenas like bathtubs, kiddie pools, sinks, toilets, and more!  The game has actually been out for more than a year, but it finally got an update with a co-op and competitive party mode, which it sorely needed.

In the single player mode, which is mostly what I played, you’ll start out each stage by sinking all the boats in five waves.  To do this, you’ll ram into them to whittle down their hit points, all the while avoiding their attacks.  If you lose all your hit points, you’ll sink and must start the stage over again.  You can ram into boats with one button, and ram backwards with another.  You can also hold down the shoulder button for a quick turn and press another button to submerge for avoiding attacks.  Another button activates a special attack, which is different for each boat.  One may use a long range ramming attack, another a short range chomping attack, a spin move, and more.  When you use a move, you must endure a short cooldown period, so make each charge count!

During the waves, boats with stars above them may appear.  Make sure to ram into those and collect the stars because that’s how you unlock new stages and boats.  Other boats have toy blocks on them, and if you ram into them to spell out SMASH you can get a special weapon.  Sometimes you can enter bonus stages where you must collect as many stars as you can while avoiding chattering teeth in the bathroom vanity sink or floating turds in a toilet.  Yeah you read that right.  And again, they finally added a co-op and competitive party modes (they’re pretty self explanatory), which this game should’ve had in the first place.  Overall the game is fun but it gets repetitive and too hard pretty quickly.

Kid Factor:

Smash Boats is rated T for Teen with an ESRB descriptor of Crude Humor.  They probably could’ve gotten away with an E rating if it wasn’t for the fact that one of the bonus stages has you floating around in a toilet trying to avoid turds.  They even have bits of corn in them and the water is yellow and everything!  Oh gross!  But you know kids will laugh so hard at that.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, but not necessary just to play.  Younger gamers may have trouble with the harder single player mode, though.

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