Biped by developer NEXT Studios and publisher NEXT Studios, bilibili, META Publishing—Nintendo Switch review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutesWith the beacons having gone offline on the planet Earth, it's up to a team of bipedal robots named Aku and Sila to repair them. Having literally only two legs and feet to work with, our brave repair bots are going to have to have to work together to throw switches, grab blocks and peddle rafts through canyons in order to get the job done.
Susan reviewed Biped back in April with the help of her partner and moving into late June I can now say that I've done the same. Breaking out the other joycons, Izzy took control of one robot while I took control of the other. This leads into a big thing that stuck out to me with Biped. It's accessible to those that don't play often as she’s not a gamer nor does she game other than Mario Party and the occasional Mario Kart match with some of our friends. She'll watch me off to the side but it's not her thing and the fact that Biped can ramp up it's challenges? I'll be honest I think she more often had a better grasp of moving our robots two legs than I did.
The premise for Biped is really simple. You have two robots that have to be moved with the left and the right joysticks. The left joystick moves the left leg and the right joystick moves the right leg. Extremely easy in theory… but let’s just say that I quite literally at times had no idea which leg I was moving as I had my robot walking backwards all while we laughed about it. And therein lies a lot of the charm with Biped. The creators have made adjustments that you can walk forwards or backwards and it doesn’t matter which way you move which keeps the difficulty down as having to use both legs to move around is already a lot harder than a simple joystick.
Split into a series of visually diverse stages, each stage will increase the level of difficulty of the challenges that lay between you and the beacon at the end of the stage. At first, it’ll just be getting across. Then, it’ll be getting across where the platform will change colours if someone steps on it. So if Blue takes a step, then the next has to be Red, then Blue, and then Red, until both have crossed. Later, you’ll have to do this while also avoiding barriers that will push you off and then after that barriers and objects that you have to step over. And this is just the colored platforms!
To not spoil the fun, as Biped should really be picked up, there is no “I can just take care of this myself” challenges. EVERYTHING is designed as a coop experience from moving tubes to walk on to handing off blocks to one another as you move forward. It does get “harder” but it’s never anything that can be viewed as too hard to pull off. We played Biped in about two sittings and that allowed us to figure everything out and pass through the standard levels. Once each normal stage has been cleared, it’ll also unlock a much more challenging stage which will truly put your skills to the test.
Even with the challenge stages, Biped is not very long but in this particular case, it’s not an issue. You can always go back to do better on a stage. You can always try this out with someone else and it’ll be a different experience as no two people really work the same way. There’s plenty of replayability though it would be nice to see either a level editor or perhaps new stages down the line.
So overall, Biped is an amazing coop experience for you and someone else. The stages are fun, the levels are appropriately challenging, and the graphics are super cute with fun music to add to the atmosphere. Being on the Switch also helps for you to bring it along as long as you’re being safe in the current climate that we find ourselves in with Social Distancing.
Score: 8.5 / 10
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