Clan N (Nintendo Switch)

Clan N is developed by the one-person team at Creamative. Hoping to scratch your feudal japan beat em up itch, is this title unique graphic style going to be enough? Read on to find out!. 

Clan N are the Samurai unit at the heart of the title, Akira, Reina, Daiki and Tarou are your playable characters, all boasting different weapon attacks and of course, Akira is a Ninja so automatically the coolest!.

There is a bad guy in town and it’s up to Clan N to do what they do best, beat up baddies, eat floor meet, and chuck shurikens everywhere. This 80/90s revival wave in gaming is making me live my best life at the moment.

I assume there is a little more story to the title but it’s a beat em up, point me in the direction of a bad guy and it gets a smack. Unless there is a real narrative focus I’m likely going to skip any cutscenes and just get onto what I came to do.

Visually Clan N reminds me so much of a title called The Last Ninja from the Commodore 64, it’s got such a usually minimalistic art style yet manages to capture everything so well. 

It offers a zoomed out camera perspective to really help you take in each of the 7 environments and allows for a much easier time platforming and navigating too. It may be a little jarring at first but you’ll accustom to it quickly.

On the audio side of this cassette, everything is fine. Nothing particularly outstanding but the music is decent and the sound effects crisp. Sounds perfectly arcadey and that’s what we need here!.

Now gameplay Clan N is about as genre standard as you can get. Now I love beat em ups, I’ll also be the first to admit they can get insanely repetitive quickly. Clan N has some of the longest stages of any beat em up I’ve ever screen scrolled in, this means repetition sets in much quicker because the genre trick of breaking things up with a new location isn’t as prevalent. 

Now to combat this there are quite a few mini-games throughout the main game, while small fun diversions don’t break up the monotony enough and you really feel the grind after a level or two.

Another critical aspect for me was the feedback in combat. I NEED that crunch, recently reviewed beat em ups like The Takeover and Streets of Rage 4 nailed the feedback whereas Clan N feels like I’m slapping people with a wet fish.

I wanted to love Clan N purely for its visual style and in small doses, I did have fun with the title. Failing some of the essentials of Beat Em Ups meant it was less of a love and more of like. While there isn’t anything particularly damning about the game now it has received a patch that addressed crashing issues, I just never felt myself enjoying the game as much as others of the genre. I do love how it looks though and hope to see more from the developer, it’s a solid first attempt to crack a rather marmite genre.