Bud Spencer & Terence Hill – Slaps And Beans 2 (Switch)

Powah Dunk | October 12, 2023 | Review | No Comments

Bud Spencer & Terence Hill – Slaps And Beans 2 as the name implies is a sequel to the original “Slaps and Beans” game, after hearing good things about that we jumped at the chance to look at its sequel, worth a look? Let’s find out!

Being a good sequel Bud Spencer & Terence Hill – Slaps And Beans 2 follows directly on from the original and sees our dynamic duo turning up shipwrecked on the coast of Africa. It wouldn’t be much of a game if they just sat around, waiting to be saved and thus end up on an insane journey that starts out with them protecting a village from a tyrannical group and running up and down a boatful of bananas to stop it from sinking, the story just only escalates from there in this lengthy campaign.

Sadly I’m not familiar at all with Bud Spencer & Terence Hill but this game has me mighty interested in looking into them, it’s fit to burst with slapstick comedy, insane scenarios and just some good old fashioned comedy from the 1970s/80s, it’s not life changing and thought provoking but I never thought I’d find myself giggling as much as I did to a side scrolling beat em up!

Graphically Slaps and Beans 2 has the visual style of an old 90s point and click adventure which makes it really unique visually within the beat em up genre. Animations are quite stiff and sadly the performance just doesn’t hold up on the Nintendo Switch and when the camera zooms out and there are a lot of enemies on screen the frame rate painfully tanks hard.

At any time during the game you can switch between the characters with a press of a button, the other character is A.I controlled unless you’re lucky enough to have someone else ready to couch co-op the game with you, sadly no online options.

There are sections where you need to use each of the character’s special attributes to cross an area, one is more spritely than the other whereas one can break boxes. It adds an extra dimension to the multiplayer and has some genuinely fun moments.

You have weak and heavy attacks as well as a special attack and grabs, the use of weapons and even team moves come in to play making this quite a robust brawler, sadly the feedback on combat isn’t the best and it feels like you’re cutting through melted butter, something I assume the developers knew due to a toggle option being “enemies flash when hit”.

Sadly Beat Em Ups live and die on that particular hill and despite having plenty of fun mini games to help break the grind of the genre up, poor feeling combat makes an already lengthy playthrough feel like a slog.

While I enjoyed Slaps and Beans 2 I feel my lack of familiarity with the source material held it back and my issues with the combat meant I couldn’t enjoy it as a pure beat-em-up. If your a fan of Bud Spencer and Terrance Hill and fancy a comical but quite janky brawling affair give this one a shot.