Jitsu Squad

Jitsu Squad is a 2D beat 'em up game full of action and lots of fun animal characters to play as. If you are looking for a four-player game, wait until there is a patch. If you want a fun single-player experience with great music and loads of action, you can't go wrong with Jitsu Squad.

If you enjoy beat-em-ups, particularly the ones from the late 00s/early 10s era like Scott Pilgrim or Castle Crashers, you’ll probably enjoy what Jitsu Squad has to offer. It’s a bit short on technique and I do wish the unlockable tag team mode was simply there from the start. Four players to go with the four characters would have been nice as well. But it gets a lot more right than it gets wrong, and its big, silly energy is hard to deny.

The main issue, however, is the game's performance, with some levels (such as the train) feeling like they play in slow motion at times. We also experienced crashes a few times throughout our post-patch playthrough — and we had to wait for the day one update thanks to the constant crashing of the unpatched version. Hopefully things will continue to improve over time, but if you happen to get a physical copy of the game, make sure you update it.

At about two hours, Jitsu Squad’s campaign is succinct. Typically, that kind of conciseness is accompanied by a comparable amount of polish. But here, there are a few too many blemishes to recommend the game for Switch owners.

This is a 2D beat’em up style game where you can play coop with up to 4 players. 4 characters are playable and there 8 levels with a boss at the end of each. I’m kind of disappointed. Don’t get me wrong it is also quite fun but only when you’re not in a boss fight. The game has a weird stutter. Like every time you hit or get hit, everything slows down, which is a fine concept but this game does it way too much and makes it feels sluggish and slow. I think it would feel much better if it were a bit faster. Your character also gets stunned for way too long and there’s no chance to recover. That’s why I hate boss fights. You can find yourself in a situation where you just get hit so many times with absolutely no way of getting out of it, which leads to certain death. You can actually hold a button to recover mid air but it just doesn’t work when you get it many many times in a row. Also the movement doesn’t feel good. You can’t jump and move up or down (meaning in the foreground and background). If you want to move up or down you have to be on the ground and walk/dash, cannot be done while mid-air. Makes the game feel even more sluggish. I played the game with the Day One Patch and certain levels, especially the later ones like 5 and up, had poor frame rate. I’ve seen videos of certain textures not loading in and just showing a checkered texture. The patch fixed that but it still happened once in the last level, it was weird but quick and painless. After beating the game once, I decided to beat it again but I unlocked everything with the accessibility option. So tag team mode was unlocked and all the moves as well. I did a solo run with the ability to swap between all the characters at will with the press of a button. That was very fun. I absolutely recommend playing it that way. I can imagine this game being really good in multiplayer. Every character has its own set of moved and special attacks. Every move was also easy to pull off and chained well together. The music was pretty good overall, but one song « Surfing on the Lava », was absolutely amazing since you do surf on the lava when it comes on. The art style is really good looking, the animation is great and the character models look awesome. The game is humorous but it only made me chuckle at best. Cool game, needs more polishing for frame rate and bugs. Bosses were not enjoyable. A few core mechanics really annoyed me. I recommend playing this on a different system for better frame rate, I’ve heard it’s more stable. 7/10