Wildfire Reviews
Here's the thing about WILDFIRE: This game is fun. The art is excellent. The music is solidly okay. The charm and memorability is fleeting and lacks the kind of variety of gameplay experiences you might have playing other games. This game will force you to think outside of the box. However, I am unsure if most will want to complete the game twice to fully unlock everything. Playing on the Switch brings its own unique challenges, like the issues with lag and aiming with the Joy-Con joysticks. If you and your friend played this game separately, you most likely will have had the same type of experience.
There are some great ideas in Wildfire, such as the way you can handle the elements to interact with the environment around you, but what we ended up getting instead was a shallow cinematic platformer with some janky controls, repetitive level design, and lots of framerate issues.
The frequent slow down significantly hurts my ability to recommend Wildfire on Switch. The back half of the game features a near constant lag that had me hoping for the experience to end. There is fun to be had still; I liked going back through early levels trying to puzzle out how to make it through while completing the optional challenges. However, the amount of joy I gained from those experiences doesn't negate the fact that Wildfire just runs poorly on Switch. If you're interested, it's probably better to play this on PC.
Wildfire has a huge amount of potential, but it's let down by frustrating trial-and-error gameplay, clunky controls and poor level design.
There are levels where everything works together to create some interesting challenges, though these are not frequent enough to make Wildfire stand out from the crowd.
It’s the underlying systems which let everything else down, and which felt incoherent to me. Some games only become fun once you work out what they expect from you, and I spent most of my time with Wildfire wondering if I was playing it wrong. Maybe I was, but if there was a fun way to play it, I never found it.