Post by: John Rairdin on November 18, 2025, 09:04:36 AM
Great visuals struggle to save clunky gameplay.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/reviewmini/73363/house-fighters-total-mess-switch-review-mini
House Fighters: Total Mess is an aerial combat game in which you control a small toy plane against opposing toys. It's a genre and aesthetic that I absolutely love. Unfortunately, extremely limited gameplay and some rough controls don’t quite live up to the charm of the premise.
Outside of the final mission, the entirety of the game takes place within a single house. Across a variety of missions, you’ll have access to different areas of the house, but the entire thing exists as one continuous environment. Slightly altered layouts for objects within the house and a slow drip-feed of new rooms keeps things fresh for the first chunk of the campaign, but by halfway through you’ll have seen everything. Most missions amount to flying to a certain spot in the house before engaging against enemy planes and turrets. Now and then a level will make use of some one-off mechanics. For example, one mission required me to pick up ingredients for a cake and drop them into a mixing bowl. Moments like that give a glimpse into a much more compelling avenue for House Fighters’ gameplay. However, they are the exception not the rule.
As you progress you’ll unlock new planes and visual customization options. A lot of the customization unlocks are found by exploring the house outside of your main objective for each mission. Unfortunately flying around as your little toy plane doesn’t feel particularly good. Movement is jerky with a camera that is locked tightly behind your plane with no sense of fluidity. The camera focuses on your plane itself rather than where it is going which makes tracking enemies feel clumsy.
What I can unquestionably complement House Fighters on is its visual design and technical setup. The game actually has graphics settings for low, medium, and high visuals. By default, the graphics are set to medium which is likely your best option if playing on an original Switch. However, if you’re playing on Switch 2, you can swap to the high settings with no loss in performance. The high preset adds highly improved light maps that significantly improve the visuals of the game. The low setting meanwhile appears to change resolution settings but even on original Switch hardware I didn’t see much of a reason to use it.
House Fighters: Total Mess is a great concept, but it just never quite executes on it as well as it should. The single player campaign is the only mode and only took me an hour or two to complete. Now and then some more interesting level design will peek through but for the most part this is a forgettable shooter wrapped in a very charming shell that ends just when it is starting to get interesting.
