Lynked: Banner of the Spark is a very cute game that tries to do a lot and narrowly threads the needle at making all of the fun genre fusion concepts work in tandem. You control your create-a-character as they descend upon a barren world overrun by robots and quickly settle into the gameplay loop that blends light action RPG combat and more in-depth town management. You complete short combat missions that unlock new parts of your town or accrue resources to use on items within the town. Then you go back to town and talk to all your robot friends to complete quests, build houses, and all sorts of other Animal Crossing-y stuff.

It’s a good enough gameplay loop. I got sucked into talking to these cute little robots and making sure I got their various workshops back in action and then building out an adorable little hamlet where we all had cool houses. The engagement throughout the town is a lot more mission-focused, though you can futz around with some creative elements to build the look of your village. It doesn’t go deep enough to fully scratch the itch of a life sim, but it builds up over time to feel like a well thought-out part of the whole.

I kept waiting for the combat to build up more over the course of the game but it never fully did. The missions you go through are primarily multi-stage kill rooms where you must destroy robots to progress. The combat is a lot of dodge-rolling and combo attacking and you usually don’t have too many options at your disposal in the heat of the battle. You have the dodge-roll and basic attack as well as a few special abilities that work on cooldowns and refills. It just doesn’t feel as crisp rolling around and attacking, especially because hitboxes are a little difficult to judge. What combat has going for it is mostly outside of the missions. Being able to go from a lumbering hammer to fast-paced claws or fists can tweak how you approach battles. The upgrades, which are doled out in pseudo-roguelike fashion at the end of a stage in a mission, can level up your weapon or add a mod that makes it so you have a chance of lighting a robot on fire or poisoning them. The coolest twist that happens is a few chapters into the game, you can bring villagers into battle with you. That’s neat and does a good job of tying what you’re doing in both halves of the game together, but it doesn’t make the moment-to-moment combat much stronger. As I said, I kept waiting for this to turn a corner into something more in-depth and more interesting but it never really did.

The combat can get built up by the variety of workshops and upgrade stations throughout your town. You can make it so your weapons start with certain benefits at the start of a mission instead of waiting for an upgrade, for one. But also a lot of the ways to make the combat a little bit more engaging typically requires you to grind through the combat to collect resources (or stumble upon the resources in your town).

A hook of Lynked is that there is online co-op. You earnestly could have fooled me because unfortunately the online on Switch 2 has been barren. The biggest change to playing the game in the online mode is that if you happen to wake the game up from sleep and don’t properly connect to the internet immediately, you’ll be kicked out of the game entirely in a manner that made me confused as to why it was even happening initially. If you’re playing on Switch in handheld, do yourself a favor and just select the offline mode at the start to avoid this malady. You can make use of GameShare on Switch 2 to play this game with a friend online, which is neat at least. The Switch 2 version also includes some performance enhancements and the game certainly looks nice at 60 fps on the console. Unfortunately, I ran into a handful of technical issues playing through the game

Lynked: Banner of the Spark is a totally fine attempt at blending an action RPG with a life sim foundation. The town building aspects are stronger than the action RPG component, but even if the combat left something to be desired, it’s an enjoyable game. The online interaction is largely a disappointment, especially because it’s an online structure that seems adversarial to the handheld half of the Switch. This won’t go down as a memorable Nintendo Direct shadowdrop, but it’s a game that has some heart, even if it gets lost in some of the repetition and online emptiness.