Put your friendship to the test
I couldn’t recommend Snipperclips enough when it launched alongside the Nintendo Switch and, to this day, it’s still one of my favorite games for the system. It’s creative, lighthearted, approachable, and gives you just enough room to be a nuisance — all great qualities for a cooperative puzzle-platformer.
If I had anything to complain about, it was that things wrapped up before I was ready to say goodbye. Thankfully and somewhat surprisingly, SFB Games and Nintendo have revisited Snipperclips with Cut It Out, Together! DLC that adds two more worlds, three more competitive Blitz games, and an art-creating Stamp mode, along with the ability to play the original levels as randomly-shaped characters. It’s a good range of content and so long as you have someone to share it with, this is another hearty recommendation.
Snipperclips: Cut It Out, Together! DLC (Nintendo Switch)
Developer: SFB Games
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: November 10, 2017
MSRP: $9.99 ($29.99 for the Snipperclips Plus bundle)
The bulk of Snipperclips: Cut It Out, Together! stems from the two new worlds, Cosmic Comics and Toybox Tools, which bring a total of 30 levels. For reference, the core game has 45 main levels. So this is a sizable bump.
There are some repeating puzzle concepts — like trimming your characters so they slot together to form a specific shape, or slicing apart background art so only the correct portions remain — but there are plenty of new ideas, too. My personal favorites involved acid; one level had me safely escorting a chicken under a continuous waterfall of body-melting liquid, while another was about moving acid over to a precariously-placed creature using a hand-made “container” that could hold the foul stuff.
Other highlights include loading, aiming, and firing a cannon at high-up targets; steering a flying broom around with an in-game joystick; and helping color-coded balls that fall from the sky to land in specially-marked zones. The goal of these and other puzzles is usually clear within seconds, but how you solve them is another matter, much less communicating well enough to make it happen. That’s the fun of it, though. Sometimes, you cut your characters just so, and it all works elegantly; other times, you finagle your way to victory and you’re utterly relieved it somehow worked.
Six of the new puzzle levels are expanded upon and made much more difficult for Party mode, the game’s two- to four-person mode. If you’re anything like me, you’ll load them up, take one long look, and go “we have to do that?!” While I was able to move through the main levels at a brisk (but not too brisk) pace, these are going to take more planning and better execution. If there’s only two of you playing, you’ll each be responsible for two characters, and that sure can get tricky.
Rounding out the DLC is the free-form Stamp mode, which lets you hover around the screen to paint at your leisure, and three new Blitz game types (Territory, Roundup, and Keepaway), effectively doubling Snipperclips‘ competitive mode. Territory inevitably devolves into a spamfest to mark the most ground with your color, but the other two are decent additions. Roundup has you capturing bugs, while Keepaway is all about balancing a ball on your head as streams of water shoot across the screen to knock it off and your opponent tries to trip you up. Lose three balls, and that’s the match.
Perhaps best of all, Snipperclips has been updated to support more control options, so you’ll no longer have to scrunch your fingers while wielding a Joy-Con. The Pro Controller and Joy-Con Grip are much more comfortable not just for basic platforming maneuvers, but for rotating your character too. And with more control choices, it’s easier to assemble a full crew for the Party and Blitz modes.
The Snipperclips DLC makes an already sweet game even sweeter. Most of the new levels slot perfectly into the existing package, bringing fresh ideas that feel right at home without covering too much of the same ground as before. If you’re picking up the all-in Snipperclips Plus bundle, it can be hard to tell where the original game ends and the DLC begins — it’s that seamlessly integrated.
[This review is based on a retail build of the DLC purchased by the reviewer.]
