Tokyo Scramble is a rather messy stealth game that feels undercooked in several areas. The performance is subpar, the mechanics feel unrefined, and the characters and story are straight-up bizarrely written. Though there are some cool creature designs and some potential for intriguing set pieces, the full package never comes together as you’d hope.
Tokyo Scramble
Developer: Adglobe
Price: $30
Platforms: Nintendo Switch 2 (reviewed)
MonsterVine was provided with a Switch 2 code for review.
Stealth games are a risky business. The satisfaction that comes from narrowly avoiding detection by a powerful enemy is something you can’t find in any other genre, but executing the sneaking itself poorly can make for an extremely frustrating and repetitive game. Unfortunately, the recently released Tokyo Scramble is one such title, despite brandishing some promising ideas here and there.
The stealth mechanics that serve as the very core of Tokyo Scramble are more irritating than compelling, especially since you die in a single hit. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but essentially, as soon as you get seen by a creature, you’re guaranteed to be hit within seconds. This is partially because you can only sprint for a brief amount of time before your heart rate rockets up and leaves you barely able to move, which provides you with very little variation in how you move.
It’s also incredibly hard to tell what the Zinos (Tokyo Scramble’s nickname for the dinosaur-like creatures) are going to do while you try to sneak by them. There would occasionally be patterns, but they were rarely consistent, leading to extensive periods of waiting for a moment that seemed opportune for dashing. And if you’re wrong in choosing said moment, you have to do the whole sequence over again from the beginning. This can lead to many repetitive sections, which wear you down rather than empowering you to feel like a professional sneak.
There are cool ideas present in Tokyo Scramble, though. A main one has you using different apps on your phone to do things like blind Zinos or distract them with environmental objects like escalators and forklifts. It doesn’t always work properly, but this is certainly the most enjoyable and inventive part of the game. Similarly, the creature designs are solid, with the praying mantis-like creatures standing out as my personal favorite.
One of the strangest things about Tokyo Scramble is its narrative. The premise of an earthquake in Japan that forces Anne, the main heroine, to find her way out of a subterranean area filled with dinosaurs is quite fun. The weird parts lie more with the characters and their dialogue. Anne never seems more than mildly bothered by her situation, despite being in an underground maze filled with unheard of creatures that kill everything in sight. She makes regrettably flat quips that feel straight out of the early 2010s and seem tonally disconnected from what’s going on.
Anne’s friends are even stranger. As you progress through Tokyo Scramble, you receive text messages from a few of her pals that provide you with additional story details. For whatever reason, her friends aren’t all that concerned about their friend being plunged into a hellish, primeval labyrinth and instead either dump clumsy exposition about their past with Anne or straight up berate her for planning to move back to America…you know, if she should survive the dinosaur purgatory she’s found herself thrust into. The whole cast is a fascinating mix of narcissistic and oblivious, which I guess could sort of add to the B-movie feel.
Tokyo Scramble is littered with technical issues.
There are also unfortunate performance issues throughout Tokyo Scramble, which is wild given the games the Switch 2 is capable of handling. Zino animations become super choppy once they’re slightly in the distance, and the frame rate stutters pretty often. The visuals are alright on their own, but they’re not high enough quality for this sort of inconsistency in performance to be justifiable.
The Final Word
Tokyo Scramble has some neat ideas, but the frustrating gameplay, choppy performance, and poorly-written characters hold it back from succeeding as a stealth game. I hope the more inventive aspects of the game can make a return in a more polished title down the line, as Tokyo Scramble sadly isn’t worth buying for those alone.
MonsterVine Rating: 2 out of 5 – Poor
