When people think of strategy games, more often than not these days the focus tends to be on the challenging end of the spectrum. Between roguelike deckbuilders, and challenging tactical titles, the Switch has plenty of games that will test your mental mettle. If, however, you’re looking for something a little more friendly, but still satisfying, there aren’t quite as many options out there. Botworld Odyssey is thankfully now here to help, delivering what’s more often a fun experience than a tough one, with plenty of room for you to set yourself up for success in a variety of ways.

Mixing together elements of creature collecting and management with real-time strategy battles absolutely gives gameplay a bit of a different feel. You’ll set up your roster of robots, each generally with their own particular strengths to leverage, position them as strategically as you’re able in the battle circle, and then let them battle it out roughly as their bot type dictates. This certainly stacks importance on trying to be sure to position each of them effectively in relation to enemy bots or obstacles, as putting one of your more vulnerable ranged bots in close proximity to some enemy bruiser will put your plans at risk. Thankfully you’ll have a variety of skills available to you on a cooldown that you can use to help out. Whether you’re lobbing missiles, shielding a key bot up briefly, or using some other sort of buff, smart use of your skills can make a critical difference in your success if things start to go south on you. 

Similar to what you’d see in other games of this sort, you’ll move from area to area, working on tasks to help the locals, making runs to gather resources, and battling in a variety of situations to help build up your squad. In general there’s not much in the way of pressure trying to push you forward, so one great aspect of the game is that if you’d like, you can take things a bit slowly to do some grinding to beef up your core bots, and then set yourself up for success for a bit as you pull less experienced ones into the mix. You could probably just steamroll with a certain dedicated squad most of the time, but depending on what the composition of the enemies you’ll face may be you’ll absolutely want to have at least a secondary roster to work with. That will at least provide for you being able to mix and match your strategies as needed. Overall, I just found this to be a refreshing, approachable, and friendlier-than-average mix of RPG and strategy elements that still remained satisfying.