Let’s! Revolution! (Switch) Review

Let’s! Revolution! is a beautiful marriage of Minesweeper and a roguelite in a package that looks and sounds great.

Let’s! Revolution! Looks Complicated, But It’s Not 

Let’s! Revolution! looks complicated on its face, but trust me: it’s simple when you play. Start each run by selecting a hero; you’ll only have one at the start. Your mission is to hunt down the King. You’ll chase him across ten boards in different biomes.

Each board is comprised of a series of hidden tiles. Move your character from tile to tile to uncover what’s underneath the next tile. Either your tile will be a blank with a number in the top left corner or you’ll flip over a road. Much like Minesweeper and the mines, danger only lies on the road tiles. The number on a safe tile indicates how many road tiles are around the spot that you’re currently standing on. A zero on the space that you’re standing on means that any adjacent tile is completely safe. However, a six-tile will spell danger in almost any direction.

You can exit a board by finding a dead end where the King is hiding. However, you’ll only maximize rewards if you fulfill certain character conditions. Sometimes, you’ll be asked to reveal all tiles on the board and defeat the enemies under those tiles and sometimes you’ll be asked to minimize tile flips or avoid road tiles altogether. In any case, enemies that are revealed on the board have timers to show how many moves away you are from an attack. Regardless of your selected character, if you reveal a slew of enemies, you’ll be in real trouble, really fast. As enemies attack you, you’ll lose hearts – when you run out of hearts, it’s game over and you’ll be forced to start again.

Defending Yourself in Let’s! Revolution!

How can you defend yourself against the board and the enemies that are hiding ready to pounce? With your hero abilities, weapons and items of course!

When you start your run, your character will come with a base set of abilities. Some classes are more focused on offense and others are more focused on stealth. All core character abilities will use varying levels of energy. As you play, you will gather more of these abilities at The Smith. Some of these abilities will cost a lot of energy and do a lot of damage. Others will take less energy and will allow you to move differently across the board or reveal things about the board. Beyond gathering these new abilities, you will be able to upgrade your abilities at Gemma’s Gym, increasing their power, and range or decreasing their use of energy.

Beyond these powers, you may purchase secondary weapons that can be replenished (like throwing knives or a bow and arrow, for instance). You may also have buffs and potions in your possession or even abilities with downsides (like replenishing your energy at the expense of revealing enemies on the board). Finally, your character has passive abilities and timers to watch, varying the ways that you have to manage your energy or the board that’s in front of you.

A Beautiful Rythtm

The thing that I love the most about this one is when you enter a zen-like state and begin to make your way through boards like Neo in The Matrix. Once you understand the way to read a board (which took me about an hour) and how you have to play with your character’s passive abilities and maneuvers, you can focus on the strategy of the boards in front of you. The pastel art and character designs help along the meditative trance that you’ll enter. They’re fun to look at and all the small love and flourishes that come out in the animation are top-notch. I’m happy to report that the Switch version of the game that I played had no issues from a technical standpoint.

The sound and music, which Antfood produced, were excellent and the short soundtrack is a highlight here. It outshines a lot of games in its category. Inspired by late 90s sound cards, this soundtrack features a lot of fun synths. They’ll help you stay focused and enter a meditative zone as you play.

Not The Most Replayable, Still A Great Package

My only complaint with this one is around longevity for some players. After playing for about five hours, I had beaten the game four times with two different characters. During that time, I had unlocked about 50% of the in-game content. You unlock content by collecting green gems on the boards in each run. Since these gems are hidden on roads, it’s just tougher/you’re not incentivized to collect them if you’re playing as a stealthy character. I wish progression wasn’t gated behind the collection of gems.

Some characters also won’t be as fun to play for some people depending on what sort of characters you typically choose in some games. You can continue to New Game+ with your favourite characters, but there’s a limit to how many times you can play without it becoming much too difficult.

This one won my Game of the Show at PAX East 2024 for a reason, it’s an incredibly fun puzzle game to play. I found myself looking at this one in screenshots months after the PC version had been released thinking that this might be a game I wanted to play. It may look a little complicated on its face but if seeing the screenshots has you curious, do yourself a favour and play Let’s! Revolution!.

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Final Score: 8.5/10

The game’s publisher provided a code for the game for this review.

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If you’re looking for an in-depth interview on this one, check out the PAX East 2024 episode of the Left Behind Game Club. In the episode, we speak to both Michael Highland and Spencer Casey about the game.