Glitch Busters: Stuck on You is a one to four player, cooperative, platforming shoot-’em-up from developer Toylogic. In a far-flung future, you play as four AI Tubers that can only be described as emoji-faced Smarties with magnets for legs. They’re on a mission to cleanse Interland of Badface’s bugs and glitches, with the aim of restoring YohTube to its former glory.
Glitch Busters is level-based and sees your squad navigating platforms, solving simple button-pushing puzzles, and vanquishing hordes of glitches across a variety of environments, from a fiery volcano to a cyber cityscape. You can switch between each of the four jelly beans on the fly, commanding them to stack up or unstack for pushing buttons and dealing increased damage.
Overall, the controls feel very unresponsive. Getting the AI-controlled beans to follow commands takes an age, and sometimes doesn’t even work due to one getting stuck on the environment. To make matters worse, the friendly AI isn’t good enough for you to complete the game solo. They’re constantly taking damage from enemies, getting stuck, or just falling to their demise, forcing a restart. The enemy AI is also extremely basic — they’ll slowly move straight towards you, and don’t feel like a threat until you’re met by at least a dozen at once.
As you progress, you’ll be competing with your fellow Skittles as to who can rack up the most Likes, collectable coins littered throughout each stage. These are used in the shop to unlock new enemies, new weapons, and pick-ups. This is great until you reach a blocked story level that’s unplayable until you collect enough Likes to unlock the enemies required for the level. This occurs several times throughout the four to six hour campaign and seems like a very unnecessary barrier.
Glitch Busters’ presentation also leaves a lot to be desired, with a bright, cartoony visual style that looks unfinished. Many of the models look very two-dimensional even though they’re in a 3D world; it’s very jarring and looks completely out of place. The sound is equally irritating, with the characters making the most horrendous noise when talking. It was so unbearable we had to switch it off in the settings. The music, although upbeat, isn’t any better with a football chant-sounding tune on constant loop. It makes navigating the clunky user interface, with its sluggish cursor, that much more frustrating.
If you can overlook the glaring issues Glitch Busters has with its poor presentation and basic AI, then there’s fun to be had with friends in the form of some enjoyable boss fights and vehicle-based levels later into the campaign. However, without a buddy by your side, it’s not worth trawling through the rest of the game with a bunch of useless peas to get there.
