Our sixth round of Splatterbot ends with my dad yelling at the TV (more accurately, at me) as I laugh gleefully in his face—which is certainly the sign of a good couch co-op.

Splatterbot is a local miniplayer party game created by Australian indie developer studio Hey! Kookaburra. It features a 2-4 player versus computer (or CPU) free-for-all and team modes. In each of the six levels, you play as a robot vacuum cleaner who leaves behind a trail of paint—the goal is to cover as much of the ground with your colour as you can before the timer runs out. There are little boosters you can acquire that make your robot move faster, leave a wider paint trail, or set off a paint explosion.

The controls and gameplay are very simple. I can imagine it being the kind of game you would set up on your Switch as easy party entertainment—it’s a game that, like Mario Kart, party guests could pick up and learn in a couple of minutes, get addicted to for a few rounds, and then hand over the remote.

However, I found myself wanting more from the game a few rounds in. While the boosters add a touch of variation to each round, making it less predictable who’s going to win, every round is otherwise the same. And because each new location, despite being called a ‘level’, doesn’t have to be unlocked, there wasn’t much incentive to win each round or keep playing once all the levels had been played.

For the most part, each level feels relatively similar to play—the Hexagon level, where the robots bounce off the sides of the ring and get a brief speed boost was a fun addition and it added some novelty to the game, novelty I would have liked to see more of.

Additionally, the CPU are pretty easy to beat, and there aren’t different difficulty levels, so it’s hard to play against them for long.

The music, too, could have had more variation. It remains almost entirely the same throughout each round, which means that there isn’t a sense of urgency or suspense towards the end of the round.

Nonetheless, the graphics, while simple, are fun and bright—they complement the simplicity of the game’s functionality nicely. It was cool to see the screen gradually become more colourful and messy as each round progresses, and become dominated by one player’s colour before being slowly taken over by another’s.

Splatterbot certainly has potential—if unlockable levels, slightly more unpredictability and a few more game modes are added to it (such as multi-round competition or harder CPU options), I can see it becoming a pretty addictive and fun little party game.