Popular free-to-play battle royale game Knives Out now available for Nintendo Switch in Japan

Knives Out (not the Rian Johnson film or the Radiohead song) has made a surprise appearance on the Japanese Switch eShop. It's another free-to-play battle royale game, a remnant of a time before PUBG Mobile. News of the release first appeared over on Nintendo Life.

By the looks of things, the Switch version is a fairly standard port of the iOS and Android originals, fit with microtransactions and some really rather muddy visuals. Regardless of the existence of other, more popular mobile battle royales, folks still seem to be playing and enjoying Knives Out. Perhaps it's doing something neat and different? The tweet below, which also features several lovely screenshots, suggests the game is a lot more vehicle-focused than Fortnite. Kinda interesting, I guess.

So that strange Japanese free-to-play title is basically fortnite on #NintendoSwitch However you use lots different vehicles than latter. pic.twitter.com/A5eNugiPTp — Leigh Wynne (@leighwynne33) October 31, 2019

Most of your time will be spent scouring the map for loot and improved gear, all while carefully taking on rival players in (maybe?) intense combat. Oh, and it comes to us from gaming giant NetEase, developers of just about everything that wasn’t made by Tencent. It reminds me of that other one, Rules of Survival. 

I certainly like some of the costumes on offer, and the game seems a tad sillier than the more straight-faced PUBG, so maybe it's worth a punt on Switch after all? It's free, as I say, which is a very fair price. It also makes sense to bring some PUBG clones over to Switch if Tencent is in no hurry to offer its megahit on Nintendo's platform.

Knives Out is currently only available on Switch over in Japan, though I imagine that'll change soon enough. Straight free-to-play mobile ports on Switch, such as Asphalt 9, haven't been received particularly well, but that's not to say that none of them can work. Devs will always have a hard time winning over console players with standard mobile microtransactions; it's their job to strike the right balance and offer a game that's worth playing in the first place.

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