Thanks to Clear River Games for the review code
Title: FZ: Formation Z
System: Nintendo Switch 2
Price: $29.99
Release Date: 05/21/2026
Story
In this modern reimagining of Formation Z, the early Jaleco arcade game, you take control of an , who you must pilot in order to fight back the evil invading forces! There’s really not much of a story here in this five stage adventure, but you do get your basic info drops from defeated enemies ala R-Type Final/Final 2.
Presentation
Formation Z was made by Granzella, and you can absolutely tell from how the title screen looks and how the menus are laid out. Much like R-Type Final 2, you have a good variety of customization options for your mech and pilot, and a few other cute touches to try and help make the experience more customizable. Upon getting into the main game, you have a decent looking horizontal shooter, with solid character models and visibility that mostly gets the job done, at first.
See, this game uses dynamic resolution, which I normally don’t pay much mind to since it’s a needed point for games to run consistently on Switch or Switch 2, but playing this in handheld made, that resolution changing aspect drove me insane here. sometimes the game looks pretty darn clean, while other times it looks like a smeary mess that also impacts visibility of incoming hazards. It also doesn’t help the game’s framerate is like a rollercoaster, with some segments being super smooth, and others being so bumpy it’s not all that fun to play or look at. This improves somewhat in docked mode, but a game like this shouldn’t be having such struggles in handheld mode, and it seems to be continuing the usual trend of Granzella games having weird optimization issues.
On the bright side, the music is excellent. Formation Z didn’t have much of a soundtrack, but the cute nod to the Arcade sound as you start a new life is neat, and the music on display during the main game is pretty dang stellar. If anything kept me going as I kept burning credits, it was the OST, and Granzella nailed it here.
Gameplay
In FZ, you take control of a transforming mech that has land and airborne forms, as you tackle five stages to defeat the invading forces. You start off in the land form at first, and can fire while moving ala a Run & Gun, and even have a jump button. Your normal shot and melee attacks are pretty self explanatory, taking out enemies from the sky and in front of you, but you also have a special melee attack that drains your energy meter, and can deal with bulkier foes in a quicker fashion.
Shifting into the Airborne form, all you need to do is just hold the jump button and your mech transforms into a plane, making the game play more like a typical horizontal shooter. You still have the a charge and rapid fire shots, and your melee move is now a series of powerful homing missiles, but now just flying around will drain your energy meter, and if it hits zero you’ll lose a life, so you can’t just stay in one form for an entire level. Luckily you can nab energy pickups as you defeat enemies, but even still there’ll be times where the land form is better to use for a segment and vice versa.
Despite a decent gameplay loop, FZ’s problems quickly began to stack up for me. I already mentioned those dynamic framerate/resolution issues, and sure enough they impact the gameplay too. For what is essentially a horizontal shooter, any sort of framerate dip is unacceptable in my book, as this ain’t your normal shmup slowdown. The resolution changes also led to more than one occasion where an incoming projectile or enemy was tougher to see than it would have been otherwise, which was infuriating, and is thankfully one aspect playing in TV mode can fix. Combine this with a game that’s pretty darn difficult in true Granzella fashion, and you have a pretty big headache that all these problems add onto.
There’s at least some extra stuff here to make the adventure last longer, outside of the difficulty making you burn through continues over and over. Like in Final 2, different difficulties can sometimes lead you to hidden secrets and different events taking place, although you don’t have branching paths this time around. Still, playing on the highest difficulty is the only way to find some secrets, and with how tough every difficulty is here, that’s gonna require a lot of trial and error. You also have a score attack where you can replay your favorite stages on 1CC, but this makes an already tough challenge even tougher.
Unfortunately, I just didn’t find the levels to be as good for memorization as the ones in Final 2. Eventually I was even able to complete a couple of stages in Final 2 on the R-Typer difficulty, but even Very Easy in Formation Z puts up one heck of a fight. I think that’s partly due to the weird performance quirks I mentioned, along with just how much worse the level designs are here. They aren’t bad or abysmal by any means, but definitely feel a bit cheap at times, and don’t have the satisfaction that Final 2 offered. My guess is this was done to make up for the lower amount of stages, but I feel the higher difficulties would be more than good enough for extra challenge, so making the overall game pretty ridiculous isn’t helping here.
Lastly, you have another thing that returns from Final 2, and not a good aspect; the currency system. In Final 2, this system was insanely grindy and made 100%ing the game a pure headache, and you have it back here in the form of Formation points. You actually pick these up within stages now, but to unlock anything like the other mechs you’ll need a lot of em, and thus that means lots of throwing your head through the same stages over and over and over to get what you need to unlock those other mechs and whatever customization bits you also desire. Considering how you have several other mecha with their own movesets to make use of, I feel it’s a bummer to gate them behind a tedious system in an already challenging game. Still, if you want more hours from your shooting game to obtain every single unlock from the store, this will do it.
Conclusion
Ultimately, I really wished Formation Z was a lot more enjoyable and balanced than it currently is, since even with some of R-Type Final 2‘s problems, that was still a pretty enjoyable, meticulous game with some pretty fun levels and great DLC stages. Alas, Formation Z’s five stages are pretty damn hard to the point of frustration, and I can’t even recommend this as a score chaser due to how tough it is to focus on the incoming obstacles on a single credit. I sure hope you like replaying early stages over and over again to get points to unlock better ships. The inconsistent framerate and changing resolution genuinely does not help here on Switch 2.
While I admired the fact Granzella took an otherwise endless score chaser and tried making it into a full shooting game with lots of secrets and customization options to unlock, it just didn’t work out that great with this one. The grind for currency, the steep learning curve, the rollercoaster of a framerate in a shooter of all things really hurt this experience, despite the excellent music. I feel if there’s another platform where the framerate is locked in place in some fashion, you’re better off playing FZ there, but even still, I think the Switch 2 could have gotten a much more polished port, or at least a locked framerate of some kind, and the level design could have gone a lot better, too. Such a shame for a great developer to likely end on this as their final released game, though I’m now curious how Final Formation turned out…
I give FZ: Formation Z a 5 out of 10.