Thank You Ratalaika Games for providing us with a review code!

Previously coming out on Steam in 2016, Donuts ‘n’ Justice ported over to the Switch in 2021. It is a side-scrolling 2D shoot ‘em up where you play as either one of two tough-guy cops cleaning the streets of the scum that pollute the city. As with most games in the genre, story elements are pretty minimum and are only there to get the ball rolling.

The objective of Donuts ‘n’ Justice is to reach the end of the stage and shoot any criminal to your left or right. Most stages have a pattern of a level followed by a boss. Every once in a while, civilians will wander in the crossfire, first indicated by an exclamation point on the right side of the screen before walking in a zigzag pattern. Enemies can and will appear from either side so you’ll have to shoot in both directions constantly. The overall controls are fairly basic as most buttons are used to shoot to the left or right. I found it best to use the triggers for shooting as using the face buttons can feel a tad confusing.

Throughout, you’ll collect cash that can be used to unlock hats in the main menu. Most hats are only cosmetic, some have gameplay effects, and a few apply visual effects. Other things that are collected are police badges that unlock more weapons that can be randomly acquired. You start with a pistol and you can get other standard weapons such as a shotgun and sub-machine gun, or the completely absurd such as a cat gun and a DNA changer. A few of the weapons feel good to use, but I noticed that there is a bad balance between them. Many of the weapons that are unlocked not only feel worse than the starting pistol, but are also worse in usage due to caveats such as less damage, fire rate, or range.

The three difficulties are normal (default), thumbsucker, and "Nuck Chorris." You have three hearts representing your life in all the difficulties. Thumbsucker (accompanied by a giggling/crying child every time it is selected) has the most amount of changes. You take a half heart's worth of damage, enemies have less health, and there is no penalty for shooting civilians. On normal, Donuts ‘n’ Justice can present a challenge as bullets are large, enemies are numerous, and you only have half the screen to work with (as the other half is taken up by the background). Nuck Chorris difficulty has the least amount of changes—most notably being the bosses taking a lot more punishment. With every death, you start at the beginning of the stage, but most stages are about 3 minutes in length at most so dying is never too much of a setback.

Donuts ‘n ’Justice looks pretty nice for a sprite-based game. The 8-bit characters might be simple in design, but make up for fluidity. The backgrounds are nicely detailed with great use of shading, color, and style. Many of the environments capture the setting of plenty of 70s-80s buddy cop and martial arts media. Music mostly exists as background. None of it Is bad, but it isn’t meant to stand out as it loops fairly frequently. There is some voice acting from the narrator usually indicating your combo chain, or from the screams of enemies. If your character shoots a civilian, he says “whoop” or “oops”.

Violent content is rather surprising as you wouldn’t expect it at a first glance. Enemies bleed quite often and most of them typically die in a kneeling fashion with blood trickling down. Sometimes when using explosive weapons, enemies will die in a puddle of blood. And while civilians can also be killed, it is normally discouraged as you’ll jam your gun on normal and higher difficulty. Language is censored within the game for comedic effect, but towards the end the acronym “WTF” is used once. An unlockable hat that is a Halloween pumpkin gives the setting a more supernatural aspect with witches, ghosts, and jack-o’-lanterns.

If I only played Donuts ‘n’ Justice once, I would have a higher opinion of it as it happens to be one of those experiences that get a little bit worse the more you play it. There are minor glitches such as badge collection not carrying over when beating the game forcing you to grind and die on stages prior to stage 5 to unlock the rest of the weapons, and that when starting a new game it sometimes doesn’t equip the hat you selected. The weapon balance is poor, especially since one hat, in particular, turns your starting pistol into the best weapon in the game by a significant margin. Since the Switch version doesn’t have an achievement system, most hats are just useless and serve no purpose.

Now, do I believe Donuts ‘n’ Justice is a bad game? Not exactly, but the portability of the Switch version just barely manages to get a recommendation out of me. Shooting groups of enemies is enjoyable and the quick runtime complements the pick-up-and-play aspects of the console. Morally, it is pretty violent so keep that in mind if you plan to pick this up for someone younger.