SWAPMEAT Review - I Didn’t Expect This Much Meat in My Face

You heard it here first, folks - 2026 is the year of the MEAT GAME. First, we had Super Meat Boy 3D, and now we have Swapmeat, surely only the second in a long string of meat games to come. One could say that meat games are becoming a genre in and of themselves! I personally wouldn't say that, but someone might.

So what is Swapmeat? Well, it's not the lingo used to exchange nudes on Grindr (though perhaps it should be), nor is it a weird phallus-swapping porno inspired by Freaky Friday, though again - maybe someone should be taking notes. Instead, Swapmeat is the gaming scene’s newest attempt to be actively repulsive to vegetarians, bringing us a beef-themed third-person shooter and roguelike that takes massive inspiration from Risk of Rain 2 while throwing in humor along the lines of Hell Pie or Revenge of the Savage Planet. But there's one big twist here that makes Swapmeat different enough from its genre brethren that you might want to be paying attention.

And that twist is… well, swapping meat! You start out as a funny little guy walking a funny little way, an operative for Rangus Corporation that goes to a variety of planets to shoot aliens. This is about as far as the story bothers to go in justifying itself, and that is completely fine! There's still plenty of quirky dialogue and strange one-liners, though if I had a dollar for every time I heard “THAT'S SOME FRESH MEAT!” during gameplay, I could probably quit my job. But very quickly you'll notice that the aliens you shoot might leave behind a souvenir in the form of their body parts. Hopefully, they were registered organ donors (I didn’t bother to check). At any point, you can swap your legs, torso, or head to gain different attacks and traversal abilities, allowing you to constantly switch up your play style.

This is a huge asset in a genre as repetitive as roguelike shooters, whose idea of variety is “do everything you just did but with a new gun now!” Swapmeat’s variety of swappable bodies is surprisingly robust too. Each body part has its own durability meter separate from your overall health meter. As one would expect, when your overall health drops to zero, the run is over. But if your body part or meat durability or whatever the fuck drops to 0, that body part simply disappears, leaving you to walk around as a revolting abomination along the lines of a headless spatula-wielding tortoise-shell-wearing squid creature or a disturbingly torsoless mosquito spider that might very well haunt your dreams.

In practice, body-swapping mostly works quite well. The only downside is that there are frequently so many things attacking you that there may not always be time to read about what a body part does before swapping it in - making experience and familiarity with the game an important facet to making the best choices. But it's hard to fault a roguelike for requiring some experimentation to learn and succeed, so as far as gripes go, this is an incredibly minor one.

So now, let's go into the structure of an actual run. You'll start in the hub area, which allows you to practice with your weapons, team up with invited Steam players, test out some different meat parts, unlock and upgrade weapons, equip perks, change cosmetics, and all of that jazz you'd expect from any roguelite. In what I consider a very smart move, it's extremely easy to unlock all of the weapons in only the first few runs. So even though you can only take two at a time into battle, the game gives you plenty of options to vary your arsenal, leaving the slower meta progression to each weapon’s unique upgrade tree.

Once you and your teammates ready yourself at the Bolt Burger, whatever the fuck that is, you’re launched toward your selected galaxy to complete a multi-planet run ending in an extended boss fight. When landing upon a planet, you can choose to explore a bit for extra items, perks, and meat parts, or run straight to your prime directives, which are the only ways to progress forward and add time to the steadily decreasing timer at the top of your screen. I can't say the prime directives are interesting at all though, requiring you to go to a location and shoot a bunch of things, defeat a mini-boss, or defend the area. Pretty typical shooter stuff and nothing that had me on the edge of my seat.

Risk of Rain 2 fans know the timer part of this game loop well, though I will say the time pressure in Swapmeat felt exceptionally tight to me. Exploring and doing your secondary directives felt like a luxury if you didn't want to get stuck fighting some seriously brutal enemies once the timer runs out and shit hits the proverbial fan. As you dispatch enemies, you'll also gain experience which nets you upgrades. When you're upgrading a weapon with elemental effects such as lightning, slime, fire, or frost, these upgrades feel impactful and fun, sometimes seriously changing the feel of the guns. The other upgrades, however, such as Supermarket Sushi that increases your ability recharge by 10% or Crow Eggs, which increase max health by 10%, fall into that unfortunate roguelike pit of being too scared to balance the game around anything interesting. They’re just incremental stat upgrades that rarely feel like they make a difference at all, which is a shame for a game that will most certainly require you to visit the same locations over and over. The meat swapping mechanic adds variety for sure, putting this well above other roguelike shooters such as Abyssus, but I couldn't help but feel the lack of meaningful mid-run upgrades making most sessions feel similar.

Now, not everyone has friends to play with online, so how does the solo experience compare to the co-op one? Quite well actually, and arguably even better depending on your perspective. My solo runs felt reasonably easier than my cooperative ones, with the multiplayer difficulty scaling significantly enough that going in with a plan felt crucial to success. But when I was on my lonesome putzing around with different meat parts and accomplishing objectives on my own, rest assured the game was still plenty tough and plenty of fun. In either case though, I did find health pickups to be remarkably stingy. If I found a crate that gives me back 20% of my health once per run, even finding that much is pretty lucky. So be careful, because most damage done is likely to stick with you.

Visually, Swapmeat aims to be colorful and crude, with gross-looking enemies and ridiculous combinations of meat parts on my character looking like something from the interdimensional cable episode of Rick & Morty. It always felt fun to discover some stupid new body part and whatever power it entailed, and the environments look fairly nice, with enough variety even within each planet that I rarely got tired of looking at it. Those playing on Steam Deck may be disappointed though, as playing at 60 fps did not appear possible. Many areas could run decently in the 30s and 40s with some drops into the 20s, but I found that for a shooter this was far from ideal, and required visual compromises like half rendering with FSR upscaling, making the whole game so fuzzy and aliased as if it was being viewed through a screen door. Not ideal. Playable, sure, but not ideal.

Some repetitive meat quips aside, the sound design is pretty good too, with fitting music and the sort of goofy voice acting you'd expect from a game that's doing as little as possible to be taken seriously.

Listen, I'll admit to you - the specific combination of cooperative multiplayer game + roguelike game + shooter is not generally my jam. I find them to be incredibly repetitive and often an excuse to pad a few hours of genuine content into dozens of hours of boring content, with only a few exceptions like Roboquest managing to rise above the rest. Swapmeat mostly avoids some of these pitfalls though - its interesting swapping mechanics keep you on your toes (assuming you have any at that moment), its unique brand of charming repulsiveness is ripe for a good time with friends, and the core gameplay feels solid enough that even the repetitive structure didn't prevent me from having a good time. That combined with the lukewarm mid-run upgrades and some weird remaining bugs, like occasionally being stuck in a top-down view when spectating your buddies, can temper the fun a bit, but overall anybody looking for a roguelite shooter with a unique twist will find plenty to love in Swapmeat. It gets the bronze genie lamp of approval.

GOOD