There’s not much else that can be said about Pure Pool (also we’ve reviewed it previously, so check that out). VooFoo Studios has successfully made a game that remains relevant and feels current over half a decade after it first released it, and for “sports games”, that’s a rare achievement indeed. You’re not going to find better ball porn anywhere, and so, even though this is a port of a six-year-old game with very little added to it, it’s great that it’s now portable and on the Switch.
Serious Sam remains the perfect foil to all the self-serious and often toxic shooters that we see today. All three games (and the two DLC expansions) that are contained in this collection are pure, unmitigated fun, and there's not a single (admittedly high-quality) rendition of Ronald Reagan across any of them. Not coincidentally, while I've already deleted that CoD off my hard drive, the Serious Sam Collection will stay on my Switch for quite some time to come. In short bursts - particularly on the commute after a hard day's work - there's nothing more cathartic.
The narrative that it weaves are great. The presentation is impeccable, and each and every one of the characters are fun to play with.
Demon's Souls kicked off what has become an exhausting caricature in the games industry. From "git gud" to comparing every halfway difficult game to the Souls series, Demon's Souls is ultimately responsible for that. It wasn't the most commercially successful game in itself, but word of mouth earned it a cult status and was directly responsible for the very mainstream Dark Souls. And now people can re-discover the dark majesty of that series foundation. It's a game that deserves to be elevated beyond the jokes and seen as a genuine piece of video game art. I would be very interested if those who have come to the Souls series later will find the deliberately unpolished elements of this remake to be as appealing, but given that FromSoftware will almost certainly never touch the King's Field series again, for me, personally, this is as good as it's ever going to get. As a PlayStation 5 launch title, it's a fascinating example of something that is both deliberately old and a brilliant use of the console's very new hardware, and brought together, Demon's Souls is reason enough to own the console, all into itself.
I've never played a game more thoroughly unpleasant than Black Ops Cold War, but since this is the video game industry, the only thing I'm meant to be talking about is how much fun it is to press those buttons. So, let's finish the review and do that (since I know this conclusion is all most people are going to read anyway). Yes, it is fun to press buttons. You can even press buttons in multiplayer, and after however many Call of Duty titles now, the half dozen development teams that worked on this thing know how to make multiplayer button pressing fun. There are standard multiplayer modes, and classics like Zombies are back because people like those modes. It's all very accessible since this series is as mainstream as they come and Activision would hate for people to find it overwhelming. In short, if you want to play Black Ops Cold War as a completely passive sponge, then you'll have a lot of fun pressing those buttons. This score, below, is for you. For anyone else who is even mildly interested in thinking about the games they play, I can't put into words clearly enough how unacceptable I find this game to be.
I don't want to take anything away from Sackboy: A Big Adventure. Platformers are one of the genres I am least inclined towards, and were it not part of a (fairly limited) launch range on the PlayStation 5, I might not have been inclined to play Sackboy at all. I am glad that I did, though, because for pure whimsy and quality level design it's a real challenge to Nintendo at its best in this genre, and that's no mean feat. Just don't go in expecting the same qualities that made the LittleBigPlanet series itself so beloved.
It's easy to be charmed by Café Enchanté, which brings together whimsy, romance and humour together with one of the more understated joys - having a favourite café and being able to take a moment out to enjoy both it, and the company that it brings
Having written visual novels myself I know just how difficult it is to turn decisions and branching narratives into something cohesive and interesting, regardless of the direction that the player takes through the narrative. I shudder to think what a wall of sticky notes would look like to map out a game with 600,000 words and nearly 2,500 decisions. Choices That Matters is a game of breathtaking scope that takes place in the most modest kind of game possible; the humble text adventure. That it tells such an excellent page-turner of a story with all those words and branching paths is the icing on the top.
Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin is a genuine cultural artefact. It never forgets the need to be entertaining and engaging, but every facet of the game is invested in communicating the Japanese cultural perspective on the world, from how we see the divine, to the respect that we should hold for the very staples that sustain us. This is a game that transcends the conventional expectations of video games, to deliver something much grander and more inherently valuable than passive entertainment to consume.
That being said, as far as the gameplay is concerned, this series is going nowhere interesting at this point there while there will be more, and I really implore Ubisoft to take a good, hard look at the bloat and consider whether a more streamlined approach that doesn't get in the way of the best feature (the history and narrative) would not be wiser next time around.
Who knows if this wild experiment will bear fruit and become its own series. Yakuza: Like a Dragon has everything it needs; an excellent crop of new characters, and even a new playground to base a series in, as we hadn't been to Yokohama previously. The future of the series would depend on how turn-based combat sells in comparison to action brawler combat, I would assume. Either way, though, Like a Dragon is a delight. It's a parody-homage to every turn-based JRPG trope you've ever known, set against brilliant character writing and the traditional urban playgrounds that have built this series into something beloved. I hope the development team is rewarded for the inherent risk that they took with this undertaking.
These two games are straight ports that have been thrown on the Switch to introduce newer players to the No More Heroes series, but they are worth revisiting because it's truly impressive how little they seem to age. Do we have faster-paced and more complex brawlers now thanks to the likes of Devil May Cry V? Sure. However No More Heroes is its own beast because it blends its punkish attitude and humour in with a surrealistic bent and some of the most memorable boss battles you'll ever play in video games. For these reasons, Suda's classics are every bit as entertaining and brash as ever, and it's great that they continue to be available to players on current consoles.
Jurassic World Evolution claims a victory of sorts in being the best "big-budget" simulator currently available on Nintendo Switch, though it cruised through there on the back of the port of Cities: Skylines being less than ideal. The fact that the game has a deep library of DLC built into the package certainly boosts its value, and when the only other options are the indies like Project Highrise or ports of the old Rollercoaster Tycoon titles, it's nice to have an option like Evolution for on-the-go play, though I am hoping that the port of Tropico 6 - a much more complex and detail-orientated simulator - proves to be the big one for the console. Jurassic World Evolution is enjoyable, but a little too simple to hit the peaks of the genre.
Clea has the foundation that it needs to become something really amazing. The aesthetics are spot-on, and the mood and themes are conceptualised beautifully. The developer has chosen a difficult genre to work with, however, and while Clea is perfectly playable and complete, I would want to see some significant strides with a sequel before it enters the upper echelons of the genre. Nonetheless, it does represent a very different kind of Aussie creativity, and it's very much worth supporting on that basis.
Really, the Trails of Cold Steel series is like one of those favourite fantasy books that you can read and re-read over and over again. Whether that be Lord of the Rings, Magician, Thomas Covenant, Drizzt Do'Urden's novels, Earthsea or Game of Thrones, they (and Trails of Cold Steel) all share a quality that makes them eminently relatable and comfortable. There are some excellent themes scattered through the game with regards to the impact of conflict, political and moral relativism, individual heroism and the strength of the group. Unfortunately, all the strengths of this series are tied up with its narrative, and we're at the point where it's hard to discuss the narrative without giving important moments away, so my review can't really reflect just how enthused I really am about Trails of Cold Steel. All I can say is that the fourth chapter is, if anything, even stronger than what came before and so while you should play all four in order, this is the one to look forward to the most.
So Pikmin 3 isn't the massive game. It never has been. It wasn't on the Wii U, and it's no "bigger" on the Switch. What it is, however, is a load of fun, and the charm is irresistible. Have we had more impressive remasters of games that were, to be frank, more impressive in the first place? Sure, but Pikmin isn't meant to be "AAA" and it doesn't try to be. Whether you've played this game previously or not, it's still a charming delight.
Transformers: Battlegrounds did the right thing in eschewing the Hollywood "mature" efforts and the games that tried to piggyback along with those to give us a true Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic. It was also right to go with a turn-based tactics game, rather than yet another action effort. What this game does is add to the Transformers property and demonstrate that it can be more versatile than the folks in suits have been pushing for over quite some time now. It's certainly not the "XCOM clone" for people that come to XCOM for the nuanced tactical strategy, but it's a nice, light little game and, for someone like me who grew up loving Transformers, only to watch the series be driven into the ground in recent years, it's nice to have something nostalgic to some very fond memories that I had as a kid.
I know it's a tough gig being a game developer when hours played is a key metric and the pundits bleat on about content rather than things that are actually important, like thematic intensity or narrative depth. Taking something that could have been something special and diluting it to give those pundits something to throw onto their backlog isn't going to help video games develop as an art form, though. The Red Lantern upset me more than most; most games aren't made by people with the vaguest understanding of art. The Red Lantern, however, clearly is the concept of artists and the vision is compelling. Next time they should try delivering a game that supports the vision, rather than what they think will boost the Metacritic score.
"Indie" visual novels are a dime-a-dozen these days. If even I can make them, then anyone can. What's harder to do is create a visual novel with a distinct (and interesting) personality, and which has either something substantial to say or is downright funny. Lached Up Games is very much about the humour, and combining an ochre Aussie sense of humour with a heavily fanservicey Japanese aesthetic is certainly distinctive enough that you've not played anything like what this developer produces. You probably should play the original Max's Big Bust before getting into the sequel, but the second is bigger and better (in every way), and it is, put most simply, pure entertainment.
There's such a lack of polish and precision to Tears of Avia that it's difficult to blindly recommend. As a fan of the tactics JRPG genre, I did enjoy this, but it would be disingenuous of me to suggest that there weren't many other games out there with a similar ambition that are executed far better.