The Lost Child is also a game that so cleanly represents everything good about the dungeon crawler genre that I found it hard to put down. The fact that it's the perfect introduction to the dungeon crawler genre also makes it the perfect first example on the new hardware.
Samurai Defender looks like it should be more than it is, but never gets there, and feels overwhelmingly shallow as a consequence.
This is 2018's most cuttingly unpleasant game to play. And I'm one of those that played Agony.
Musynx is as no-frills as rhythm games get. That's not necessarily a criticism, because the music - the most important feature of the genre - is a stand-out delight. I will play this one a lot more than I play DJ Max or Superbeat Xonic, for example. And yet, while the promise of plenty of DLC music to come is exciting, Musynx also lets itself down by being far too easy, and limited in features, to hit those high notes as one of the best examples of the genre.
This is the kind of game I can sit down to and play for an entire evening without realising how much time was slipping. It's always "just one more turn," or "just one more battle", and even after all these years of playing Koei's strategy and action games set through the Sengoku period, and reading books about it, I'm always impressed that Koei Tecmo manages to teach me something new each time it releases something in the franchise.
We've seen plenty of stalker horror games in the past (Amnesia being perhaps the best example), but a combination of bugs and absolutely dismal guidance from the game makes this one a very painful grind to work through, filled with trial and error deaths and far too few checkpoints for this kind of gameplay.
Milanoir is not the longest game, but that breakneck pacing is so high octane that it can become draining. Unfortunately, it's not a game that's easy to pick up and put down at will, because it's a little confusing as to when it's actually saving the action.
I truly love West of Loathing. It's charming, silly, fun and, most surprisingly, offers genuinely engaging combat and questing.
If you're sick of tower defence games, give this one a go, because it'll restore your faith in the genre.
World Soccer Pinball is still not great pinball, because it offers such a pedestrian, basic, near-childish design, but it's playable and passable.
It's just too simplistic and bog standard in design. I appreciate that the developers were aiming for traditional pinball experiences, but that's no excuse for not at least coming up with some dynamic, flowing table designs.
Bringing a dozen these games together, and then adding superb customisation options and a museum mode that manages to be genuinely informative, and you've got one incredible celebration of a fighting game series that has meant so much to so many people over the years.
This game's predecessor was remarkable. This game itself is a remarkable evolution of that original vision.
With all of that said, it's still only the slimmest of steps up from what most people who are interested in Dark Souls have already played to death back on the PlayStation 3.
The collection of games itself is just such incredible value, covering off such a broad range of SEGA's history when it was at its very finest, that anyone missing out on this is doing themselves a real disservice.
Despite those small issues, I can see this game developing a strong core audience that will play it for quite some time to come. It's simply too groovy, colourful, and cheerful to resist.
For people who didn't play through the DLC on the Wii U version, or want a portable version of Hyrule Warriors that doesn't feel like a one massive compromise after another, Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition is essential.
Conan Exiles is enjoyable enough, but it does reveal some fundamental weaknesses in the survival genre; it's not one that can be tuned effectively to storytelling, and that means that if you're using a storytelling property, such as Conan, you're going to need to exhibit a great deal over control to bring the necessary focus into the experience, and unfortunately the developers weren't able to quite get there with Conan Exiles.
Three games in, and Koei Tecmo really understands how to make a dynamic, exciting One Piece Warriors game. The teams behind these Warriors games are also clearly comfortable with the Nintendo Switch as a piece of hardware, and One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 might be three years old now, but the Switch "ultimate edition" really is the ultimate edition.
Hello Kitty Kruisers isn't a great game from an adult's perspective, and that's a bit of a wasted opportunity as there are plenty of adult Kitty fans out there. But where most games made for children are brutally bad, I don't think Kruisers is that. In fact, I think the developers have cleverly stripped back the elements of a kart racer that children struggle with, while leaving the elements that they're inclined to enjoy.