The Nintendo Switch has been blessed with a number of good single-player card games at this point. Whether it's Shadowverse, Lord of the Rings, or The Witcher spinoff, Thronebreaker, players have plenty of deep, rich, highly strategic card games to choose between. Cards of the Dead, meanwhile, is about as engaging as Solitaire. Sure, I've played a game or two of Solitaire in my time when I'm that utterly bored, but that was when I was on a work computer and relying on pre-installed games, or on a boat with nothing but a pack of cards. If you've got Cards of the Dead on your Switch, you've also got a thousand alternatives for single-player games, and most of them are more worthwhile than this.
I’m glad that I played SkateBIRD, and it hurts that I’ve had to give it this score. I firmly believe that as games are an art form, game developers should be trying things, even if they don’t ultimately succeed. SkateBIRD is a brilliant idea and it takes a big, heaving swing at it. Sadly, though, it’s a strikeout. However, with that being said, if the developers get another innings, I would play a SkateBIRD 2 without a moment's hesitation, and I would fully expect that the developers would deliver having had this experience.
Neither the competent structure nor reasonable aesthetics are enough to save Beach Bounce Remastered. Once again: fan service is great, when it's in service of something. A game like Max's Bigger Bust, despite being all-in with the fan service, writes in plenty of excellently Australian humour to contextualise it. Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation is one of my favourite visual novels of all time, and it, too, is very heavily focused on fan service, while still giving me a reason to actually want to see the girl's skirts blow up (I heart you Tohka). Beach Bounce Remastered has absolutely nothing going for it, other than those spread legs. It's utterly boring.
The Dresden Files: Cooperative Card Game is such a fundamentally flawed concept, and the execution is so lacking, that it offers nothing whatsoever of value.
Silent World is, mercifully, over quite quickly.
There's simply no reason to play something so utterly bereft of thought as Narcos.
Stranger Things 3: The Game is trash that does more harm to the property than good. It was almost quaint going on a memory trip back to when video games were used to churn out cheap bonus money grabs every time a major film landed, but the industry has moved on from that nonsense, and there's nothing about this game that is acceptable in this day and age.
I knew going in to Happy Words that it would be a Scrabble clone, and I was fine with that. As a fan of Scrabble - and board games in general - I like the idea of having it on the Switch for on-the-go play. But when the AI is about as interesting as a parrot with access to a dictionary, a UI that actively wants to stop you playing the game, and a complete absence of anyone online to play with, I was left speechless, that a developer in 2019 was somehow capable of making a worse version of Scrabble than what we had on the Game Boy back in the 90's.
Time hasn’t been good to Blades of Time, and and other than for the morbidly curious, I can’t see anyone being masochistic enough to derive any value out of it.
I'm all for developers to look for ways to reenvision the classics - look at how incredible Tetris 99 is in breathing new life into a puzzle classic that's over 30 years old. What I have no tolerance for is games that only do the most superficial thing to spin a classic as a "new game." History 2048's "history" adds nothing to 2048, so right down to the title, this game is a false promise and a poorly executed mess.
This is 2018's most cuttingly unpleasant game to play. And I'm one of those that played Agony.
Timberman Vs is such a confused and poorly thought out game, I wouldn't recommend it if it was free
Rento Fortune just isn't worth it. There's a good half dozen genuinely good board games available on the PlayStation 4 if you want to play board games on the big TV, including Monopoly itself, and those games have interfaces that don't drive you insane trying to work your way through them, don't have random caricatures of Kim Jong Un popping up for no actual reason, and have some kind of effort put into the production values.
It's never fun to play a game that's so fundamentally uninteresting that you really struggle to even watch the screen as you're playing. Fantasy Hero: Unsigned Legacy is a painfully generic and completely forgettable action JRPG, and there's just so much better stuff out there that deserves a port to this console that I'm almost offended that this one, somehow, was singled out for a release on the Nintendo Switch.
There's nothing of value in Wonder Boy Returns. It's the weakest platformer I've played for years, and were it a free Flash game, as it so closely resembles, I still wouldn't recommend it.
I admit that I made the mistake of buying this game without first checking that the multiplayer would be in there, but in my defense, this is a port of a game from 1998 and it is truly nuts to think that the developers couldn't include it
It's probably just as well Sony gave this thing away for free with PSPlus memberships. It's the only hope the game has of actually keeping an audience (because it's a multiplayer-only game, it needs a large and sustained community).
I never managed to actually get someone to play this with me. They took one look at the single player game, with all its misfiring attempts at nostalgic glory, and begged me to play something else instead.
I hope the developers are able to take the experience from this game and build on it, because the industry needs more people like this than it does indies churning out yet more pixel shooters and aspiring eSports games, but The Girl and the Robot is a lost cause, I'm afraid.
I appreciate that the game's also attempting to throw in some bullet hell elements and so on, but it's only middling at that kind of action too. There might be some limited interest in Deathstate for people who like to overcome difficulty spikes, but to be honest, you're better off dusting off that copy of the Gauntlet remake instead.