AI: The Somnium Files starts out slow but once you've traversed a few of its delightfully surreal Somnium dreamscapes and got to an ending or two, working your way back through your flowchart and striking out in different directions, it becomes an engaging and tense affair. Fans of the Zero Escape games will feel right at home here, and director Kotaro Uchikoshi's talent for putting the player into increasingly unsettling circumstances ensures everything takes flight in a very satisfying way as you work your way through the many strands of the loopy central mystery towards its various different endings.
Blasphemous is a beautifully crafted Soulslike/Metroidvania action game set in a delightfully unhinged, deliriously gory world filled with well-designed enemies, satisfyingly meaty combat and some truly memorable and grotesque boss battles.
Unlocking skills as you progress does render a little of the challenge obsolete as you can choose to let tactics take a back seat and just blast away at blocks to brute force the victory but, if you play within the rules and try to clear all those tricky side challenges, you'll find a tasty little puzzler here that's well worth the small entry fee.
Yes, it’s missing its multiplayer component here and we’d love to see gyroscopic controls patched in pretty sharpish, but overall this is a technically top-notch port of a stellar first-person shooter that you should really check out – especially if you missed out on it the first time around.
Developer Forgotten Key has crafted an enchanting world here, with a fantastically fun and fitting means of traversing it; a splintered land full of melancholy memories in which you soar, a singular source of hope in flight above a world that’s relying on you for salvation. It’s a trip, a meditation on the nature of man and his fractured relationship with the natural world around him, a beautiful journey that's well worth taking.
Vambrace: Cold Souls is one of the best-looking games we've seen on Switch – it really is a stunner – but in terms of gameplay, it's a pedestrian affair. Dungeons are boring and difficult, combat is bereft of any real strategic depth or flair and it thinks nothing of wasting hours of your time for zero reward. The story gets off to a cracking start and it's obvious that an amazing amount of artistic talent has been channelled into creating the City of Icenaire and its surroundings, but, in the end, it's all rendered a little pointless by the fact it's attached to such a monotonous and dreary plod of an RPG.
Pandemic: The Board Game is a perfectly functional version of the popular board game, now available for you to play on-the-go in solo mode or with some friends in local co-op.
Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet is one of the stronger outings for the series in a video game format. However, it’s still bogged down by heavy-handed and often thematically troubling melodrama that’s delivered at a glacial pace and prefers to eschew the potentially interesting aspects of the world it depicts in favour of stereotypical male heroics, teenage matters of the heart and questionable attitudes to its female characters.
Obsidian has created a heartfelt tribute to the classic 'Infinity Engine' RPGs of old; one that takes the best of those games, delicately updates them and – in the process – becomes something of a classic itself. For RPG fans, this is a must-buy.
If you haven’t played Skulls of the Shogun in any form over the past six years, we still can still heartily recommend the single-player campaign as a generous and devilishly fun slice of turn-based strategy action that perfectly suits the Switch, particularly in handheld mode.
Pawarumi is a tough-as-nails shmup with a unique central mechanic that takes time to master. Stick with it though and you'll be rewarded with a slick, fast-paced shooter that looks and sounds amazing and will test your skills to the max. There's really nothing else like it out there right now and, even with slight reservations over the difficulty, a lacklustre story and paucity of game modes, this is an easy recommend for fans of the genre looking for a proper challenge.
Fantasy Strike isn’t going to blow anyone away aesthetically and its arcade mode is a little barebones. However, in terms of gameplay, it absolutely achieves what it sets out to, offering fun and accessible fighting action to newcomers whilst at the same time possessing enough technical depth in its roster of characters to keep more seasoned fighters interested.
Tiny Metal: Full Metal Rumble surpasses both its predecessor and the recent Wargroove to become the number one Advance Wars clone available on Switch right now.
Hyperlight Ultimate is a great little arcade shooter that was good on 3DS and now arrives on Switch in a much more complete and satisfying form. The subtle gameplay tweaks here help make things a little less hardcore than in the original game, but this is still pretty tough stuff that comes highly recommended to fans of the genre who like a stiff challenge, so long as they stay away from Panic mode.
It genuinely feels like an unfinished game in places, and it’s a real shame.
Q-YO Blaster is a great little tribute to Parodius, filled with inventive enemies and brilliantly designed boss battles. Its gameplay is solid and addictive with a beautiful art-style reminiscent in places of the mighty Cuphead. It's short and sweet for sure, but it's got lots of replayability and is perfect for whipping out for a quick blast on quick journeys and, all in all, is yet another cracking addition to the Switch's ever-growing roster of top quality shmups.
Mainlining fails to really provide any interesting commentary on its chosen subject matter, revelling instead in caricatures we’ve all experienced a hundred times before; stuff you’ll have seen done better in any Grand Theft Auto game that has parody websites involved. Its gameplay too often degenerates into trial-and-error and lacks any sort of consequences for the player getting things wrong, which renders the whole investigative process pretty much pointless.
If you can ignore The Sinking City's technical failings, set the combat difficulty to easy and stick to getting embroiled in the story
My Friend Pedro, for the most part, delivers on its promise to provide you with an almost endless variety of ways with which to carry out the flashy brand of OTT violence that's had gamers eagerly awaiting its release. The controls can be cantankerous at times and the levels are far from being an eclectic mix, but it adds enough diversions to the action with light puzzling and platforming elements to keep things interesting enough to see through to the end. Also, your best friend is a banana.
Kudos to Mebius for creating an entry in the genre that does so much to welcome newcomers into the fold whilst at the same time offering a blisteringly difficult challenge with plenty of hidden depth to hardened warriors looking for their next shooter addiction.