Gotham Knights is a dark, dense and surprisingly gripping action adventure that almost manages to step up to the level of the very best of the Arkham series. There's a cracking story to dive into here, a huge and wonderfully detailed city, tons of lore for Bat fans, brutally crunchy combat, four cool superheroes to get a handle on and some of Gotham's most infamous villains to take down as you fight to prevent an all-out turf war. We were slightly concerned going into this one but, as it turns out, we needn't have been. If you can ignore some messy menus and a few too many upgradeable bits and bobs, you'll have a great time.
No Man's Sky on Switch is a fantastic port of a game we genuinely didn't really believe would make the transition to Nintendo's console without some serious technical issues. Hello Games has made the necessary cutbacks and downgrades to get this intergalactic survival sandbox playing at a super solid frame rate and the colourful, chunky graphical style here ensures that it all still looks pretty fantastic to boot. With all of the game's previous updates and content included - barring multiplayer at this point - and a plethora of customisation options courtesy of the massive Waypoint update, this is an easy recommendation for survival fans and one of the most impressive ports we've seen on Switch to date.
Moonscars is a dark and punchy 2D action adventure that tweaks the Soulslike formula just enough to make it worth jumping into yet another entry in this most overstuffed of genres. The combat here is super slick stuff that's meticulously animated through the game's exquisite pixel art style, there are a ton of cool skills and weapons to get your hands on, and the world and its enemies are thoroughly well-designed. It's a shame, then, that this Switch port currently suffers from fairly consistent frame rate issues, because beyond a few difficulty issues here and there, it's pretty hard to find fault with what Black Mermaid has served up. Let's hope this one gets a performance patch for those stutters.
Honestly, if you're a fan of Skyrim, we reckon this is an upgrade that's worth grabbing and it's also worth pointing out that, although the full version is expensive, you can frequently catch the standard version of Skyrim on a deep discount during eShop sales and then upgrade that way. If you've never played the game before — and we 100% refuse to believe there's anyone who hasn't — this really is the best, most feature-rich, content-packed version of an RPG that, no matter how much we make fun of it, always completely sucks us right back into its world every single time we boot it up.
Get busy unlocking new powers, blinking in behind bad guys, stabbing and shooting and skulking around, scouring environments for clues, choosing which lead to follow next as you push and pull and probe every corner, every wrinkle of this labyrinthian puzzle box. And it's on Game Pass too? You're spoiling us, Microsoft.
NBA 2K23 makes the inevitable downgrades and cuts that we see every year with this franchise on Nintendo's console and, just like other last-gen versions of the game, it's also missing both The City and the brand new MyNBA Eras. Loading times can be frustrating, and 30fps basketball feels noticeably stodgier than the 60fps found in other versions. However, if you can put up with these necessary downgrades and slight technical shortcomings, this is still a solid port of a superb basketball sim that's stuffed full of enough content to see fans through another season.
Beyond the ability to collect minifigs and customise your character — something that does nothing to really change up the actual battling at the heart of it all — there's very, very little here to sink your teeth into. It all ends up feeling like a rather poor free-to-play mobile game, and one that doesn't perform very well on Nintendo's hardware.
Immortality is easily Sam Barlow's best game to date and, when you consider the delights he's served up previously, well, you get an idea of just how good this one really is. It's a dazzling display from any angle you to choose to admire it; top-notch acting, brilliant writing, a core mechanic that's complex but carried off with style and grace, intuitive controls that draw you into your role...just remember to avoid spoilers, dive into the mystery of Marissa Marcel completely unsullied, and you're in for one of the most exquisite gaming experiences of this year, or any other, by quite some distance.
Kirby's Dream Buffet is a colourful and chaotic slice of slapstick party game action that serves up a nice range of modes to play either offline, in online ranked matches, and with friends in split-screen or local play modes. This is an easy, breezy game to jump into, perfect for beginners and young gamers, with plenty of courses, lots of unlockable goodies, and a budget price point to boot, making for one delicious treat that we're gonna be digging into for some time to come.
Thymesia has all the ingredients necessary to make for a solid indie Soulslike, but falls short of greatness due to messy implementation of mechanics, bland level design, weak lore, and issues with difficulty balancing.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a genuine masterpiece and the highlight of Monolith Soft's superb series thus far. There's an emotionally-charged and surprisingly edgy epic to get stuck into here, a sprawling and hugely engaging narrative populated by a cast of unforgettable characters that's backed up by some of the very best combat we've had the pleasure of getting to grips with in this genre to date. Over 100 hours into this one, we're as captivated now as we were when we first booted it up and it has more than delivered every bit of the adventure, emotion, and action that its key art promised it might. Aionios awaits, it's time to seize the future.
F1 22 is another super solid entry in Codemasters' superlative run of racers. There may not be any really pressing reason to pick this one up if you own last year's game, but besides a lack of new ways to play and an F1 Life mode that's all a bit pointless in the end, this is still the pinnacle of F1 video game action that fans of the sport will no doubt be enjoying until F1 23 drops.
If you can make peace with a few missing options and don't mind the paid DLC aspect you'll still have a great time here, and if you're coming to these games fresh you're in for an almighty treat, it's just a shame that SEGA has chosen to sully the endeavour with unnecessary greed and a few glaring functional omissions that could so easily have been included. So there you have it, Sonic Origins has got it where it counts but a little more TLC would have seen our score bumped up by a few points. Maybe next time, SEGA.
With such banal gameplay, we turn to the narrative here for hope and, even though it kicks off in a promising manner, it very soon crumbles and fades away, with a nonsensical and very abrupt ending that left us shaking our heads and wondering what on earth the point was. Coming from a small dev team of just six people, there's still things to admire here; Industria nails the vibe it's going for, there's some terrific music and it looks superb in places, there's no doubt a lot of effort has gone into this certain aspects of this project. However, none of this is enough to smooth over the fact that this is a tediously dull, monotonous, and derivative game that offers up absolutely nothing of any real worth in terms of story or mechanics.
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is a thoroughly entertaining mash-up of Musou mayhem, strategy and relationship-building aspects that should more than satisfy fans of both the franchises involved here. It improves upon its 2017 predecessor in several ways, most notably in providing a far more engaging story featuring a narrative that's ripe for several replays. With impressively solid performance on Switch and an action-packed campaign that'll see you blasting your way through tens of thousands of foes for a good 30 hours in a single playthrough, this is right up there with the very best Omega Force has served up thus far.
No matter how much we like the game itself - and we like it a lot - it's very hard to recommend picking up this poor Nintendo Switch version as things stand. Without the technical issues, this one's an easy recommendation and a solid start to a fantastic RPG trilogy. However, in its launch state, it's a much harder sell. Fingers crossed we see a patch ASAP.
If this sounds unacceptable to you, well, we're in total agreement, as there's no excuse for a bug like this, one that should be easily spotted by anyone playing through the port, making its way into this final release version. It's a massive shame, as in terms of overall performance this third entry in the series runs well enough but there's just no getting around the freezing issue here, it needs sorting out with a patch ASAP before we can consider giving this one any sort of positive recommendation. For now, we'd steer clear of another disappointing port for Harebrained Schemes' stellar series.
If it gets a patch that fixes the performance issues and most egregious bugs then you're looking at one of the most entertaining RPGs on Switch; it's that good. For now, however, we're left shaking our heads and wondering why on earth Shadowrun: Dragonfall has been re-released in this state.
The Shadowrun Trilogy is a superb trio of RPG classics that we were psyched to get stuck into all over again on Nintendo Switch. However, constant performance issues, including stuttering frame rates, long loading times, unresponsive and sticky controls, and a serious bug that freezes your game entirely at points, means that this is a series of ports we find it very difficult to recommend picking up as things currently stand at launch. Let's hope there's a significant patch on the way ASAP as these are games that deserve to be played by as many people as possible.
Shadowrun Trilogy is an excellent trio of tactical RPG titles that serve up wonderfully atmospheric worlds, well-written stories and entertaining turn-based combat to boot. With surprisingly breezy core mechanics and fairly short running times for all three entries it's a perfect series for newcomers to the genre and tactical RPG veterans alike, and another fantastic addition to Xbox Game Pass that we highly recommend you check out ASAP. Let's just hope that freezing bug gets patched out nice and quickly.