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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From its opening moments upon a prison ship bound for Fort Joy to non-stop adventures that take you across the high seas to the Reaper’s Coast, Nameless Isle and beyond, Divinity: Original Sin 2 simply dazzles.
Gun Gun Pixies is a bad game. It’s a terrible third-person shooter, a clunky platformer and an incompetent visual novel, all wrapped up in an embarrassingly puerile attempt at titillation.
This beautiful Switch remake rebuilds all of this from the ground up in fine style. It adds modern conveniences, a dungeon creator, amiibo support and lots of little quality of life improvements whilst infusing every single square inch of Koholint – every secret passage, Piranha, Pokey and Pig Warrior – with a level of detail and depth that totally reinvigorates both its timeless story and classic Zelda gameplay for a whole new generation of gamers.
Habroxia is a pretty bland and curiously straightforward little shmup with nothing about it that stands out as being worth recommending.
Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast has an opening five chapters that will test your patience to its absolute limit. In some ways, this is down to its age and in others it's just bad design coupled with the odd decision to hold back the game’s best aspects for such a long stretch. This poor pacing is the one thing standing in the way of us giving this a hearty recommendation. However, If you think you’ve got the fortitude to push on through to the good stuff – a trial worthy of Yoda himself – you’ll be handsomely rewarded with some top-notch Star Wars action.
Contra: Rogue Corps has some good ideas.
Devil May Cry 2 is quite rightly regarded as a misstep for the now storied franchise; a confused and oddly bland game with a nonsensical story, boring level design, terrible enemy AI and a central protagonist who has seriously lost his mojo. There's some fun to be had here and there by virtue of the fact it is a Devil May Cry game; that signature combat still intact, despite the fact it never really attempts to put your skills to the test. Still, there's no escaping the reality that this is one entry in the series you can absolutely skip without feeling like you missed anything. Roll on Devil May Cry 3.
Fight’N Rage arrives on Switch and immediately positions itself as one of the must-own action games on Nintendo’s console.
Dead By Daylight has been around for quite while now and has remained a pretty popular game on both PC and console over the years. It’s a straightforward and repetitive online affair that, if you're lucky enough to be matched with the right bunch of randoms or happen to be playing a custom match with friends, can deliver the goods in terms of frights and tension from time to time. However, it has also always been a pretty clunky affair, a fact which is amplified further here by the noticeable graphical downgrade, laggy menus and the exclusion of a bunch of DLC that we really feel should have been included for the steep asking price.
As it stands, for a budget price, this is a still a slick little twin-stick shooter that nails the basics and is well worth your time if you're a fan of the genre.
Together, these two make for a pretty essential addition to your Switch's RPG library.
Into the Dead 2 is a pretty fun, well-made auto-run zombie survival game that arrives on Switch at a ludicrous price point that makes it very hard to justify picking up.
Zombieland: Double Tap - Road Trip is everything you've come to expect from a lazy movie tie-in. Its gameplay is mechanically competent but it's bland beyond belief, short, cynical and lazy. It has the most tenuous of links to the actual film it portrays and is ultimately a very basic twin-stick shooter with a tired-looking Zombieland skin tossed carelessly on top – it also costs far more money than it has any right to. If this was a free mobile game you might get an hour or two of braindead time-wasting out of it, but as an almost full price console release, it's pretty much indefensible.