2019's Samurai Shodown is finally available for the Switch, bringing one of the foundational Japanese fighting games to a brand-new audience.
Fight'N Rage is a 16-bit-styled beat-'em-up that expands on the genre's strengths but also keeps a couple of its weaknesses.
The puzzles and banter are as good as they've ever been, though Trine 4 has a hard time overcoming some dodgy combat mechanics.
A Plague Tale: Innocence is an odd and often frustrating experience, with an escort mission front and center. There's a lot here that makes it worth checking out, though, even if only once.
Heaven's under new management. It takes a little while to come into its own, but 'God's Trigger' is a decent weekend's worth of splatterpunk entertainment.
I’ve got a laundry list of other minor complaints, like how dumb the “boss fights” are, but the randomness is my biggest issue. It turns what could be an interesting, thoughtful sort of puzzle game into a series of pulls on a slot machine. That’s not necessarily entirely bad, and you can get some fun out of it regardless, but it’s a mixed bag.
There's the seed of a good game here, but it's underdeveloped. Garage has style and wit to spare, but its cheap deaths, poor map design, murky graphics, and frequent bugs all add up to a frustrating experience. I'm usually willing to give any zombie game more credit than most sensible people would, and even I can't recommend this.
My complaints, it should be said, are relatively minor. Battle Chasers: Nightwar is a good, surprisingly polished callback of a game that replicates a lot of the feel of classic JRPGs without bringing along most of their flaws for the ride. I have no idea how appealing it is to anyone who didn't spend 40-hour chunks of his childhood on Final Fantasy III, but for me, it's a pleasant combination of modernity and nostalgia. That's a tricky combination to pull off.
Beyond that, however, I see Bleed's appeal, but it's a game that just isn't for me, at least not right now. It's a distinct experience in that it's a modern game dressed in a retro game's skin, with a substantial learning curve built into it before you're even competent. I don't think it's bad at all, but playing it feels like I've found myself in the cockpit of some vehicle that I don't know how to drive, five seconds before a crash. I figure there's a decent audience for this sort of game out there, but I'm not in it.
For the moment, I'm confident in saying that Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite plays well, which is good, because everything that surrounds that base game is a hot mess. It deserves a lot of the initial terrible buzz it received because unless you have your hands on it, Infinite just looks like refried hell. The Vs. series has never exactly been known for its high production values, but for a major fighting game release in 2017, this borders on embarrassing. It's a fun game that's often difficult to look at, and more so than any balance patches or DLC, it could use a fresh coat of paint.