It's just hard to shake the feeling you've played this game before, and better.
If you're the type to burn through the Louvre in an hour and wait for your companions in the cafe, The Mooseman may well try your patience. If you're more inclined to wander around with an audio guide, reading every accompanying plaque and information card, you'll likely enjoy its sedate pace, workaday puzzles and catalogue of artefacts. A clumsy UI seriously hampers the experience but, if you're willing to work around the irritations at its core, it offers an interesting, sometimes beautiful journey.
In many ways God Wars is like a new Picross game; it's more of the same. The Japanese folklore narrative offers a slight twist, but the script is painfully dull and repetitive. If you're dipping your toe into the genre or only have time for one of these, we'd sit tight to see what Intelligent Systems has up its sleeve with the upcoming Fire Emblem: Three Houses. If you're a strategy junkie after a fix, it gets the job done with all the mechanics and systems you'd expect – but nothing new or novel.
It's not for everyone, but Warriors Orochi 4's multitudinous hordes can be pleasurable to sweep through, despite the game feeling by-the-numbers in many ways. This is simply more, and while fans might be able to forgive the bland presentation, we'd wager that non-devotees would have a much better time with the Zelda or Fire Emblem spin-offs – with the characters, settings and accoutrement you know and love helping to temper the monotony when you're not quite ‘in the zone'.
If it were a launch title, we'd recommend tactics fans investigate Mercenaries Wings: The False Phoenix, at least until something better came along, but something better did come along – several things, in fact. If you're an insatiable tactics fiend who's munched through everything else, including the previous collection, this is stodgy, competent filler that should keep you going for a while; it's a supermarket meal deal or a plate of cocktail sausages. It's no-frills and fine, but with a veritable buffet of tasty, interesting alternatives, who wants a sausage on a stick? Perfunctory, cliched writing and a lack of niceties make it a tougher sell when there are literally hundreds of hours to be had elsewhere.
There's no shortage of charming, artistic puzzle-platformers on Switch and Koloro is certainly a good one; there's much to like in its simple mechanics and narrative, and there's satisfaction to be found in its puzzle-solving. The problem is that you've almost certainly seen everything it has to offer somewhere before and, as much as it engages your grey matter while you play, it's unlikely to stay with you in the same way the games it evokes do.
Omega Labyrinth Life is a Whopper of a game – delicious and juicy on the poster, but it's really just salt and stodge. If you're after some decent dungeon-crawling filler, it certainly does the job and there's pleasure to be had, but there are far cheaper, more adventurous meals on Switch eShop that are ultimately more satisfying and won't leaving you feeling mildly guilty. If you're a curious onlooker whose interest is piqued, we'd wait for a sale; fanservice isn't enough to justify the asking price at launch for anybody but diehard Omega Labyrinth devotees.
While the central conceit sounds promising as an FMV experience, The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker fails to find a consistent tone or fully engage the player in its story. It offers a couple of nice ideas and the odd smile, but if you don't care about the central mystery, you're left with madness, and the disparate threads never weave together in a satisfying way. The two ominous notes of the soundtrack (only a mild exaggeration) are left to supply tension, and with The Bunker and Late Shift showing how the genre can be relevant and entertaining in 2018, it's hard to recommend this over the alternatives.
Panty Party is not unenjoyable. Don't be tricked into thinking you'll be ogling barely dressed girls – the panties themselves are the stars here. Bayonetta is an infinitely more alluring proposition in absolutely every way, but Panty Party's hack-and-slash style gameplay isn't without merit and there's a certain bizarre joyfulness to it. It's mostly-harmless, repetitive nonsense that you'll blow through in an afternoon, but we'd be lying if we said it didn't raise a grin or two through its sheer WTF-ness.
Star Story: The Horizon Escape is an inoffensive time sink with some competent gameplay that's 'fun' for an hour or two. Once you've seen a couple of the endings, though, it quickly palls. If you've run out of things to play on your Switch – and given the current flood of software, that's highly unlikely – and you're willing to forgive a lack of polish, you could do far worse, but look elsewhere if you're after a meaty adventure game.
If you find Ecco the Dolphin a bit dull, Hungry Shark World is an ideal antidote – what it lacks in finesse it makes up for with vicious energy. The gated content is doled out a little slowly, but the base gameplay is fast and satisfying, if a little repetitive. However, it's the interminable loading screens that truly destroy the pace and hamper the arcade-style fun, making this one hard to recommend.
Space Ribbon is not without merit – and the closer it inches into F-Zero's slipstream, the better it gets – but a terribly humdrum beginning, lacklustre implementation of items and a central mechanic which forces you to slow down to speed up makes it a tough proposition. There's fun to be had if you persevere but considering how the alternatives provide pretty-much instant diversion, this makes you work too hard for it.
It'd be easy to look at the bobcat's resumé, look at this and dismiss it out of hand. Unfortunately, although Bubsy: Paws On Fire has the foundation of a decent runner and developer Choice Provisions knows what it's doing in terms of creating levels with an engaging flow, less than stellar performance, bland and repetitive stages, superfluous gameplay additions and long loads combine to drag the experience down. It's not awful, it's just nowhere near as good as the Runner series and ultimately we'd recommend ditching the bobcat and spending time in the company of Commander Video instead.
We spent a long time mulling over why Senran Kagura: Peach Ball didn't push any of our buttons. If you find anime ladies with animal features highly appealing, you can probably add a couple of points to the score below. Ultimately, though, Peach Ball serves up a tedious, repetitive story with monotonous characters and pinball tables that can be characterised likewise. Despite a polished art style and a genuinely interesting idea of livening up the arcade game in a way only possible in a video game, we found the end result sorely lacking in the pinball department.
Harvest Life is not irredeemably awful, but it's rough and easily outclassed by the games it evokes. It feels dehydrated, with all the soul and polish sucked out, and a few pleasant tunes aren't enough revive it. Games of this ilk thrive on charm; this is subsisting on numbers and fodder. Harvest Moon fans don't have much on Switch at the moment beyond Stardew Valley, but life's too short to waste in Lohwold.