Leonardo Faria's Reviews
Tt’s pure, cathartic, and an unapologetic sensory overload. It’s pure nonsense. It’s a game that doesn’t excite with its visuals and overexcited sound design, but it’s so bizarre you will keep on playing it out of sheer amusement. There isn’t anything else like it on the Nintendo Switch or any other console.
The differences being minute aren’t exactly a deal-breaker. It’s legitimately hard to improve upon a formula that has been polished to near perfection for Sports Interactive’s small, but die-hard loyal fanbase. Football Manager 2023 caters to its audience and gives zero craps if you’re not part of this minute niche. If you are part of this demographic, however, this will once again be a time-consuming, heart-wrenching, immersive, and engrossing experience, one you could easily spend spend hundreds of hours playing.
I will commend The Case of the Golden Idol for being an excruciatingly smart game with a neat method of developing its lore and world-building, but its mystery solving gameplay loop, while engaging for those into whodunits, features some flaws worth pointing out. Solving a case is really rewarding, but getting stuck in a particular puzzle feels punishing, with the game nearly starting to treat you in a condescending way if you start using its (tiresome) hint system too often.
This chaotic gameplay and a really simple yet neat RPG progression system, where you’re given the opportunity to level up skills and increase stats like HP and attack, are what make The Pinball Wizard more entertaining and replayable than it should be.
Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher is a hilariously absurd game from a novelty standpoint, and it has neat elements, such as hunting for NFC-infused objects at home in order to generate monsters, which gave me a nostalgic feeling of inserting CDs in order to get monsters back in the 90s. However, it is still a dated and clunky game for 2022 standards. It gets repetitive quickly, but if you’re part of the aforementioned demographics, you’ll have the time of your life with this dude-in-a-rubber-suit breeding simulator.
I am not going to try to tell you that Gotham Knights is a pristine superhero game devoid of issues, for there are many, but I really enjoyed playing it. In fact, I haven’t stopped playing it yet. Its story is fantastic, and the core gameplay loop is solid, whether you’re talking about a story-driven solo mission or yet another nightly patrol with some mates. It is not, however, a game that deserves the label of “next-gen only”, as its performance is outshined by many other PS4 and Xbox One games.
As it stands, Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed is a great idea for an asymmetrical multiplayer experience, a potentially fun co-op time with friends, hampered by questionable design choices and a severe lack of content. You’ll see everything the game has to offer in an hour or so.
By no means is this good, or even mediocre, but I’ve seen much worse on the system. It’s just yet another unnecessary port that not only doesn’t perform well on such limited hardware, but also doesn’t fit in at all as a game available on a portable system. There’s just no reason for you to bother with it.
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is the gift that keeps on giving. Its predecessor was excellent, but left a lot of room for improvements. Ubisoft took that as a foundation and made Sparks of Hope bigger, prettier, funnier… in summary, it’s better in every single conceivable way.
It fails as a challenging first-person shooter, it fails as a comedic game (using LOLZ in your dialogue doesn’t make you funny), and it fails, to a lesser degree, as a retro homage to the Nintendo 64 era. There is a good chance you have never heard of it prior to this review, and sadly, I think it’s best if you keep unaware of it. It’s no offensively bad, but I cannot think of a single redeeming factor. Not even the inclusion of capybaras… for the “LOLZ”.
I’m really glad that A Plague Tale: Requiem managed to overcome the burden of sequelitis and shine as a worthy successor to the fantastic Innocence. Sure, its predecessor was a bit more impactful due to it just dropping from out of nowhere, but Requiem manages to exist alongside it by amping up the tension and psychological aspects of its story.
Cheapness and slight amount of jank aside, Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova is actually a pretty decent game.
I cannot believe I was actually excited for Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3. Honestly, I legitimately had high hopes for it. I thought that fan feedback and the resources offered by next-gen machines would let its developers craft a serious competitor to Mario Kart. Man, how disappointed I am. Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3 is worse than its predecessor in almost every single conceivable way. This game is in dire need of going back to development in order to be properly finished. It is, so far, the worst performing game I’ve played in a next-gen console, and possibly the most disappointing release of 2022.
I commend Dakar Desert Rally for being a lot more polished and accessible than its predecessor, but it’s still a hard game to sell to a wide audience. Don’t worry, the game itself is actually pretty good, despite its technical issues, but it is a very niche rallying game that pales in comparison to its vast amount of competitors when you put them side by side. Maybe a follow-up will add a quick play mode and fix its technical issues. As it stands, it’s janky and still brutal towards newcomers, but it’s a step in the right direction for the series.
Here’s the weird conclusion to this weird port of a really weird game: I don’t think the Switch version of NieR: Automata is worth your time, despite it being, for all intents and purposes, excellent. Considering the limitations of the hardware it was ported into, it’s a godlike effort, but one that makes it the worst version ever released for this game, by far. You’re not getting the best version of its soundtrack, you’re not getting the best visuals, you’re not getting the best framerate. Even though you could, in theory, play it all on docked mode, why bother? You can get better performing and cheaper versions of it elsewhere.
All in all, Atari Mania has a fantastic concept, and could have been a surefire hit, but its poor performance, lack of polish and unfair difficulty ruined my enjoyment with it. The fact that WarioWare: Get It Together somehow managed to be even worse is the only reason I’d call Atari Mania the ideal candidate if you want to have something that even remotely resembles Nintendo’s cult classic series on the Switch, but even so, it’s a massive stretch.
No More Heroes III could have been great. Its visuals, performance, and combat system are all a massive improvement over its predecessors. This game had all the ingredients to become a hack ‘n’ slash classic, but Suda51 had to shove it, nay, drown it with arrogance, self-indulgence, and some of the unfunniest “humor” I’ve witnessed since, well, the original No More Heroes, I suppose. The return of the pointless open world is further proof that player feedback, as well as trend analysis, haven’t been taken into account.
Super Jagger Bomb is just Bomb Jack with an average-at-best polygonal coat of paint. It plays just like a nearly forty year old game, with little to no interesting gameplay elements added to the mix. You might want to grab it if you have some sort of nostalgic feelings towards that Tecmo cult classic, but at the same time, if you do, the original Bomb Jack is available on the Switch eShop. You probably own it already.
Prodeus would have been great if it was only a mere shooter heavily inspired by 2016’s DOOM, but its developers went above and beyond. What an amazing game. It’s both a love letter to old and modern shooters, embracing the best elements from both eras. Its levels are amazing, its gameplay is fast-paced and punchy, its soundtrack is insane… and it’s got a freaking phenomenal level editor that will basically ensure that players will have an endless supply of brand new levels to tackle for the foreseeable future.
Even if the gameplay loop outstays its welcome after a few rounds, and you can play all of its songs in about two hours, I can’t help but love the fact that Trombone Champ exists. It’s just… weird. Weird in the most adorable of ways.