Pine Hearts is one of those rare wholesome, cozy games that doesn’t try to use an emotional overlay to hide gameplay that’s not very fun when you get down to it – it’s got an emotional core underneath a game that’s fun to play.
It has plenty of flaws that are very easy to see, and I’m sure those will frustrate lots of people. But at the same time, these games are classics for a reason, and even if the experience isn’t wholly perfect, the package is still enjoyable enough that it’s sure to please pretty much everyone who plays it.
If you’re a fan of Portal-style puzzlers, you should buy it.
It’s a cozy game that realizes a sickly sweet veneer isn’t enough to draw people in, you also need to provide solid gameplay – and that’s something this game delivers. You’ll have to have a high tolerance for cutesiness, to be sure, but in the end, it’s worth it.
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom isn’t the first game that tries so hard to be wacky, nor would I begrudge developers who want a game that’s popular among streamers. But I can’t say that the end result is all that fun – not when there are all kinds of genuinely good modern 3D platformers out there that don’t rely nearly as much on silly gimmicks.
While no one would confuse it for a GOTY contender or anything, it’s still a solid riding simulator with a decent amount of content. Given how bad it could’ve been, that seems like a win.
Games that rely heavily on nostalgia walk a fine line. Done the right way, they evoke games from yesteryear while also adding their own spin; done poorly, and they make you wish you were playing those other games instead. Frogun Encore, unfortunately, falls into this latter category.
Even if it was outshined by its successor, Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD is still worth your time. It may not be the GOTY contender that Luigi’s Mansion 3 was, but if you give it a chance, you’ll still find it worth your while.
Crow Country is clearly influenced by some of the scariest games of the ‘90s, but it’s good enough that it can be enjoyed today even if you never played those games the first time around (or even if you’re generally too much of a scaredy cat to play them).
There’s a very easy way to tell if Dread Delusion will appeal to you. Does the phrase, “Like a trippy, PS1 version of Morrowind” make your heart all a-flutter? Then you need to play Dread Delusion. Immediately.
Bang Average Football is a game that deserves having people play game after game after game. Not only does it perfectly nail the feeling of playing sports games back in their infancy, it also adds a cozy, Stardew Valley-style frame around the whole thing that you’ll want to do even if you don’t usually like those kinds of sims. It’s an excellent game all-around that does a whole lot of things right.
Seeing as I still have fond memories of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture nearly a decade after I played it, I’ve been eager to see The Chinese Room return to this style of game – and I’m very pleased to see that with Still Wakes the Deep, their return is a huge success
If you go into Heading Out expecting a driving game, you’re probably going to be sorely disappointed. It’s something entirely different from that – and, improbably (given the different genres being thrown together), it works incredibly well.
Capes isn’t so much a super-powered version of XCOM as it is a mediocre XCOM clone that happens to feature superheroes – and there is a difference, as this game illustrates.
I have no doubt that if you loved Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door the first time around there’s nothing here that will detract from your memories – and if you’re looking to check the game out for the first time, it’s probably aged better than most of its contemporaries, the occasionally slow pacing aside.
Even as a single-player adventure, Song of Nunu delivers. It may or may not be a faithful representation of the League of Legends characters, but it says a lot about the quality of this game that none of that really matters.
The neat thing about Dicefolk is the way it defies easy classification, even though it brings together a couple of really well-worn ideas.
Is Metro Simulator 2 the worst game on the Switch? It’s quite possible.
It’s neither fun nor terrible, but rather simply bad – and bad in a way that never quite makes the jump into guilty pleasure/so-bad-it’s-good terrible.
Biomutant is entirely forgettable. There are an abundance of much worse games to play on the Switch, to be sure, but there are also plenty of games that are better, so unless you just want to kill time shooting things in an open world – which, to be fair, is sometimes a wholly understandable impulse – you’re better off avoiding this one entirely.