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Unfolding like a classic Disney tale, this is a beautifully animated adventure that weaves a deeply personal tale. Bye Sweet Carole is driven by its art style and a brilliant musical score, but occasionally stumbles due to stiff controls and frustrating mechanics.
Ball x Pit is a tremendous brew of so many ideas it ought to collapse under the confusion. However, it operates in such perfect balance that it appeals both to the one-more-go instinct and to more cerebral planning and creativity. Kenny Sun Studios set itself a heck of a challenge but, fortunately, hasn't dropped the ball.
Pokémon Legends: Z-A should be celebrated for its fabulous real-time combat and its largely smooth jump to the Switch 2, but in condensing things down to one single location, it loses part of the Pokémon magic that Arceus and many other entries managed to amplify.I'll forever find filling up my Pokédex fun, and for the Switch 2 generation, this is a good starting point for the franchise. But if the Legends series is to continue, it needs to recapture its personality and fuse that real-time system with a bit more freedom.
Between a restrained scope and structure that harkens back to the Atelier games of old, a bevvy of fresh gameplay twists to call its own, and a metric ton of fanservice for veterans, Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian feels like a triumphant celebration of the entire series' legacy.More importantly, it's just a really great RPG experience. Appropriately, it mixes together a bunch of quality ingredients - a heartwarming narrative, strategic and dynamic turn-based combat, complex crafting systems - and synthesises them into a jolly little romp of an adventure. There's certainly a bump in the road or two, but the ride is too enjoyable to linger on those for long.
You won't become fluent in Japanese by playing Shujinkou, but it will introduce the basics of both hiragana and katakana to you in a game that features the best bits of the Etrian Odyssey series in a very clever way. The combat system is solid enough that not even the counterintuitive menus could keep me from diving back in for more.
Absolum is an on-par experience to Dragon's Crown, but a superior game in terms of its key metrics. Its combat, collectible augmentations, and planning are exceptionally well-formulated, ensuring no run is ever quite the same and its strategic options and play-styles are ever-deepening. It's incredibly impressive in its reconstitution of arcade, role-playing, and roguelike formats, evolving them into something fresh and exciting.To that end, it's one of the best of its kind, whatever that kind may be. If you don't enjoy the idea of repetition and grind, you may not fall in love with its initial five hours, but the momentum for one-more-go becomes so compelling after a while that it's impossible to relinquish the pad.
Yooka-Replaylee, in most ways, feels like the game that Yooka-Laylee was always meant to be. The core experience has remained the same, but much has been added or tweaked to make for a significantly more confident and streamlined experience.Though the technical issues hold it back a bit, at least on Switch 2 at launch, this is still a clear improvement over the original and a game that no fan of the 3D platforming genre should miss out on. Even if you played the original to completion, I'd say Yooka-Replaylee is still very much worth your time and money.
Little Nightmares III faithfully preserves the oppressive mood, clever environmental puzzles, and visceral unease associated with the series, but feels like an echo of what came before. While its dark allure remains potent, the baffling absence of local co-op undercuts the game's most ambitious feature. Though its multiplayer concept shines in theory, the absence of a character-swap feature to enrich single-player mode feels like another missed opportunity.
With how stellar a package the Vows of the Virtueless proved to be upon release, the expanded and feature-packed Disgaea 7 Complete should be a slam dunk of a recommendation to any tactical RPG fan - but re-releases are rarely that simple. For anyone who missed out on the original the first time around, this version is every bit as great and stands tall as the ultimate, feature-complete iteration of the game.At the same time, there's no denying that the handful of brand-new content additions fall on the niche side and mostly serve those who want to live and breathe Disgaea 7 for their next hundred-plus hours of game time. Even stalwart fans who loved the base game may want to think twice before dropping the price of admission on this updated version and starting from scratch for a couple of post-game goodies.
Sonic Racing: Crossworlds is a genuinely excellent game, but the Switch version is just 'alright'. The dynamic track designs, high replayability, and thrilling visuals all combine to make for a game that - judged purely on that content - stands as a strong competitor to the dominant Mario Kart series.But the poor visual quality and resolution present in the Switch version drag down the overall experience and make it feel like a much more mediocre experience. I'd still give this port a light recommendation; it's a fair choice if Switch is the only platform available to you, and ultimately justifies the price of admission. Otherwise, I'd suggest waiting to see how the upcoming Switch 2 version pans out, or picking it up now on another platform.
Galaxy 2 on Switch includes the same additions as the first game. It introduces Assist Mode to give newcomers a leg up, and if you're playing co-op, Player Two can use the mouse controls on Switch 2. It also suffers from the same quirks: the gyro controls, although perfectly serviceable, never feel quite as good as the original Wii controls, though some of the camera issues in the original perhaps aren’t quite as prevalent here.
Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter is a comprehensive audio-visual update of a classic series opener, with great characters, a world that you'll want to explore, and deep combat with a wealth of options. The updated style runs best on Switch 2, with only the odd stumble in docked performance.
Star Trek: Resurgence is a modest enterprise, but Dramatic Labs did a stellar job of capturing the qualities of the show, specifically its '90s era, with all the strengths and weaknesses thereof. As with the show, technically, you may notice some rough edges, but the creators have worked wonders with their resources. The visual novel stylings here suit the material, and it's got it where it counts, with excellent writing and performances across the board.Non-Trek fans won't get half as much out of it, and you may not be tempted to go back for a second playthrough. But if the current crop of Trek shows isn't quite scratching your itch, Resurgence does a great job of transporting you back a generation.
Supergiant Games is five-for-five with Hades II, a huge, triumphant sequel that manages to diverge mechanically and offer more challenges and variety than its predecessor. It helps that it's nearly faultless on Switch 2 in particular.Sometimes there's a bit too much going on, and in shooting for a bigger, more tragic story, I think it's lost a bit of heart. But, quite frankly, I don't want time to stop because if it does, I won't be able to play Hades II anymore.
I don't want to let my moan about the final boss overshadow the review. There's still a fun game here, and a lovely remaster of a well-loved platformer. The things it does well - the personality of Pac-Man, friends, and enemies in the cut scenes, the variety in the gameplay - shine brightly. For those with nostalgia for the original, I'm sure you'll enjoy your 'Re-Pac'-aged version. It's been made with love. For non-fans, however, this is a more difficult purchase to justify.Arguably, the price is a little steep for what's on offer, and some lingering retro-frustrations in the execution of the 3D platforming and boss fights might sit badly with an audience expecting a game with the finesse of more modern alternatives. Sure, even Donkey Kong Bananza has its share of cheap deaths, but the truth is Pac-Man World 2: Re-Pac isn't in the same league. Short, sweet, prettified, retro, and not for everybody; those are the keywords here.
Yes, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles cuts content from the War of the Lions version, and it's a shame. However, put this one issue aside, if you can, and you've got a fantastic - and fantastically thoughtful - revamp otherwise. Meaningful QoL changes meld with delicate gameplay nips and tucks, CPU enemy tune-ups, and a smoother-flowing experience overall to deliver a game that's pretty much impossible to knock.Fans will be fully absorbed into the story all over again, enjoying the new flow of the narrative and experiencing the whole thing so wonderfully well-acted. Newcomers, who're less likely to be bothered by the missing content, well, they can just get busy lapping up one of the all-time great tactical RPGs looking and playing better than ever.
EA's Switch 2 football debut is a night-and-day difference from its half-hearted Switch one, setting a great precedent for the future of the series. EA Sports FC 26 delivers a fully-featured version of the game, and while it only runs at 30fps and has a gated-off Ultimate Team mode which doesn't tap into the series' larger crossplay community, it still plays a fantastic game of football and offers more game modes than you'll ever know what to do with.
With Death on the Nile, Microids Studio Lyon has settled into a great formula for a Poirot adventure: a supporting playable character brings novelty and gives the moustachioed star room to ham it up as a lightly comic persona. Some mildly disjointed pacing and a dozily relaxed speed might put some people off, but if you want the cosy feeling of curling up with a good mystery novel, then this is absolutely the game for you.
Earthion is a terrific piece of work. It's more an accomplished production, arguably, than a shoot 'em up of incredible highs, but at the same time, that's part of its charm. It has a different feel thanks to its shield system and mid-stage upgrade rungs, and this is a refreshing and welcome change from the norm. Much of the fun is in figuring out the order of bolstering your ship and the little tricks that various weaponry affords when faced with tricky junctures. It does some things other shoot 'em ups don't do, and is all the more standout for it.At the same time, it fails to achieve some things that other shoot 'em ups do so well. Nonetheless, Earthion is a treat of a game: a bold new Mega Drive work that sits in the upper echelons of the console's broad catalogue, and shouldn't be passed up by fans of the genre or wonderful 16-bit works.
While I adored Lego Voyagers' visual style and emotive design of the main bricks, I often found the actual puzzles underwhelming, and the game ended just as they started to get interesting.If you ever find this on sale and want to just enjoy an evening with someone, this is a clever little co-op adventure with surprisingly touching themes. But when it comes to the difficulty of the main puzzles and the amount of content on offer, Lego Voyagers feels a few bricks short of a full set.