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World War Z is an unremarkable zombie shooter that serves up a decent five-odd hours of action if you can find a few friends to play with. It's repetitive stuff; basic and unsurprising for the most part, but this Switch port is solid, managing to provide the full-fat experience without too much in the way of technical issues or other shortcomings. If you're in the mood for blazing through bland masses of zombies with a few friends in tow, this one's got you covered – just don't expect much more than that.
Just Dance 2022 is okay. It's more of the same with some cool new tracks, a slick and smooth experience overall that plays it safe and works just fine as a result. However, it also constantly pushes its subscription service and ends up feeling a little convoluted and tacky as it spends more time flogging tracks you don't own over letting you enjoy the ones included with the base game. Fans of the series - or anyone who's just danced to even a single track from the series - will know exactly what they're getting here, but newcomers should be aware that they'll need to fork out more cash after buying the game in order to enjoy the full experience.
Shin Megami Tensei V is a modern masterpiece. It successfully delivers on all the aspects that have made the series thus far so popular with fans-namely through its high difficulty, heavy narrative themes, and expansive team-building options-while polishing up and tightening the weaker aspects. Things like a more easily navigable map and more difficulty options to cater to players of all skill levels comfortably make this the most approachable entry in the series, and it feels like there's more things to do in the world than ever before. If you are at all a fan of RPGs or have been looking for a good entry point into this oft overlooked series, we would strongly encourage you to pick this up as soon as you can. Shin Megami Tensei V was worth the wait, Atlus has successfully stuck the landing with this one.
Demon Turf is a fantastic platformer that's held back from true greatness by sections of dull and repetitive combat. Push through this, however, and you've got a game that rewards daring and bravery, bolstered by wonderful platforming controls that let you string together incredible combos. The visuals are initially a bit jarring, but the character design really shines through and give it a timeless aesthetic. If you're a fan of 3D platformers from the 'golden' N64 era and beyond, this one is well worth a look.
With split-screen co-op, and incredibly gentle expectations as far as the gameplay is concerned, LEGO Marvel Super Heroes is a fantastic, low-stakes game for parents and kids to play together, but also for adults who are looking for something that pleasantly whiles away the hours without beating you over the head with difficulty. Excelsior!
Dusk is one hell of an impressive piece of software and possibly the single best Unity port to Switch we've ever seen, sidestepping all the usual performance problems and delivering a brilliant experience of a brilliant game. We've tried to think of meaningful criticisms or negatives. Of course pad controls are never going to be as precise as mouse aim, but when the developers have tailored the analogue sticks to such a degree of precision, that would be churlish to ding them for. It's not as good a game as Quake, but almost nothing is. It's arguably a better port than Quake got, and that was itself excellent. There's a relatively limited arsenal of weapons - they're all great, but there's no iconic gun here, just your usual pistol, shotty, assault rifle, explosives, et al. Ultimately, Dusk is another absolute cracker in what's turned out to be a phenomenal month for Switch; a real horror show, and the highest of 9s.
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy is a great game, a fun and colourful adventure full of excellent writing, brilliant acting and plenty of wacky action and exploration to dig into. However, this Switch cloud version renders pretty much any praise we could lavish upon it entirely inconsequential as it serves up a truly messy, laggy and unreliable experience - even when played via our super solid, ultra fast internet connection. It is, in short, a disastrous and ridiculously expensive way to play through a game that deserves so much better. Pick this one up on another platform if you can and steer well clear of this mess.
Mario Party Superstars is a love letter to the parties you remember attending 20 years ago. A disappointingly slim selection of boards takes the shine off things somewhat, but it's hard to argue that this is the best Mario Party has been in over a decade. No new ideas absolutely feels like a missed opportunity, but by the same token we'd much prefer to have all these classic ideas intact rather than potentially tainting them with unwanted and unnecessary inclusions only added for the sake of being new. Grab a can of Tango and a fistful of 10p Freddos - you're going to party like it's 1999.
There's a lot to like about Maiden of Black Water; while we didn't find it overly scary, it is very good indeed at being eerie. You'll see ghosts out of the corner of your eye and when you check, they'll be gone. It's oddly cosy and non-stressful for a horror game, because your camera is such an efficient weapon and the combat it propogates is too action-packed to really let any dread sink in. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though we found the earlier PlayStation 2 instalments of the series were more interested in actively frightening the player. If you get absorbed in the storyline - which is easy to do as the episodic structure makes "just one more area" a compelling prospect - you'll find a good 15 or so hours of game here, and much more if you decide you need to get higher ranks as you improve your Camera Obscura with upgrades and other boons. Performance problems aside, this game's a real winner and worth snapping up if you're a horror fan who missed it on Wii U.
As a combat experience The Legend of Tianding is up there with the Guacamelee! series, showcasing excellent gameplay that allows you to string together multiple attacks and use your enemies' weapons against them. With distinct chapters introducing their own standalone missions, however, the game stubbornly forces you to endure a huge amount of set-up, with long conversations with NPCs and arduous treks across the hub world of Taipei. Trimming this fat would have benefited the overall pacing greatly, but push through this and you'll be rewarded with one of the most thrilling combat experiences we've encountered in a while.
Dungeon Encounters is a masterstroke of game design, character and narrative – it's storytelling in the way only games can be. It teaches how scale is felt in a game, and it teaches, through their absence, the roles of rich visuals and verbose storytelling. Next time we play an RPG with baroque graphics and forests of text, we will understand a little more deeply where a game's atmosphere really comes from.
Dying Light on Switch is quite a remarkable achievement, and we're happy to report that Techland has mostly stuck the landing with this one. Its ambitious open world full of zombies is unlike anything else in the Switch's library and, between the core campaign and six years of constant DLC updates, there's potentially hundreds of hours of enjoyment to be had here. Granted, all of this comes at the cost of performance that can be middling compared to other platforms, but this is neatly balanced out by the convenience of playing in handheld mode. We'd give Dying Light a strong recommendation, though with the caveat that Switch owners who rarely play in portable mode may want to pause and consider buying it elsewhere. Wherever you may fall, we'd strongly encourage you to consider this Switch port; it really is quite good.
If we were to name any complaint, it’s that the core gameplay in Evertried can feel a little stale after extended sessions. Skills and traps mix up the way you play somewhat, but you’re ultimately still confined to pressing one of four directions for the whole game, which gets a little samey given enough time. Still, we’d give this one a recommendation; there’s lots of replayability, the concept of its gameplay is something we haven’t seen before, and (most importantly) it’s fun.
Replaying the levels only serves to exacerbate a nagging feeling that A Little Golf Journey is simply too repetitive. When you move from one set of levels to the next, the visual design changes, with some courses looking genuinely beautiful. This doesn’t change the fact, however, that the terrain simply lacks variety throughout. The game clearly strives to provide a relaxing experience, but in doing so, it struggles to give much incentive to keep playing.
The Good Life knows where its strengths lie. Its functional open-world model and mostly-dated gameplay systems sit quietly in the background and allow its quirky charm to take the spotlight. That charm is piled on thick, with absurd characters (and absurd accents), a plot that digresses so wildly it seems unable to remember where it started and, lest we forget, the whole dog/cat transmogrification thing. The charm and atmosphere have to be seriously compelling if they are to excuse the well-worn mechanics, repetitive tasks and frequent slowdown and pop-in. If Japanese old-school gaming whimsy × twee Englishness isn't for you, then neither is The Good Life. But if you're a SWERY fan and that sounds like your cup of tea, get dunking.
The Crysis Remastered Trilogy arrives on Switch in a fantastic set of ports that deliver the full-fat super soldier experience with very little in the way of stutters, bugs or other technical failings. If you're picking this one up as a complete set, you've got a ton of excellent shooter action to blaze your way through in a trilogy of games that's aged remarkably well over the years and looks and plays great on Nintendo's hybrid console. Individually, however, things get a little more complicated, with the first two games easy recommendations, whilst number three is a little on the short side and feels rather threadbare without its multiplayer aspects to beef things up.
Crysis 3 Remastered stealths its way onto Switch in a fantastic port that delivers super solid gameplay and very little in the way of noticeable technical issues. However, with its mutliplayer aspects completely excised, this is now a fairly slim package that ends up being the hardest to recommend of the three Crysis titles available on Nintendo's console, especially if you're considering picking it up as a standalone title. What's here is still top-notch stuff, it's just a little too short-lived.
Crysis 2 Remastered is a super solid port of an excellent FPS that looks and plays fantastically well on Switch. Yes, you lose out on multiplayer, but there's still a generous single player campaign to get stuck into here that does a great job of funnelling you through its blockbuster setpieces whilst ensuring you get plenty of opportunity to tool around and experiment with your crazy Nanosuit powers. Crysis 2 may well be the very best entry in Crytek's franchise, and it's absolutely one of the finest shooters currently available on Nintendo's hybrid console.
Taking a balanced look at Aeon Must Die!, we really struggle to see exactly what anyone could get out of it. It's repetitive, ceaselessly uninteresting and frustrates on a fundamental level. We've certainly played worse games and it deserves credit on some level simply for having so many ideas, but none of them are good - or, at least, none of them are executed with the requisite level of skill that would make them work. It's a shame, because with more refinement, more of a tight clutch and a willingness to throw out what doesn't work, we feel like Aeon Must Die! could be pretty special. As it stands, there's no level on which we can enthusiastically recommend it.
By the time the credits roll you'll likely still have some hidden paintings to find, and even if you leave them behind, this is a thoroughly pleasant and satisfying experience on Nintendo's system. With smart puzzles, beautiful presentation and a story full of emotive moments, Inked: A Tale of Love is well worth your time.