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Pulsating beats, cool sayings, fashion as armor and the Joy-Con as pointer: The World Ends With You works very well on the Nintendo Switch despite the lack of precision in battle and will continue to impress in 2018 with its gripping story and incomparable style - whether you experience the adventure in TV or handheld mode.

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The Football Manager 2019 by Sports Interactive shows up with few innovations and surprises. The well-known formula still works, but this must not excuse why new features like the revised training do not work properly. The Football Manager still has the charm of a spreadsheet, with an old-fashioned graphics engine and new bugs. Fans will have their fun with Football Manager 2019, which despite all its weaknesses is the best version yet. However, Sports Interactive will not make the step into the mainstream with this game.

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Cybarian is an entertaining, crisp retro platformer with a loving look, a cool soundtrack and some nice details. The just four varied levels can be solved by experienced players in well under an hour; in the first round of the game it probably takes two to three hours, depending on your skill, to learn and master all the mechanisms and traps. Considering that the game is available for less than 5 Euro, this is okay from my point of view. If you're in the mood for a bit of crunchy pixel art action again, you won't go wrong with Cybarian.

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Starlink has a good playful foundation, but it has been sacrificed to a generic Open World approach and rampant recycling. Atlas is all about mass instead of class - it's a shame about the great Toys-to-Life approach.

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The few deep and very well written quests unfortunately get lost in the paper and terminal clutter. The loss of human NPCs is a bitter blow to the apocalypse. But the game world is filled with so much love, details and little stories that it would be quite ignorant not to visit the shooter RPG again. Maybe in a month or two, when the biggest bugs have been fixed and the first DLC has been released.

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This trip to Kanto is more than just a return: Game Freak and the Pokémon Company are finally taking their first small steps into the future and making Pokémon more open, lively and modern. This is the way to go!

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Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is a very good strategy game and I had a lot of fun with it during the whole season. The fights are challenging (also for veterans of the genre), the story is interesting and exploring the zone is rewarded with new weapons and better equipment. The only thing I'd like to see in the next part of the series is a little more content. Apart from the campaign and a few occasional trips to secondary areas, there's not much to get.

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After Journey and Abzu, Gris is another extraordinary trip into a fascinating virtual world, which will stay in your head long after the finale - and, unlike the other two, also has playful qualities. Congratulations to Nomada Studio on this great debut project and a worthy end to the game year! Gris takes us on a four-hour emotional journey into a magical world whose colours, images and sounds hypnotize - and which, in addition to its audiovisual attractions, can also entertain us with interesting puzzles and games.

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Double Cross doesn't do anything bad as a Jump'n'Run, but has hardly any charm, can't set its own mark in any way and is hardly worth mentioning on the Nintendo Switch compared to the strong competition.

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Despite the gameplay variety in the different worlds, Elli unfortunately offers too little to stand out from the crowd. If you liked the shrines in the last Zelda and if you like a light version of them, you can take a look and won't do much wrong. Thanks to a very easy level of difficulty and the lack of fights, Elli is unlikely to offer enough entertainment value to everyone else.

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One has to appreciate Causal Bit Games will that they tried to further develop the formula of the clear role model, which is of course Ghouls 'n Ghosts. It would have been better, however, to hand over the story mode only when it is free of it's faults and better designed. It's annoying that the difficulty of the game too often lies in finding the easiest and luckiest route through the dungeons with every new screen death, while the arcade mode seems to be much more polished. So Battle Princess Madelyn remains a likeable game which brings fun for a few hours due to the arcade mode. This and the charming character design can't fool you about the numerous annoyances, and so Madelyn finally awakens one thing above all else: The longing for Knight Arthur.

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An almost perfect trip to Raccoon City shows what remakes have to look like. Now please take a look at the remake of the third part!

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Vane awakens the hope for an exciting, gloomy gaming experience in the style of Inside or Journey, but ultimately fails in the implementation and also offers hardly any fresh ideas over his short playing time.

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The fact that Metro Exodus also works for me as a newcomer to the Metro series and that I can now comprehend the often quoted strengths of the shooter cannot be denied. The balance between survival-, shooter- and stealth-gameplay, exploring the extensive areas and returning to narrow dungeons and tunnels, which are garnished with horror elements, is well done. I also liked the wonderfully refreshing reduction to the bare essentials in terms of HUD, markers and other ballast very much and intensified the immersion immensely. In the end, Metro Exodus entertained me well for about 20 hours, but didn't completely convince me. Nevertheless, the experience is worth a recommendation to me and Metro fans will probably take it anyway, although 4A Games has not only remained true to its strengths, but also to its weaknesses.

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Away: Journey to the Unexpected describes itself as a Feel-Good-Adventure right from the start and when it reaches the right target group, the four-hour adventure might also be a bit fun and feel good. The cuddly child comic style with a hint of anime, the uncomplicated gameplay - albeit with pitfalls - and the story are basically a round thing. Whether this is sufficient in form and scope as a gaming experience, everyone must decide for themselves. For me personally it was okay as a game snack for in between, but didn't bring me any highlights or the often quoted Feel Good atmosphere, felt shallow and will therefore quickly disappear from my memory.

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Travis Strikes Again doesn't live up to the name No More Heroes or the talent of Suda51 and bores for almost seven hours with blunt action, uninspired level design and the eternal unwinding of the same processes.

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Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom not only does justice to the Wonder Boy series, but improves the familiar concept in many areas. The game has convinced me from the first to the last minute, and it's a pleasure to jump through the beautiful kingdom with Jin, solve puzzles and defeat demanding bosses. Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is a must-have title for anyone who likes jump'n'runs or classic action-adventures.

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Liar Princess and the Blind Prince is a lovely puzzle game experience that has entertained me for about five hours. The story doesn't contain any highlights in the course of the game itself, but it is still told in an interesting way and it shakes hands with the constantly growing challenge in gameplay. A look behind the hand-drawn fairy tale story with Japanese sound reveals a fine message, which also has an effect after the end of the game.

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Pode is a wonderful puzzle discovery adventure, which not only fascinates me with its colourful and varied scenery, which you can let shine in every room, but also with the two cute actors Boulder and Glo. For about seven hours I was entertained wonderfully, always curiously entering the next level, exploring its puzzles and secrets, and always had a smile on my face. Pode doesn't reinvent the puzzle genre, but offers harmonious and well thought-out mechanics that encourage puzzling and equally challenges the good mood spray. Practical that you can enter the journey together in a co-op as well as a single player. The atmospheric soundtrack rounds the whole thing off and delivers an all-round feel-good game that you shouldn't miss.

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If you had a lot of fun with Far Cry 5, you will appreciate New Dawn. The usual good gunplay and the traditional open world work for the chaos on the streets of Hope County again this time. The cross-references to part 5 and Easter Eggs to other Ubisoft games are also well placed and encourage you to continue playing. But that was it. Especially the artificial "intelligence" and the flat characters quickly spoiled the fun of the game.

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