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I never thought I’d see Cricket Captain on the Switch. Cricket Captain 2023 should have stayed on platforms where I wouldn’t have been tempted to pay for it. What a waste of money.
Sorry, devs. You are very wrong about that. Demon Sword Incubus may technically work. But it’s not inspiring or interesting. It’s not even good. Most egregiously of all, though is that it lacks the one thing people bought the game for. In a very real sense, buying Demon Sword on Switch is like buying a porn DVD with the nudity and sex cut out. What’s left when you do that?
Honestly, Fragment’s Note+ comes across as what would happen if someone who smooshes dolls or figures together to make them kiss were to write a visual novel. There is a lot of talent that went into making some of the elements of the game. The art is nice, and given more narrative context the “steamy” scenes would have been so much more fun. The localisation is also far better than the game deserves. It’s just that underneath it all is a ridiculously, stupidly juvenile story, and there’s no saving that.
Ten-pin bowling works as a little minigame, aimed at a social and party environment. It’s a simple, easy-to-grasp sport, and the consistency with the rules makes it ideal for pick-up-and-play fun. However, PBA Bowling 2023 aims to be more than that. This wants to be a serious simulation of a sport where the skill involved cannot be adequately abstracted into button presses. As a result, while PBA Bowling 2023 is a perfectly well-made game that is free of bugs and glitches (sadly a rarity among niche sports titles), it is also an intensely boring, shallow game. You’re better off sticking to the light and frivolous take in Wii Sports.
Should the very negative impression that Alone Musc levels be tempered by the fact that the credits list just four people? Perhaps, but then perhaps those four people should have worked on something more in-line with what they had the resources for. Alone Musc is, by a long way, the poorest rhythm game on a console that has a lot of excellent rhythm games, and unfortunately, for a genre as straightforward as this one, there was nowhere for this team to hide their inability to compete with the other developers working in the genre.
You can play regular chess, too, and it works, though there's an utter lack of inspiration behind the little battles between the chess pieces. Worse, the AI isn't going to throw up a challenge to anyone but the most beginner of chess beginners. Finally, it's all terribly ugly, most notably with the backgrounds, where we're meant to be able to fight in "towns", "graveyards", "castles" and other locations, but in practice, the developer just has just dropped a differently-shaped rock here and there and called it a day. There are exceptional options for chess on the Switch. Pawn of the Dead, meanwhile, is one of the poorest games on the console.
Real Boxing 2 is everything wrong with mobile gaming, and while it's free of the microtransactions on Nintendo Switch, all that it has to offer is an endless parade of matches that display no personality. I'm no expert on boxing, but I know enough about the sport to know that boxing fans aren't going to find this satisfying on any level.
The Nintendo Switch has been blessed with a number of good single-player card games at this point. Whether it's Shadowverse, Lord of the Rings, or The Witcher spinoff, Thronebreaker, players have plenty of deep, rich, highly strategic card games to choose between. Cards of the Dead, meanwhile, is about as engaging as Solitaire. Sure, I've played a game or two of Solitaire in my time when I'm that utterly bored, but that was when I was on a work computer and relying on pre-installed games, or on a boat with nothing but a pack of cards. If you've got Cards of the Dead on your Switch, you've also got a thousand alternatives for single-player games, and most of them are more worthwhile than this.
I’m glad that I played SkateBIRD, and it hurts that I’ve had to give it this score. I firmly believe that as games are an art form, game developers should be trying things, even if they don’t ultimately succeed. SkateBIRD is a brilliant idea and it takes a big, heaving swing at it. Sadly, though, it’s a strikeout. However, with that being said, if the developers get another innings, I would play a SkateBIRD 2 without a moment's hesitation, and I would fully expect that the developers would deliver having had this experience.
Neither the competent structure nor reasonable aesthetics are enough to save Beach Bounce Remastered. Once again: fan service is great, when it's in service of something. A game like Max's Bigger Bust, despite being all-in with the fan service, writes in plenty of excellently Australian humour to contextualise it. Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation is one of my favourite visual novels of all time, and it, too, is very heavily focused on fan service, while still giving me a reason to actually want to see the girl's skirts blow up (I heart you Tohka). Beach Bounce Remastered has absolutely nothing going for it, other than those spread legs. It's utterly boring.
The Dresden Files: Cooperative Card Game is such a fundamentally flawed concept, and the execution is so lacking, that it offers nothing whatsoever of value.
Silent World is, mercifully, over quite quickly.
There's simply no reason to play something so utterly bereft of thought as Narcos.
Stranger Things 3: The Game is trash that does more harm to the property than good. It was almost quaint going on a memory trip back to when video games were used to churn out cheap bonus money grabs every time a major film landed, but the industry has moved on from that nonsense, and there's nothing about this game that is acceptable in this day and age.
I knew going in to Happy Words that it would be a Scrabble clone, and I was fine with that. As a fan of Scrabble - and board games in general - I like the idea of having it on the Switch for on-the-go play. But when the AI is about as interesting as a parrot with access to a dictionary, a UI that actively wants to stop you playing the game, and a complete absence of anyone online to play with, I was left speechless, that a developer in 2019 was somehow capable of making a worse version of Scrabble than what we had on the Game Boy back in the 90's.
Time hasn’t been good to Blades of Time, and and other than for the morbidly curious, I can’t see anyone being masochistic enough to derive any value out of it.
I'm all for developers to look for ways to reenvision the classics - look at how incredible Tetris 99 is in breathing new life into a puzzle classic that's over 30 years old. What I have no tolerance for is games that only do the most superficial thing to spin a classic as a "new game." History 2048's "history" adds nothing to 2048, so right down to the title, this game is a false promise and a poorly executed mess.
This is 2018's most cuttingly unpleasant game to play. And I'm one of those that played Agony.
Timberman Vs is such a confused and poorly thought out game, I wouldn't recommend it if it was free
Rento Fortune just isn't worth it. There's a good half dozen genuinely good board games available on the PlayStation 4 if you want to play board games on the big TV, including Monopoly itself, and those games have interfaces that don't drive you insane trying to work your way through them, don't have random caricatures of Kim Jong Un popping up for no actual reason, and have some kind of effort put into the production values.