Switch eShop Game Reviews
Review Star Racer (Switch) - An Indie F-Zero Through And Through
Where we’re going, we don’t (always) need roads
I read a comment about Star Racer somewhere that I quite liked, the gist being that it’s the latest in the ‘F*** it, I’ll do it myself’ genre. This describes a release where an indie developer has decided to fill a gap left open by a bigger studio. The clamour for a new mainline entry in...
Mini Review Project Neon (Switch) - A Capable New Neo Geo Shmup To Test Your Mettle
Neon Geo
Project Neon is a Neo Geo game that was successfully Kickstarted in 2019. A vertically scrolling, arcade-style shoot 'em up that will feel familiar to those ingratiated with CAVE and Toaplan, its frontend presentation is simple and to the point. There are no difficulty settings, a single, non-configurable CRT filter, and some rotation and...
Mini Review Future Knight (Switch) - Channels The Spirit Of Tiger Handhelds To Great Effect
Don't worry about your grandma. She can live with me, be my maid.
Do you remember those Tiger handheld LCD games, extremely limited and mostly rubbish, that you used to love so much? Future Knight’s styling is exactly, and uniquely, that: its foreground sprites crisp, black and inky; its backgrounds lucent, pastel-hued imprints. Charming,...
Review Kynseed (Switch) – Not The Fairest Of Them All, But Still A Merry Fairytale Life Sim
Grow your own way
Kynseed begins with a personality quiz that bestows upon you in-game benefits based on your answers. That’s a pretty good sketch of the life sim’s magic: choice. The debut from English studio Pixelcount (a team of former Fable devs), this fairytale-inspired game has entrepreneurship, fishing, marriage, combat, and plenty more...
Mini Review Turnip Mountain (Switch) - A King Of Swing-Style Climbing Puzzler With Charm & Challenge
Reach for the stars
The 2026 bingo card continues to expand with another unexpected surprise: a spiritual successor to Donkey Kong's King Of Swing. Released on Game Boy Advance in 2005, this beloved puzzle platformer saw DK traversing vertical walls and avoiding hazards along the climb. Luke Sanderson's Turnip Mountain takes that idea and adds...
Nostalgia hit
Late at night, I’m huddled up in bed with my Switch 2 millimetres from my face, when suddenly it feels like I’m being slapped with a Ratatouille flashback. My mind is flung back in time to the days of late evenings fervently exploring Pokémon Black and White, to weekends huddled in front of my TV playing Xenoblade on Wii, and...
Mini Review Kabuto Park (Switch) – Gotta Catch 'Em All In This Cosy, Bug-Battling Deckbuilder
Fight and flight
Reading the description for Kabuto Park, I imagined it would be like Animal Crossing’s Bug-Off. But this quick, cosy beetle-collecting game from French developer Doot Tiny Games presents a concept that’s closer to another Nintendo series: Pokémon. The story is pretty light. Your character, Hana, visits the eponymous park for a...
Review Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection (Switch) - A Janky Compilation Carried By Nostalgia
Time to put these to bed
Back in the day, it was pretty well understood that seeing a popular show or brand on a licensed video game didn’t necessarily mean that you were in for a great time. Though titles such as DuckTales or GoldenEye 007 broke through as exceptional titles for their respective eras, the majority of licensed games were usually...
Review Coffee Talk Tokyo (Switch) - An Enjoyable, Bittersweet Third Blend
A caffeine dream
When I was a teenager, I landed my first-ever job as a barista at a busy chain coffee shop in the heart of New York. When I didn’t have my nose in the books at school, I’d spend hours making all manner of drinks for the city’s thirsty clientele. It was daunting work — customers expected to get their drinks fast, and the...
Review TetherGeist (Switch) - Satisfying Platforming That Owes A Debt To Celeste
Keeping the spirit alive
2D platformers are easy to find. They’re one of the oldest genres in video games, and thanks to that long pedigree, they’ve been getting made for nearly the entire industry’s history. It would be impossible to play through them all in your lifetime. Great 2D platformers, though, are rare. TetherGeist belongs in that...
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Review R-TYPE DX: Music Encore (Switch) - A Pint-Sized Port, Still Curious And Cute
The force is with you
In R-TYPE DX: Music Encore, we have a release aimed at a niche gaming subset in much the same way as SNK’s Neo Geo Pocket collections. As such, some affection for both the era and the original hardware is necessary to appreciate what is essentially a reconstituted, miniaturised version of a much larger arcade game. And, like...
Review Constance (Switch) - A Beautiful Metroidvania With Something To Say
Constance craving
The idea of an indie Metroidvania exploring mental illness has become a bit of a cliche. The past decade has seen successes in the genre like the Hollow Knight and Ori games, as well as titles like Celeste that manifest their main character’s mental journey through their mechanics. Constance owes a lot to every game listed above,...
Review Monster Crown: Sin Eater (Switch) - A Satisfyingly Deep And Open-Ended Pokémon-Like
Go on, eat the sin cake
In 2021, a monster-catching RPG called Monster Crown hit the eShop, a one-man project aiming to emulate the glory days of Pokémon. Though it had its shortcomings, it mostly captured the essence of its inspiration and evidently it garnered enough of a following to justify the launch of a sequel after a successful Kickstarter...
Mini Review GRIDbeat! (Switch) - A Brutal Yet Absorbing Rhythm Experience
Don't skip this beat
I love a good rhythm game, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how quickly GRIDbeat! would grab (and hold) my attention. As one of the first titles from the newly revived publisher Acclaim, it makes a strong, bold entrance with unique, stylised visuals, razor-sharp gameplay, and excellent music. The aim of the game is simple:...
Review ZPF (Switch) - A Unique-Feeling Mega Drive Shooter With Some Switch Issues
Heavy metal fantasy
“Zone Profile Fantasy”? “Zoom Port Focus”? Nobody knows whether ZPF is an acronym or not, except perhaps the three-man development team behind it: Perry Sessions, Mikael Tillander, and Jamie Vance. Prior to ZPF, Sessions and Vance created a contra-style NES demo called Cavity Destroyer for Vance’s brother’s dental...
Sucking blood and free time once again
Sometimes a game is so good it creates its own genre. Whether you call it a survivorslike, bullet heaven, or something else entirely, Vampire Survivors pretty much invented an entire roguelite subgenre. So, when your game creates a whole new genre, where do you go next? Cards, of course. Vampire Crawlers is...
Review Pokémon Champions (Switch) – The Most Accessible & Flawed Competitive Pokémon Has Ever Been
More bugs than Viridian Forest
Keeping up with competitive Pokémon battling has always been a hassle. As the mainline series shifts from generation to generation, so does which Pokémon are available, access to specific Pokémon, methods for training those Pokémon, the introduction of new moves, abilities, and held items, as well as a continued...
Mini Review Easy Delivery Co. (Switch) - A Mysterious Gig-Economy Sim With Immaculate Vibes
Clock in, zone out
When a video game's biggest selling point is that it's perfect for zoning out to, it could sound like faint praise. Yet the fact that I still wanted to deliver stuff and poke around for secrets in Sam C.'s Easy Delivery Co. — a low-poly delivery simulator that's equal parts cosy and dreary — after the credits rolled speaks...
Upping the ante
Back in 2024, Balatro made big waves in the indie roguelike space, offering a relatively simple but incredibly addictive take on the age-old game of poker. After selling millions of copies, it’s now spun off its own sort of sub-genre inspired by its mechanics, and one such game is called Beyond Words from MindFuel Games, a new...
Review Marvel Maximum Collection (Switch) - A Decent Nostalgia Cake With A Konami Cherry On Top
"Welcome to die!"
The prize in Limited Run's Marvel Maximum Collection, unquestionably, is Konami’s 1992 X-Men: The Arcade Game. Famously, it holds a Guinness World Record for being the only arcade beat ‘em up to support six simultaneous players. This port allows you to switch between two, four and six player options — in line with its...
Review Ratcheteer DX (Switch) - A Bite-Sized Zelda-Like That Feels Right At Home On Nintendo
A (play) date with destiny
Faced with a world-ending winter, would you endure the cold and risk freezing to death, or freeze yourself to survive it? That's the dilemma at the heart of Ratcheteer DX, a compact Zelda-like set in subterranean cryo colonies during an extinction-level ice age. It's a thoughtful premise for what is, at its core, a...
Review Pokémon FireRed & LeafGreen (Switch) - Red-Hot Nostalgia In A So-So Wrapper
TPC used Remember! It’s super effective!
Pokémon FireRed & LeafGreen is a difficult game to evaluate. Re-released on the Nintendo Switch eShop to celebrate Pokémon’s 30th anniversary, this 22-year-old Game Boy Advance remake of the original Pokémon Red & Blue feels like a lacklustre way to celebrate one of the largest media franchises known...
Anything Qud happen
The legends of Caves of Qud stretch back into the ancient times, through mists of lore, to a moment of destiny. That’s right – all the way back to 2007, when American team Freehold Games began development on this ambitious roguelike RPG. After a 17-year journey to version 1.0 in 2024, gathering a devoted PC following, this...
Review Love Eternal (Switch) - Disturbing, Devilish Platformer Flips A Few Too Many Times
Flipping fun?
Published by Ysbryd Games and developed by brlka, Love Eternal is an arduous platformer presented primarily in a retro 4:3 aspect ratio. It follows a teenage girl named Maya as she wends her way through a lonesome, though artfully-depicted, castle and the surreal, twisted memories that haunt it. The game begins as many platformers do:...
Mini Review Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse (Switch) - Plenty To Plunder In This Solid Sequel
Part of your world
Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo was one of the most delightful surprises for the Switch; a visual novel that broke the fourth wall in unique ways while telling a compelling story laced with horror. The sequel, Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse, is more of the same, and that’s a good thing. If Square Enix wants...
Once upon a time...
While we continue to wait for a true RPG sequel to the early Paper Mario games, many indie developers have attempted to fill the void, and while nobody has quite managed to recapture their magic, Escape from Ever After feels like the closest anyone has gotten yet. It’s got some quirks, but it does a great job of offering an...
Review I Hate This Place (Switch) - A Messy Monster, But With A Certain Charm
A strong word
The way I see it, there are three different versions of I Hate This Place. First, there’s the game as promised in the trailers: a survival horror with some general emphasis on resource management and gunplay, all elevated with some nice-looking cinematic storytelling. Sweeping cameras slowly reveal the ominous presence of creepily...
Review Hollow Knight (Switch) - One Of The Finest Metroidvanias That's Not A Metroid Or 'Vania
Bugs now available on Switch 2
This review was originally published in June 2018 when Hollow Knight launched on the Switch 1. To celebrate the release of the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, we're republishing it along with some brief impressions of the free upgrade, which is available to download now. The Switch isn't exactly lacking for quirky...
Review Jimmy And The Pulsating Mass (Switch) - The Best EarthBound-Like You've Never Heard Of
Jimmy Dreams World
Early on in Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, the young protagonist confronts a possessed frog statue in a house surrounded by a bloody lake. The possessor turns out to be a rotten Jack O’Lantern, capable of dangerous fire magic but with a goofy, cheerful grin. Defeating it, Jimmy stands where it used to be, and immediately...
Nightmares and Dreamscapes
The Metroidvania revival (did it ever really go away?) keeps rolling, and here comes another stylised combat-platformer where a strange little hero gets lost in a dark, labyrinthine fantasy world. This time, our protagonist is John, who stumbles into a bizarre realm full of somnambulist weirdos and giant babies. Studio...
