Nintendo Life eShop Selects
Image: Nintendo Life

Welcome to Nintendo Life's eShop Selects!

Here we pick three of the best Switch eShop games we've reviewed in the last month and highlight them on a digital podium. Whether they take home the bronze, silver, or gold, you can be sure that the eShop games below — along with our round-up of runners-up — are worthy of your precious time and money.

Let's take a look at the games that made the grade this month.

Honourable Mentions:

While these titles didn't quite make our top three this month, they're still certainly worth checking out.

Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube840k

3. Sky Rogue (Switch eShop)

While it lacks any storyline and the randomised nature of the missions may strike some as lazy, arcade-style dogfighter Sky Rogue has plenty of gameplay where it counts. The jet combat action is superb, aided by excellent controls, a wide range of weapons and plenty of stuff to unlock.

The 12-stage campaign mode will keep you coming back for quite some time — thanks largely to the unique roguelike approach where death means losing everything, but the experience gained means a better chance of success next time around — and the ability to rope in a friend in co-op adds even more longevity.

Granted, when you do eventually complete the game there's not a great deal to bring you back, but it will take quite some time and effort to reach that point – and you'll have had such a blast you won't feel short-changed.

2. Rogue Aces (Switch eShop)

Rogue Aces is a stellar, fresh experience — even more so if you never played spiritual forerunner Wings of Fury — that landed on Switch eShop seemingly out of nowhere. It not only delivers an audio-visual treat, but also an overwhelmingly entertaining stimulation of the senses thanks to the frenetic aerial ballets you take part in.

Easy to pick up but devilishly hard to walk away from, Rogue Aces demands just the right amount of arcade shmup skills and strategic planning with the odd lucky break when something just works out. All of this is complemented by some excellent humour in the form of audio quips from your Captain, the enemy Baron aces and the one-liners from ally pilots.

Kick the tyres and light the fires, fellow Switch pilots; this war won’t be winning itself with you sitting pretty on that carrier deck.

1. Dragon Blaze (Switch eShop)

Dragon Blaze remains a beautifully executed TATE shmup with a unique gameplay gimmick that goes beyond having the titular dragons as eye candy, effectively making them a core part of the high-score-chasing experience.

You may be able to clear the whole game in under 30 minutes, but we very much doubt you will play it once and never touch it again. This is Psikyo on top of its shmup game - brilliant, addictive, and another must-have.

How we decide our eShop Selects top three: To qualify for this list, these games must have been released as a digital-only release on the Nintendo Switch eShop in that particular month, and must have been reviewed on Nintendo Life; we select the qualifying games based on their review scores.

Here, the top three were decided first based on their NL review score, and then by their User Rating on the site.