In the early days of the Switch eShop, one of the first indie darlings to resonate with audiences was Blaster Master Zero, an enhanced remake of the NES classic. What began as an already solid remake quickly grew into something much more substantial thanks to a series of paid content drops and free updates that widened the scope of the game considerably with the addition of new modes and playable characters, demonstrating that Inti Creates had a vested interest in curating a new fanbase around the long-dormant IP.

Though hindsight is always 20/20, few could’ve predicted the surprise release of an original sequel, Blaster Master Zero 2, mere minutes after its first reveal on a Nintendo Direct, but fans were understandably ecstatic at the opportunity to further the adventures of Jason and Eve. Luckily, Inti Creates pulled out all the stops this time; Blaster Master Zero 2 rises to meet the high bar set by its predecessor and surpasses it in just about every way. This is pure, retro platforming goodness at its finest.

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If video games have taught us anything over the years, it’s that adventures are always better when undertaken with a friend. Experiencing a challenging mission for the first time. Overcoming a boss with hard-fought teamwork. Solving a puzzle at the exact same moment. Co-op can often give us some of gaming’s most meaningful moments. That sentiment must have been in the mind of Swedish developer Coldwood Interactive when it began working on the sequel to heartfelt platformer Unravel, because it really shows.

Unravel Two is very much an iterative sequel. That's not meant as a negative, but rather that its developer knows what made the first game so charming and simply doubles down on those unique qualities. Once again, you control a miniature woollen hero called Yarny, who travels on a 2.5D adventure using his own yarn-based string to swing across gaps, pull down objects to reveal new paths and scale seemingly insurmountable heights. You’ll still be using picture frames as gateways to new levels (this time contained within a central hub based in a lighthouse), only now there are new memories to explore. This time, however, Yarny is joined by a blue-coloured friend, leading to levels filled with environmental and platforming puzzles that call for the two woollen pals to work together.

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If there’s one thing Nintendo Switch already has in abundance, it’s JRPGs. There are classics from yesteryear, Triple-A odysseys from some of the biggest developers in the word and a healthy smattering of independently-made offerings. As Switch owners, we’re spoiled for choice, so if you’re bringing a Japanese-style role-playing game to the platform in 2019 you really need to have something pretty special to help it breach the surface of that turn-based ocean.

Unfortunately, Azure Saga: Pathfinder Deluxe Edition really doesn’t bring anything new to a crowded genre, but that doesn’t mean that this is a bad game or one worth avoiding due to a lack of quality. In fact, it’s quite a serviceable little title with plenty of things to like; it’s just the kind of game you’ll play, enjoy that almost instantly forget the moment you switch off your console. For some genres that might not be an issue, but JRPGs have often lived and died on their ability to stay with you long after the adventure ends.

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It’s been a quiet baseball off-season this past Winter. A few players went here, some went there. Then it went quiet. Nothing much happened. Then Manny Machado signed for a lowly $300million to go to the San Diego Padres. The once damp squib of a Hot Stove was now absolutely napalmic. Not wishing to be undone, and desperate to smash the $325million contract record set by Miami Marlins (and now New York Yankees) slugger Giancarlo Stanton, the current darling of Major League Baseball, Bryce Harper, signed a new contract with the Philadelphia Phillies for a paltry $330million (cash in the pocket guaranteed). Pocket change. A dull off-season. Nothing much happened, right?

Even as we sit here, hammering away at the keys for this review, it’s just been announced that one of the greatest players ever to step to the plate, LA Angels beef mountain Mike Trout, is on the verge of signing a new contract with the Angels for a pauper's salary of $430 million. That’s approaching half a BILLION pounds, if you're in the UK. For one player. That’s around $60,000 per at-bat, $25,000 per inning, $3,000,000 per month, $4,000 per hour or if you want to really quibble, $70 per minute. Soccer has absolutely nothing on baseball when it comes to contracts and salaries.

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Should you scold your warrior-princess because she keeps turning her subordinates into frogs and you think it is a bit extreme as far as disciplinary measures go, or should you praise her because she just survived being double-teamed by enemy mechs without any squad support?

This is The Princess Guide in a nutshell, a game that splits its time between the zany anime stylings of magical-fantasy storytelling and real-time mission-based action gameplay. Don’t let the cutesy name and art style fool you: The Princess Guide places systems within systems to form layers of complexity which pose a steep learning curve for the player. That is, when you’re not enjoying a story scene where Princess Liliarte jokes about eating a whole cow or Princess Alpana is hoping you think her tail is cute.

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Musou fans have been a bit spoiled this generation, with many great releases in this niche genre coming out for the Switch, some of which are from the Big N itself. One of the more middling Musou games from the early days in the Switch’s life was Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star, which married that tried-and-true hack ‘n’ slash gameplay with the long-running, convoluted anime franchise, and though it had its issues, that release proved to be an interesting and promising experiment that we hoped would get a follow up. Now, XSEED has opted to take another crack at the concept with Fate/Extella Link, a sequel which still carries some of the issues of its predecessor, but proves to be the better game on the whole.

The story of Fate/Extella: Link picks up right where its predecessor, Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star, left off, following the Servants’ search for Altera after she’s kidnapped by a mysterious new foe who’s begun to ‘Oraclize’ other Servants in a mad campaign for assimilating SE.RA.PH itself. As one may expect, the narrative often leans hard into anime tropes and plotlines, packing the story full of larger-than-life characters and ridiculous story beats that are played with almost comical seriousness; none of these elements coalesce into a particularly memorable or compelling story, but you’re sure to have a great time along the way as you chuckle at the jokes and revel in the overall campiness of it all.

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Motorsport Manager for Nintendo Switch will grind your hope into dust and feed you a balanced diet of disappointment for the first few hours of every playthrough. You’ll languish at the back of the pack, race after race, as you choose the wrong tyres for certain conditions or fail to keep your drivers in a positive working relationship. You’ll fail to meet sponsor offers and lose a much-needed source of cash. It’ll feel like you just can’t do anything right to save your plucky racing team from motorsport mediocrity.

But then something clicks. Soon you realise that intermediate tyres work better when the track is damp, but wear out faster when used for too long on dry circuits. Soon you realise focusing research and development on a transmission upgrade will greatly benefit your cars when navigating a track with lots of sharp turns and meandering curves. Now you’re able to keep your drivers in better spirits, and soon you’re climbing up the ranks and securing more cash from big-name sponsors. Now it’s time to start thinking about challenging for a podium finish…

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The all-wise, all-knowing barkeeper has become something of a narrative archetype. There are countless stories out there that feature an improbably wise drinks server who can get even the most uptight customer to relax and talk about their troubles.

Donovan, the suave barkeeper and owner of The Red Strings Club, takes his persuasive art to nigh-on mystical levels. The cocktails he serves in his retro-tinged establishment aren't just darned tasty - they're fine-tuned to accentuate a specific emotion in the drinker. It's this unique skill that forms the meat of The Red Strings Club's gameplay. This deft physics puzzler mechanic requires a steady hand on the player's part, as you carefully tip measures of spirits into a mixer.

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Golf games, much like the real-life sport, tend to elicit two very different emotions. For some of us, they're the ultimate cross between relaxation and competition, but for others, they're an exercise in abject frustration that often lead to hacked up fairways and bent clubs. Of course, we'd all prefer to be improving our handicap in the former, and Nintendo Switch's latest trip up the links aims to find that chill sweet spot. Enter the isometric puzzle pitch that is Golf Peaks.

Originally released on iOS at the end of 2018, Golf Peaks is one of those little games that's so simple that a) you're surprised no one thought of it sooner, and b) you know that 'simplicity' is just a foundation for some devilishly challenging trick shots later on. Each course exists as an isometric set of platforms, and your task is to get your ball into the hole in the fewest number of strokes. So far, so golf. However, rather than simply hitting the ball until you've presumably caved in half of the course, you're instead given a set of cards that each represent a specific number of spaces you can move at a time.

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Nintendo 64 games living a second life on handheld is nothing new, certainly not if you've owned and loved a 3DS at some point in the last eight years. But there's something about that mid-to-late-'90s heyday of shooters – an era that gave us GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark and Quake II among so many others – that still exudes a quintessential kind of magic. And so while the original Turok might not be considered the series' pinnacle – that falls to the incredible Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, which is also coming to Switch this year – it's still an FPS landmark filled with charm, character and well, loads of dinosaurs.

Even if you've never heard of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter – never mind played it when it first launched in 1997 – it's important to appreciate just how much this off-the-wall title progressed shooters as a whole. It was the first FPS to appear on N64 (back when its lineup of games was barely into the double digits) and it was massively ahead of its time. Its levels were open, full of twisting corridors, open-plan glades and shortcuts galore. It utilised motion capture to give enemies a realistic sense of movement, and its AI was aggressive and relentless in its quest to vanquish you. Even the way you sway and tilt from side to side as you run is a world away from the rigid movement model of Doom.

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Toby Fox had certainly stumbled onto something special when Undertale was released in 2015; the seminal post-modern RPG garnered quite the cult following for its quirky humour and disarmingly dark themes, which went a long way towards cementing its unique identity. Now, a few years and several ports later, Fox is back at it again with a follow-up project, the first part of which has released on the eShop for free as Deltarune Chapter 1. Though not a direct sequel (or maybe it is?) of Fox’s magnum opus, Deltarune feels more than worthy of its predecessor's legacy, even if it does come off as being rather light on new ideas.

After an amusing introduction with a character creator, the story begins by following Kris, a young human child going to an ordinary day of school in a world populated by monsters. Kris and the school bully, Susie, are soon asked by their teacher to retrieve chalk from a nearby supply closet, only to find themselves falling headlong into a mysterious dark world. Here, they’re informed that they’re heroes prophesied to bring balance to the world and set out on a quest to set things right so they can go home. Though the storyline is about as cliché as possible, Deltarune borrows heavily from its predecessor in the way that it handles nuance and ‘behind the scenes’ storytelling; despite appearing to be a simple tale of heroes saving the world from darkness, little hints along the way suggest a much larger plot is in motion.

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Which is more fun: trekking into unfamiliar territory or walking a more familiar path? Valley released in 2016 for PC, Xbox One and PS4, and has now landed on the Nintendo Switch. On a platform that’s already rich with indie delights, can this blend of first-person platforming and environmental storytelling stand out in the crowd?

After choosing Male or Female, a quick cutscene sets the stage: The player is an archaeologist, embarking on a canoe trip into the Canadian Rockies in order to follow up on a lead concerning something called the Lifeseed. Of course, the canoe runs aground, and after emerging from a cave system into unknown territory our protagonist soon realizes they are now in for much more than they originally bargained for.

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‘Kick doors, kill men.’ These four seemingly simple words, which appear on-screen while you patiently wait for one of RICO’s procedurally generated levels to load, might seem like a throwaway line – and yet they perfectly sum up its bombastic simplicity. For all the extra objectives and features, everything boils down to putting boots to doors and asses, and that’s what makes its first-person shooter action so addictive.

Falling into that randomly laid out and semi-roguelike corner of the industry populated by the likes of City of Brass, RICO is a co-operative FPS that revels in the moment-to-moment exchanges of its gunfights. You play an agent of a task force sent to hunt down and destabilise criminal organisations the only way you know how: by killing every drug-peddling, gun-running felon stupid enough to stray into your crosshairs. You’re here to deal out justice, one room at a time.

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In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and LEGO video games. On every platform, seemingly since time immemorial, the good folks at TT Games have been taking those humble Danish toy bricks and turning them into a successful – if not particularly groundbreaking – series of titles. Of course, having access to all those blockbuster film licences probably didn't hurt either, and it's off the back of another – The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, to be precise – that we get the first family-friendly cinematic tie-in of the year.

Interestingly, The LEGO Movie 2 Videogame actually has more in common with one of the series' most ambitious and non-licensed games, 2017's LEGO Worlds. While this Minecraft clone never quite captured the imagination of the digital building crowd, it did embrace a creative suite of ideas the franchise had previously never dabbled in. The LEGO Movie 2 Videogame doesn't go 'full crafting', but it uses its large sandbox settings to its advantage by enabling you to scan objects with a pair of binoculars, which then saves a blueprint you can then rebuild on select platforms.

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If there's one thing Hard West absolutely nails, it's the way it retains the palpable danger and lawlessness of the Wild West and infuses it with a noir-ish supernatural edge. Thanks to some excellent voice acting and a soundtrack that captures a unique take on this formative period (courtesy of Marcin Przybyłowicz, he of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt fame), this narrative-driven, consequence-ridden experience takes two very different thematic sources and blends them both without diluting either.

While much of its world-building is delivered via on-screen text and sketched animations, you'll find yourself investing plenty of time and emotion into the lives and deaths of your posse of outlaws. Gameplay is divided between two distinct perspectives; you'll explore an overworld in a choose-your-own-adventure format where each decision you make can have both positive and considerably negative outcomes on the flow of the story. Each one is broken down into scenarios, with combat represented by an isometric view not too dissimilar to the XCOM games or the recent Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics on Switch.

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Awesome Pea is described as "a classic run-and-jump platformer," which is about as plain and simple as the game itself. Here indeed is a platformer that looks like an old Game Boy game, and that features a whole lot of running and jumping – and precious little else. At this point, we suspect the developer would like nothing more than for us to spin off into a paean to the lost art of simplicity in game design. But this isn't the review in which to do so, because we came away from Awesome Pea wanting more. More pace, more variety, more colour, and more fun.

Perhaps we've played a few too many iOS-to-Switch conversions over the past year, but we were somewhat surprised to find out that Awesome Pea hadn't originally been a mobile game. That's not intended as a sniffy comment by any means. It's just that the game has a familiar bite-sized, super-focused cadence to it. The levels here are brief affairs in which you, as a smiley-faced pea, must make it to the exit, collecting as many coins and gems as you dare en route. You have a time factor to consider too, at least if you're playing for a high score.

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While the Tower Defence genre might not be quite as big as it once was, there’s still room for more additions if a developer can bring something new and innovative to the mix. Or, at the very least, do the job competently enough to represent its compatriots on Nintendo Switch. Hell Warders, from Hong Kong-based developer Anti-Gravity Game Studios, certainly doesn’t tick the former box thanks to some clunky controls and a general lack of originality, but it does offer an entertaining way to kill waves of mindless enemies with friends.

Following a similar template to the likes of Orcs Must Die! and Pixeljunk Monsters 2, you’ll play one of three Gothic-styled heroes as they attempt to stem – you guessed it – the hordes of hell from taking over a suitably fantasy-themed world. Your goal couldn’t be simpler: erect a series of defences in a series of small arenas and vanquish systematic waves. Most Tower Defence games tend to rely on a top-down view as you monitor your units, but Hell Warders drops you into the middle of the action, a la a third-person shooter.

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Much like its infinitely versatile mascot, the Kirby series has always been comfortable in taking many forms; Kirby has starred in several roles that diverge significantly from the copy-ability platforming of the mainline series. Kirby’s Extra Epic Yarn – an enhanced re-release of the seminal 2010 title – falls in this lineage of off-beat sequels, exchanging the floating and power-copying with a more traditionally-focused platforming experience that features a striking visual art style. This new release also features a host of new gameplay and content updates to elevate its status above that of the original, making some welcome and much-needed changes while losing none of the charm that marked the initial release as such a classic.

The story opens with Kirby encountering a mysterious magician named Yin-Yarn while roaming Dreamland, and after a brief conflict, Yin-Yarn transports Kirby to a magical universe called Patch Land where everything is made out of yarn. Here, Kirby no longer has the ability to eat foes or fly indefinitely, but his new, stringy form allows him to shapeshift in myriad ways while also granting him a trusty whip that lets him unravel and ball up his enemies. The story – narrated by a hammy, but charming narrator – then follows Kirby’s adventures with Patch Land’s Prince Fluff, as they embark on a journey to sew Patch Land back together, get Kirby home, and defeat Yin-Yarn.

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Rad Rodgers is a walking, talking ’90s cliche. A wisecracking kid who clashes with his parents while boasting a love of video games so deep it’s burgeoning on a clinical addiction. He’s perpetually glued to the CRT TV in his room and the blocky grey console (called ‘Dusty’, naturally) sits beneath it. Then, one day, the TV turns into a portal and sucks him inside. It’s the ’90s to a tee, and proud of it.

Rad wakes up in a world spliced together from some of his favourite games, and that old grey console has suddenly turned sentient, spurted a pair of spring-loaded arms and picked up a vocabulary that’s likely to turn the air various shades of blue. Dusty is voiced by none other than Jon St. John (AKA: Duke Nukem) after all, so you know you’re getting a voice born to offend. With a giant gun at his disposal and Dusty strapped to his back ready to whack anything that gets close, Rad sets out to shoot everything that dares to move.

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It could be argued that no developer has yet managed to successfully translate the traditionally complicated gameplay of the RTS genre to consoles, all due to the lack of available buttons and a mouse to quickly navigate menus and units. Still, that hasn’t stopped many developers from trying, and the experiments performed in pursuit of this often result in some fascinating hybrid kinds of gameplay. Swords & Soldiers II Shawarmageddon stands as a strong example of this, translating that sprawling strategy gameplay to a simpler, two-dimensional plane. Though it can be plodding in places, Swords and Soldiers
II does an excellent job of recreating the thrill of RTS action; fans of the genre will want to pay attention to this one.

The game primarily follows the exploits of a clan of Vikings led by the boisterous Redbeard; the BBQ and sheep obsessed Nords travel to hell and back on a quest for treasure and sheep, accosted at every turn by Persians and Demons with goals of their own. Unsurprisingly, the narrative here isn’t all that much of a focus, but the goofy, Saturday morning cartoon type of storytelling does a great job of keeping the gameplay from becoming too stale; it’s tough to stay uninterested when someone’s wife gets stolen, or a hellish demon named Matt rains down fire and fury on the enemy team’s units. Though this pervasive humor occasionally strays into eye-rolling territory, we found it to be far more charming on the whole, adding some much-needed character to the somewhat repetitive battles.

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