Price: $29.99 / $14.99
Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster brings back this 1995 'Doom clone' in style — another resounding success for Nightdive Studios (who also handled the excellent Quake and Quake II remasters, among others). It returns LucasArts' curious, nostalgia-laced FPS with loads of new bells and whistles, including enhanced gameplay, revamped visuals, and a wealth of accessibility options.
This is easily the best way to experience Dark Forces and revisit an oft-forgotten era of Star Wars before the prequel trilogy - and before the sequel trilogy booted the Expanded Universe out the 'Legends' airlock.
Price: $12.99 / $3.89
Steredenn: Binary Stars is a fantastic game that does a great job of providing an experience that feels simultaneously classic and modern. Its high difficulty, rewarding gameplay, endless variety, and beautiful presentation make this an essential buy for any fans of the genre, and a high recommendation for those who aren’t.
If you’re looking for a tightly made arcade game that can be played both in short bursts and for hours on end, here's yet another one for your list.
Price: $24.99 / $7.50
Streets of Rage 4 is the very best the series has ever been. Its hand-drawn graphics breathe new life into Wood Oak City and its inhabitants, the soundtrack is outstanding, and the combat feels better than ever.
Lizardcube, Guard Crush Games, and Dotemu managed to completely modernise the look and feel of Streets of Rage, expanding on the experience without losing sight of what made the original games so popular to begin with – and the handful of additions made to the action here serve only to enhance the classic core gameplay, resulting in one of the best side-scrolling beat 'em ups we've played in a long time.
And the Mr X Nightmare DLC is pretty tasty, too. A truly fantastic brawler.
Price: $24.99 / $14.99
Tales from the Borderlands is arguably Telltale Games' finest hour and easily one of the very best choice-driven narrative adventures available on any system. This is 10 glorious hours' worth of top-notch entertainment with a world-class cast, consistently excellent writing that manages to perfectly balance comedy and drama, non-stop twisted action and a cast of kooky characters that are a joy to spend time with.
This really is the best the Borderlands universe has ever been, and a game that everyone should experience at least once.
Price: $24.99 / $12.49
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is the best Turtles beat 'em up ever made. It looks delicious, sounds superb, and rekindles childhood memories beyond all expectations, time-warping you back to 1987.
Its combat system is so much fun to mine that you feel compelled to keep coming back to try new strategies, and with its awesome co-op multiplayer, the experience evolves again and again. Like many a beat 'em up, it does get repetitive as you enter the last third, but that’s more a fault of the concept than the game. Shredder’s Revenge really is an unprecedented, ahem, shell-ebration.
The Dimension Shellshock DLC adds new fighters and a Survival mode, too, and if you can't get enough of your Turtle-filled co-op brawlers, there's also Digital Eclipse's TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection, which features a boatload of Konami classics to keep you busy for hours.
Price: $39.99 / $15.99
TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection is indisputably one of the best things Konami released in the Switch generation, meeting all expectations and then some. Bar absent difficulty settings for the arcade games, it’s an anthology that finally gets it totally right.
Digital Eclipse and Konami have done the fans justice, offering a comprehensive library that doesn’t hide content behind a paywall, while going above and beyond in terms of features and bonuses. With online functionality and rollback netcode being the icing on the cake, this is the gold standard for retro collections.
Price: $39.99 / $19.99
Tetris Effect: Connected is perhaps the best iteration of the classic puzzler yet.
While this Switch port doesn't offer a great deal over existing versions in terms of features, it delivers the one key ingredient that its rivals cannot: portability. Sure, some will argue that Tetris Effect: Connected's unique brand of synesthesia only really comes alive when played on PSVR or an Oculus Quest headset, but we'd argue passionately that this game benefits far more from the ability to pick it up and play whenever, wherever.
Just as the Game Boy and Tetris combined to create an irresistible, world-conquering fusion back in 1989, Tetris Effect: Connected found the hardware that allowed it to truly shine, making this an utterly essential purchase for all Nintendo Switch owners. Don't forget those headphones.
Price: $39.99 / $9.99
The House in Fata Morgana is over 40 hours long, and in those 40 hours, you'll maybe get to make about three decisions. It is a visual novel in the strictest sense of the word, and you must be prepared for that going in. But with a fantastic, original, slow-burn story about love, loss, hurt, forgiveness, and recovery, it's one of the best visual novels out there — and your patience will be paid off in the end.
Price: $39.99 / $27.99
In a series renowned for its stellar writing, twisting plots, and wonderful characters, The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero is a stand-out RPG. Narrowing the focus of its story to one state, and honing in on a smaller cast of characters, makes for a fantastic and engrossing adventure that is about both intimate relationships and huge, secretive scandals.
The fact that this is just one half of a duology means that, while the story wraps up nicely here, we had tons of questions that we were itching to get answers to in Trails to Azure. If you haven't played Trails, it's time to overcome that barrier, because there’s no better place to zero in on this fantastic series than in Crossbell.
Price: $39.99 / $27.99
The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure takes everything that’s excellent about Zero and runs a marathon with it. It’s one of the best-paced games in the series, with some of the best characters, best music, and easily the best setting.
The Crossbell Arc is a hugely compelling two-parter that captures everything that makes the Trails series what it is perfectly, and Azure in particular deftly balances high-stakes drama, political intrigue, and poignant character moments. This is one Switch RPG we won't be feeling blue about anytime soon.
Price: $59.99 / $41.99
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a landmark release, both for its franchise and Nintendo. It was the first time that the company truly took on the open-world genre, and by arriving late to the party it embraced the strengths of top-in-class games while also forging its own unique identity.
BOTW was a revolution for the series, but the Legend of Zelda essence is still there — its soul remains, and the end result is captivating. After years of following the same old template, Nintendo bravely took Zelda in a new direction and delivered an absolute triumph which still has us regularly revisiting its iteration of Hyrule. This is the series' best-selling game for a reason.
Its sequel expanded on the open world first presented here, but the excitement of exploring Breath of the Wild's wilderness for the very first is an experience nobody should miss. And the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition polishes out a couple of blemishes with 60fps performance that gives the game new life once more.
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