Latest Reviews
Review Dying Light Platinum Edition - A Solid Switch Port That'll Please Portable Players
Dead good
Note: Dying Light Platinum Edition is unavailable on Switch eShop in Europe at the time of writing pending an issue with the game being banned in Germany. In 2011, Techland released Dead Island on most seventh generation consoles to mostly positive reception. Still, Dead Island had never quite been the game that Techland envisioned it to...
Review Cotton Guardian Force Saturn Tribute - Great Games Let Down By Poor Ports
A slightly troublesome trio of tributes
This trio of retro shmups — Cotton 2, Cotton Boomerang and Guardian Force — have released under the “Saturn Tribute” umbrella (bundled together on a physical cartridge in Japan that's recently been announced for the West, or available individually via your local eShop at the time of wr
Review Astria Ascending - A Solid JRPG Salvaged With The Help Of Final Fantasy Veterans
Second time's the charm
In late 2015, a new game came to iOS called Zodiac: Orcanon Odyssey, offering up a reasonably high-quality classic JRPG experience. Though it was originally slated to arrive in some form on the PlayStation consoles of the time, this console project never got off the ground and was subsequently cancelled. Now, that project has...
Review Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl - A Strong Platform Fighter With Polish Problems
It's better than bad, it's good
Licensed games have a history of being largely a bit pants. There are notable exceptions of course, but for every Goldeneye 007 or SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom there’s fistloads of the likes of M&Ms Kart Racing, Superman 64, and the Wii version of Iron Man.
Review Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases - More Visual Novel Than Puzzler
Compels me, though
Mystery fans will have been keeping an eye on Hercule Poirot: The First Cases following the frightful crime scene that was The ABC Murders. The Belgian detective’s latest arrival on Switch is again courtesy of French publisher Microids, but the developer this time is Blazing Griffin, who have engaged with the Ardennian gumshoe...
Review Metroid Dread - Quite Possibly The Best Metroid Game Ever Made
And the E.M.M.I. goes to...
After absolutely nailing its first shot at a Metroid adventure with 2017's Metroid II 3DS remake Samus Returns, Nintendo has given MercurySteam another bite at the cherry in which they've chosen to retain many of the unique gameplay elements of their last outing whilst adding a bunch of stealth. It's a risky manoeuvre,...
Review Monster Crown - Enjoyably Old-School Monster Battling For Pokémon Lovers
"I choose you... to read this contract!"
About three years ago, Studio Aurum pitched Monster Crown on Kickstarter, a monster-battling RPG which wasn’t shy about taking inspiration from a certain popular Game Freak franchise. After making over nine times as much money as the initial goal, the title then shifted to Early Access on PC, where it was...
Review FIFA 22 - Another Match Abandoned
Getting a new game? Neuer not
“Fool me once,” the famous phrase goes, “shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” With FIFA 22, EA is attempting to fool us thrice, and although we haven't been able to find any official ruling on what this means, we’ve come to the conclusion that it basically rolls back to “shame on you” again...
Review Embr - A Spark Of Co-Op Potential, But Never Catches Fire On Switch
In the line of fire
At first blush Muse Games' Embr put us in mind of riotous slapstick comedy titles such as Overcooked and Tarsier Games' excellent The Stretchers. This is a bright and colourful multiplayer-focused mess of firefighting carnage that also presents itself as a wry satirical take on the state of 21st Century capitalism. It's got the...
Review Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot + A New Power Awakens Set - An Iconic Story Retold Well
A pleasant trip down Memory Lane
There are few characters in the world of anime more iconic than Goku, the Saiyan sent to Earth as a baby who eventually becomes one of the most powerful beings in the universe. His story has been told across almost every medium imaginable since his manga debut in 1984, including anime, video games, and the terrible...
Review Darksiders III - A Poor Switch Port Of A Distinctly Average Series Entry
Hellish
We're pretty big fans of the Darksiders franchise here at Nintendo Life. These games may pilfer their core mechanics from all over the shop, and make no attempt to hide the fact in the process, but they're pure comfort food; cosy, familiar, resolutely old-fashioned in how they go about their business, and for the most part a lot of...
Review Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania - Feature-Packed, But Far From Top Banana
"I really love bananas!" - AiAi
Super Monkey Ball is an incredibly simple idea: poor little monkeys are trapped in air-tight balls. They can probably breathe but it isn't specified, and all you have to do is roll them to the goal. Yet somehow the original two games and the expanded Deluxe compilation managed to take that premise and mould it into...
Review Knockout Home Fitness - Too Limited And Lightweight To Be A Contender
Fails to pack a punch
The Switch is slowly but surely becoming home to a new dawn of fitness games. The success of Ring Fit Adventure has clearly inspired a new batch of keep-fit titles, with the likes of Fitness Boxing 2, Active Life Outdoor Challenge and even Nintendo’s limited release Jump Rope Challenge all vying for a piece of the fitness...
Review Hot Wheels Unleashed - Probably The Best Hot Wheels Game Ever
More die-cast fun than a game of D&D
There are few licences out there that are better suited to a video game than Hot Wheels. After all, when the whole brand revolves around collecting a wide variety of tiny cars then creating over-the-top tracks for them to race on, it’s fair to say that any game that manages to capture that essence of pure fun...
Review Colors Live - A Basic Art Application Elevated By Clever Hardware
The Sonar Pen is mightier than the thumb
Note: Special thanks to Sasha Stowe for acting as consultant for this review. You can find her art on Instagram and Twitter. A fair few ‘applications’ have made their way to the Switch, usually just stuff like YouTube, Calculator, Netflix, that sort of thing, but now we have a full-blown digital art...
Review RiMS Racing - A Poor Switch Port Makes For An Uneasy Rider
Brake drag
In order to very quickly condense exactly what kind of motorcycle sim RiMS Racing is, consider this: There are over 500 fully licenced vehicle parts in this game and just eight actual bikes. This isn't a sleight on Raceward Studio's game, far from it, the eight bikes here are very obviously authentically detailed and lovingly crafted,...
Review Kitaria Fables - A Delightfully Cute, Fantasy Life-Style RPG Adventure
One for the grinders
It's been seven years since Level-5's toylike RPG masterpiece Fantasy Life came to the 3DS in the West, and like addicts seeking our next hit we've been searching for something that replicates that feeling ever since. Between games like Ni No Kuni (also Level-5) and cutesy Rune Factory-likes such as Littlewood, we've come...
Review Active Life Outdoor Challenge / Family Trainer - Fit Enough For Purpose
Wii think we've seen this before
There used to be a time during the Wii era where you couldn't move for fitness games. The enormous success of Wii Fit led to a steady stream of imitators, from well-known established publishers all the way down to the shovelware merchants looking to cash in on the latest fad. One of the more unique offerings was...
Review Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom - A Sublime Port Of An Awesome Adventure
Ding Dong Delightful
Level-5's Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom originally released on PS4 back in March 2018 to pretty much unanimous critical praise, and playing it now in this latest Switch iteration, it's really not too hard to see why. This is a wonderfully well-crafted adventure that hits the ground running, nails pretty much every single...
Review NBA 2K22 - Loading Aside, This Baller's Got It Where It Counts
Hoop Dreams?
With another year's NBA season not too far away, a brand new edition of NBA 2K makes its way onto Switch just in time to give b-ball fans a wealth of slam-dunking sports action to get stuck into. This time around developer Visual Concepts has made a few neat changes to shooting and defence, improved upon last year's controversial shot...
Review Cruis'n Blast - An Arcade Racing Icon Returns In Spectacular Fashion
A Blast from the past
Long-time Nintendo fans will know that the Cruis’n series has an interesting history with the company. The original arcade version of the first game, Cruis’n USA, was said to be the first title running on Nintendo's upcoming Ultra 64 hardware, a claim which ultimately turned out to be a bit of a porky pie. Its subsequent...
Review Big Rumble Boxing: Creed Champions - Comes Out Swinging On Switch
That’s how winnin’ is done!
The Rocky series has deservedly cemented itself as one of the most iconic franchises of modern cinema. It naturally spawned a number of games over the years, with developer Survios turning out the latest efforts: the 2018 VR title Creed: Rise to Glory and Big Rumble Boxing: Creed Champions. The latter is a departure...
Review WarioWare: Get It Together! - More Magnificent Microgame Mayhem
Wario always win!
We've all been waiting a good long while now for a brand new WarioWare game to dive into as, in terms of a proper fully-formed entry in the series — one that isn't a greatest hits compilation or experimental spin-off — it's been well over a decade since the last mainline addition to the franchise dropped. However, the long wait...
Review Monster Harvest - Poor Execution Of A Promising 'Stardew Valley X Pokémon' Premise
It hurt itself in its confusion!
It must be tough to be a hopeful dev working on a farm sim project. Stardew Valley—a simple looking project made by one guy—has so effectively raised the bar for what a pure farm sim can be that matching it seems almost impossible by this point. The only way that a new game could feasibly beat it would be by...
Review Sonic Colors Ultimate - The Best 3D Sonic Game Gets A Respectable Remaster
Just take my hand, we're gonna reach for the stars
Being a Sonic fan is hard. The Blue Blur has starred in quite a few legitimately great games over the years, but he’s also been in just about as many clunkers that tanked his reputation. Sonic has especially struggled when it’s come to his forays into 3D environments, yet there was an all too...
Review Rustler - GTA Goes To The Ren Faire And Makes A Medieval Mess
Medieval times
Editor’s note: Having been informed of a launch day patch (not made known to us prior to publication of this review) that improves various performance and stability issues on Switch, a reviewer's note has been added to the end of the text below. Jutsu Games' Rustler attempts to take us back to the chaotic top-down craziness of...
Review Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 1 - Cult Classic Tactics RPGs, But Undeniably Dated
Brave Souls and the Phantom Nomad Eaters
We live in a golden age of remasters and remakes when it comes to video games. It seems like every week there are more classic games that are getting new life on a current gen console. This might seem like a crass attempt to squeeze a few more pennies out of gamers (and in many cases it is), but it is also...
Review No More Heroes III - A Swaggering Joke Of A Game That Suda51 Fans Will Love
FU Fighters
It's certainly a relatively novel take on the whole E.T. thing. You all saw that instantly iconic "Goddamn Superhero" trailer back at the 2019 Game Awards, right? Cute little alien FU (pronounced "foo" - careful now) returns to earth 20 years after he was taken in and cared for by hapless Elliott-alike Damon Ricitiello (last seen in...
Review Slime Rancher: Plortable Edition - A Solid Plort Of A Superb Slime Sim
Your next farming Plort of call
Upon hearing the title of Slime Rancher: Plortable Edition you might be forgiven for imagining a dozy, snoozy farm simulator that bears a striking resemblance to Stardew Valley with some Dragon Quest Slimes and a first-person perspective thrown in. If that’s you, well you’re only half right, or maybe a quarter...
Review The Silver Case 2425 - Style Over Substance In This Pair Of Early Suda51 Epics
Case closed
Every now and again, we review a game that's just absolutely no fun. The review process can sometimes be a bit of a drag — we know, complaining about a job where you play games for a living is like being annoyed that your career as a biscuit taster is making you put on weight — and unfortunately, The Silver Case 2425, a two-in-one...
