3DS Game Reviews
Review Girls' Fashion Shoot (3DS)
Fashionably fun
It's apparently every young girl's dream to become a model - wearing the latest clothing trend, looking fabulous walking down the catwalk with photographers on the sidewalk capturing the moment. Girls' Fashion Shoot provides just that, but substituting the catwalk for magazine photo shoots while sitting comfortably at home. As the...
Review LEGO Marvel Super Heroes: Universe in Peril (3DS)
Another bag of bricks
With a great franchise comes a great number of releases. In the case of the LEGO video games series, their multi-platform games have hit just about every major gaming console of the past 10 years. Having no desire to be left out of the series’ success, LEGO Marvel Super Heroes: Universe in Peril brings an original adventure...
Review Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate (3DS)
Throw away the key
Being ambitious is no easy task. Playing a full, big-budget console game on a portable system is likely in every gamer’s wildest fantasies, but due to hardware limitations, we’re often left disappointed by half-hearted ports. Armature Studio, in its infinite wisdom, recognized this concern and chose to take this one in a...
Review One Piece Romance Dawn (3DS)
Just give it up, Luffy
Anyone would be forgiven for thinking crafting a decent RPG from the lore of established anime juggernaut One Piece would be a simple task; the bombastic characters, epic quests and thrilling battles the series is known for should, in theory, make for an excellent adventure. With One Piece Romance Dawn, what developer Three...
A Critical Hit
If there’s one thing famed RPG developer Square Enix cannot be accused of, it’s failing to change over time. The early Final Fantasy titles were an exercise in optimistic grandeur, their idyllic landscapes serving as the stage for huge, epic quests filled with wonder and discovery. As of late, however, the company seems to have...
A puzzling page-turner
American developer and publisher Big Fish Games is literally a big fish in the market of casual gaming. The creator of the Mystery Case Files series, the studio has carved out a profitable niche on PC and mobile platforms with its unique brand of hidden object puzzlers — and has also transferred some of these outings to the...
Review Ben 10 Omniverse 2 (3DS)
Ben bleh
The latest tie-in to the Ben 10 television series, Ben 10 Omniverse 2 is a serviceable title that falls prey to many of the issues that plague licensed games. It's a shame, too, because the creative, action-packed world and characters of the series certainly would lend themselves well to a video game. Developer 1st Playable Productions has...
Review Mario Party: Island Tour (3DS)
Rolling the dice
Back in 1999, Mario and his crew could have taught Prince a thing or two about how to celebrate the coming of a new millennium. Establishing itself as a mainstay on the Nintendo 64, the Mario Party series showed up three times to blister hands and bring friends and family together to yell at each other at the top of their lungs...
Review Power Rangers Megaforce (3DS)
No, no, Power Rangers
Let's just say it up front so that nobody skimming the review will miss it: Power Rangers Megaforce is a terrible game. Not only that, it's actually broken in several respects. And we don't mean "broken" to mean "unfair" or "poorly designed." We mean "broken" to mean "it does not work." The concept of the game is promising...
Review Doodle Jump Adventures (3DS)
Scrappy
In recent years, many popular mobile games have found themselves being ported to consoles and handhelds, often with mixed degrees of success. Doodle Jump Adventures, based on Lima Sky’s smartphone hit Doodle Jump, is the latest phenomenon to make the transition and much like Angry Birds before it, does a good job of fleshing out the...
Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube764k Watch on YouTube Review Regular Show: Mordecai and Rigby in 8-Bit Land (3DS)
Regular Show game for 3DS, send it to the moon
When we heard that WayForward was developing a Regular Show video game, we were optimistic. Not only does the studio generally pump out better-than-expected licensed games, but last year it produced Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage?!, which ended up being a loving tribute to the...
Review Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (3DS)
Shell shocked
It’s arguably difficult to consider Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV reboot as anything other than a rousing success. Blending together elements from the classic 1987 series with a more modern approach, the show has been a hit with fans both new and old, treading that awkward line between paying homage to the past and...
Review The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (3DS)
A classic series gets a fresh new coat of paint
Much like everyone's favourite green-garbed hero Link, Eiji Aonuma, current producer of The Legend of Zelda series, is also on a quest of his own. However, Aonuma-san isn't tasked with saving Hyrule, nor is he desperately searching for the sacred Triforce; in fact, his personal mission isn't nearly as...
Review Hakuoki: Memories of the Shinsengumi (3DS)
Ronin with the homies
Hakuoki: Memories of the Shinsengumi combines standard dating-sim tropes with a captivating setting and fantastic writing to provide an experience that is surprisingly greater than the sum of its parts — even if it may fall far out of the comfort zone of most players. When meek protagonist Chizuru ventures to Kyoto in search...
Review Beyblade: Evolution (3DS)
Worth taking for a spin?
Despite the original anime TV series coming to an end almost a decade ago, it seems that Beyblade is still very much a thing. It’s curious to think that the concept of pitting spinning top toys against one another would prove so exciting for so many in this technologically enhanced day and age, but then the world...
Review Skylanders SWAP Force (3DS)
Swap-n-go
There is a common and unfortunate trend in video game development in which a great game is released on a home console, and then a vastly inferior version — or spin-off — is released as a portable title. Recent victims of this phenomenon include LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins and Sonic Lost World. While these shouldn’t be...
Review Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy (3DS)
A final puzzle to savour
The arrival of Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy is an occasion both exciting and tinged with sadness. For dedicated fans of the franchise across DS and 3DS there's the promise of hundreds of puzzles and a generous dosage of gentlemanly charm, offset by the knowledge that — for now at least — this is the last...
A Rune of one's own
The Harvest Moon series has become something of a standby over the last decade or so, so it's easy to forget just how revolutionary it was when it first hit the Super Nintendo back in 1996. An RPG where players progressed not by fighting battles or banishing evil, but by tending gently to the land, caring for animals, and finding...
Smaller screens, bigger problems
Due to the disparity between technical capabilities, it's tough for a dual Wii U / 3DS release to hold up on the portable device that's captivated tens of millions of gamers. So let's just toss that comparison aside and acknowledge that much of the 3DS iteration of Sonic Lost World is following the same principles...
Review Around the World with Hello Kitty and Friends (3DS)
Bonjour, Kitty
Hello Kitty first burst onto the scene in 1974 courtesy of Japanese company Sanrio, which designs and produces products solely aimed at the kawaii – meaning cute in Japanese – section of popular culture in the country. Since then, Hello Kitty has become one of the most recognised and successful brands in the world, appearing on...
Mystifyingly bad
Porting games has always been common practice for most third-party companies. It goes without saying, but it makes good business sense for a game publisher to enable its software to reach as wide an audience as possible. And it's something that most of us don't have a problem with; if a company makes it easier for us to play its...
Evolution or revolution?
Do you remember that first time you rushed home with the latest copy of Pokémon, gleefully slotting it into your handheld and dreaming of becoming the next Pokémon Master? Everything was new, fresh and exciting. Every time that pixelated grass flickered and you encountered another never-seen-before monster you held your...
Review Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl (3DS)
Don't call it a comeback
When Etrian Odyssey arrived on the DS in 2007, it was something of a revelation. A dungeon-crawler that traded in dusty catacombs for organic, open-air environments and prized cartography and character customization over narrative, it combined the best of pen-and-paper RPGs with Nintendo's new touch-screen hardware to create...
Hat-trick hero?
The Inazuma Eleven football / soccer RPG franchise is a major success in Japan, so much so that spin-offs and new releases are — at a minimum — arriving on an annual basis. Localisation to Europe has been a slower burn, and unfortunately non-existent in North America, so the arrival of Inazuma Eleven 3, the third title in the...
Review Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst (3DS)
A mystery indeed...
The standard Nintendo DS version of Big Fish Games’ Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst was released on 19th April 2013. The original game that DS title was based on was first published for PC systems in February of 2009. So to find that this “new” 3D edition of a four-month-old DS port of a four-year-old game is being pushed...
Review Turbo: Super Stunt Squad (3DS)
A snail's pace
Based on the movie from DreamWorks Animation about a garden snail who longs to become the fastest racer in the world, Turbo: Super Stunt Squad for 3DS is yet another licensed title that suffers from a lack of working controls, solid visuals and compelling gameplay. While D3Publisher and developer Torus Games have the right idea —...
Review Mario & Luigi: Dream Team (3DS)
A never-ending dream
If there was more justice in the world, Mario & Luigi: Dream Team — or Mario & Luigi: Dream Team Bros. as it's known in Europe — would enjoy the same level of hype and anticipation as some of its prestigious predecessors on the 3DS in 2013. And yet, rather like its snoozy subject matter, it drifts into view on a...
Review Shin Megami Tensei IV (3DS)
Good Goddess
Atlus has given 3DS-owning RPG fans plenty to be excited about recently, with Etrian Odyssey IV and Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers both released this year alone. Now the latest entry in the mainline Shin Megami Tensei series has arrived to complete the dungeon-crawling hat-trick, bringing its unique brand of demon...
The best of 200+ worlds
It's unlikely that this review is the first you're hearing of Project X Zone; with a sprawling, time-traveling, world-hopping, dimension-skipping plot that draws together more than 200 characters from about 30 different franchises, there's been a lot of excited talk about this one. Now that we've been able to spend our time...
Review Animal Crossing: New Leaf (3DS)
Return of the thieving raccoon
It’s likely that before the archaic and newly-retired Mayor Tortimer sailed off into the sunset he turned to the fresh-faced Mayor-to-be beside him and whispered, “Remember, you’re only a Mayor, not a King, and this is a democracy, not a dictatorship.” And with that, he turned, winked, donned his Hawaiian shirt...
