Switch eShop, Switch Game Reviews scoring 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6/10
Patience you must have
The Switch is finally getting itself some Star Wars games! With last week’s release of the rather excellent Star Wars Pinball being very quickly followed by this, a barebones port of 2002’s Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. Quite rightly regarded as one of the very best Star Wars games – certainly in terms of its...
Mini Review Ritual - A Nice Setup Let Down By Boring Gameplay
Set gameplay to 'auto'
Just in case there’s any confusion, Ritual is not an adaptation of the fantastic horror novel by Adam Nevill, though we’d almost prefer it if that were the case. Instead, Ritual is a top-down action RPG in which you play as a powerful Sorcerer who partakes in a quest of revenge after a failed sacrificial attempt from a...
Review Overland - A Survival Roguelike That's Often Too Frustrating For Its Own Good
Go west
For all the vast and far-reaching open worlds out there – of which there are plenty on Nintendo Switch alone – there’s something acutely intense about exploring something on a far smaller scale. Without being burdened with the chore of filling a large virtual land mass with ‘stuff’, even the smallest design decision can have a huge...
Review Jet Kave Adventure - A 2.5D Platformer That Doesn't Reinvent The Wheel, More's The Pity
Little rocket (cave)man
Not every game has to be revolutionary, you know. While it’s always nice when a developer tries to push a genre further and break new ground, there are times when all we want is something familiar, something solid, something safe: a warm, cosy jumper in a world full of attention-seeking t-shirt slogans. Jet Kave Adventure...
Review Gun Gun Pixies - A Pitiful Perv-Fest That Also Fails As A Video Game
Space Oddity
Originally released for PS Vita in Japan back in 2017, Gun Gun Pixies tells the story of two intergalactic hornballs, Kame Pon and Bee Tan, otherwise known as Pixie Team, who are sent to earth on a secret mission to observe the interactions of a bunch of teenage girls living in a dormitory. Pixie Team’s home planet Pandemo is in the...
Review Umihara Kawase Fresh! - An Appealing Platformer That Makes Itself Hard To Love
Something fishy
There’s something strange about Umihara Kawase Fresh! It’s not the fish with human legs; it’s not the tadpole that lays frogs. It’s not even the pork pizza you serve to a pig. What’s strange is that it can’t seem to decide how difficult it is. Assuming you are not familiar with the Umihara Kawase series, the opening of...
Mini Review Legend Of The Skyfish - A Poor-Man's Zelda
Hook, line and stinker
You don’t need to look very long at Legend of the Skyfish to know which series it takes influence from. Heck, the clue is in the name itself. Taking place on a set of islands, you take on the role of Little Red Hook, a girl with a particular talent of traversing the land and vanquishing foes with – of all things – a...
Review The Long Journey Home - A Thrilling Space Epic Undone By Its Own Spitefulness
Homeward bound
The randomised yet finely-crafted adventures found within The Long Journey Home are filled with wonder. Manoeuvring your ship through vast and numerous solar systems, navigating unexplored planets and meeting strange and wonderful alien species – it's all good stuff. But the coin is always flipping in the vacuum of space; the cosmos...
Review Bubsy: Paws On Fire! - How Many Lives Does This Bobcat Have?
Paws for loading
"Bubsy's back!" While that phrase might strike fear into your very soul, there must be a fair amount of readers with at least a residue of affection for the orange bobcat. Bubsy the Bobcat hails from the age of mascot platformers that has come back into vogue with the current wave of '90s nostalgia, and he somehow remains in the...
Review Boreal Blade - Challenging Freeform Swordplay Undercut By Technical Problems
Bae blade
There’s nothing quite like battling for victory while teetering on the precipice of defeat. It’s that adrenaline-inducing moment in virtual time that’s made everything from driving simulators to fighting games so consistently engrossing. A sliver of health. Increasingly ill-favoured odds. But when you win, despite it all, it’s a...
Review Vambrace: Cold Soul - A Gorgeous RPG That's Tragically Undone By Dull And Difficult Gameplay
Soul Eater
We here at Nintendo Life have something of a soft spot for 2018’s excellent roguelike RPG Darkest Dungeon. With its beautifully distinctive art style married to tight, enthralling battles which made maintaining the sanity of your party of warriors every bit as important as keeping on top of your combat strategies, it managed to walk a...
Review RAD - A Gnarly Roguelike Which Is Let Down By Balance And Performance Problems
Get bent, muties
Double Fine has long since made a name for itself as a rather ‘out there’ studio that nonetheless produces quality work, such as Brütal Legend, Psychonauts, Headlander, and Costume Quest. Its latest release, RAD, fits right in with this lineage, blending in crazy '80s themes with an action-heavy roguelike gameplay loop. It’s...
Mini Review Whipseey And The Lost Atlas - A Kirby Clone That's Over In The Blink Of An Eye
You'll whip through it
“Jump and whip your way through this epic adventure,” begins the opening blurb for the Whipseey and the Lost Atlas listing on the Nintendo eShop. It undoubtedly does feature jumping, yes, and there’s certainly a decent amount of whipping to be found, but calling it epic is a bit of a stretch; we’ve had hiccuping spells...
Review Grandia HD Collection - Two Classic Games, Shoddily Remastered
Not as grand as we'd hoped
You’d be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the Grandia series at first glance. This adventurous JRPG series is one of those that – for better or worse – never really found its footing with a wider audience, and though it had a strong start in the late ’90s, Grandia mostly fizzled out by the mid-2000s for a...
Review SEGA AGES Puyo Puyo - You Can't Polish A Puyo This Plain
Less ‘yo’, more ‘pu’
We’ve now reached the tenth game in the Sega Ages series, and it’s safe to say the project has been a resounding success. Over the course of the past year, Sega and the retro wizards at M2 have released a steady stream of old-school ports that have had us using the phrase ‘definitive version’ more times than...
Review Pandemic - A Too-Simple Conversion That's Looking A Little Green
Down with the sickness
When deciding to bring a popular board game such as Pandemic to a new platform one of the first questions you’ve got to be asking yourself is what can this version add to the already existing game to make it worth a purchase; more specifically, what can the move to digital bring to the table? How do you utilise the...
Mini Review PC Building Simulator - A Surprisingly Decent Rig
Have you switched it off and on?
The Switch is home to a vast variety of games encompassing all sorts of genres from first-person shooters to visual novels, but we can probably all agree that PC Building Simulator is a game that none of us were expecting to see pop up on the eShop (then again, we got Car Mechanic Simulator, so apparently anything's...
Review Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet Complete Edition - This Anime Adaptation Misses The Target
Hollow Fragment
Sword Art Online has been around in some form or another since all the way back in the prehistoric times commonly referred to as 2002. Originally a series of light novels, it’s been praised for its exploration of themes relating to the intertwining of real and virtual worlds and the effect this has on the psyche and physicality of...
Review Turok 2: Seeds of Evil - A Painfully Incomplete Version Of An N64 Classic
Multiplayer goes extinct
The first-person shooter has become so prevalent on consoles in today’s market, it’s bizarre to think back to a time where PC gamers held the lion’s share of the genre. By 1998, the desktop faithful were gorging on Half-Life and Unreal, but a little console by the name of Nintendo 64 wasn’t about to bow down to the...
Review Hamsterdam - Lengthy Loads And Mobile Tropes Hamper This Hamster
Rats on, rats off
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from video games, it’s that heroes come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. From the straight laced Hylian hero Link to the wise cracking Umbra Witch Bayonetta, devs have given us some of the most memorable characters in any medium thanks to their unique design and endearing personalities...
Review The Forbidden Arts - Repetitive Combat Prevents This Platformer From Catching Fire
A spellbinding adventure?
A lot of games these days like to capitalise on nostalgia. Whether it’s with pixelated graphics or callbacks via specific gameplay mechanics like side-scrolling platforming, old school enthusiasts have more choices than ever before. The Forbidden Arts feels very much like game straight from the GameCube era, with a...
Review Omega Labyrinth Life - A Robust Dungeon Crawler With Plant-Based Padding
Roguelife
We’ve looked at several games over the past few months with a focus on fanservice: some of them offering cheeky, inoffensive fun in short bursts (Dead or Alive Xtreme 3: Scarlet); others spicing up some lacklustre mechanics with surreal frivolity (Panty Party); others still that utterly fail to disguise boring gameplay with jiggle...
Review FIA European Truck Racing Championship - Driven Off The Road By Performance Issues
Rig-amortis
It stands to reason that if you weld four wheels and an engine onto something, there’s probably bound to be someone who wants to race said thing around a track like a maniac. Because that’s the only reason we can imagine why there’s a real-life professional racing league for big rigs and trucks. It’s clearly a big deal for many...
Review Redeemer: Enhanced Edition - Bloody And Brutal Action That's Been Poorly Ported To Switch
Monk-ey business
Redeemer: Enhanced Edition is the Ronseal of top-down beat-’em-ups. With no frills, bells or whistles, it does exactly what it says on the tin/box/eShop description. You’re a former soldier living in a remote monastery. And when some bad dudes attack your temple and kill your fellow monks, it’s up to you to embrace your old...
Review Caladrius Blaze - A Mechanically Competent Shmup With Gratuitous Presentation
Behold the power of the "Shame Break"
Caladrius Blaze is new to the Switch, but didn’t just pop up overnight. The top-down shooter launched as plain old Caladrius on Xbox 360 in Japan in 2013, before progressing through arcade, PS3, PS4 and Windows on the way to Switch. Looking further back, it’s descended from 1990s Japanese arcade favourite...
Review Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power - A Charming, Magical Jaunt Stumbles Into 3D
High fantasy in three dimensions
When an established franchise fundamentally changes up the tried-and-tested gameplay it's known for, it can either go really well or quite badly. Take Metroid Prime, for example: moving the series into a 3D environment for the first time turned out to be the best decision possible, resulting in one of the most...
Review Kill la Kill: IF - An Underwhelming Arena Fighter That's Only For Fans Of The Anime
IF only it was good
When a popular anime receives a video game adaptation, more often than not it's some form of arena fighter. On Switch alone, we've already seen the likes of My Hero One's Justice, Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 and more transform hit anime licenses into enjoyable spectacle fighters. With a sea of...
Review Skulls of the Shogun: Bone-A-Fide Edition - A Fine Port, But Online Play Is Dead On Arrival
Samurai Shutdown
Another day, another strategy game releases on Switch. With the arrival of the excellent Tiny Metal: Full Metal Rumble and a brand new Fire Emblem game, it seems we’re rather spoilt for choice in a genre that’s already delivered us the likes of Wargroove, Valkyria Chronicles 4 and the sublime
Review Automachef - Considerably More Complex Than Using A Microwave
Rice of the Machines
Given that Team17 has already enjoyed huge success with Overcooked and Overcooked 2 – both of which are available on the Switch – you’d be forgiven for initially thinking that Automachef was more of the same; an attempt to tweak the format a little and keep dining out (ahem) on what it knows is already working. This...
Review Lust For Darkness - A Clumsy Trip Through A Depraved Hellscape That's As Sexy As It Sounds
Mood killer
Two-and-a-half-years into its inception and Nintendo Switch isn’t struggling for games of a horrific persuasion. From unnerving yet humorous adventures such as The Padre to zombie-ridden action adventures a la Resident Evil 4, us hybrid handheld owners have plenty of grisly titles to satisfy our gluttony for the macabre. One thing we...