Latest Reviews
Mini Review NUTS (Switch) - A Relaxing But Repetitive Way To Spend A Few Hours
Furry found footage
With its striking visuals, first-person perspective, and rural setting, you could easily mistake NUTS as a spin-off of the critically acclaimed narrative title Firewatch. Indeed, you spend much of your time free-roaming a woodland area, retreating back to the comfort of your caravan to sleep and chatting to a friendly colleague...
Mini Review PUSS! (Switch) - Strangely Compelling Nightmare Fuel
A whisker away from sadism
Remember that scene in the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where the tour group take a boat ride through a psychedelic tunnel? Remember how utterly terrifying it was (still is)? Now imagine such lunacy applied to an entire video game; that’s pretty much what you get with PUSS! Billed by developer...
Review Hero-U: Rogue To Redemption (Switch) - A Fine Successor To The 'Quest For Glory' Series
So U Want to Be a Hero
23 years have passed since the release of the fifth and final entry in Corey and Lori Ann Cole’s Quest for Glory hybrid adventure/RPG series and now, after two Kickstarter campaigns, the duo has returned with Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. This is a spiritual successor to their classic franchise that manages to harken back to...
Review Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury (Switch) - A Superb Mario Adventure With A Bowser Bonus
Meow that's what we call value
Well, it’s finally here. The 35th anniversary of Mario may soon be ending with a Thanos-style snap of the fingers for Super Mario 3D All-Stars and Super Mario Bros. 35, but before we mourn them, Nintendo has one final release to celebrate the big three-five, and this one’s sticking around for good. Super Mario 3D...
Review Little Nightmares II (Switch) - A Spooky Platformer Dripping With Tension And Dread
Sweet dreams are made of this
Ever been somewhere you know you shouldn’t? Fear and curiosity can entwine themselves into intoxicating shapes, dancing in your guts as you push ever forward into the dark, knowing that the consequences of your being discovered will most likely be dire and terrible? That’s what Little Nightmares II goes for, and it...
Review Persona 5 Strikers (Switch) - Much More Than Your Average Musou Spin-Off
Screwball Scramble
Persona 5 Strikers, otherwise known as Persona 5 Scramble: The Phantom Strikers in Japan, finally blasts its way onto Switch consoles in the west and, if you were expecting this Atlus/Koei Tecmo crossover to be a straight-up Musou style spin-off, a Dynasty Warriors-esque effort with a fancy Persona skin hastily slapped on top,...
Keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, rollin’
One of the coolest aspects of the Metroid series – in particular the Prime trilogy – is the Morph Ball ability. Curling up into a literal ball and using its momentum to reach new places is a consistently unique and fun way to traverse the world. Glyph takes this concept and applies it to an entire...
Review Project Starship X (Switch) - An Unconventional Shmup That's Full Of New Ideas
X marks the spot
Just as we tend to approach games that try to hammer the shoot-em-up into a new mould with an air of caution, Project Starship X, in fact, starts with a caution. And it’s necessary. We fired it up in a dark room and, ten seconds into the first stage, just as hell broke loose, the cat sat on the TV remote. The volume went so...
Review Sword Of The Necromancer (Switch) - A Dismal Dungeon-Crawler That's Best Left For Dead
Sometimes dead is better
A sword that can raise the dead? That’s the opposite of what they usually do! Gosh, if only we had something like that, we could resurrect all our enemies so we can enjoy destroying them again. But we digress. The titular Sword of the Necromancer and its ability to is the hook upon which this game enacts its otherwise...
Review Redout: Space Assault (Switch) - A Bargain-Bin Star Fox With Spectacular Visuals
In space, no one can hear you scream
A couple of years ago, the Switch played host to Redout: Lightspeed Edition, a flawed futuristic racer that nonetheless turned out to be a pretty good experience all around. It was the sort of thing that established a great foundation to be built upon, and we were sure that a sequel – if one was coming –...
Review Gods Will Fall (Switch) - An Addictive And Original Nintendo Switch Roguelike
Pictmin
Clever Beans Ltd, the team behind 2012's When Vikings Attack! and, perhaps more notably, the fantastic WipEout Omega Collection of remasters on PlayStation 4, make its first foray onto Switch with Gods Will Fall, and what a successful first foray this is. What we have here is a properly challenging and highly inventive dungeon crawler packed...
Review Shing! (Switch) - Will Test Your Patience More Than Your Fighting Skills
Streets of Rage (quit)
Mass Creation's Shing! is a side-scrolling beat 'em up in the traditional Streets of Rage mould that valiantly attempts to inject a little originality into the genre by utilizing a unique control scheme which sees player's attacks assigned to the right thumbstick, rather than the usual button-bashing way of things. It's an...
Review Olija (Switch) - A Cinematic Adventure Packed With Atmosphere
Return of the Obra Flinthook
Olija is, at its simplest, an action-platformer with a harpoon that lets you grapple up to different areas. If you played the fantastically dynamic Flinthook – or you've used Zelda's Hookshot – then you'll recognise the mechanic: shoot hook, dash to hook, repeat. The harpoon can (and should) also be used as a weapon,...
Review Tadpole Treble Encore (Switch) - A Must-Buy For Fans Of Rhythm Games
Still pretty sharp
In August of 2016, the rapidly-declining Wii U eShop was graced by the release of a neat little indie game called Tadpole Treble. As the dream project from Matthew Taranto, a popular webcomic artist, Tadpole Treble easily proved itself to be a memorable and creative experience that we quickly fell in love with. Now, nearly five...
Mini Review Disjunction (Switch) - A Fine-Looking Homage To Konami's Classic Metal Gear Titles
Tactical Dystopian Action
Stealth games are pretty hard to come by these days. Good ones are even fewer and far between. The good news is that Disjunction feels like a breath of fresh air, then. Its gameplay is like a love letter to stealth games of yore, melding together tight, responsive gunplay with effective close-range combat, all wrapped up in...
Review Shadow Gangs (Switch) - A Tough-As-Nails Shinobi Tribute That's Worth Your Time
Giant evil Freddie Mercury. How's that for a hook?
We’ve played a lot of tough games here at Nintendo Life. We’re no strangers to the Game Over screen, but equally, we never gave up. You could say we’ve been around the block. We’ve knocked out Mr Dream. We’ve cleared Smash Bros. Ultimate at 9.9 intensity. There’s very little we baulk at...
Review Golden Force (Switch) - Vibrant Action-Platforming Marred By Rough Edges
A disturbance in the Force
The initial vibe we picked up from side-scroller Golden Force was a very positive one. The mixture of platforming and combat – complete with power moves, juggles and burst-dashes – recalled Treasure’s GBA masterpiece Astro Boy: The Omega Factor. It may not be the most well-known game, but trust us when we say this:...
Mini Review Colossus Down (Switch) - A Neat Concept Squandered By Bland Gameplay
Titan-falls short of greatness
The idea of running amok in a giant mech is certainly a tantalising one, isn’t it? With Mango Protocol’s Colossus Down, this is exactly what seven-year-old child prodigy Nika decides to do. Following on directly from 2015’s short title MechaNika, Colossus Down is a 2D side-scrolling brawler in which you must...
In need of deforestation
Paying homage to retro titles can be a tricky thing. Do you stick to an established formula, or do you stray and carve out your own path? Timothy and the Mysterious Forest does a bit of both. One glance at Kibou Entertainment’s top-down adventure, and it’s clear that this game owes an awful lot to The Legend of Zelda:...
Review Turrican Flashback (Switch) - An Annoyingly Incomplete Collection That's Still Worth A Look
Are you a Turrican? Or a Turrican't?
Factor 5’s beloved Amiga platform shooter has been egregiously missing in action for some decades now. At least, the series is back on modern systems in the relatively exhaustive form of the Turrican Anthology 1 and 2, seemingly physical-only collections that brin
On the Ryza
Hot on the heels of 2019’s excellent Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout, developer Gust has wasted absolutely no time in releasing this second epic adventure for Reisalin “Ryza” Stout, a protagonist who’s proven so popular with fans that she’s the very first since the Atelier series kicked off back in 1997 to...
Review Cyber Shadow (Switch) - A Blisteringly Brilliant Action Platformer
Go, ninja, go!
Nearly seven years ago, the world was first introduced to Shovel Knight, a passion project that aimed to emulate some of the most legendary game releases of the 8-bit era. Since then, Yacht Club Games has gone on to extensively expand on the base Shovel Knight game, and now the studio has begun to look to the future to its next big...
Review Calico (Switch) - Bursting With Heart, But Crippled By Bugs
Glitchy and scratchy
As part of the "wholesome games" trend, Calico promises quite a few of the hallmarks of the genre: cats, cafés, gentle music, soft colours, cooking, and befriending fluffy animals. The gameplay is unchallenging, but it's meant to be that way; your in-game avatar – a magical girl you design yourself with a fairly in-depth...
Review Hitman 3 - Cloud Version (Switch) - Not Perfect, But Perfectly Playable
Portable Predator
Well, it's finally time. IO Interactive's superlative World of Assassinations trilogy draws to a triumphant close with Hitman 3, one final blast of slick and sophisticated missions for the unstoppable Agent 47 to shoot, strangle and poison his way through as he continues to close the net on the elusive Partners of Providence...
Review WRITHE (Switch) - A Nintendo 64-Style Budget Blaster That Needs More Work
Bangkok Dangerous
Mission Crtl Studio's WRITHE is a simplistic, straightforward old-school FPS that sees players take on hordes of giant Sago worms who have descended upon Bangkok in the wake of an evil food corporation's greed-fueled experiments. Strapping on your P.H.U.L.A. life-support armour and grabbing your plasma launcher and phosphorus...
Review Wrestling Empire (Switch) - A Love Letter To Pro Wrestling That Falls Foul Of Hilarious Bugs
Bug-a-mania is running wild
It's been a long time since a truly brilliant wrestling game has been available on a Nintendo console. Not since the days of WWF No Mercy on the Nintendo 64 and the Day of Reckoning series on the GameCube have Nintendo fans been able to properly enjoy a genuinely brilliant rendition of pro wrestling, and frustration is...
Time to break out the "L-word"
Digital games can be a wonderful thing. They don’t run the risk of getting lost like physical game cards. You can fit an awful lot of them on one MicroSD card these days. They grant indie developers an easier option for distribution. Yet games like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game also highlight the biggest...
Mini Review Door Kickers (Switch) - A Tough Tactical Take On That Old FPS Trope
Press 'X' to breach
Many modern FPS titles contain the obligatory ‘breach’ scene. You know the one; you blow a door off its hinges and suddenly everything goes into slow motion. You scan the room, and as luck would have it, all of your enemies are right in front of you, ready for the picking. It’s flashy, it’s cinematic, but it’s not...
There is no spoon
One quick glance at The Hong Kong Massacre, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Hotline Miami has been given the Legend of Zelda Space World treatment. On face value, the two games are remarkably similar, with the same birds-eye viewpoint and absurdly over-the-top violence right from the start. The Hong Kong Massacre is a...
Mini Review Florence (Switch) - The Very Definition Of 'Short But Sweet'
You know Florence?
Florence originally came to Switch back in February 2020, but we didn't manage to review it at launch. Following several reader requests, we're pleased to say we found time to catch up with it over the holidays... What is Florence? It could be described as an interactive novella or a visual novel, perhaps, although those are...