Game Reviews scoring 9/10
Review Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider (Switch) - Drop-Dead Gorgeous, Neo-Retro Action Platforming
Stepping back in time
Making any video game is exceptionally hard work. But creating a retro-style experience that feels 100% authentic to the source inspiration adds a whole extra layer of difficulty. Implementing pixel art visuals and calling it a day just doesn't cut it, but what developer JoyMasher has done with Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider is...
Review Please, Touch The Artwork (Switch) - And We Saw That It Was Good, Very Good
Stijl AND substance
To know whether you'll enjoy Please, Touch The Artwork, all you need do is glance at your bookshelf. If you have any art books whatsoever sitting there, we can pretty much guarantee you'll have a great time with this delightfully entertaining, thought-provoking, and unpretentious puzzler. Likewise, if you've ever taken yourself...
Review Chained Echoes (Switch) - One Of The Very Best RPGs Of The Year
Breaking the chains of mediocrity
About seven years ago, a solo indie developer named Matthias Linda began working on an idea he had for a new RPG, itself likely the product of many years of producing fan games based on his genre favorites in RPG Maker. After a successful Kickstarter in 2019 and who knows how many hours of painstaking iteration,...
Review Rogue Legacy 2 (Switch) - A Roguelike Legend Returns In Fine Form
Don't Rogue Your Legacy
While not the first roguelike by any means. 2013’s Rogue Legacy — alongside classics like Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac — had a hand in making the now-plentiful genre the huge deal it has become. Nearly a decade later (not counting two years of early access), Cellar Door Games has finally followed up on their...
Mini Review Windosill (Switch) - A Cult Classic Puzzler Gets A Dreamy Switch Port
Flashback
Well, isn't this a nice surprise. Some 13 years after it first released as a Flash game on web browsers, Patrick Smith's delightful Windosill has arrived on Switch, giving players a fresh chance to experience this breezy, playful, and rather magical little journey through a series of enchanting puzzles. Windosill's unique aesthetic has...
Review Lunistice (Switch) - A 32-Bit Platforming Dream That Gives Sonic A Serious Run For His Money
Frontier justice?
Ever since game fans collectively realised that crunchy polygons were worth getting nostalgic over, PS1-core indie games have been growing into the new pixel art. With Lunistice, one-person shop A Grumpy Fox has delivered a shining example of this modernised lo-fi aesthetic. Sparkling in chaotic but coordinated palettes of...
Review Prodeus (Switch) - An Excellent DOOM-Style Shooter For Old-School FPS Fans
"We will send unto them... only you."
It’s interesting to look back and see how first-person shooters have evolved since the days of Doom. What once used to be a genre focused more on the single-player experience of exploring levels and killing monsters slowly turned into something more focused on multiplayer experiences. In recent years, it feels...
Review Signalis (Switch) - Brilliantly Tense And Surreal Sci-Fi Survival Horror
The signalis good
Survival horror games are tough to get right. Even giants of the genre like Resident Evil find themselves leaning harder into action or simple jump scares over time, but when it is at its best it is more tense than frightening. Signalis is one of the best survival horror games we’ve played and the perfect title for Switch owners...
Review Pilotwings 64 - A Real Gem, Sparkling In The Shadow Of Mario 64
Top flight
This review originally went live in 2013, and we're updating and republishing it to mark the game's arrival in Switch's N64 library via the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack. Releasing alongside Super Mario 64 when the Nintendo 64 launched back in 1996 (1997 if you're European), it was somewhat inevitable that Pilotwings 64 was...
Review No Man's Sky (Switch) - Right Up There With The Very Best Switch Ports
Galaxy Quest
This article was originally published as an in-progress review without a score prior to the arrival of the 4.0 Waypoint update, which brought a raft of new features in the days after launch. It has now been updated with our impressions of Waypoint and awarded an overall score. It's been a long old road for Hello Games' No Man's Sky...
Review NieR:Automata The End of YoRHa Edition (Switch) - A Modern Classic Shines On Switch
NieR-ly perfect
NieR:Automata is perhaps a story of the power of word of mouth. A sequel in an IP with a devoted but modest following by Square Enix standards, it became a notable sales success over time as initial fans convinced neutrals that something special had arrived. Director Yoko Taro was also clever in his approach to storytelling - playing...
Review Return To Monkey Island (Switch) - An Impeccable Encore For An Adventure Gaming Icon
Look behind you! A three-game series!
In 1990, Ron Gilbert created the seminal point-and-click adventure The Secret of Monkey Island. It grabbed hearts and hasn’t let go for 32 years. In 1991, he concluded Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge on a bombshell cliffhanger. In 1992, he departed Lucasarts, and the secret third part of his trilogy went...
Review Shovel Knight Dig (Switch) - A Finely Formed Roguelite That Strikes 16-Bit Gold
"Now dig on this"
Since the last 8-bit-style game came out, Shovel Knight has been branching out more into other genres as developer and publisher Yacht Club charts a course for where its eponymous nobleman will go next. In December, we got the wonderful Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, which smartly blended falling block puzzle mechanics with...
Mini Review OneShot: World Machine Edition (Switch) - A Brilliant And Bittersweet Indie Darling
You've only got OneShot
A cat-like child named Niko wakes up in a decrepit house, locked in a room with a bookshelf, a password-locked computer, and a TV remote control on the floor. It’s too dark to read the books and there’s no sign of a password anywhere – it's up to you to find a way out. Not long after, Niko stumbles upon a massive...
It's more than zero
We don't blame you if you’re intimidated by Falcom’s The Legend of Heroes: Trails series. This massive saga is now up to its twelfth mainline game in Japan, with the West falling behind at an alarming rate. However, one piece of the puzzle has been missing for years – Crossbell. After years of begging, fans are finally...
I choose you!
Fun fact: at this time last year, we had only just learned of the existence of Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars. Not only has that game and its sequel—Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden—come out since then, but we’ve now received yet another sequel in Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden. As you’d probably expect, this...
Review Radiant Silvergun (Switch) - A Superb Shmup That's Still One Of The Very Best
No refuge
Making it business to boycott sensible business practices, Treasure’s commitment to dying consoles once cemented it as Japan’s most revered boutique developer. A practice that gave rise to some of gaming’s most significant works, Radiant Silvergun is a product of both spectacular overachievement and unapologetic showboating. Once...
Review Jack Move (Switch) - A Short, Sharp, And Utterly Gripping Cyberpunk RPG
In bird culture, this is considered a Jack Move
It feels like most JRPGs these days don’t really tread much into hard science fiction. Sure, big franchises like Final Fantasy or Xenoblade aren’t afraid to mix in some tech alongside their magic, but it’s rare that you’ll see developers fully commit to a world that’s all robots and...
Review Splatoon 3 (Switch) - The Pinnacle Of The Series And Switch's Slickest Shooter
Peak squid performance
When the original Splatoon launched on the Wii U back in 2015, it was pretty groundbreaking. Nintendo making an online shooter? It sounded like a recipe for confusion, but as they so often do, Nintendo took a formula that had been refined to the point of parody and decided that it would be fun to be able to swim in bullets...
Pizza dude's got 30 seconds
For gamers who weren't yet born in the 1980s, it may be surprising to learn that Konami’s pedigree was once second only to Nintendo’s first-party output. Undyingly creative and highly quality-driven, the innovative glow that earmarked their arcade years was never truly rekindled post-1994. Hot on the heels of...
Lost in plaaaaaaaay
Graphic adventures can’t seem to settle themselves. Most new games seem to have to start at first principles and decide on their own verbs, loops, control scheme, puzzle types, difficulty, hint system… and it feels like there are more misses than hits. Which makes it all the more impressive that developer Happy Juice Games...
Mini Review RITE (Switch) - A Short And Very Sweet Precision Platformer
A platformer done Rite
Precision platformers—such as Slime-San, The End is Nigh, or Celeste—can be tough to pull off given their razor-sharp requirements. Make the game too frustrating, and most players won’t even try to overcome the devilish challenges laid out for them. Make the game too easy, and it’ll lose a lot of its ‘hardcore’...
Review Wave Race 64 - A Thrilling Racer That's Still Deeply Impressive
Splash wave
This review originally went live in 2016, and we're updating and republishing it to mark the game's arrival on Switch as part of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack. Wave Race was not a well-known series prior to its arrival on the Nintendo 64. Actually, it wasn't a series at all, but rather a single release: a top-down racer on...
Review Two Point Campus (Switch) - A Beautifully Balanced Sim That's More 'Friend' Than 'Fiscal'
Putting the 'U-need' in 'Uneedversity'
After the excellent Two Point Hospital released on Switch moments before the world was rocked by a global pandemic, Two Point Studios are at it yet again with Two Point Campus. If the name hadn’t made it clear already, rather than running a hospital for money, Two Point Campus has you running a university...
Mini Review Hindsight (Switch) - Another Beautifully Moving Hit For Annapurna
Don’t look back in anger
If you played the excellent Neon White recently and were surprised to learn it was published by Annapurna Interactive, brace yourself to be completely unsurprised with this one: they don’t come much more Annapurna-y than this. Hindsight is a story that plays out through gentle interactions, with no complex objectives or...
Review Cuphead - The Delicious Last Course (Switch) - Short, Sweet, And Utterly Essential
You'd be a mug to ignore it
There’s a section near the end of one of the new stages in Cuphead’s DLC that made us shout a four-letter word at the screen extremely loudly, and that word wasn’t ‘cups’. Being the level-headed types we are, it’s very rare for a game to make us resort to such outbursts, but there we were, bellowing the sort...
Review Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak (Switch) - A Deliciously Difficult, Must-Have Expansion
An expansion with bite
Monster Hunter Rise has proven to be a welcome continuation of the IP's global growth in popularity, following the breakout mainstream success of 2018's Monster Hunter: World and its Iceborne expansion on non-Nintendo platforms. Rise itself brought some interesting evolutions from World, retaining more of the quirky charm we...
Review Portal: Companion Collection (Switch) - A Nintendo Debut For Two All-Time Greats
This was a triumph ♫
When it was announced that Portal and Portal 2 would be making their way to the Nintendo Switch as part of the Portal: Companion Collection, fans collectively choked on their cakes. Two of the best puzzle games of all time on the go, you say? Yes, please! Naturally, when certain games get ported to Nintendo’s hybrid system,...
Review AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative (Switch) - Another Very Fine Murder Mystery
An AI in your Eyeball
It is hard to beat a good murder mystery. The classic battle of wits between the detective and killer makes for perfect tension and AI: The Somnium Files – nirvanA Initiative takes advantage of this established formula to give players a fun mystery with plenty of twists and turns, keeping them engaged through the closing...
Review Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes (Switch) - Musou Magic That Ranks Among The Best
Dynasty Worriers
With the success of the likes of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, Persona 5 Strikers and, of course, 2017's Fire Emblem Warriors on Nintendo Switch, it should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that Omega Force, the developer behind the long-running Warriors franchise, is intent on continuing to serve up more zany crossovers
