Switch eShop, Switch Game Reviews scoring 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6/10
Review Simulacra - An Interesting Horror Title That Doesn't Quite Hit The Mark
Tik Tok, you’re dead
What would you do if a mobile phone belonging to someone else was left on your doorstep? Chances are (in this day and age) the device is protected with face ID, fingerprint ID or a password and/or pin, so naturally any self-respecting citizen would turn it in to the police. But in Simulacra, an unusual glitch allows you to...
Review Five Nights at Freddy's 3 - Proof Of The Law Of Diminishing Returns
What could possibly go wrong?
By the time Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 came out, it had been just over half a year since the first game’s debut. The low budget feel and ongoing lore had solidified the series as a popular mainstay, although for many, a modicum of franchise fatigue was beginning to set in. Though each game features its own take on...
Review Star Ocean: First Departure R - An RPG Nostalgia Trip That's Showing Its Age
A gentle HD update for an old classic
This very first game in the Star Ocean series - a series which eventually grew to include eight titles of varying quality - has been through a handful of iterations over the years. Originally released exclusively in Japan on Super Famicom back in 1996 it was then extensively remade using the Star Ocean 2 engine...
Review Five Nights at Freddy's 2 - A Sinister Sequel That Dials Up The Complexity
New location, same horrors
Five Nights at Freddy’s took the world by storm after its August 2014 release, yet series creator Scott Cawthon wasn’t one to simply rest on his laurels. A mere three months after the first game’s debut, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 was available for purchase, offering an expanded and revised take on that basic cat...
Review Where The Water Tastes Like Wine - A Unique Narrative Experience That Fails As A Video Game
Don't take a sip
Given our hobby's slavish pursuit of the validation and prestige afforded to cinema, it's entirely common (and expected) for a video game to want to tell a story. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine goes beyond these limited aspirations, instead offering a story about stories, where narrative is your weapon and your currency. That...
Review Decay Of Logos - An Epic Mess Of A Game, Despite The Lengthy Delay On Switch
Soulless
Originally planned for release back in August on Switch, Decay of Logos was delayed by its developers in order to fix some issues with the game on Nintendo's platform. We played this original version back at the time and found it seriously lacking, suffering from a crushing number of gameplay bugs, some terribly muddy graphics and a dire...
Review House of Golf - Mini-Golf Madness Held Back By Some Awkward Issues
Suburbian tee off
Everyone loves a good game of mini-golf. The wacky courses and absurd obstacles combine to create a challenging, yet accessible game that almost anybody can get stuck into. There have been countless video games based on mini-golf, ranging from console titles like Carnival Games: Mini Golf to smaller, flash-based games of varying...
Mini Review Raining Blobs - Can't Compete With The Best The Genre Has To Offer
Familiar territory
Anyone even remotely familiar with game franchises like Puyo Pop and Tetris will feel right at home with Raining Blobs. It’s a puzzle game in which you need to match up coloured globules that fall down the screen in order to wipe them from the board, scoring combos and points in the process. That’s more or less all there is to...
Review Yaga - An Average Action Adventure Saved By Its Engaging Sense Of Humour
Ivan the (Not So) Terrible
Yaga is an action RPG steeped in Slavic folklore that tells the story of Ivan, an unlucky one-armed blacksmith who becomes accidentally embroiled in a supernatural beef and ends up on the adventure of his lifetime. You see the Baba Yaga, that mysterious old woman who dwells deep in the forest in a house built on chicken...
Review Narcos: Rise Of The Cartels - An XCOM-Style Outing That Doesn't Live Up To The Show
Plata o plomo?
Remember when licensed games used to be all the rage? A generation ago, practically every film worth its salt had a tie-in video game, and while there were the occasional good ones – GoldenEye 007 anyone? – for the most part, they were a cheap and forgettable way to boost your Gamerscore while simultaneously filling up the shelves...
Review Disney Tsum Tusm Festival - A Colourful Party Game That Isn't As Fun As It Looks
Less 'Heigh Ho', more 'hey ho'
Like the toys themselves, Disney Tsum Tsum Festival is a mutated mess that is both adorable and yet utterly bewildering. On the face of it, this is a collection of mini-games populated by stylised versions of your favourite Disney characters, yet it doesn’t quite live up to that promise. This is in part down to its...
Review Romancing SaGa 3 - A JRPG Classic That's Often Quite Hard To Love
"You and me could write a bad romance"
It would take years to fully play through the entirety of Square Enix’s seemingly bottomless back catalogue of RPGs, and though the company is best known for genre stalwarts such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, there’s also a staggering number of ‘other’ offerings that – for some reason or another...
Review Animus: Harbinger - A Budget Dark Souls Clone Which Needed More Polish
Diet Souls
Animus: Harbinger attempts to take the well-worn Dark Souls style of slow, methodical combat and create a boss-rush game that sees you battle your way through a total of twenty-one small arena levels, defeating a handful of run-of-the-mill enemies before taking on an area boss in order to gain new weapons, grab upgrade shards and money to...
Review Thief of Thieves: Season One - More Of A Snore Than A Score
Like Inspector Clouseau, but without the comedy
It's not hard to see what Rival Games was thinking with Thief of Thieves. Take a long-running comic series by Robert Kirkman, co-creator of The Waking Dead, give it the Telltale Games treatment with fancy cel-shaded comic book stylings, add some Hitman-lite sneaking about in trendy European locations...
Review Bee Simulator - An Interesting Idea That Never Really Takes Flight
To Bee or not to Bee? That is the question
For many years, simulator games were previously the preserve of uber-serious players, keen to try out loving recreations of pastimes that could charitably be called dull. If a game had ‘Simulator’ in the title, it was a clear sign that it’d be an admirably straight-faced experience, with a focus on...
Review Headsnatchers - Multiplayer Mayhem Mangled By Manky Controls
Don’t lose your head
Headsnatchers is a surprisingly unique party game in which you need to, er… snatch the heads off your opponent’s bodies in order to score points. This may be by kicking the head into a football (soccer to those on the other side of the pond) goal, slam-dunking the head into a basketball hoop, or climbing to the top of a...
Review Stay Cool, Kobayashi-san!: A River City Ransom Story - A Neat Bonus, But That's About It
Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kobayashi Side Story
Unless you are a hardcore Kunio fanatic, there's a good chance that "Kobayashi who?" might be the first thing that goes through your head as you read this, so it's best we start off this review with a small introduction. Kobayashi Masao is both leader and strongest member of Reihō Academy’s Shitennō –...
Review Raging Loop - A Gorgeous Visual Novel Cursed With Pacing Problems
Kill or be killed
If you’ve ever had a friend excitedly praise whatever TV series they’re currently watching only to have them, almost apologetically, say “it starts off really slow but gets really good about 12 episodes/chapters in” then you’ll have a really good idea of what it’s like to play Raging Loop. Initially, Raging Loop’s...
Review Hello Kitty Kruisers - If Your Age Is In The Double Digits, This Is Best Avoided
So easy an actual cat could play it
It’s odd what passes for rare these days. Take Hello KItty Kruisers, for example; released physically on the Wii U in limited numbers, it can be bought on the Wii U eShop for a mere ten bucks and yet the boxed version regularly sells to collectors for upwards of $60 online. Thankfully, the game has now...
Review WRC 8 FIA World Rally Championship - A Decent Racer That Struggles In Switch's Portable Mode
Hits the skids
After the disappointment that was V-Rally 4 on Switch – the only other 'pure' rally game currently available on Nintendo's console which arrived in something of a shambolic state – can developer Kylotonn return to the platform and finally give fans of the genre something to smile about with the latest entry in its WRC series of...
Review Root Letter: Last Answer - A Clumsy, Laughable Stab At A Visual Novel
The Last Answer to a question no one asked
Do you have a niggling doubt about something you experienced as a child? Something unresolved or unexplained? Perhaps we all have a faint memory that haunts us; a gentle denial that we think we’ll never have to face up to. Have you a tingle in your spine? A skeleton in your closet, a secret sin you’ve...
Review Garfield Kart Furious Racing - A Rancid, Regurgitated Hairball Of A Racer
This kitten's got flaws
“Garfield, the famous lasagna-loving cat, is back!” That’s according to the description for Garfield Kart Furious Racing on the Nintendo eShop. The reality, however, is quite another matter entirely. Despite a description (and a price tag) that would suggest this is a sequel to the infamous Garfield Kart, we’ve got...
Review Corpse Party: Blood Drive - Well-Written Horror That Suffers From A Personality Crisis
Bloodcurdlingly inconsistent
If you thought the '90s action flick Face/Off had an identity crisis, wait until you meet Corpse Party: Blood Drive. Part visual novel, part survival horror, Blood Drive is the third game in the Corpse Party series and features the surviving cast of the prior two games. While the original Corpse Party – originally...
Review Mistover - A Dungeon-Crawling RPG That's Over-Encumbered With Punitive Mechanics
Mist Opportunity
Take the most casual of glances at a couple of screenshots or some gameplay footage of Krafton’s Mistover and it’s not hard to see where it gets the vast majority of its inspiration. Following very closely in the footsteps of 2016’s sublime Darkest Dungeon, this is a dungeon-crawling RPG that has all the most important pieces...
Review Race With Ryan - A Thoroughly Average Racer Tied To The Most Annoying Licence Imaginable
Team Cynic Racing
It might be difficult to believe, but Race With Ryan is one of the most difficult reviews we’ve written in a while. When you’re covering a game based on a licence it’s always important to make sure your opinion of the licence itself doesn’t get in the way of the review. After all, nobody wants to read a review of an NBA...
Review Dusk Diver - Enjoyable Combat Can't Fully Atone For The Problems Elsewhere
Interdimensional Express
JFI Games’ Dusk Diver is a Musou-style hack-and-slash affair that tells the story of Yuma, an innocent high school student thrown into the middle of an interdimensional battle between the ancient animal Gods of Kunlun. Taking place between an impressively detailed recreation of the Ximending district of Taipei and its...
Review Arcade Archives VS. Castlevania - Fixes Some Sins, But The Original Remains Superior
Fangs, but no fangs
The original NES Castlevania has seen its fair share of re-releases over the years, but the same can’t be said for its alternative arcade version. VS. Castlevania was originally released for the Nintendo VS. System of arcade hardware, which for the most part offered tweaked versions of NES games designed to focus more on...
Review Beast Quest - Don't Be A Hero, Stick With The Books
Positively beastly
If you’re of a certain age, the Beast Quest books were likely a staple of your childhood. Having first launched in 2007 with Ferno the Fire Dragon, the series has been going strong for twelve years and shows no signs of slowing down. Including the first four books scheduled for publication next year, there are currently an...
Not exactly a whole new world
Movie tie-in games can be notoriously hit-or-miss in their quality. Often, the games seem to be something of an afterthought or simply advertisement fodder for the film they're based on, but every now and then, tie-ins can surprise with how well they stand on their own. Back in the day, the video game adaptations of...
Review Close To The Sun - A Poor Imitation Of BioShock That Looks Worse On Switch
Getting a bit too warm there, Icarus
It’s perhaps almost parody at this point for eager Switch fans to tweet their longing desire for a game to be released on the system. "Is it coming to Switch?" remains a near-constant reminder to the social media marketing teams that there’s an entire console fanbase that wants their shiny new game replicated...