Latest Reviews
Mini Review Super Soccer Blast: America VS Europe - Simple But Sloppy Soccer
Boot it
The heavily delayed Euro 2020 tournament is just around the corner, and football fever is once again permeating the homes of countries worldwide. The Switch has several decent football games, but with EA launching frankly embarrassing yearly 'legacy' updates to its FIFA series on Switch, there are certainly gaps in the field for a midfield...
Review Mundaun - A Rich, Sepia-Toned First-Person Horror Show
There's evil resident in this village
Take our advice: if you ever receive a suspiciously detail-light missive informing you that a loved one has passed away and urging you not to return to your home village, trust us on this one – just let it lie as advised. Let them lie, we suppose, because no good has ever come from going to a village, as...
Review Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection - Ryu Hayabusa Deserves Better Than This
Ninja Gaiden Whack
Whether you prefer Ninja Gaiden Sigma over Ninja Gaiden Black, or 'vanilla' part two over its enhanced edition, or don’t really care either way and just wanna get on with slicing and dicing everything in your path, the prospect of enjoying Team Ninja’s legendary action series on Switch is a pretty tantalising one. Here is a...
Review Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Storm Ground - Ruined By Roguelike Repetition
Flawhammer
Games Workshop – where nobody has a nice time. Okay, let us clarify; it’s entirely possible to have a nice time playing their games or painting their models or – heck – even chatting to their legendarily helpful and inclusive staff. But pick a world, pick a game and we’d be hard-pressed to say that any character is having a...
Mini Review Mighty Goose - Have A Gander At This Stylish Run 'N' Gunner
Come with us now, on a journey through time and space
Geese are really going from strength to strength, aren’t they? After conquering the indie scene in House House's Untitled Goose Game, the species is now taking to the sky with Mighty Goose, a side-scrolling shooter that offers a flavour of games like Metal Slug and Mercenary Kings. With minimal...
Mini Review Astalon: Tears of the Earth - Likeable, High Fantasy Metroidvania Action
The Three Musketeers
Astalon: Tears of the Earth is yet another retro-inspired action platformer on Switch eShop, with a sprinkling of light RPG elements. It tells the tale of an unspecified planet that falls into chaos after an endless battle between its many kingdoms. After decades of surviving in the wasteland, a band of three heroes journey into...
Review Fighting EX Layer: Another Dash - A Solid Street Fighter EX Spin-Off For Connoisseurs
Layer scrape
Back in the mid-1990s, when Capcom was feeling pressure from 3D fighters like Tekken and Virtua Fighter, they published their own 3D version of Street Fighter called Street Fighter EX. It was actually outsourced to a company called Arika, founded by ex-Capcom employee Akira Nishitani, who had previously worked as a designer on Street...
Review Super Bomberman R Online - A Battle Royale Blast Defused By Long Waits And F2P Frippery
Bombs Away! ...Eventually
With an influx of incredible modern takes on classic titles such as Tetris 99, Pac-Man 99, and the short-lived Super Mario Bros. 35, Super Bomberman R Online feels like the video game equivalent of a kid picked last for the sports team; an altogether scrappier, less elegant battle royale title than its peers, but one that...
Review Sludge Life - A Crude, Delightfully Disposable First-Person Graffiti-'Em-Up
Basic sludgeanomics
Thug life. Slug life. Thudge life. Sludge Life. It’s a pretty simple A-to-B transition when you really look at it. Okay, it’s not. At all. But you try and open a review for a game like this... and what is there to say? Sludge Life is a game where you do stuff. Exist at your own pace. In this game, you — as Marge Simpson...
Review Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance - A Punishing But Pleasurable Vintage Dungeon Crawler
Baldur? Well, it has been twenty years...
It's been twenty long, long years since this Gamecube classic thrilled us all with its quasi top-down hack-and-slash dungeon crawling action. And time has not been kind... to us. This game is really hard! Have we been spoiled by much friendlier, less aggressive takes on the genre that have proliferated in...
Review Pathway - Competent XCOM-Style Combat, But Is That Enough?
It belongs in a museum
Every now and then, you play one of those games that just feels a little bit too late. It’s not that a game in this category is bad or doesn’t have good ideas, but sometimes it’s just a victim of the current gaming landscape. How many Metroidvanias have you played by now? What about roguelites or 2D
Review King of Seas - Naval Combat Gets Grindy After A Promising Start
Yo, ho! (a grinder's life for me)
3DClouds, the studio behind racers such as All-Star Fruit Racing, Xenon Racer, and Race With Ryan have taken time away from the circuit and are back with a procedurally generated pirate adventure that charges players with becoming the one true King of the Seas. There's a touch of Sid Meier's Pirates here, a dash of...
Review Knockout City - Dodge This Superb Squad-Based Arcade Action At Your Peril
Dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge
As seasoned dodgeball professionals over here at Nintendo Life, we're well aware that the most important aspect in creating a successful video game based on this king of sports is nailing the sound that a ball makes as it smashes powerfully into the face and/or body of your opponent. It really needs to get that...
Review Rise of the Slime - Slay The Spire Lite, With Tiddly Text
It's time to slime
Forget the Age of Aquarius (what do you mean, you already did?) — this is the age of the roguelike deckbuilder. If you're into cards, procedural generation, dungeon crawling and turn-based combat, then buddy, you've come to the right review, because Rise of the Slime is all of those things. Yes, if you've enjoyed the likes of...
Review Layers Of Fear 2 - A Decent Premise, But A Disappointing Sequel
Layers of Persevere
Polish developer Bloober Team has produced something of a mixed bag thus far when it comes to their horror/psychological thriller game output, with the likes of Observer and the first Layers of Fear definitely feeling like their most successful efforts to date. However, for every riveting, Rutger Hauer-flavoured cyberpunk horror...
Review Aerial_Knight's Never Yield - A Super Stylish Yet Straightforward Runner
Super style over substance
If there's one thing that Aerial_Knight's Never Yield has got totally nailed down, it's a seriously funky sense of style. This is a super cool side-scrolling runner from Neil "Aerial_Knight" Jones that really does look and sound the absolute business. However, it's also one that's somewhat lacking in the gameplay...
Review Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition - Princely Patience Is Required
Waiting for Space-Godot
Another day, another Animal Crossing-meets-Harvest Moon-with-a-twist game. Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition is a farming, fighting, fishing and foraging game set in space, with a tiny, spherical planet upon which to do all of those activities: New Leaf by way of Le Petit Prince, if you will. And you are, in fact, a petit...
Review Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind - This Is The Spooky One
A game about murder, and proper queueing technique
We've already covered a lot about the history and provenance of the Famicom Detective Club remakes in our review for The Missing Heir — the first game in the duology, released solely in Japan in 1988 — so you might want to read that review as well if you want the full picture, or you're...
Review Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir - A Delightful And Silly Mystery
Ace Attorney's grandfather returns triumphant
Famicom Detective Club is brilliant. Famicom Detective Club is also incredibly stupid, sometimes. But it's still brilliant. It's both, at the same time, like a child who's just argued that, if glue is non-toxic, then there's really nothing wrong with them eating a whole cup of it. Sure, sticky child!...
Mini Review Subnautica: Below Zero - A Rather Cool Sequel
Deep Blue Sequel
In Subnautica: Below Zero, the sequel to Unknown World's superlative Subnautica, you're once again back on planet 4546B, crash-landing rather spectacularly on the frozen far side of the alien world this time around where you're immediately thrown into a mystery surrounding the fate of your missing sister, Sam. It may have a slightly...
Mini Review Subnautica - A Wondrous Trip Under The Sea
The Life Aquatic
Subnautica really is one of the great indie early access success stories, a game honed to near perfection during a long gestation period on PC, with lots of input from avid fans helping to shape the core experience as it exists today. As a result what we've got here is a confident and constantly thrilling marriage of addictive...
Review Before I Forget - A Poignant Portrayal Of Dementia
Full of colour and emotion
It's not often that a game with a high profile tackles a particularly difficult and emotive illness, though when they get it right they're rightly lauded for bringing these topics into the gaming medium. Before I Forget earned attention and headlines - with some notable award nominations - for its portrayal of dementia,...
Review SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off - A Bit Undercooked
We do this for forty years, and then we die
Though not always deserved, mobile games have long since obtained a reputation for being rather shallow and money-grubbing affairs. And though the mobile space actually accounts for the lion’s share of the profits raked in by the game industry year over year, this monetary growth is seen by many to come...
Review Skate City - Lacks Real Challenge, But Good For Board-Based Vibing
Lords of Dogtown?
If you've been hankering for a little 2D side-scrolling skateboard action but Roll7's OlliOlli series is just a bit too hardcore for your liking, Agens and Room 8's Skate City might just be right up your vert ramp. There's no precisely timed landing of tricks required here, no sweaty palms, complex combos or finger-twisting...
Review Castaway Paradise - "Like Animal Crossing" Indeed, Minus The Good Bits
Shell shockingly bad
If you told someone that you were a huge fan of gourmet homecooked meals, you'd be well within your rights to boot them off the nearest cliff if they came to your next party with a lasagne dish full of wet cat food. Likewise, if a game bills itself with the actual tagline "It's Like Animal Crossing!" and then attempts to meet...
Review The Longing - Tedious By Design, And Incredibly Successful At It
For a minute there, I lost myself
There’s a section of the acclaimed Windows adventure game The Neverhood entitled “The Hall of Records”. It’s essentially a (very) long gag – screen after screen of rooms, full to the brim with quite bizarre text. It takes what feels like hours to make it through with main character Klaymen’s agonisingly...
Review Shantae - A Dated Dance That Completes The Set On Switch
It doesn't cost hundreds to play it anymore!
Though Shantae has gone on to become an indie gaming icon, her origins were much dicier. The original Shantae was potentially planned as a SNES or PC release before it finally settled on the Game Boy Color. Production went well, but the game required an expensive cartridge which caused many publishers to...
Review Rain on Your Parade - A Refreshingly Brief But Saccharine Shower
Cloud strife
Rain On Your Parade wants very much to be the next Untitled Goose Game. It so desperately needs to be that quirky breakout hit, the virtual talk of the water cooler, the “have you seen that cloud game?” game, spawn of a trillion thinkpieces. To be fair, it’s a strong concept. You take control of a rain cloud and, er, rain on...
Review There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension - Don't Let The Title Fool You
Follow the white rabbit
What are you doing here? We assume you’ve clicked a link under the assumption that you’re going to find a review of a game, but as you can quite clearly see from the title, there is no game. So we’d like to apologise for wasting your time here, and we’ll catch you on the next one! Okay, we’re joking - obviously. We...
Review Battle Axe - A Battling Throwback That Doesn't Land All Its Hits
Lord have Mercia
Veteran pixel artist Henk Nieborg's old-school throwback, Battle Axe, seeks to replicate the classic top-down hack and slash action of arcade classics such as Gauntlet, Knights of the Round and Golden Axe. With Nieborg himself on graphical duties and legendary composer Manami Matsumae (Mega Man, Final Fight, Shovel Knight) providing...
