Digimon Survive is one of the best visual novels to come out so far this year, with plenty of heart and tension to carry you through to the final act. Fans looking for an engaging story with well-written and presented characters that deal with life-and-death situations will enjoy the ride, while players focused on the combat will probably find that the game comes up short. Despite its sluggish, padded start, Digimon Survive is well worth the long wait.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is the strangest thing you'll play from Nintendo, bringing with it laughs and creativity in abundance. But even with improvements over the 3DS game, it follows a familiar structure that isn't always enthralling or hilarious.Tomodachi fans will certainly be living the dream with this new entry, but I'm not desperate to keep coming back to my island. A little more variety would've been welcome, but the customisation, and the thought of my cat being best friends with DMC's Dante, will have me peep in every so often for a little pick-me-up.
Rise of the Slime has some accessibility issues, mostly because of its occasionally iffy controls and the ridiculously small text, but if you can look past those, then you'll find a pleasantly bitesized little roguelite deckbuilder. It's no Slay the Spire, but it doesn't need to be; it keeps to its small scope well enough.
SnowRunner is an interesting truck driving game where the environment is your opponent. As long as you can put up with its audio and visual issues and understand that it's an extremely slow-paced game, the rewards for sticking with it are worthwhile.
Layers of Fear 2 is a rather disappointing follow-up to 2016's interesting and effective psychological horror effort. There's a decent premise here, a strong setting and an opportunity to tell an interesting tale, but it feels wasted for the most part. Despite looking and sounding great, predicable scares, repetitive gameplay, disappointing puzzles and a story that just never makes a decent connection result in a game that's pretty hard to recommend overall.
Aerial_Knight's Never Yield is very obviously a passion project that's had a ton of love poured into its super stylish aesthetics and excellent soundtrack, however, it's also one that's rather sorely lacking in the gameplay department. Wally's runs through this futuristic take on Detroit needed more in the way of challenge and variety in order to keep things interesting - more obstacles, more twists and turns and opportunities to show off your skills as you improve and take on higher difficulties. As things stand, this is one slick looking and sounding game that just doesn't manage to provide an incentive to keep playing for very long.
When Unknown Worlds announced they were bringing this one to Switch we were hugely excited, this is one of our all-time favourite games after all, but it was excitement tempered with a degree of scepticism as to how on earth they'd manage to cram the entire experience onto Switch in a properly playable manner. As it turns out, we needn't have worried as this is a super solid port that - besides a few loading stutters here and there and some scenery pop-in that's present in every other version of the game - successfully delivers one of the very best survival experiences on any platform to Nintendo's hybrid console.
However, slight niggles aside, Below Zero absolutely delivers in providing more of the excellent deep sea survival antics that we know and love from the original Subnautica. This is a super solid port too, a joy to sink time into in both docked and portable modes, with only a little stuttering here and there as you enter new biomes - and the series' ever-present scenery pop-in - to mention in terms of technical shortcomings. Unknown Worlds has served up another superb slice of survival shenanigans here, one that we highly recommend diving right into.
Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition is a good-enough-for-now game to tide over Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon fans, but its insistence on drip-feeding you content on its own schedule misses the "self-sufficiency" angle that its predecessors nailed.
Subnautica and its excellent sequel have arrived on Switch in unexpectedly fine form. This is an absolutely essential survival smorgasbord, a fantastic port and something of a must-buy double feature for fans of the genre. If you're purchasing one or the other separately on Switch we'd still plump for the original game, as Below Zero's fleshed out narrative and on-foot sections dilute the overall experience ever so slightly, but, regardless of which you choose, you're in for a mighty good time here with two of the very best survival games currently available on any platform.
Yes, Raiden IV is not a typical shmup by contemporary standards, and won't be for everyone. Equally, all of these modes have been available in some form elsewhere. But as a single package, Raiden IV x Mikado Remix offers the Switch one of its best shooting game releases yet – and that is saying something on a console that has emerged as an unexpected star vehicle for the genre.
Before I Forget is a short, beautiful experience that nevertheless approaches a challenging and rather sombre subject. It takes creative bravery to share a game that represents the impact of dementia, and to do so sensitively and as accurately as possible; it achieves this goal. We not only suffer the disease with Sunita, but engage with the successes and joys of her life. Before I Forget finds a careful balance that is to be commended.
Though its gameplay can be entertaining enough in short bursts and its art looks nice, SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off proves to be a disappointing take on the beloved IP. Shallow gameplay, performance issues, and weird controls make for an experience that's simply 'ok' at best. Considering that you can also access a version of this game on your phone for free, we can't fully recommend that you spring for this one. There are much worse things you could buy off the eShop, but SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off simply doesn't offer enough value for its asking price.
Skate City is a laid back, chilled out alternative to the more hectic skateboarding action of the likes of Roll7's OlliOlli series. The various tricks and skills here won't take you long to master, putting together little runs through Los Angeles, Oslo and Barcelona feels satisfying and the overall aesthetic suits the rather simple, straightforward nature of proceedings. However, there's an undeniable lack of actual challenge and variety here, alongside a few niggling framerate issues on Switch, that result in a game that's reasonable enough value for a quick bash, especially given its budget price point, but one that won't last anyone beyond the most avid of skateboarding fans for much longer than a couple of hours.
Castaway Paradise is hardly the first game to take inspiration from Animal Crossing, and it certainly won't be the last - but its unoriginal adherence to the Animal Crossing formula is bad enough, without the added veneer of in-app purchases, hastily reskinned and demonetised for a full-price release. It began life as a Facebook game back in 2014, and it still feels like one seven years later.
R-Type Final 2 makes an authentic if flawed contribution to an iconic shooting game series. Many of the problems seem technical, so hopefully an update could do plenty - especially if it lets you lock that camera pitch. All we can hope for, then, is that we are still in the beginning of R-Type's final phase, and that what Final 2 gets right is allowed to rise to the top.
We can't lie - we hated The Longing. We hated every second of playing it for review. Is it a resounding success at presenting all of its themes? Is it thought-provoking in a way that few games manage? Is it an exhausting slog we wouldn't wish on our worst enemies? The answer to all these questions is yes. But, with all that said, you cannot help but respect the developer's audacity and unwavering commitment to their principles. What the game sets out to do it accomplishes with flying colours, and it's filled with clever ideas and meditations.Ultimately, The Longing is one of those video games that defies traditional scoring metrics. What kind of score would you give a game that succeeds so triumphantly at being utterly, utterly tedious? A one? A ten? It feels inadequate and somewhat trite to split the difference, but here we are.
