As the PR reads "the official version of one of the best board games!" I think that's a bit of a bold claim. It's certainly an official version, but it's not one of the best games that I've played this week, let alone of all time. I honestly don't see the appeal in Rails to Riches. It's a competent enough game, but it's far too standard for Eurogames to be mechanically interesting, and the videogame adaptation is presented blandly. In addition, the Switch port suffers from a cheap and unintuitive interface, brought over with too little thought from the PC original. If you really love your board games, then this is perfectly fine, but it's less "one of the best board games" as it is "just another one of a huge library of options that you may, occasionally, be in the mood for."

As a rhythm game fan, I have to say that Inside My Radio left me disappointed. It might have been an amazing experience had I been unable to follow a simple beat upon starting up the game, but years of experience in the genre made the experience entirely trivial.

It's a competent chain reaction game backed by lacklustre design and writing. The excessive violence might turn off some and the lack of challenge will turn off others, but for people looking nothing more than cheap fun can do worse than OMG Zombies!.

Timber Tennis Versus has a nice pixel aesthetic, and for $Aus3, it's hard to fault the developers for the effort that has gone into making the package as comprehensive as possible. It's a substantial step up from Timberman Vs, too, because, shallow as it is, there is at least more to do than mash a single button. It's by no means an essential game, but it's passable for (very) short bursts of play.

Impact Winter is a beautiful and thoughtful game, and at least initially, it ticks all the boxes in terms of emotional delivery, narrative execution, and sheer atmospheric mastery. However, the mechanical flaws are an unfortunate counter to the ambition and care that has gone into the title.

People will be talking about the first two Doom games for decades more – those two games may well be remembered as true classics of the gaming medium a century down the track. This Doom won’t. This new Doom is terrible...Like the greedy organisation that unleashes hell on Mars, this is the product of exploitation; the developers at ID Software and Bethesda are playing with fire in treating a property as valuable as Doom this way.

There are animated cut scenes and visually appealing visuals, but the raw lack of innovation in a kind of game that is rapidly showing its age really does let it down.

Ultimately, Boot Hill Bounties just doesn't do much of anything. It does succeed in being a retro-themed JRPG set in the Wild West, but it's not a particularly interesting Wild West, the combat system is functional, rather than interesting, and it was really hard to maintain interest in anything that the game offers. Boot Hill Bounties doesn't do anything wrong... other than be so uninspired that it doesn't give anyone a reason to play it either.

At its core, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds relies on the unpredictability of players to help provide the variety, and that is not a bad way to go. Still, I would really like to see the technical issues smoothed out and more variety in the form of maps added to help make PUBG's a better overall experience.

This is the most disappointed that I’ve been with Square Enix for quite some time.

I found this to be a visually interesting, dynamic game, but not an especially engaging one.

As the latest burger off the production line, Gotham Knights is fine. It ticks all the boxes, name-drops all the right characters, has the right voice actors, and is a big, expensive project that looks and plays like it should. At the end of the day, though, you’re still eating a greasy burger with no nutritional value whatsoever. While it’s fine to say “yeah but sometimes that’s fun,” there is a point where we need to acknowledge that this is all some people eat. That’s not healthy and I, for one, am sick of superhero nonsense being such a vacuum of talent producing such mindless output, when the games industry (and Hollywood) could be doing so much more.

Talisman is a classic board game, and deserves respect for that. It’s also eminently playable to this day, and very easy to pick up and play, and as such it’s a genuinely good game for lazy Sundays with friends. But the Nintendo Switch port of the game suffers from the console's limitations, and the utter reliance on luck can make this game a very frustrating experience over the longer term (and, as a quick side note at the end - games of Talisman can be long - be sure to have a pot of coffee ready as you sit down to play this one).

Anything but inspiring.

World Soccer Pinball is still not great pinball, because it offers such a pedestrian, basic, near-childish design, but it's playable and passable.

If there was forward momentum on the subsequent chapters, or some kind of guarantee that the story will actually be completed, then Corpse Party 2 would be essential. I love this series for its sublime use of horror language and the pictures it paints with words rather than relying on (just) the visual grotesque. But this "latest" entry into the franchise only gets to be great if it's actually finished.

It’s got all the hallmarks of a successful JRPG, but dressing it up in beautiful hand-drawn maps and a stunning soundtrack hasn’t gone far enough in helping to conceal its flaws. It’s a shame, because the bones of a great game are there. They’re just too bogged down in a shaky delivery to be enjoyed in the manner that they deserve.

There are some good ideas to be found in Bookbound Brigade, and when everything clicks into place, it can be a lot of fun. But between the unreliable map, the tedious combat, the tired sense of humour, and the missed opportunity to do anything noteworthy with the "literary mash-up premise", Bookbound Brigade's good ideas are overshadowed by poor execution.

As good as it looks, though, The Callisto Protocol is bad horror that has nothing meaningful to say and struggles to have a single original moment within it. I know that there are people out there saying that the game was “rushed out” to meet a deadline of “releasing before the Dead Space remake”… and perhaps it was! That might explain the performance issues on other platforms. However, that’s not really the problem with it. What lets this game down is that the core theme is broken to its foundations, and even if it ran perfectly at all times, in a best-case scenario, all polish would have ever done is ensure that it was entertaining enough to play. It was never going to be a horror experience that anyone remembers, even five years from now.

But in the end, it becomes hard to recommend The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to anyone but the most devout of webhead fans, because it's a game that squanders all that potential.

Empathy wants to be a narrative-first game, that much is clear. But the constant distractions, menial busywork, and tedious puzzles constantly distract from the pacing that’s so critical to a story like this, and the end result is something that doesn’t really work well as either a puzzle game or a narrative experience.

Fundamentally, though, MLB the Show 23 is a good game. MLB the Show 22 was a good game. Adding the Negro Leagues mode was noble from Sony (and no doubt the kind of goodwill-generating progressive addition that will keep the licensor happy with how Sony is treating the IP). However, the misstep with the World Baseball League and a complete unwillingness to build on any mode but the awful Diamond Dynasty also make this year’s The Show unacceptable. If you missed last year’s iteration, then you can add a couple of stars to this score, because for you, it won’t be one of the most cynical annual iterations that we’ve seen in sports games for quite some time. For the rest of us, though. No. Not good enough.

So, what's left? What reason is there to purchase Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Remastered Edition? That's really the problem here. There isn't one. This isn't Trials of Mana with its breathtaking scope, characters, and narrative reborn for a new generation. This isn't even a port of a beloved classic like Star Ocean or Romancing SaGa, because unlike those faithful ports, Crystal Chronicles Remastered doesn't preserve the reason people loved the original. There's something of a hit of nostalgia in playing through the single-player game... but it's the nostalgia of how much you loved playing that original game, with friends, and the realisation that you can't do it as well as you'd like to, in classic local multiplayer action, bites.

It's a lot of fun, and something I'll come back frequently for short bursts. The biggest problem Warband Skirmish has is that it's a free to play game that the developers have attempted to force a "premium" monetisation model onto.

The theme could have been better explored and the rough edges on the control detract from the inherent fun of the puzzles. More than anything else, however, is that Attractio doesn't do anything to progress its genre.

The game itself is a noble effort, sure, but ultimately far too ambitious to achieve what it’s really looking to achieve. The end result is the death knell for horror games; it’s just not intense or frightening enough.

A game that heavily borrows genre trappings of other, more successful games, in order to push the Doctor Who narrative in a way that won’t be palatable to anyone except the most core of fans. It’s impressive how much effort went into developing this game, judging from the graphics assets, extensive writing, and voice acting, but it’s all in service of familiar and tedious game mechanics and a divisive story. It doesn’t reach the lofty heights of “Blink”, and like the Weeping Angels themselves, it’s an artifice best left ignored.

It makes a good transition from PC to console, but Rebel Galaxy was far too vapid and uninspired to be a really stand out game in the first place. While that means it's not terrible, it's also a complete waste of what the far reaches of outer space offers for creative narrative, and this is deeply disappointing.

Ultimately The Sun and Moon just isn’t unique enough that it justifies sitting through the poor presentation. Puzzle games are dime a dozen on every platform out there.

Even more than Monopoly, The Game of Life is a board game from a bygone era. Once upon a time, the nice, meandering journey through suburban life and expectations thereof that the game depicted was considered a representation of a happy, wholesome life experience, but in 2021 lionising that seems incredibly passe. Sticking a "2" next to the title while not doing much to address this dissonance doesn't paper over the fact that very few people actually want to play The Game of Life these days.

The split between aesthetic pleasure and unforgiving gameplay will be what drives the spear between whether this game is a worthwhile buy or not. There are a few things which the developers get absolutely right, and as a product of a small-team it’s fun to simply celebrate the sheer joy with which Lichtspeer was made. There’s value in the art, the style, the writing and the magic when it all comes together. As much as I enjoyed all that, however, I can’t say that this is a game which plays well.

Photo Finder is easily the weakest entry in the Chibi-Robo series and lacks the same vision and atmosphere of its forerunners, but it still has the love Skip always pours into its quirky adventures.

Ethan: Meteor Hunter is an interesting little game and a decent platformer with interesting concepts, however sometimes the unrefined controls can get in the way of being truly enjoyable.

Most tellingly, though, the frustration of trying to find a green cursor highlight amongst dozens of balls of the same colour is quite possibly the most insane thing to overlook that I've ever seen done in a puzzle game.

There have been a lot of retro games over the last few years, but I have found the ones that tend to be the most successful are the ones that blend in some sort of modern convention. In this case, the resource system that allows for ship improvement is easily the best part of what is otherwise a solid if unspectacular shooting game. If you enjoy a good retro shooter, Zotrix should be pretty appealing.

It does seem as though Arc System Works were relying entirely on the nostalgia to sell Double Dragon IV. And while it captures the essence of those original games it falls short of being a good game today simply because the original hasn’t aged well. It would have been pretty rockin' back in the 80s though.

Theatre of Sorrows isn't worth your time. It's dressed up nicely with some good art and the occasional sinister moment to dwell on, but underneath that is little more than a basic resource management experience, with such egregious repetition through its "roguelike" elements that it becomes rote well before you've even finished the game for the first time. As a carefully-planned, linear and focused experience, Theatre of Sorrows could have been something creepy and evocative. Instead, it's like reading the same snippets of Lovecraft over and over again. Do that, and it doesn't take long at all for them to lose all meaning and value.

Yes, it's had far more effort that's been put into its presentation than any other example of the genre I can think of, however by its very nature this is a very limited genre, and Infinity Runner just doesn't do enough to prove its merits beyond an iPhone time waster.

Far too shallow to stand up to the crop of other tactics JRPGs released this year, in what has been a really good year for the genre.

Actraiser Renaissance, however, is a remake that should have simply stuck to the basics that made Actraiser great. Instead, what you get are moments of greatness broken up by far too many moments of mediocrity.

Looney Tunes Galactic Sports isn't bad. It does what it set out to achieve. The problem is that it lacks any ambition to do anything more than a cash-in, and this game really isn't going to be remembered as the finest project Sony backed on its PlayStation Vita platform.

Cocoro is a difficult line defence title that might turn a lot of people away from it because the sheer difficulty doesn't gel with the art style.

Sadly, apart from being really, really ridiculously good-looking, Fashion Dreamer just hasn’t got much going for it. With no real reward mechanism to encourage you to think about fashion, and nothing stopping you from building up an extensive wardrobe of clothes simply by jumping online for a couple of minutes here and there, there’s so small of an incentive to actually play. Especially once you’ve found an outfit for your character that’s so cute that you don’t feel the need to mess around with it any further.

Stikbold lacks any kind of narrative or gameplay substance to be a compelling single player game. Sadly, it’s all too simple to be an effective multiplayer title, either. It’s passingly fun.

I wouldn't spend money on it because it's a shallow grind hiding under some very pretty character design. In other words, it's great, but only at a cost of nothing.

Monopoly on the Switch works, much as it did on PlayStation 4. There are some nice little elements, like themed boards, which don’t change the gameplay in any way, but are fun to see. All the popular Monopoly house rules are in there too, so however you like to play the game you’re covered. Loading times are a bit long, and the AI takes its sweet time to take each turn, but otherwise it’s a very clean, visually appealing take on the board game.

I do think the Castlevania retro collection that Konami has coming soon will do a better job. Focused as it is on a single, more mainstream franchise should help elevate it in the same way the Street Fighter collection was elevated by the sheer quality and consistency of the brand. Haunted Castle would have been more fitting in that collection, though. Konami really does make some odd choices at times.

Of course there are a lot of top down shooters on the Switch now. Some, such as Jydge or Mr Shifty, actually do some interesting things with the structure. Crimsonland is the polar opposite. It’s the safest, most generic example of the dual stick shooter in years. There’s no denying there’s a visceral thrill in the action that it offers, but let’s just say it’s just as well the game’s priced to be a cheap bit of throwaway fun.

I like my retro gaming to be bathed more in rosy nostalgia and details about what made a game great or a company significant, not drenched in cynicism. Super Technos World: River City & Technos Arcade Classics isn’t awful by any stretch, but it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that it is something of a cynical cash grab first and foremost. Do better, Arc System Works!

Do this game again, but shift the focus so that everyone can enjoy it without relying on others being online, and then we'll talk.

Lovecraft fans will get a kick out of the references to the horror maestro's body of work that are scattered throughout the mansion as well. From Deep One through Necronomicon it's all there. As primitive as the game is by modern standards, Alone in the Dark is a true classic, and for a dollar or so on the iOS it's well worth playing, either for nostalgia value or to experience the very formation of the horror genre.

I’ll never get sick of NewZealand Story. Most of the other titles are interesting as a curio, too. The quality of the ports for all of these titles great thanks to Hamster’s technology. However, as a package, this is a woeful excuse for a compilation, and that’s particularly surprising given that it came from the same publisher that gave us the Space Invaders Invincible Collection. That was one of the very best retro collections on the Switch. One I play almost weekly to date. “Disappointing” that Taito Milestones 2 lacks the same effort doesn’t begin to describe what I feel it.

It is disappointing to see a game like Metrico take so many wrong turns and squander so much promise. It becomes yet another example of a game burdened by creep, one that started with a simple premise that becomes buried by complexity.

On the Game Cube app, there is Mario Strikers. That is an excellent example of a time where Nintendo and its party sports developers had a handle over the balance between capturing the basics of the sport and making it arcade fun. Now, though, they’ve lost the plot entirely. I genuinely don’t understand who this is for, but it isn’t me. Or anyone that I know who loved what Mario Tennis once was.

The misfortune here for Nintendo EAD is that party games need to be accessible and appealing to a mass audience, but 1-2-Switch settles for a very specific demographic and all but alienates the rest. For that reason, it’s not a purchase I would recommend; it would have been better as a "free" pack in so that people would get the chance to try it for themselves before deciding on whether it had any long-term longevity for them.

If for no other reason, NinNinDays is worth a spin because the asking price is cheap, and the art is just that good. As pervy pin-up goes, there just aren't crotch shots and taut midriffs of the same quality on the Switch as what Sumire's story offers. However, outside of the art, a limp localisation of what is only a standard and uninspiring narrative are big red flags that would hang over any visual novel, and NinNinDays doesn't get a free pass for those issues just because its fan service is particularly appealing.

Yu-Gi-Oh! has come a long way in the years since these titles, both as a card game to play (many might argue that it’s too complex now) and as something to adapt to video games. This collection is a lot of nostalgic fun to remember the simpler times, but is also important to understand just how limited these games are. It would be like if EA put together a retro compilation of its FIFA football games. Sure, you’d have a rush of nostalgic delight loading up the GBA game that you spent months playing back in the day, but it would only take one or two matches to realise that nostalgia has a habit of warping memories and not all classic video games are timeless. Some are. Konami’s Castlevania collections show that. I fully expect the impending Suikoden collection to be a similar story. These, however, are not.

Plasma Puncher is a gorgeous, difficult and sometimes frustrating game. The excellent production values are overshadowed by some minor technical inconsistencies, but while I could spend all day complaining about the small stuff, the real weakness is a lack of gameplay depth.

It looks fine and plays flawlessly, but there is one issue that I find with the game. It’s on the Wii U. There is a 3DS version as well, so it may have been a case of the developer finding it easy to port to the system, and there very may well be the audience for word search games on Nintendo systems. But I can't see why people would sit in front of a TV to play a word search game.

I wanted to be more engaged in Samurai Defender. It takes place in one of my favourite periods of history, and we've got plenty of reference examples of games handling this era well - everything from Nioh and Samurai Warriors to Muramasa, Onimusha, Nobunaga's Ambition and Tenchu. All of those games or franchises offer enjoyable gameplay, but just as importantly, a sense of history and place to give the gameplay context. Samurai Defender looks like it should be more than it is, but never gets there, and feels overwhelmingly shallow as a consequence.

Calling All Units doesn’t set out to do anything new, it’s pretty much an online only version of Need for Speed: Pursuit. The new mechanics of chasing down others online with a group of others is indeed fun, and for the most part the online does work. The story does nothing exciting whatsoever, but it does teach the new mechanics and how they work.

The lack of creative innovation from one Kairosoft title to another becomes exhausting if you play more than a few of them, and Magazine Mogul is an incredibly shallow experience. It's a pick-up-and-play delight, and it has an appealing theme, but where Game Dev Story is so well regarded because it established Kairosoft, Magazine Mogul is really starting to wear out the welcome. It's frustrating because all Kairosoft would need to do is throw caution to the wind and make just one serious simulation game with this set of production values and the company would completely reinvent itself for the better, I feel. The focus on unrelentingly casual experiences is nothing more than a game of rapidly diminishing returns for the company, and I just can't see even the most hardened Kairosoft fan caring about these new releases any longer.

Obliteracers introduces some interesting ideas, but between dead lobbies and limited local options, its multiplayer core falls a bit flat on PS4. With nothing else to pick up this slack, it ends up being a game that quickly loses steam.

The thing is, there's an enjoyable little game here. Strip the gimmicks, and you have a fun little paid title that could be beaten from start to finish in a few short hours. But instead, repetition drags down the lasting fun-factor and the comical satirical narrative of the game ends up self-refuting itself.

With time and patches, this could be a must play, but as it is I can only cautiously recommend RymdResa as a game with fascinating ideas and inconsistent execution.

It is worth noting that I gave Hidden Around the World’s predecessor, Hidden in my Paradise, a great score. But for some reason, Hidden Around the World resonates less with me. It’s cute. It’s fun while it lasts. But with the frustrating bugs and very little narrative, it is also easily forgettable. One major problem I’d like to forget is that the game didn’t improve on Hidden in my Paradise: the same issues persist, which were easier to overlook the first time around. When there are already problems, don’t just copy and paste them into another game. It’s just the same, and that doesn’t cut it for me.

This really is as no-frills as games come, and is priced to match.

Ultimately, it’s a little difficult to really understand what the developer was aiming for here. It seems more like it was a project from someone who was simply inspired by the entertainment value of stuff like Octodad than a game that is really looking to break out with its own identity. The potential’s there, but it’s all a little to raw for its own good.

Putty Squad is not a bad game, and with the relative lack of titles currently released on the PlayStation 4 it does fill something of a void. Still, platforming enthusiasts with PlayStation 4s do have access to Rayman Legends, rendering it rather pointless to grab Putty Squad unless you're an absolute genre purist.

There's also something to be said about the presentation. Combat plays out through an appealing Dragon Quest-like perspective. Environments are simple, but interesting. The music is often quite enjoyable. Justice Chronicles isn't by any means a classic game, but by Kemco's workmanlike approach to the genre, it's one of the more playable ones.

Horizon Chase Turbo does a good job of creating a sense of speed, and emulating the look and feel of Out Run. Where it falls down is in replacing the timer mechanics of Out Run, which made for a frustrating but ultimately exciting and tense arcade game, with a more typical racing track structure. It plays fine, but with none of the intensity, nor sense of reward, of the game it pulls almost all of its inspiration from.

But I can't get over the fact that this is meant to be a survival game that doesn't create a convincing argument for being a survival game. And because it compromises its vision, How To Survive is a fun game, but little more than that.

Perhaps the most appropriate way to describe the Toy Soldiers HD experience in 2023 is “quaint”. Essentially, you’re playing a defunct and superseded genre, blended with ancient action mechanics, more than 10 years old. There has been no meaningful effort to do much more than upscale the visuals. Therefore, what you’ve got here is something that has its charms, but is archaic on every level. Toy Soldiers was never good enough to be a “classic”, so you don’t even get to enjoy the retro nostalgia that comes from early-era PS3/Xbox 360 games now. It’s just dated.

I might not be much of a Sonic fan, but I know that if Square Enix had done the equivalent of this to that Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster collection, I would have blown my top. I did give the lazy effort to bring the mobile ports of Dragon Quest 1 – 3 to Switch a piece of my mind, and I don’t see that SEGA’s done any better with the Game Gear games here. The good news is that if you’ve already got Sonic Origins, then you’ve got all the bits of Sonic Origins Plus worth playing.

If you've got the patience for a game that does absolutely nothing to encourage you to play it, then Chivalry's combat is nuanced enough to keep you interested for a while. But on the PlayStation 3 this looks and behaves very much like a budget game released on the console in its dying throes.

The fast-paced combat does make for a good time, do not get me wrong, but unless you're the most hardcore of fighting and NARUTO fans, this is a safe one to pass on.

I will forget about having Ember on my Switch within a few months of having being done with it now, I suspect. If you do play it, you'll be looking at around 20 hours of highly derivative, classic RPG action. You won't be annoyed by Ember and, played in short bursts, you won't be bored of it either. It has that pick-up-and-play quality.

The game looks fine, though obviously paired right down over what you can eke out of your PlayStation 5 version of the game. Just what kind of graphical performance you get seems to depend on your device. On the Apple TV, for example, the crowds seem to have been turned off, which lends games an odd energy and atmosphere; the sounds are still there but the chairs are empty. I call it "COVID-19 match mode", though, so for now it's actually timely. Also, the crowds are there when playing on higher-end iPhones. Whatever the case the animation is smooth and the range of camera angles are great. This is a good game of basketball and strikes a good balance between depth and accessibility. I just wish that 2K didn't use this as a bare-bones demo for the full console experience and gave us that season mode.

Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics is cynical. It has taken a safe, familiar genre, done absolutely nothing but the most straightforward, safe application of it, and thrown the Dark Crystal license over the top, but it has in no way tried to do anything interesting with Dark Crystal.

Weeping Doll had a lot of potential, and it’s genuinely disappointing that it wasn’t able to follow through with it. This one you can’t chalk up as developer teething pains with VR; this game would be every bit as flawed, regardless of the platform it was on.

But it’s just not a great game and it doesn’t bring anything new or interesting to the genre. A character that we could get behind, some interesting level quirks, or some humour would have been enough. Instead, all Super Kiwi 64 trades on is the fact that it’s a nostalgic platformer for people that have fond memories of Banjo-Kazooie and are really that desperate for something new in that very specific genre to play. And people that don’t mind a vastly inferior experience just for that moment of nostalgic rush.

Levels+ is a completely forgettable game. It's got some gorgeous aesthetics, and functionally it's a refined, balanced, and perfectly competent Threes clone, but there is no longevity to the game whatsoever, and the lack of an online leaderboard for a game like this is downright amateur.

I’m 100 per cent certain the developers went into this with all the right intentions. They wanted to deliver a grisly and gratuitous homage to Sweeny Todd, and spin it into a casual business simulator for players. They’ve achieved that. I’m just not sure it was ever going to work as a concept. Things aren’t visceral when they’re rote and the Penny Dreadful heritage of the game doesn’t lend itself to particularly interesting themes over long periods of play. Finally, casual business simulators are light & fluffy for a good reason, while Ravenous Devils doesn’t do anywhere near enough to transgress and challenge that. It’s an earnest effort that a bit of market research might have advised against ever making.

This score is not reflective of the quality of the games (overall). I’m not going to be putting Alpine Ski down in a hurry, and I’ve been playing Qix for decades now, so I would never begrudge it being part of a Milestones collection. Most of the other titles are interesting as a curio. The quality of the ports for all of these titles great thanks to Hamster’s technology, but nonetheless, this is a woeful excuse for a compilation, and that’s particularly surprising given that it came from the same publisher that gave us the Space Invaders Invincible Collection. That was one of the very best retro collections. “Disappointing” doesn’t begin to describe what I feel about Taito Milestones.

Ixtona gave me exactly what I was expecting, and, ultimately, I didn’t regret the hours I spent with it.

Obviously I’m not the target audience, and sure there might be some kids that get a kick out of collecting figurines that resemble wizards and hot dog men, but I like to think the developer should have given a bit more credit to the target audience. The other LEGO games all manage to be child-friendly without being insulting to everyone else in the process.

The game plays perfectly fine, but it just shouldn't have been made this way.

It's laudable that, as a tiny indie production, the developer decided to get that right so that the game plays nicely, before worrying about anything else. Sadly, that "anything else" is also what elevates a game. Getting the core mechanics right is expected. Giving players a reason to care and to want to continue playing on is where success comes from and so, while I admire the Aussie spirit in taking on something this ambitious, it really is a game that could have done with a lot more resourcing.

It's a workable enough take on the game. Like I said at the start, pool is ideal for a handheld platform, and I can see myself playing Premium Pool Arena a lot while on trips or during short breaks. It's a clean, efficient, and largely no-frills take on the game, and in all that it's pleasant and enjoyable. And that's really all that can be said about a game like this.

There’s also the problem of the game’s lore, which has signs of potential but is lacking in its execution.

Perhaps I'm wrong with about all of this. Perhaps the developer made the right move in paying for the official PBA ten-pin bowling license. Perhaps all that energy that went into license development so that half the game's feature list on the Nintendo listing can trumpet the real-world authenticity will translate into big sales for Farsight Studios. If that is the case I reckon I'm going to go out and acquire the world croquet championships because there is clearly a big untapped market opportunity in this licensed hyper-niche sports game market.

On the surface, Akane is a super difficult game that requires absolute dexterity with a controller. It has some fantastic ideas which sadly are all cancelled out by mechanics and design choices that fight against the good stuff. It looks gorgeous, and can be enjoyed in really short spurts, but unfortunately there’s just not enough substance in this game to consider recommending it above the vast array of games available on the eShop right now.

Zenith’s gameplay issues don’t stop it from being a very workable system in a very entertaining genre. If it was devoid of its plot (or, better yet, with a more interesting narrative), I’d actually be arguing that it’s an enjoyable little game. However, the relentlessly juvenile attempts at humour never let up, and I didn’t laugh once. I think that says all that needs to be said about Zenith’s fundamental issues.

There's nothing offensively wrong with Labyrinth of the Witch. It's a cutsey Mystery Dungeon-like roguelike. There are already so many examples of that genre, though, and the Nintendo Switch didn't need another one whose only innovation was to bring a mobile gaming grind to proceedings.

That’s a shame, because there’s a lot of potential in the Psychonauts universe for a fantastic VR game – this much is apparent even to me, despite having never played the original game. The quirky characters and outlandish locations are just begging to be explored with the kind of immersiveness that VR offers, but Rhombus of Ruin isn’t that game. If anything, it’s a game that makes me want to finally check out Psychonauts itself, but that’s due as much to what this game fails to deliver as to what it succeeds in.

Lacking personality as it is, and with its main selling point - the multiplayer - being an apparent bust, it's very hard to understand who would actually want to buy into this version of Skulls of the Shogun.

The game lacks originality and suffers from a lack of narrative, and those two factors aren't enough to make up for the decent puzzles.

There will be a very small audience for Barton Lynch Pro Surfing. People who want an effort to build an accurate and serious simulation of the sport will likely find something admirable about the attempt. As limited as it is, there has been a real and genuine effort to create something authentic. However, as the first effort at a proper surfing game in quite some time, I would hazard a guess that even the hardcore surfers would have just liked something fun to play, even if the developers dialled back the attempt at realism just a tad.