Blood Waves is the kind of trash that reflects badly on all indies. The developer has taken an established, popular genre, copied the basic elements of it wholesale, but done so in such an incompetent and soulless manner that it's hard to see the game as anything but pure cynicism.

Golf Peaks isn’t going to stand out on the Switch. It’s well made, clean, and the minimalism is appealing, but it’s also somewhat limited and hard to sit down to for long periods. But jumping on a train for a short trip, or waiting for friends to get organised for a game of Mario Kart? Well those off minutes can easily be filled with some Golf Peaks action.

Left Alive is a bundle of genuinely brilliant ideas, let down by frequently shoddy execution. A resoundingly anti-war war game, with a deep understanding of the way that war complicates personal and societal morality, Left Alive asks all the right questions that a game about war should. It also does a great job of making that sense of survival as desperate as it should. If only there was the technical competence behind it, to support those great ideas.

Eternity is a misfire. It's such a pity to see a project that had such good intentions fall to the wayside, but it's hard to share the feeling that for a new developer, making its first game, Eternity is an overreach in just about every way. I'm sure we'll see something much more refined and mature next time around.

Assault Android Cactus' greatest weakness is that it defines itself as an "arcade dual stick shooter" in such a traditional fashion that it's limited by that. The game's greatest strength is that it is so slick, smooth, and energetic that its limitations don't matter in the slightest. This is one cracking game.

Its simplistic combat and dull mission structures mean it quickly runs out of steam for anything other than quick bursts of play, and the Switch has plenty of games that can fill that need in a far more compelling way.

Stellaris is an aesthetically beautiful and rich in storytelling, and I'm fully enamoured to it. It plays beautifully on console, and it's the kind of game that's impossible to put down once you start playing.

Combine the uninspired enemies and level design with a checkpoint system that’s more than happy to erase half an hour of progress if you die midway through a run, and you’ll find that RemiLore becomes a game that’s more tedium than fun.

Devil May Cry 5 is exactly what we’ve come to expect of the series. In fact, if anything it feels like the developers were that terrified of repeating the response to Ninja Theory’s DMC, that they’ve gone overboard on being traditional. But then, with such a slick, enjoyable combat system, and all the witty banter that you could ever want in a game, DMC 5 is a fine way to bring the series roaring back after a decade in limbo.

This game is a false promise and a poorly executed mess.

Despite the dull combat system and the infuriating card collecting mechanic, it manages to tell a fascinating and surprisingly relatable story that should be experienced at least once.

An unapologetically smart and thoughtful game, one that's happy to be philosophical, and one that's willing to make you work to truly dig into what makes it so wonderful. It's like a work of literature in that way, as opposed to a page-turning novel, and it commands (and deserves) respect for that.

Dead or Alive 6 is amazing. It’s the best looking fighting game out there, bar none, and has a combat system that is both instantly accessible for newcomers, without feeling condescending, and yet also offering plenty of depth and complexity for experienced fans. It’s not perfect; the story mode is enjoyable but slightly undercooked, and one suspects that we’ll have to wait until pretty deep into the DLC strategy for the real over-the-top humour that the series is most famous for to start to really shine through. But then, those criticisms also applied to Dead or Alive 5, and that was a game that I played on an almost weekly basis for six years. I can’t see Dead or Alive 6 being any different.

Meow Motors has its issues, but overall, it gets away with it all. It's a bright, colourful, charming and cheap little kart racer that kids can enjoy, and people who never seem to tire of kart racers will have a compulsive need to buy and mess around with. As we wait for the PlayStation 4 to finally have a great kart racer (Crash Team Racing is on its way), Meow Motors is nothing to cough up a hairball over.

Jump Force fulfils its central purpose - anime fighting - splendidly. Instead of focusing on that brilliance, the developers piled disconnected features from other games on top. With better utilisation of fanservice and context for the characters present, this could have gone down as Bandai Namco's best outing in the category, but the love still shines through.

If you can get a group together, then Hell Warders is a lot of fun that you won’t soon forget. The action is tight, the challenges is robust, and the setting is impeccable. For single player tower defence, there are better options on the Switch (namely PixelJunk Monsters 2), but nonetheless there’s a lot of effort and talent that has gone into Hell Warders.

It still tells a potent, important story, and looks the part, but I fear the only thing people are going to notice as they play is how unrefined and often downright irritating they find the button-pressing bits, because they are so poor they completely overwhelm the stuff that players should be focusing on instead.

It's actually refreshing playing a game that doesn't try to be expansive, and instead focuses on neat, high quality gameplay loops.

Far Cry New Dawn while being a great experience feels more like an expansion to Far Cry 5 than it does its own stand alone title. This is not a bad thing, but if it had to be compared? It would be like saying New Dawn is equivalent to The Witcher 3’s Blood & Wine which was a great addition to the main title.

Truly, once you get over the initial hump with Tangledeep, you’re looking at a game that you can play over the long term. If nothing else, it’s lovely to know that there are some developers out there that understand what Rogue when creating their “roguelikes.”

Sadly, Alvastia Chronicles is yet another conceptual failure and broken mess of a game. I admire Kemco for its dedication to the retro aesthetic, and, as the old saying goes, a broken clock is right twice per day. Kemco has produced worthy games in the past through this approach. But while churning bland, derivative, and poorly tested games might work on the mobile space, in a commercial sense, there's nothing of value in Alvastia Chronicles. It's nothing but a drain on a person's time.

Tokyo School Life is a romance visual novel, about a period of time in people's lives that tends to be very nostalgic (and therefore good source material for storytelling). It has moments where it resembles a standard fanservice-heavy visual novel, but it doesn't take long to realise that that's not what the developer was aiming for at all. Instead, Tokyo School Life is a sweet and charming story of warmth and good characterisation... and an earnest and genuine attempt to highlight everything that is great about Japan.

Modern Combat: Blackout isn't a great game by any stretch of the imagination, but it's playable enough, and it's the only military shooter of its kind currently available on the Nintendo Switch. I'd suggest that you're better off with something like Splatoon for competitive hijinks, or City of Brass if you're looking for a simply well-made first person action title.

This is a game designed to make you smile the whole way through. It doesn’t need to challenge you, or to make you prove your expertise – it’s there to remind you of idyllic childhoods, exploring forests and caves and give you that sense of wonder that you once experienced through the old-school top-down adventure game genre. We rarely celebrate games because they are simply, unapologetically joyful, but Reverie is a great place to start, if you’re looking for joy.

With few quirks, Solstice Chronicles is a well-made isometric shooter that effectively cribs an aesthetic that calls to mind a blend of Doom and Aliens. For local multiplayer fun, mowing down the hordes with a mate remains reliably good fun. A shockingly cliché and poorly-constructed narrative, combined with a sense of monotony that sets in far too quickly, does let this game down though. It’s best played in very short bursts, with big breaks in-between sessions.

I respect the developer for what he has done in creating a game to help heal himself. I identify far more than I ever could have expected; Drowning seems to take my thoughts and put them right into the character's head. It's eerie. Accurate. Emotional. Unfortunately, it's also poorly planned, poorly placed, and in some parts, questionably written. There are also graphic choices that remove you from the immersion in emotion that I expected while playing, and sadly, the decent narrative doesn't make up for these glaring issues.

The story and characters that Arcade Spirits presents are wonderful and days after beating it are still floating around in my head. Arcade Spirits packages a lot in its six hour journey and is an example of how a game designed to be inclusive game can be done right.

While Metro Exodus doesn’t do anything wrong as a blockbuster shooter, where the original titles were original and refreshing, Exodus is yet another in a ever-deepening pile, and the Metro franchise deserved better than to be exhausting.