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.

So with New Star Manager you get poor on-field football action, and poor off-field management. Throw in the cheap "typical mobile game" aesthetics and design, and it's hard to understand who would want to play this. People who simply like football would go for FIFA. People who want a management simulator would go for the densely rewarding Football Manager. Both of which are already available on Switch.

To criticise Pocket Academy; things tend to happen more slowly than in some of Kairosoft's other titles. You unlock new buildings and facilities more slowly, and run out of cash more quickly. Time also ticks by at a slower rate. The most directly comparable Kairosoft title, Hot Springs Story, is much more sprightly, and therefore the superior place to start if you're looking for just one Kairosoft sim for your Switch.

It's a surprisingly decent narrative, mind you. BlazBlue has all the typical tropes of youth action anime, with its focus on moving up and down power rankings something overly familiar to anyone who's watched even a few anime titles in the past. But, again, BlazBlue does it convincingly enough that you feel like you're getting a full anime season as part of the game's entry price. Throw in the quality competitive seen, umpteen different alternative gameplay modes, and the sheer size of the roster, all available from the outset, and BlazBlue is going to be hard to put down for a long period of time.

The Switch version runs gorgeously, too.

For those who do understand their 4X genre, however, At The Gates will come across as a breath of fresh air. It's a ground-up rethink on how the genre can work, and what the 4X might look like as applied to the many cultures and civilizations out there that didn't have the imperialist intent that most 4X titles assume. For that, it's one of the most interesting strategy games I've played in years.

Memory of God has created a poignant experience featuring a character type that is rarely explored in the medium. The game’s esoteric story and tedious mechanics might look bad on the surface, but they contribute effectively to the game’s unique tone – and the ending is sure to be something you’ll remember for a long time.

This developer/ publisher understands the Grimm aesthetic and structure better than anyone else out there.

Song of Memories does have an excellent combat system and lite JRPG mechanics. It also has its moments where it's genuinely amusing, and the contrast between the monster story and the fan service-rich romance is... eclectic. It's a difficult game to really pin down, but for those that can let the oddity of it all wash over them, it can also be an surprisingly difficult game to put down.

Still, How to Sing to Open Your Heart is worth a look if you want some cute, lighthearted romance. It's full of heartwarming moments backed by fantastic artwork, and even if the attempts at dealing with more serious matter fall short, that's reason enough to join Myana on her adventures.

While there are a lot of standard features for its genre, God Eater 3 is far from standard. Where once this was one of the genre's pretenders, sitting quietly on handheld consoles and developing a small, but dedicated audience, it now looks like Bandai Namco has a series that belongs with Toukiden and Monster Hunter at the very front of the stage.

It's going to be hard seeing Etrian Odyssey go... but it needs to. Without that mapping component, it would lose its core and soul, and with Etrian Odyssey Nexus, we've got a near-complete realisation of everything Etrian Odyssey has stood for for so many years. This is a good place to finish what has become a beloved series for many. Perhaps there will even be another dual screen handheld down the track, but in the meantime, farewell, dear friend!

It’s a pity that there will be some (or many) who will inevitably dismiss Death’s End re;Quest as an anime fan service game, because it has a smart core under those trappings. As a blend of visual novel and JRPG, and as a blend of science fiction and conspiracy thriller that has a good, sharp bite to it, I would have to say this is the most inherently interesting game that Compile Heart has created to date.