For now, though, I think it’s pretty telling that while Civilization VII certainly costs a pretty penny, I’ve already found myself going back to play VI when I want to play something that I enjoy. It’s simply not inspiring me, and given that this series above all others has, in a very real sense, shaped my lifelong interest in history, being uninspiring is perhaps the worst mistake Firaxis could have made.

Sugoro Quest: Dice Heroes can be a fun game, albeit a frustrating and unfair one. With that said, I won’t blame you if you decide to rely on save states while playing. Now onward and roll for great justice!

Hello Kitty Island Adventure is one of those games that could only come from Japanese culture. There aren’t many other cultures that see an inherent spirit and soul in a mascot, and to most of the rest of us, mascots are tools to use for branding and marketing, or otherwise become famous because of their association with a product like a film or a game (hello Mario and Mickey Mouse). It’s rare that a mascot IS the product. But that’s what has happened with Hello Kitty. Before today, most Kitty games came across as a cheap effort to extract more cash from that lucrative product, but Hello Kitty Island Adventure is different. This is a genuinely worthwhile use of your time, and the fact that it’s also free of predatory microtransactions is the sweetener on top.

The big selling point of Kingdom Come Deliverance II is also its biggest potential drawback. You’ve got to be genuinely interested in the history that it depicts to find it immersive. I do wonder whether some people will come in expecting a Skyrim-like or a first-person Witcher experience and end up disappointed with this. It’s not that kind of game. It’s far more grounded and gritty, but if reading Tolstoy or Yoshikawa appeals to you, then Kingdom Come Deliverance II is very much for you.

Neptunia Riders Vs. Dogoos is frustrating. For fans of the series, it’s fun and hits all the right notes. It’s just over way too quickly and the developers missed a real opportunity to make this a dynamite multiplayer experience. It’s also so totally reliant on appealing to existing fans that it’s going to completely fail to find a new audience for the broader Hyperdimension property. It could have been so much more for all audiences, but as it is will simply be a fun little spinoff while we continue to wait for the next big step forward for this delightful series and its characters.

There’s not too much in the designs that you won’t have seen in just about every single platform game out there, so you get your requisite forest levels, ice levels, factory levels and so on – but it all hangs together well.

I wanted to like Love Too Easily more than the game let me. There are a lot of good ideas and noble intent in there. It’s just let down by what I will put down to creative inexperience.

Freedom Wars is one of the smarter and shaper takes on the Monster Hunter formula. While Capcom’s series is certainly more refined and well-produced, there’s enough intelligence and sound enough concept and philosophy within Freedom Wars that helps to elevate it. It might only ever be a “cult classic,” but then again they say the same about David Lynch films. Sometimes a “cult classic” is just an intelligent art work that dares go against the grain a little.

The puzzle pieces are often incredibly-well hidden. That would be fine if the game wasn’t perfectly satisfactory without drilling into people that these pieces needed to be found. It’s a sour note to finish with and disappointing because the game is otherwise truly brilliant, but those collectibles are largely why I have given up on the platformer genre. Whatever happened to the idea of building a game where it is fun just to go from one end of the level to the other, and still feel validated that, yes, I’ve finished the game at the end of the last level?... With that gripe out of the way, the Nintendo Switch remaster of this classic platformer is the definitive version of it, and anyone who loved playing it previously is going to love the opportunity to play through it again. If you’re newer to video games… this is an essential modern classic.

Overall, Dynasty Warriors Origins is a big, explosive, and massively entertaining action game, and true to its title, a conscious effort by Koei Tecmo to get back to the qualities that so many people have enjoyed from the series over the years. Lu Bu is terrifying, Sun Shangxiang is history’s greatest tomboy, Zhuge Liang is brilliant, and watching all these stories play out with such energy is just utterly brilliant.

It firmly exists within the Ys series, and just as last year brought us that magnificent remake of Dragon Quest III, here’s an old-timey classic within the action JRPG genre for the people who appreciate it. Not everything needs to be deep and meaningful, and Felghana certainly isn’t that. But it’s easy to appreciate its place within one of the longest-running and most enduring JRPG properties of all time.

I don’t think anyone who looks at Tokyo Clanpool will be under any illusions about whether it’s for them or not. The game wears its charms on its sleeve and delivers a quality and consistently amusing, if somewhat mechanically standard, dungeon crawler behind it. It’s unfortunate that the “censorship” of a small part of it will cost it within the small niche audience for the game, but just know that it’s a far better game than you might see in the user reviews. They’re upset about the removed elements. What’s left there is highly enjoyable if you’re there for a frivolous, silly, charming and funny dungeon-crawling JRPG, rather than the touch-em-up minigame.

Grizzly Man is the best Pixel Pulps game to date, and it is a great way to start a new trilogy; the next two games will be Dark Side Sewers (about a remote viewer) and Possession Junkies (about a Wiccan who is the last of her lineage).

I hate to be the guy railing against a lack of content in a game, but while Riki 8Bit Game Collection was clearly a labour of love, I have to question why this wasn’t released as a music CD or music download instead, because 99% of the experience is in those music players and the Switch is not the ideal place for a music player. There’s less than ten minutes worth of gameplay in this collection, and as good as that music is, I can’t add it to my Apple playlists for working out or enjoying while I’d reading a book. The end result is, sadly, a conceptual misfire.

Basically, Xuan-Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament, is an older game and suffers from a poor localisation, but there’s a heart and soul in it that is so earnest and honest that it’s very easy to forgive the game its transgressions. Whether it’s the mixing of fantasy, spiritual philosophy and some of the most ancient recorded history, or the engaging combat system and stunning art direction it’s easy to get lost in this adventure, and full credit to EastAsiaSoft for giving us a second chance to play it.

The long-and-short of Fairy Tail 2 is that it’s a perfectly competent JRPG by one of the true specialists of the genre. It’s not going to be remembered as Gust’s finest work, and is more of a play-and-forget experience. This is a year that has given us everything from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to Metaphor, a mind-blowingly good remake of Romancing SaGa 2 and, arguably, the finest Yakuza game yet with Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. In comparison to all of that Fairy Tail’s by-the-numbers approach will seem routine. But it’s also got all the hallmarks we come to expect from Gust – this is comfort food gaming for JRPG enthusiasts, using strong material well. Sometimes, that’s all you need.

We may well never see simulators made in the mould of RollerCoaster Tycoon anymore. To an extent that is understandable – spending hours carefully building a park only to run out of money and see it fall into ruin might be authentic, but it’s not exactly “respecting the player’s time” and providing the dopamine hit that game developers talk about at their conferences these days. For my mind, though, aside from difficulties in trying to make a mouse-only interface from yesteryear work with a modern controller layout, this is the finest simulator available on the Nintendo Switch.

I suspect that because I refuse to pay $500 for a digital dress, my interest in Infinity Nikki will disappear the moment I miss out on getting a particularly attractive costume from one of the limited events. But then I’d be better off just waiting for a Nikki figure to come out with my favourite dress on it instead anyway. I can see myself becoming a big-time collector of Nikki figures, and I love the character and what Nikki represents outside of the monetisation. However, the monetisation is inexcusable, even by the standard of exploitative gatcha games. No video game about collecting dresses is worth more than it would cost to buy the actual dresses in the real world. What’s more, when you let the monetisation undermine everything that the creative side of the game is aiming to achieve and suck the joy out of the fundamental mechanics, you’ve just broken your project.

I don’t like being particularly cruel in reviews, but IronFall Invasion never needed to leave the 3DS. It was bad enough there thanks to its totally worthless storytelling and generic, bland gameplay. With the Switch it doesn’t even have the distinction of being one of the more technically impressive tech demos on the console. It truly has nothing going for it.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Fantasian was a project designed to give several legends of the JRPG genre closure. By revising their great classic and both modernising and paying homage to it in equal measures, they can look back at their careers with the satisfaction of having completed a full journey of their own. For people that clearly love storytelling so much it’s hard to imagine a better way to finish up.

Perhaps part of the reason I have a higher tolerance for this game is not just that I love the base property, but I also love those old N64 bad 3D platformer efforts. Remember Chameleon Twist on the N64? Probably not, as it didn’t exactly win over the critics and was actually one of the most expensive N64 games. I loved it though. Or what about Glover? Or Bomberman 64? Snow Bros. Wonderland is a bit more modern than those titles, but you’re probably right that it has a dash of that heritage and tradition in it. And so you are probably right that the audience that is going to love Snow Bros Wonderland is vanishingly small. Unfortunately for you, you’ve landed in the middle of a Venn diagram where one circle is “Game Critic” and the other is “Snow Bros. Bro”. And so now your name is going to be attached to a glowing score for the game into perpetuity, because I really did love every moment of this game.

The basic reality is that a work as derivative as Dokimon is lazy. That’s not to say a lot of work wasn’t put into it. I’m sure the developer and whatever team they had spent many, many hours cobbling this together. But it’s creatively lazy and contributes nothing to the monster-taming RPG genre. And so all that work has ultimately gone to waste.

Talisman is really just a glorified game of Snakes and Ladders when it comes to players having the agency to determine the winner. They simply don’t. There’s a lot to like about the presentation and theming of the board game, and unlike its previous Talisman project, Nomad’s done a sparkling job with the presentation and aesthetics of this one. For that reason, it is the definitive version of Talisman out there, but there are just so many board games that were released in the past decade that have ruled Talisman obsolete from a game design perspective, and so many of those have a digital edition too.

Farming Simulator remains an excellent experience. It’s educational, in that you’ll walk away with it with an appreciation for what farmers go through so you can eat. At the same time, once you are familiar with its systems and loops, it becomes laid back and almost meditative for the way you’ll go about what is mechanically a repetitive grind, but aesthetically and thematically a rewarding loop that keeps you both engaged and stress-free. Farming Simulator continues to appear like it should be a mess of paradoxes, yet in action, it just works.

The Devil’s Whisper is so niche that as far as I can tell I’m the first one that’s reviewed it, anywhere. Including user reviews on Steam. It’s a pity that it’s going to fly under the radar like that, because it’s a fun blend of a homage to B-horror movies with its own unique identity. It is also clearly a work that the developers cared about a lot, given the effort that went into designing the narrative and the voice acting. I do think the art has let it down and made it difficult to convert people on the Steam page into buyers, but I recommend looking past that, because this is a decent VN worth your time.

To be frank, here, I don’t think enough was done to make Planet Coaster 2 enough of a sequel. Adding water parks and slides, and more rides in general, were all perfectly rational ways to expand on the Planet Coaster experience, but we’re in an era now where DLC is getting Game of the Year nominations, and I do think that this feels more like a massive DLC drop at 50% of the price of a base game than a new, full-priced game. And as fun as the emerging “Frontier Simulation” formula is I also can’t help but wish that the developers would challenge themselves to try and create an actual simulator at some point. Make something with teeth, folks! You might be surprised just how invested your players get when their decisions have consequences for their parks, too.

Goblin Slayer is a perfectly adequate tactics JRPG that people who have nostalgia for the genre back on the PlayStation will have a particular fondness for. Mileage may be slightly better for the fans of the anime, but even then I think the big problem this game has is that it’s very superficial and shows very little interest in making any kind of statement or point. In other words, it plays exactly like an ‘anime tie-in’ game, and nothing more or less than that.

It has taken me an age to review this game – it was released a month ago – because one of the good things about a slow-paced slice-of-life visual novel is that you can mess around with it in between playing other things, but it has never been far out of my mind as I’ve played it. To fully appreciate it you’ve got to be comfortable with glacial pacing and an earnest attempt to take something that looks like it should be fanservicey and give you something to think about instead. Calibrate your expectations just right and SINce Memories: Off the Starry Sky may just surprise you.