While not as packed or well known as some of the previous SEGA AGES releases, G-LOC Air Battle is still a great addition to the lineup. If you like After Burner and Out Run, then you will feel right at home here. New players can also pick this one up and get the hang of it right away. It’s not a must own, but more of a quick pick up and play game. If you are looking for dogfight action found in games like Ace Combat, you aren’t going to find it here. Just a simple Arcade quarter-muncher designed to challenge and sometimes frustrate you. I say try it out, you may like it.

Basically, Rush Rover is a nondescript game that’s only worth playing for the trophies or achievements, if those appeal to you. It offers a few minutes of fun, but pretty much nothing else beyond that.

The weirdest thing about Breeder Homegrown is that it could’ve easily turned into a semi-decent horror game if there’d been even a little bit of attention paid to developing a cohesive story. It has a somewhat creepy atmosphere that, in better hands, could have been used to great effect. As it stands, though, there’s nothing really here to make the game worth recommending — unless, of course, you have $5 bucks to spend and a half hour to kill, and you want one of the easiest Platinums you’ll ever find.

It’s highly addictive thanks to how quickly those dates breeze along, and even if it’s all done with a wink, the game never seems like it’s looking down on the genre (which, I’ll admit, I may have been doing going into it). It all makes for a fun way to pass the time, and if you’re looking for something a little different on the Switch, you’ll find it right here.

Really, the only good thing I can say about Battle Rockets is that it must be a labour of love, because it’s only on the Vita. Personally, as someone who has played the Vita for far more hours than most people, I feel like that’s enough to make the game worthwhile, but for anyone who isn’t a diehard Vita completionist, Battle Rockets is more an oddity worth noting than something worth playing.

Just about the only way Blood Breed might appeal to you is if you, too, have nostalgia for the early days of PS1 horror games — but if you do, you’re probably much better served playing the Resident Evil remakes than you are playing junk like this. For that matter, I suspect that if you were to go back and play some of those classics from that games, they’d still be better than Blood Breed. Really, just about anything is better than this.

A terrible game with generous checkpoints is still a terrible game. Thunder Paw manages to take a formula you wouldn’t think would be easy to screw up, and somehow finds a way to screw it up. It’s an abysmal game, and everything about it is best avoided.

Given how nice it looks, I suspect that if you were to strip out most of Moons of Madness’ gameplay — such as it is — you would’ve been left with a very solid (if somewhat short) horror walking simulator. Instead, all you have here a somewhat scary horror game that manages to drown itself in a whole lot of pointless busywork.

While the game is mostly focused on exploration and education, every so often you have to fight off sharks and other predators. It feels totally out of place with the rest of the game, watching it veer from “Save biodiversity” to “Zap that shark!” and back again. I understand that the developers probably wanted to gamify sea exploration, but that doesn’t make it any less odd. I wouldn’t say any of those flaws ruin Deep Diving Adventures, though. They may detract a little from the overall experience, but, at the same time, that overall experience is different enough from most other games out there that it still feels pretty unique. As long as you don’t go in expecting something flawless, if nothing else you’ll come away with a whole new appreciation for water levels.

Needless to say, One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 is just as fun as the first three games in the series. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it doesn’t have to. If you want a game where you can take over a map by punching your enemies through buildings, you’ll get precisely that right here, and that couldn’t make me happier.

If we’re grading Epic Word Search Collection based on how well it delivers, well, epic word searches, I don’t think there’s any disputing that it does what it sets out to do. It may not be replace the old pen and paper variety, but if you’re looking for a good time-killer — and these days, we all are — it’ll do the trick.

There’s really no other way to describe this game as anything other than a middling Bomberman clone. There’s no story. The hero is a skeleton who has to escape a series of dungeons for…reasons. The graphics are vaguely retro, with no distinguishing features. The controls are as standard as they come, with the only thing that really stands out being the fact it’s awkward to move the eponymous hero around, which means that you’re going to needlessly die quite a few times. That said, you only die if you play, and there’s really no reason why you need to play Explosive Jake in the first place. As Bomberman clones go, it’s certainly one of them, and you’re better off just seeking out the original instead.

I give EQQO a lot of credit for keeping things basic and allowing the on-screen action to function without ever having to explain itself too much. Unfortunately, it works that well because there’s really not much of a challenge here. In normal circumstances, that might not be the worst thing in the world: it could allow you to focus on the game’s essentials, and in EQQO’s case, that theoretically means focusing players on its utterly delightful story. Unfortunately, however, the reality is that the most notable thing about EQQO isn’t the story or its characters, it’s the absolutely awful controls. No matter how adorable the game is, or how much love went into it, those controls are really its defining feature, and in this case, they drag everything else down with them.

There’s nothing here that seems impossible right off the bat, which is a nice step up from a lot of these kinds of games. It’s just hard. But hard doesn’t equal bad, of course. That was true for Dark Souls, and it’s true for Duck Souls+. It’s not like there aren’t dozens of other tough-as-nails platformers that inhabit the same space, but Duck Souls+ is definitely one of the better ones.

Journey to the Savage Planet is a frustrating game. Not because it’s that hard (it’s not, at least not intentionally), and not because it’s broken (at least not too much). No, it’s frustrating because it’s so close to being a good game, and you can see the tweaks that would have made it a good game…but absent those tweaks, it all just feels like a giant missed opportunity.

It’s fine for what it is — but, if you’re looking for a good kart racer or 3D platformer, there are better options out there. On the Switch alone, there’s Super Mario Odyssey, of course, but also plenty of other decent games of this ilk. Even if you’re thinking strictly in terms of PS4 or Xbox (and I kind of am, since I liked this game enough that I want to pick it up for my niece to follow up on my Paw Patrol and kids’ PS4 controller at Christmas), there are still games like Yooka-Laylee or Tearaway that are higher quality. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get your kids Gigantosaurus: The Game ever, only that there are other games you should get for them before this one. It’s hardly a must-play, but if you’re looking for ways to get your kids hooked on gaming at a young age, this one might be the way to start.

So yeah, I really found myself loving Final Fantasy VII Remake, to a degree that I’m likely going to go back through it on Hard mode (which unlocks post-game) and try to platinum it if I can find the time. Even after 40 hours spent with it I’m finding it hard to pull myself away from the game, and I think there’s a good chance you’ll feel the same way too.

While professional sports have been cancelled indefinitely, something like Dunk Lords arrived just in time to help with social distancing (I mean it doesn’t even have online play…although I hope they implement it at some point otherwise it might prevent the title from having serious legs). That said Dunk Lords is close to a total package for an arcade sports game. Great gameplay, fun gimmicks, colorful cast, I certainly look forward to a console port.

As it stands, I’m not going to say this one is a must-play, but it’s solid enough that if Ratalaika and Petite want to continue on with another sequel in this series, I certainly wouldn’t complain.

Whether intentionally or not, Wizards of Brandel isn’t afraid to show it has a sense of humour, and it makes the rest of the game seem a lot more palatable, even enjoyable. Admittedly, if you don’t find that hilarious, then you’ll just find Wizards of Brandel to be yet another in a long line of unremarkable, indistinguishable JRPGs. And, what’s more, if you hate microtransactions, then you may even find this game intolerable. Personally, though, this was the best KEMCO JRPG I’ve seen in a long time — possibly ever — and I’m willing to ignore those microtransactions if it means the game leans in on the silliness as much as this one does.

If we’re talking about things like reduced load times as a big plus, I think it’s clear that R.B.I. Baseball 20 isn’t the (relatively) smashing success that R.B.I. Baseball 19 was. But it still points to the game making an effort to improve, which clearly wasn’t the case up until last year’s outing. Whether that will help the series next year when MLB The Show stops being a Sony exclusive remains to be seen, but for now, at least it means that anyone who wants a baseball game outside of the PlayStation ecosystem won’t have to suffer through a game that’s a complete write-off.

It’s really hard to enjoy Draugen when it all feels like it’s a collection of nods to other, better games. A game shouldn’t make you want to play other games, yet most of the time I spent with Draugen I was wondering about whether it was too soon to go back and play Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch. If you’ve never played those before, this won’t seem nearly as derivative — but that’s more an argument for playing those other games than it is for playing Draugen.

I genuinely cannot find a real fault with this game. Sound design is incredible, the visuals are stunning, the story exceeds all expectations, combat and puzzle design manage to remain true to what fans would want, while also seamlessly translating themselves to the VR space, there is humor, there is horror, everything comes together and creates the perfect Half-Life game. This is the game that VR was waiting for, this is the game that VR was built for, and if you have VR technology, you owe it to yourself to play this game. If you have been waiting for the right game to come along and make the VR purchase worth it, Half-Life: Alyx is it.

It’s a decent enough game that improves a little when you realize that it’s not actively trying to kill you at every opportunity. Not exactly the stuff of eventual GOTY material or anything, but I’ve definitely played worse.

Hidden Through Time is pretty cute. It’s got an art style that comes off as a cross between Scribblenauts and The Oatmeal, and as someone who likes both of those things, that appeals to me. Every time I finished a level, some part of me half-expected to hear that little Scribblenauts tune that played whenever you found a shard, which should give you an idea of just how close the resemblance is. But intuitive controls and fun design don’t make for a great game — that would require the game itself to be fun, and honestly, Hidden Through Time just didn’t do it for me. If you’re a diehard hidden object fan who really wants a challenge, it might be worth your time, but if you’re looking for something you can play with your kids, I have a hard time imagining it would pass muster.

Trancelation works as entertainment, but not edutainment. You’re probably not going to come out of it fluent in any more languages than you went into it with, but if you just feel like dodging around the screen to a great beat, it’ll do the job.

As I said before, we’re talking about a KEMCO game, so you more or less getting exactly what you’d expect when it comes to Asdivine Dios. There are far worse JRPGs out there, but there are also far better ones, and this one comes in right where you’d expect, in the exact midpoint between those two extremes.

Being able to play the game with family in the same household may require a bit much (multiple Switch consoles and copies of the game) but when you get it all up and running, it is a great way to spend your time stuck at home. I’ve spent hours with the game every day since launch, and have yet to come close to being exhausted with it, and seemingly never run out of things to do. So, if for some reason you have yet to pick this one up, I’d definitely recommend doing so.