Much like Super Volley Blast, Super Tennis Blast is a very enjoyable arcade sports game that is a notch above comparable modern fare. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but with strong multiplayer fundamentals and an engaging career mode, this is a tennis game that deserves a place on the Switch next to Mario Tennis Aces.

Both Assassin's Creed III and Liberation are titles worth investing time into. They contain tons of content that’s fun, and the time setting makes for some interesting scenarios, but the technical issues for this Switch port aren’t worth the trade off for being able to play on the go. These issues aren’t bad enough that the Remastered editions on the Switch are an unplayable mess, but it’s still a mess regardless.

Despite its generally low amount of content, Anarcute is enough fun to keep you playing to the end, with the full package making it incredibly difficult to count the little game out. I found it impossible to ever be in a bad mood while playing this game, spending my sessions bouncing my foot to the incredibly upbeat soundtrack while sending my cat army to throw a gas truck at a group of fascists and shouting about how I was going to “tear down the PETriarchy”. It’s good old fashioned chaotic fun, and in the end it doesn’t really need to be anything else to succeed at what it’s going for.

If I have a grievance with European Conqueror X, it’s that there’s an enjoyable, robust, and competent turn-based strategy game at its core surrounded by nothing distinguishing. It satisfies that itch for its genre, but its dry presentation and impersonal nature might keep you from wanting to play for more than short intervals.

Gato Roboto might lean a little too heavily on homage, but never truly in a bad way. It might be more goofy than great and more adorable than original, but the game still delivers a pint-sized prance that comes together nicely even if it’s a little short. This follows through on the premise of Meowtroid extremely well.

Project Nimbus isn’t bad, it does too many things competently to deserve such a label. And it isn’t utterly bereft of fun; at times I was enjoying zipping around the battlefield launching autonomous drones to hunt down targets. However, the core gameplay loop just doesn’t sustain any feeling of satisfaction.

If you feel the need to revisit Wonder Boy or Adventure Island, which were ported to pretty much everything available in the late 80’s, you might give Wonder Boy Returns Remix a shot. For the rest of us, though, there are two much better Wonder Boy games on the Switch that you’ll probably enjoy a whole lot more.

​Little Friends delivers on its promises, but its failure to do more to capture my attention left me mildly disappointed. The dogs and cats are adorable, and there are many outfits to buy and customize. But after the daily feeding and watering of your friends is over, the gameplay becomes a little rote. Perhaps a more laid back player will find this charming game amusing enough to occupy their sparse free-time.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, while short, has a lot to offer thematically. It doesn’t show anything mind-blowingly new, but rather comes across like a beautiful amalgamation of the greatest hits from dark fairytale. It only scratches the surface of its own potential, but the beautiful scenery, music, themes, and interesting take on gameplay make it a definite title to check out.

Team Sonic Racing is the perfect addition to the Switch’s kart racing lineup. It’s a fast and exciting roller coaster of a racer with the style and spunk you’d expect from the Sonic series. While it doesn’t perform on the Switch as well as on other consoles, that doesn’t change the fun of speeding through this iconic universe.

The unfortunate optimization problems as well as the general gameplay may leave somebody who’s not a fan of survival games disappointed, but people already well acquainted with the genre will probably find it a thrilling and spooky experience if they give it a shot. Darkwood is a game with potential, and I certainly hope the developers take any lessons learned from it and return with the killer horror title they’ve come close to creating.

The Spring of 2019 has been a wonderful stroll down memory lane of Square Enix glory, and Final Fantasy XII is the high note it ends on. Featuring every quality-of-life improvement to date, and the ability to play in handheld or on a television at a moment’s notice, it’s an easy decision to call the Switch version the definitive experience. Final Fantasy XII may end up being the best of the franchise on Switch, but with so many titles still available, hopefully it won’t be the last.

Outbreak is sort of a fun mode, but it does get old quickly, and everything surrounding it is unexplained or prone to error messages, and I can see it becoming kind of gross in a free-to-play way. Blades of Time is bad, and you should not play it.

Any Castlevania fan would be doing a disservice to themselves by not picking up the Castlevania Anniversary Collection. With the ability to save replays and create a save state, choose from six different display options and three borders, and flip through a bonus book filled with cool art, history, and interviews, this anthology is a great value. I would have liked to see a sound test option built into the main menu, the ability to remap buttons, and multiple save files per game, but on the whole the Castlevania Anniversary Collection delivers.

Loot-driven action RPGs can find themselves in a pattern of being repetitive, relying on the desire for the next shiny piece of armor to keep players engaged. Lapis x Labyrinth certainly falls into that category, but unfortunately despite the huge number of items you earn, many tend to be downgrades. However, the diversity in each character type works to its advantage, promoting mixing and matching party members to help reduce the feeling of grinding in this outrageously stylistic 2D Action RPG.

Resident Evil has a storied history and the series has evolved over the years to feature a wide range of gameplay styles. Revisiting the core survival horror gameplay with an added modern control scheme proves to be a wonderful pairing. Featuring two characters for a majority of the adventure adds some interesting puzzle design, but also takes away from the feeling of isolation and dread. Fortunately the frightening and off-putting atmosphere helps to counteract that. While it isn’t the best of the classics, Resident Evil Zero still manages to deliver an authentic survival horror experience.

Despite shortcomings, the remake of the first Resident Evil title is a tense, exciting romp through a mansion that has a ton of creepy secrets. There are definite signs of aging here that make me appreciate current day luxuries, but once I got past those I enjoyed Resident Evil’s puzzles, scares and horrors.

It’s astonishing just how well RE4 has held up after nearly fifteen years, but it still managed to draw me in and keep me playing no matter what intermittent problems I ran into. There’s a reason this game has been so celebrated over the years, and if you’re like me and have been ignoring it for over a decade, then there’s no better time to see what the big deal is than right now.

Blazing Beaks is one of the Switch’s hidden eShop gems. Regardless of the potentially steep learning curve, the game always leads to lots of laughs. It’s best played with a group of friends to get the most enjoyment out of all the content that the game has to offer. If Blazing Beaks even remotely catches your eye, it is well worth a purchase.

There isn’t anything really bad about Sniper Elite V2 Remastered, but there also isn’t anything that’s particularly good either. The Remastered port itself is underwhelming, so I don’t think there’s much reason for fans of the series to take the opportunity to relive their memories of the original. Newcomers wouldn’t be making a mistake to pick up this game, but I can’t think of anything in the game that’s really worth going out of your way to check out. I’m really interested in the idea of a shooting game that’s leveraged on methodical and deliberate actions, but the level design in Sniper Elite V2 undermines its stealth mechanics so much that it ends up feeling like every other shooter on the market, but now with far less health and much harder aiming.

Overall, if you are already a fan of visual novels as a whole, Worldend Syndrome will probably be successful at drawing you in. If you’re not already a fan of the genre, it isn’t likely to change your mind. Between the lengthy prologue and the slightly disappointing shift in gameplay that comes after it, Worldend has a lot of potential for its storytelling that it constantly seems to put just out of reach in order to pad out its length and starve the player of interesting information until the very last second, before repeating the same process over and over again.

All told, Shalnor Legends isn’t trying to hide its source material, but this opens it up to serious criticism because it doesn’t do enough to differentiate itself. If you are going to make a Zelda-like, it’s important to either have a compelling hook or be great. Blossom Tales and Reverie are much stronger titles in this genre that found a way to be similar but also different from Nintendo’s legendary franchise in their own ways. Shalnor Legends pales in comparison to any Zelda game. The use of “Legend” in the title is the only real link between these worlds.

Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Champions managed to impress me in multiple ways. While the game looks nice enough, the presentation is purely background for some fantastic gameplay elements. The grid system and its approach are really fun to play around with and give you just tons to consider. That being said, the tutorial can be a bit confusing and throws you into the game proper with very little care. Once you get over that hump, you will find that it can be learned through a number of games. There are deliberate systems at play, but the game guides you to where you need to go.

All in all, Venture Kid is a retro platformer that plays fairly well, but lacks the excitement or inspiration of the Mega Man series it tried to model. With such a wide spectrum of games in this genre that push the limits of what an action-platformer is capable of, something so vanilla is going to get lost and overlooked. Unless this is the first such game you’ve ever played, you’ve likely seen everything offered here somewhere else.

If you’re not a Nintendo Switch Online subscriber, I can only recommend this if you’re desperate for the Tetris 99 experience against computers. There are better, fuller Tetris games out there - even Puyo Puyo Tetris is a fuller experience (and comes with a whole lot more).

If you’re a fan of the golden era 3D space shooters that permeated gaming in the mid to late 90s, I can virtually guarantee you’ll enjoy Strike Suit Zero. That being said, it is at best a solid and enjoyable entry in the genre that doesn’t do much to advance it. Its performance levels make it a bit of a rough ride as well. All that said, its grasp on the genre is solid enough that I still found myself having a very good time playing it. If you’re hankering for a classic 3D space shooter you can take on the go, give Strike Suit Zero a shot.

Cafeteria Nipponica is just fine. The game was able to pull me in multiple times, but also created way more dead air than I was good with. It does some unique things like improving recipes and concerning yourself with customers directly, but it follows that familiar template that Kairosoft managed to create.

Slime Tactics falls into the category of a game that is cool on paper but only decent at its execution. Tactical placement with a neat story twist is interesting but fails to provide the level of engagement I want. The continual upgrades kept me moving ahead but I was still ultimately frustrated by the entire package given the grind that was seemingly required to compensate for poor AI.