Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge

(available for Playstation 5, Playstation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Nintendo Switch version used for this review)

Shredder’s Revenge has come to us a year after its initial announcement, being made by the indie studio Tribute Games, based in Canada. It was promised to be a throwback to classic Ninja Turtles beat em’ up games, particularly the game Turtles in Time- which you will be able to play soon, thanks to the Cowabunga Collections coming soon to all platforms.

This game has had tons of updates over its development time, with the promise of more and more characters before its release date.

Full disclosure, I went into this thinking that it wasn’t going to live up to the hype. I thought that this would be one that old school fans of Ninja Turtle games would enjoy but it would only be good for a couple of rounds, and I wouldn’t have that much fun with it. I can safely say that the hype is justified on this one!

PROS

• Combat

This is a really good throwback to classic Ninja Turtles arcade games, and it delivers in this department. Tribute Games might be a small studio, but it feels like they’ve been making games like this their entire life. They do an excellent job giving certain characters strengths and weaknesses, and you earn more moves and combat techniques by levelling up characters during story mode. If you really like a challenge, you can take part in arcade mode, both of which are for offline and online multiplayer. They do an excellent job of differentiating the characters to find one which suits your style. For example, Donatello has very good range but he doesn’t have much power, and Raphael has the opposite problem. There are seven characters in total, with the starting roster being the original four turtles of Raphael, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Leonardo. But you also have access to April O’Neil and Splinter and you unlock Casey Jones once you beat story mode for the first time. You really want to go back and forth levelling up your character on story mode for when you join someone else’s online session.

Luckily, the combat is really good so it’s really fun to keep going back and doing the levels over and over again. After the first weekend the game came out, I played the first level about seven or eight times, whether I was joining other player’s sessions or just starting again to level up another character. I’m a massive fan of the character Casey Jones, so once I unlocked him, I went back and did the story mode again. My advice would be to go through all of the characters to find which one suits your style, and then have a back up in case someone else in an online game picks your favourite. Luckily, none of the characters feel like they’re lacking. Though, some of them might not suit your tastes. For example, I’m not too good at playing Splinter. There’s nothing wrong with him but his slow, combat focused style didn’t suit me. I definitely preferred playing the faster characters like Leonardo and Michelangelo. Though, that being said, I did get a kick out of playing Casey Jones, who is a more power-based character.

• Turtles’ history

If you’re a fan of the old cartoons or just the Ninja Turtles in general, there’s a lot here for you. There’s a boss fight at the end of each level and there’s all sorts of characters that they drew from. There’s a ton of these ones where you think ‘They’ll never bring this character in’ and lo and behold, they appeared!

With 16 levels you can imagine the variety of villains that they bring into the game. There’s obviously Shredder, and of course you do fight Bebop and Rocksteady, but they also put in characters like Baxter Stockman and some really obscure fan favourites that I won’t dare spoil. There’s also a lot of side characters to rescue which lead to another aspect of the game which is getting the collectibles from them to earn rewards.

There are even tributes to the classic arcade games, Turtles in Time get a few references as well as the other arcade games, even the soundtrack references the older games. The game even starts with a new version of the classic Ninja Turtles theme song, which is undisputedly one of the greatest theme songs of all time, so the second that starts playing my attitude was ‘yes, more of this!’

I’m not even the biggest Ninja Turtles fan but I did like the old cartoons, so a lot of the references here were great for me. I will admit that a few of the old game references flew over my head since I didn’t play them too much, but man, if you’re a Turtles fan, there is so much good stuff in here!

• Multiplayer

Multiplayer is great, for one thing, they treat it like an arcade game that anyone can leave and join at any time- including with online multiplayer. The fact that I could open a room early on and have other players join me was just great. I really enjoyed playing the game even with random people. In fact, I felt that this way was the best way to play the game. And the fact that it had that much openness and transparency was great. There’s also not a shortage of players, this game allows up to 6 players in multiplayer and that was way more than I was expecting. This feature is available in both online and offline multiplayer. Seriously, you want to play this game in multiplayer at almost all times. It’s even really good fun with just one extra person, and for some of the later levels you’ll really want to have an extra helping hand.

• Graphics

This is probably the best looking 2D Ninja Turtles game ever. It does a fantastic job replicating the old arcade game look as well as modernising it. Smart choices to have the late 80s cartoon designs as opposed to the more recent Nickelodeon designs. The game strikes a very good balance and also has a very good framerate, even when the game was in online multiplayer. They did an excellent job replicating what it would feel like playing this on a real arcade machine, and I think that it’s really commendable because that’s not an easy task.

• Soundtrack

I already mentioned the new version of the Ninja Turtles theme, but even without that this game has a brilliant soundtrack. It has a lot of nods to Turtle history but it still feels like its own thing. There’s an excellent mix of the classic and modern games being brought to this one. I really would recommend making sure you have a good sound system when playing this game.

MIXED

• Online multiplayer

I played the Nintendo Switch version of the game and online multiplayer was definitely a bit of a mixed bag. For one thing, while I was trying to join online rooms there was connection issues on a number of occasions. It fortunately happened less frequently when I was the host, which leads me to believe that the issues I was experiencing were tied to the internet of other players. That being said, when the multiplayer did work (which was the case most of the time) it’s fantastic. Even with random people, it’s a great time. On a few occasions I did manage to get 6 players, and it’s amazing how fun it can be. This is one of the reasons I had multiplayer switched on at all times. I would really recommend playing it that way, even if you don’t have many friends to join in- though you can invite friends or make the room private if you wish to.

• Single player

Single player functions fine and is still very enjoyable. I actually played this back and forth on a journey to Liverpool and I found that playing the game by myself to be a lonely experience, especially when I was playing some of the later levels and I didn’t have back up for some of the more difficult boss fights. But the fact that I didn’t have someone to back me up in that regard definitely didn’t help and while single player is an enjoyable experience, it definitely isn’t as enjoyable as multiplayer- so most of the fun of the game is due to having friends to play with or a good internet connection.

CONS

• Really short

This is a minor con since games of this nature are expected to be really short (in truth, it was even a lot longer than I was expecting) but you can beat story mode in about 2 hours. Arcade mode is there if you want a challenge and you’re limited to a number of lives in that mode. Though, I’m wondering if a few months down the line if I’ll enjoy playing the same 2 hours over and over again with random people- especially since it seems that this game wont get any DLCs in the future.

I can’t guarantee that my friends are going to want to play this at all times, so it feels like playing the same 16 levels will have diminishing returns.

• Can’t level up in other people’s sessions

Feel free to tell me I’m completely wrong about this- but I could never get my characters to level up when I was playing with someone else. For example, I joined a game at one point playing as Michelangelo for about half an hour and I came back, and he hadn’t levelled up. If I’m not doing something wrong and that is the case, that’s a massive knock for me, since it means that I wouldn’t be benefiting from playing with other people and helping them in their games.

• Cross play

I must stress that I didn’t test the cross play feature at this time. Despite the fact that I have a game pass subscription, I haven’t downloaded the PC or Xbox version of this game. I did, however, tune into the Good Vibes Gaming twitch stream in which they were using the cross play feature, and it had numerous issues. Obviously, this affects the multiplayer between the PC and Xbox versions specifically, though if they are planning to bring cross play to the Playstation and Switch version, they really need to make sure that it’s fixed and working before doing so. During that stream the team had massive connection issues.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is one of the best arcade beat-em-ups released in years, joining Streets of Rage 4, as being one of the champions of the genre. There’s a ton of great stuff for Ninja Turtles fans, the multiplayer is great, the soundtrack is phenomenal, the gameplay and combat are very addictive and rewarding. I do feel that the single player isn’t as great and this drags down the experience slightly as well as the game being short, but those are both standard with this genre and is expected. I will say that the cross play and levelling up issues in multiplayer do annoy me a little bit. That being said, I highly recommend picking this game up for some good multiplayer fun. This is really one of the most addictive multiplayer games that has come out this year.

Final Score: 9.3/10

The Quarry

(available for PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox One & Series X, PC. PS5 version used for this review)

The Quarry is the latest game from Supermassive Games who previously made Until Dawn and the Dark Pictures anthology series. This is the latest in that vein of games, though Supermassive haven’t given it the Dark Pictures label, showing a clear distinction from those games and seeming as though they wanted to tie this closer to Until Dawn, considering that that has been the most successful so far. The marketing has been very successful with this game, it’s done quite well in terms of trailers, and it touts a big cast with some famous names in, like Scream star David Arquette, Detective Pikachu star Justice Smith and Modern Family’s Ariel Winter, to name a few.

This also feels like the first one of these games to take advantage of the new consoles, with particular emphasis to buy these on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Though from what I’ve seen of people playing the PS4 and Xbox One versions, it’s not much of a downgrade- though you are going to pay more for the next gen versions. My copy, for example, cost £70- which is as much as what Sony is charging for its first party titles.

I’ve had some issues in the past with the Dark Pictures Anthology games, but I went into this with a bit of enthusiasm because I felt like a lot of player points were listened to.

If you’re not aware of these games, they’re basically 3rd person action-horror games that are like ‘make-your-own-choice’ movies. You get very stereotypical slasher horror characters and you’ll be controlling 8 of them. Your goal is to try and get most of them out alive, but you may not necessarily be able to succeed, considering that you won’t be fighting characters, but by making quick-time decisions that affect the story, which can get characters killed. In my playthrough, I made some very dumb decisions under pressure that got my characters killed. The game does warrant repeat playthroughs this way, because there are trophies and game achievements for various ways out. For example, there’s a trophy for getting the ending where everyone dies and one for where everyone lives.

PROS

• Story and performances

I’ve never really been a huge fan of the storylines in the games that Supermassive have brought out since Until Dawn, and The Quarry clearly takes inspiration from Until Dawn, the plot structures are actually quite similar in a few ways, but aren’t quite the same. As a plot goes, it’s quite good. And it will obviously change depending on the decisions you make in the game. You can have certain characters interact in certain ways, some might gain a moral conscience in parts of the game and some may become morally bankrupt where they sabotage another character or deliberately screw up. That being said though, they gave us lots of characters with decent personalities and many of them I wanted to see come out alive – there were only a few where I thought I didn’t want them to see the end.

The game also makes it a lot clearer when decisions are being made that will affect the story, even early on, since the game flashes ‘Path Chosen’ part way, and when the consequences of a decision are made it will then flash with ‘Path Update’. It doesn’t warn you in advance, so in a first playthrough you may end up walking into one of these and there is no rewind button for it. If you didn’t want that character to die and you’ve made that choice, sorry but you’re going to have to wait until the next playthrough!

The performances are really good in this game. Most of the actors are doing motion capture, and I thought that they all did well considering they’re having to do a very hard task of acting and imagining all while in a blank studio.

I did a stream for the last Dark Pictures anthology game and at the beginning of it we didn’t like most of the characters so one of the people in chat wrote a joke of what the solution was going to be- and it ended up being the write answer! This time around it’s a much better plotline and it delivered a very good twist down the line.

In the first playthrough that I did for this review I didn’t really get much out of some of the twists that were unveiled- in fact, some of the characters were barely in it because of my decisions. It does have some of the problems that Until Dawn had of bouncing around in between subplots. However, unlike Until Dawn, it has way more moments where characters can be killed. There’s not too many moments of a character having immunity.

As a whole, the story this time around is a much better improvement.

• Graphics

I already talked about motion capture being used and it’s still pretty good here. I think that the team has improved on the graphics since Until Dawn, and this game looks gorgeous on the PS5. It does a very good job getting the actor’s likenesses, in particular I would say Justice Smith and David Arquette look particularly recognisable. Ariel Winter was a bit harder to spot at first, but I think it’s because I’m not used to her having hair that short in a role.

The graphics are really good! I think they did a good job overall. Some people have said that there’s a few weaknesses and the uncanny valley is still kind of in effect (I did notice sometimes that characters had eye movements that didn’t sync up properly or weird expressions) but as a whole, this game seems to be acting as a test for Supermassive games to get used to the technology within the new consoles, and I’m interesting to see what they’ll do next.

• Co-op and multiplayer

I had to do a test run of this one by myself unfortunately since I couldn’t get anyone to join me over the weekend that the game came out, but I think that this will be the game I put on in the next big gathering when my extended family comes up to visit.

It follows a similar idea to the other Dark Pictures anthologies; you simply have to have one controller and you pass it around depending on which character is in control. Normally, this could end up being a bit disproportionate, for example if there’s three people playing, someone is going to have control of more characters so they have a better chance of getting out and surviving, but this is handled pretty well. For one thing, the co-op has been extended this time and is up to eight players, and I really imagine it’s going to be really fun to have people work together. Unlike the other games, one of your characters can die due to someone else’s decisions, which is something that happened to me on a playthrough. I had one character hide and this resulted in another character dying without giving me the opportunity to do anything about it. I made a couple of dumb decisions in my first playthrough!

• Much better quicktime events

The quicktime events in Man of Medan are a little overcomplicated. They often result in a lot of timing sequences that I didn’t feel were very newcomer-friendly, which these games do have a broad appeal so it seemed odd. This time, all the quicktime events are timed only to a few buttons, most notably the left analogue stick. What’s more, the timing is way more forgiving. I think I barely ever messed up on quicktime events. That being said, I was playing the default option for most of the time- and there are accessibility options. You can make the time on these events shorter or longer depending on your desired play style. There’s even more accessibility options such as aim assist for when you have to use the left analogue stick and the right trigger to aim a shot, when you’re trying to protect a character or protect yourself.

I found that some of the sequences were a bit more forgiving. The only ones I had more trouble with were the holding your breath ones, those felt a little less forgiving in terms of the timing mechanic, but as a whole, I felt that this will suit beginners quite well.

• Rewind button

At the start of each playthrough you’re given three lives which can act as a rewind button to save lives. In co-op, you need to make sure to use these wisely – there are no extra ones. Don’t think that you can make a dumb decision and you can just quit and reload so the game will take you back, it will take you right back to the cutscene where you screwed up. The fact that the game even has this option will help massively for people who go trophy hunting.

MIXED

• Gameplay

I’ve always been a bit mixed on the gameplay in these sorts of games since while I do enjoy exploring the environments and uncovering all the different aspects of the mystery it does feel a bit annoying that none of the characters have a run or quick moving button. There’s a load of sequences where I wanted the game to speed up. There have still been a few shakeups, in games like Until Dawn you had the totem poles which gave you the possible futures, and this time you have tarot cards of which there are multiple to find in each chapter. You don’t get them immediately- the new host this time is a fortune teller. They will give you a vision of the possible future, but if you find multiple cards you still only get to be shown one each time. Some are really deceptively difficult to find, though with enough exploration you should be able to find at least one in every chapter, and some of them are tied into some interesting backstory. I’d really recommend going out of your way to look for them on a repeat playthrough.

The gameplay feels majorly improved, simply for the fact of the more forgiving quicktime events and the rewind button. There’s a lot less times in this game where I felt annoyed with the game’s design, especially comparing it to the Dark Pictures anthology games.

• Movie mode

Movie mode is a new addition for this game, it essentially means that you can witness the story without playing the game by compiling a series of cut scenes depending on the outcome, and it becomes your personal movie night. It might shave a few hours off of the game but it’s still a long movie! A couple of the options that they have are good since they may give you ideas and tips for particular outcomes. The game mode gives you three options: everyone lives, everyone dies, or director’s chair- meaning that you can choose how characters respond to events and can decide what their general characteristics will be. I think that this one is the most fun since you can change it up every time and see how the story turns out.

I think that this mode is quite good since it can be exhausting to try out all of the different playthroughs, but I don’t think that it’s the best way to experience it. It’s way more fun to get a few friends round and consult decisions as the game is going on. But I do think that it’s good for a horror movie night in!

CONS

• No online multiplayer at Launch

I really wish that this would have been kept in! As I recall, most of the Dark Pictures anthology had online multiplayer, but you aren’t given the choice for this. Everyone has to be in the same room! It’s quite annoying considering that me and a lot of my friends bought the game believing that there was going to be online multiplayer and it just wasn’t there. Supermassive have confirmed that the game will recive an update that will add online multiplayer though at this time that date has not been confirmed

I think they would do well to patch this in as a new feature.

• The game is too dark sometimes

I don’t mean dark as in tone, but dark as in lighting. There were a lot of times where I wished someone had turned on the light- I could barely see what I was doing. There’s been a lot of effort into making these characters and environments look good as the game developers have covered this up most of the time with the lighting. You might want to mess with the game’s lighting and contrast settings.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The Quarry is a very good spiritual successor to Until Dawn. It’s quite a long game, coming in at 9-10 hours, which is about an hour or two longer than Until Dawn and significantly longer than the Dark Pictures Anthology games. I’d say you can do a good playthrough of this in 2 or 3 goes.

It’s a much better multiplayer experience considering how good the characters are and how more forgiving the gameplay is.

For £70 though, this game offers a lot of replay value especially if you’re trophy hunting on the PlayStation version, I think £70 may be too much for this game. It’s very well put together and I think it’s worth it but as a whole I’m not entirely sure. It depends on how much you think the gameplay length matches the value, but you might want to wait for a sale on this one. If you liked Until Dawn, this is the best one I’ve played since that one came out.

I’ve seen reviews describe this game as uneven, and on a technical level it’s got some issues, but as a whole I think it really works.

Final Score 9.1/10

Nintendo Switch Sports

Nintendo has now decided that just at the point where the switch outsells the Nintendo Wii in lifetime sales, it’s time to resurrect the Wii Sports brand for its fourth entry, renaming it Nintendo Switch Sports to of course reflect the console that it is on. Nintendo Switch Sports now being the fourth entry in the series comes with a few returning sports as well as a few new ones, and uses the gyro controls in the joy cons to reflect the movement of the characters in the game, similar to how the Wiimotes used their motion controls.

If you were a fan of those games you might end up realising that this is within that collection of games. The Miis that were so characterised with Wii Sports aren’t on the box cover despite the fact that they are available to be part of your character in the game, which I think was a bit of a mistake.. And it’s not entirely obvious from small factors like the look of the logo. Personally, I think that this game is a genius idea considering how many people own Switches now. Resurrecting one of your best ever selling games from what is now your bestselling system is great, but whether it will translate to sales is another matter. I actually think this game would have sold mega bucks if it was released much earlier when we were all still locked in our houses, similar to how Animal Crossing: New Horizons being released in lockdown gave us all something that we felt was missing in our lives at the time.

But how does the game actually stand out? Especially considering how the Switch doesn’t have a sensor bar similar to the Wii. So, as I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, gyro controls can be a bit temperamental at the best of times, the best implementation of them so far has been in Splatoon 2, and a game like this can really live or die based on the controls.

PROS

• Sport Selection

The game has launched with 6 sports, though as we learnt in the February Nintendo Direct, there is a plan to add a seventh sport in Autumn, where the series will add golf into the mix. Which I’m certain will please many people who enjoyed Wii Sports Golf.

The six sports in question so far include the returning sports of bowling, tennis, and Chambara (the sword fighting game from Wii Sports Resort) as well as new sports of football, volleyball, and badminton. One of the most popular, boxing, is still not here. Though, apparently data miners have found code for dodgeball within the game so keep an eye out for that one to perhaps be released later. I wouldn’t rule out that more sports past golf would be added into the game.

Once you’ve done your character creation, you can play almost any sport you want at any time, both as single player and online multiplayer. Sports have varying quality. Football comes with two options: Shootout mode, which requires a leg strap with comes with the physical version of the game, (though if you’ve purchased this game digitally, it will work with the leg strap that comes with Ringfit Adventure) I tried out both modes and I will say that football works quite well, and I think shootout mode is the most realistic because it’s the only one where you use your feet. That being said, it was very fun to do and the only complaint I have is that the camera is a bit funny at times, it actually reminded me of Rocket League, only without the cars. I think some people are having trouble getting to grips with it. I was in a game where we won 4-0, and we only won that way because 2 of the goals were own goals by the opposite team, including one where I felt that they clearly had a camera or control issue.

Badminton is actually a lot of fun, and it’s a good 1v1 sport, since tennis requires it to be doubles matches (you can play 1v1 for that, but you have to control 2 characters at the same time). Badminton does control very similar to tennis, but the differences are noticeable, and it definitely feels like a more intense game than tennis does at times.

Chambara is my least favourite, I’ll go into more details in the controls section of this review, but it felt like the one that was most based on luck than anything else, and I kind of wish that the team brought back boxing instead of Chambara. I think it was for the more family-friendly image, but I’ve seen news footage of pensioners playing the boxing game on Wii Sports, it definitely doesn’t come with any serious implications of violence.

Tennis and bowling are very similar if you’ve played them on Wii Sports. Tennis definitely is a lot of fun and functions very well, and bowling is genius! There are so many great ideas that they’ve had with it. If you’re playing offline you can create bowling obstacle courses to test your accuracy and it acts like a bowling equivalent of mini golf. The online version is where I had the most fun with this; the game essentially becomes a kind of battle royale mode with the lowest scoring players being eliminated after three rounds. I haven’t won a game of bowling to date, but I’ve come in the top 3 a few times and it’s been very good fun, it’s really been the most fun I’ve had in the entire game.

One of the newer games is volleyball, and it’s another 2v2 game, though, unlike tennis where you can turn it into a 1v1, this game requires at least 4 characters to be in it, so you will have to have an AI partner if you’re not playing online. This game definitely requires the most of a learning curve since you’ll be doing one of four things: serving or bouncing the ball, blocking a player from getting the ball over, passing the ball over to the spiker or spiking the ball in hopes that it will get past the other team’s defences. Luckily the game knows that there is a curve to this and will give you alerts about what you’re doing at that point in time. If you’re playing this game offline with three other people, make sure you have a big room! I don’t really have a big living room, so I insisted we didn’t play volleyball at my place.

Overall, it’s a very good selection, and you definitely can get into any sport you like at any time. After a while, you will be getting some new options. I don’t think there’s many weaknesses in the sport options, the only one I didn’t personally like was Chambara, but I do think that that one will have its fans for whatever reason.

• Multiplayer functionality

Now the game functions quite well, I only really had issues when I ran into any lag or disconnect with my internet. I have heard some people say they have had lag in the game, but I haven’t really noticed it myself.

The beginning of the game will take you to Spoco Square which really doesn’t have as much personality as Woohoo Island from Wii Sports Resort.. After you’ve done one of each of the sports, you can pick 3 sports at a time and it will find you an online game available to launch you into. Or, you can pick 1 or 2 games to increase your chances of playing a particular sport. Or, you can insist on one sport in particular, while it may take you a bit longer it will get you into that game. How well that will do with time when the player base thins out a bit, we will have to see.

Online multiplayer functions fine and split-screen multiplayer functions well, I wouldn’t say that there are any major malfunctions at this time. Though I have heard some people have had issues with the online multiplayer which has of course affected reviews, because Nintendo didn’t allow early reviewers to play online until the day of reviews, which means that a lot of reviews couldn’t be done until after the release date so that players could experience all of the game’s functions.

My report of it was quite good, though I think it was a dumb move on Nintendo’s part to restrict access to reviewers.

MIXED

• Gyro controls

Let’s get down to the control business, because like I said earlier, games like this live or die on the controls. For the most part, they’re really good, and they function pretty well. There are times where it feels like I’m just flailing the control instead of trying anything with accuracy, for example in tennis, it felt like no matter what way I was swinging it that the game picked where the ball would go. For the most part, it still functions pretty well and controls fine. Football feels pretty weird considering you use both joy cons and at the moment unless you’re playing shootout mode, neither one of them is on your leg?

Bowling, volleyball, and badminton didn’t give me any control issues. Chambara is where I felt a bit off. For one thing, you have to re-centre the gyro pointer on the television each round. While the controls do seem to replicate your arm movements in many ways, I think that it contributes to the fact that when you swing it it seems to be not as effective. It almost feels like random luck for who swings and who blocks. It’s one of the reasons why I really didn’t play much chambara. I didn’t really have much of an issue with controls, but there are a few little issues I had that kept me from completely seeing the positives.

• Live service features without live service microtransactions

This ties into the character creation. You can basically get lots of cosmetics such as words you can use for your character’s nickname, makeup, glasses, outfits, different bowling balls or tennis rackets, etc. The good news is, there are no micro transactions! You have to earn these by doing well in sports and you get multipliers added to your scores while receiving a free gift, depending on how well you do in the sport. For example, you can get an amplifier in bowling if you get a strike or if you make it to the top 3 or top 5. The thing is though, the gift isn’t always the one you want, it’s random- and they all have expiry dates. For example, there was one that had 12 days from launch before it was gone. There is a good reason for you to go for these, they do come with completion bonuses, but I do think it feels like artificial incentive and the fact that it’s random also kind of annoys me.. Again, it feels like a live service game without it being completely live service. It’s coming with a lot of benefits but also comes with some negatives.

The whole thing feels kind of confusing. Just before I finished writing this review, they added a new football heavy selection, but it didn’t come with the exact time that it’s going to expire unlike the starter set and the cute set that came with launch. I haven’t been playing it for an incredibly long amount of time, so I don’t even know how often these are going to rotate. But it is what it is, so we’ll have to see as time goes on..

• Character creator

I don’t really dislike the character creation you get in Switch Sports as the default option. I know people said that they look a bit uncanny, but as a whole I thought it was alright. What I don’t like about it is that there’s not as many options when released compared to creating a Mii. You can transfer your Mii to be your character, but that comes with its own issues. Mainly, you’re limited to how much customisation you can actually do- you can’t put glasses or a hat on your Mii, you’re limited to some equipment in the sports and the outfit your Mii wears. But as a whole, I would say that they look fine but I wish there were more options when you start the game. I think a lot of people are embracing them as most people that I play with online use them over the Miis.

CONS

• Playing portable

The Switch is a hybrid device. Its biggest selling point is the fact that you can take it on the go with you and you can plug it into a television also. So with that in mind, I took the game with me a couple of times when I was leaving the house. I took it with me when I was in the office as well as a Magic the Gathering night in my hometown. And man, is this game impossible to play portably! Not in a literal sense, but it’s way more difficult than is practical. For one thing, you have to detach the joycons. So, if you’re using an original model switch rather than an OLED switch, you haven’t got a better kickstand. Even though I was using an OLED, the screen felt too small. I had to often lean in to see where I was aiming in bowling and I sometimes even had trouble seeing the ball when I was playing games like tennis.

What’s more, it’s not great if you’re not in a big environment. I actually nearly hit my friend when I was playing tennis! It also probably looks a lot weirder to spectators. I think that Nintendo knows this because all of the marketing for Switch Sports at the minute shows people playing it on the television and all of the warning signs in-game tells you to keep the joy cons attached with the harnesses so you don’t fling them into the television. But all of those warnings show television screens! Nintendo really wants you to play this docked.

I never really enjoyed playing this game portably much, no matter how big the environment I had was. I think it’s kind of lacking in that sense, they should have put a bit more thought into the fact that this was coming to a portable system.

• No Switch Lite accessibility

All of the games require joycon detachment, and after the Switch Lite came out and people complained that some games required the purchase of extra joycons, I thought that Nintendo would instruct their developers to avoid games that required a purchase of extra joycons. But obviously that’s not the case with this game. But that being said, that means that if you have a Switch Lite, you’ll need joycons and a stand to use it, since the Lite is entirely portable. I think that it’s rather telling that the adverts I saw for this game, the Lite didn’t appear at the end of the advert- it just showed the regular Switch and the Switch OLED. Nintendo really wants to discourage Lite owners from getting this game, but the Lite is where a lot of people have purchased Switches because they will be playing their games portably and not playing on the television. I think they’ve really limited their player base by not accounting for players on that system.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Nintendo Switch Sports is a really good casual game, I actually had a really good time with it. I think its biggest flaws are that it’s not very portable-friendly and the gyro controls do have a couple of issues particularly in Chambara. But as a whole, it functions really well. Whoever thought of turning bowling into a 16 person battle royale is a genius!

While I don’t think it’s going to have the same impact that Wii Sports did, I think that Nintendo could turn this into an excellent live service game and just keep adding new sports to it. Especially if Nintendo’s marketing plan is for the Switch to go on for a lot longer than any of us anticipated.

I think this is a good game for your downtime, but I’m not sure how much you’re going to get out of it when much bigger titles come out. I’m not sure how much I’m personally going to get out of it when I’m trying to complete Xenoblade Chronicles 3.

As a nice, fun, casual game, I think it’s just as good as some of the Wii Sports games, as I think it’s a good game alongside 51 Worldwide Classics.

FINAL SCORE: 8.3/10

And now Elliot’s review

I don’t think that anyone, not even Nintendo themselves, were expecting Wii Sports to be as much of a breakout success as it ended up being. What started off as a tech demo for the Wii Remote ended up being one of the most beloved games in Nintendo history and led to it being one of the most sold games of all time. A number of fans have been wanting a follow up to the game for years (some jokingly) which we surprisingly got when Nintendo announced Nintendo Switch Sports which released on 29th April 2022.

Seeing as there’s no story to speak of, we’ll just move straight onto the presentation which is good in some parts, and bad in others. For starters, you’ve probably already noticed that the designs for your avatars have been criticised since the game was first announced, criticisms that I agree with. They are very unappealing, looking more like something you’d find in a mobile game or one of those third party games you’d find on the Wii, they just seem lifeless and don’t stand out at all. Luckily you can use Mii’s if you want, unfortunately however if you do you will be more restricted on customizability options as opposed to the game’s own models. Outside of that though, I do like the courts that you play in, they’re very simple and follow the game’s theme perfectly (even if that theme is just the Nintendo Switch Sports logo and a lot of blue). As for the music, it’s fine… just fine. It mostly just serves the purpose of background noise and is ultimately not that memorable, but it’s not to the point where I find myself disliking it. 

Nintendo Switch Sports plays pretty much the same way as Wii Sports does. You play from a select number of sports with a heavy reliance on motion controls. At time of writing, you have a selection of six games to pick from:Tennis, Bowling, Badminton, Chambara, Volleyball and Football, though Nintendo have said that they are adding more games in the future. While other people would complain that they released the game unfinished, I would disagree, the game never feels like it’s missing out on content and not once did it feel like it was lacking in any way. 

Every time you play a game online you’ll receive points depending on how you played, mostly for long rallies, if you win a game and things like that. When you reach one hundred points, you’ll be able to receive an item at random from a small selection of cards. These cards will only be around for about a week, however they are always swapped out for another and you’re given a decent number of points after each match so you’ll have plenty of chances and time to be able to get all the items. 

Now from here on this review is going to be structured a little differently from my normal reviews. Rather going with my usual format, I’m instead going to split each sport into their own sections and talk about them individually. So without further ado…

Tennis

Tennis is, for the most part, the same as it is in Wii Sports, the entire goal of the game is to swing the Switch Joy-Con to hit the ball and the character moves automatically towards it. It’s very simple, but a lot of fun. Unlike some other sports in this game, the play rules are different when you play offline as opposed to when you play online, primarily in the points system. When you play offline, the points work just like they would in a normal game of tennis, with you getting to decide the number of games you play, when you play online however, you only play one match and the winner is whoever scores up to seven first. Unfortunately though, I have to admit that tennis is better in Wii Sports. First of all, I said that your character moves automatically to the ball and darts towards it when you swing, or at least it should. While it does most of the time and does it pretty well actually, sometimes the character won’t dart towards the ball when I swing and will just stand completely still and swing from there, it luckily doesn’t happen too often but it’s annoying when it does. Another issue is that the game decided to attempt to add a bit more depth into the game by making it possible to mess up slightly on the swing, giving your opponent a chance to do a powerful strike at the ball. It’s not the mechanic that I struggle with, I actually welcome it, the main problem that I have with it is that I’ll have messed up the swing and have no idea why. The game doesn’t make it clear how I messed up, especially when I’m certain I managed to swing the same distance and timing perfectly in the past. I just wish that the game would tell me why I messed up so I can avoid it rather than having to guess. The last issue, which is an issue with the game as a whole, is with the Joy-Cons themselves. As I mentioned in my The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD review, the Joy-Cons aren’t as well suited to motion controls as a regular Wii Remote is, and it shows. Even in a game as simple as this I still find the game getting my swings completely wrong. I’ve genuinely lost count of the number of times I swung left and the game swung right and vice versa, once again it doesn’t happen too often but it’s super annoying when it does. 

Bowling 

Just like tennis, bowling plays pretty much the exact same as its Wii Sports counterpart. With you aiming your throw down the runway and tossing your ball towards a set of pins (sadly you can’t throw the ball behind you and make the Mii’s jump, I’m still in mourning). In local you can have a standard game with just yourself or other players in the same room or you can do a special course, which adds a number of obstacles in the way of your throws, which I actually quite like, it adds a level of challenge that I really enjoy. When you play online however, you play against sixteen other players in a battle royale, where players are eliminated every three rounds and you all compete to stay in the game. This is probably the best thing that was added to the game, it adds a level of tension that I did not think was possible in a game of bowling and it’s just a really cool idea. And before you ask, no I haven’t won one of these – the highest I’ve ever ranked was third –  and I doubt I ever will (the bowling players are so good it’s actually scary). 

Chambara

Chambara is basically sword fighting. You get the option of three weapons, sword, charge sword and twin sword, that you’ll be able to use in the game. In the game the goal is to knock your opponent off the platform. You swing the Joy-Con to swing the sword, obviously, and you can hold down the ZR button to block an incoming attack, if the swing isn’t at the same angle as the block then you stagger and will be susceptible to an attack. This is honestly my least favourite game in the bunch, to the point where I could only stomach to play a few games of it. First of all, this is where the motion controls are at their worst. There are numerous times where I find myself swinging the sword only to have my avatar swing at a different angle from me despite the fact that I was certain that I got it right. I feel the need to carefully aim before I swing and, considering that you do need to be quick to get a hit in, that’s really not a good thing to be thinking of. The blocking on the other hand feels like it’s completely random if it actually works or not, there have been numerous times where I was certain I was blocking in a different direction than my opponent’s swing, and yet the attack still went through, it just left me frustrated and salty by the end. And the less I say about my online games, the better. Just a massive disappointment all around. 

Badminton

Badminton is one of the three new sports added to this game. It plays a lot like tennis, where you just swing the Joy-Con, except this one seems to be a bit deeper than that one. Rather than just swinging the Joy-Con left or right, you’ll mostly be swinging it diagonally. There are also multiple types of swings as well, an upward swing that you have more control over but is also a lot slower, or an overhead swing that happens when the shuttlecock is above you, that hits harder but you have little control over. This is probably the mode that I played the most, but I can’t deny, I’m a tiny bit mixed on it. I do find it a lot of fun, I enjoy that it requires more technique than tennis does and, because of the small court, these rallies can go on for a long time, which heightens the tension of the game, though they can get a little annoying after a while if they go on for too long. On the other hand though, it is way too easy to fumble on. If the shuttle is a little out of reach and you swing then you’ll find yourself messing up on the return and your opponent can do a power strike. This isn’t the problem I have though, that award goes to the tripping. If the shuttlecock is especially out of reach you’ll end up tripping over and messing up the return, to make matters worse it takes an eternity for you to get back up, meaning that it’s an almost guarantee that your opponent will get a score on you. And to make matters even worse, you don’t learn about this in the tutorial section of the game, I learned about this through a bloody loading screen, which leads to a problem with the game as a whole. The tutorials only tell you the simple controls rather than how the games fully work and thus leaving you to figure out the rest on their own. Another problem with this game is the motion controls. Because the game developers decided to have your racket follow the movements with your Joy-Con, just flicking the controller isn’t always enough. On numerous occasions, when I would swing the remote to swing the racket the game would just move the racket to the side slightly rather than swing it. The Joy-Con would need recalibrating very frequently as well, as it’ll end up off centre after a couple of games, it does get annoying. Despite that though, I do still find the game a lot of fun, I would probably say that it’s my second favourite game in this collection. 

Volleyball

While I admit I’m not the best at this one, this is probably my favourite game in the collection. This is easily the most complex one so far, as it requires the player to do multiple different actions for when they bump, set and strike. It’s also probably the hardest to get right, as when your opponent strikes the ball on to your side it’s not the easiest to predict where it’s going to end up and you’ll have to manually move your character to get the chance to bump the ball. What I especially like about it is that, unlike other games, if you mess up slightly, it’ll tell you how by saying whether you did the action too early or late, something that I wish the other games would do. It relies a lot on teamwork as well as you’re having to put a lot of trust into your partner to not mess up and vice versa. Honestly, I just really like this one, I don’t have anything to really criticise it on, it’s pretty great. 

Football

This is an interesting one. Football is the game that plays most like, well, a video game. This is the only game in this collection and requires the use of both Joy-Cons, you use the left one to move the character with the thumb stick and you use the right to kick the ball by swinging it, and you can swing both to dive forward and do a header. If either team gets two points ahead of the other team, the normal, very oversized ball will be replaced with a golden ball that will be worth two points. This game is alright. It honestly reminds me a little of Rocket League, not just with the size of the ball but also with how easy it is to lose it and how little control you have over it. Though honestly, it didn’t really leave that much of an impact on me. While I can’t really think of anything I hate about it, I can’t exactly say that I love it. If there were any problems I have with it, I think that you run out of stamina a little too quickly and it takes a long time to build back up, especially considering how big the field is. Also if anyone quits the match early, the game keeps playing with one team having less players than the other, which is really annoying as the exact same thing happens in Splatoon and it’s still something I don’t like here. 

Overall, while some sports are definitely better than others and Chambara is a mess that I will not want to touch with a ten-foot pole, I still had a lot of fun with the game. While I can say that Wii Sports does some things better – mostly with the motion controls – I can happily say that this is a worthy successor. So yeah, I do recommend this game if you’re a fan of Wii Sports and I hope you have fun with them. Just make sure you are careful of your surroundings and try not to break any lights while playing bowling like an idiot… like I did.

7.7/10

The House of the Dead Remake

(Available for Nintendo Switch only)

The House of the Dead remake was announced during an indie showcasing that Nintendo place online, and is yet another example of SEGA handing over one of their classic franchises to outside studios in order to create further entities in their series- this has happened before with titles such as Shenmue 3 and Streets of Rage 4.

This time, the remake has been handled by a small Polish studio, Megapixel Studios, who handled the remake of Panzer Dragoon. While I wasn’t that favourable towards the Panzer Dragoon remake when it came out, I heard that it got better down the line with free updates but I’ve not actually gone back to that so I can’t personally confirm or deny that.

The remake has been kicked around the release schedule quite a bit, it was meant to come out in late 2021, but obviously has only now been released in April 2022 and is intended to be a complete remake of the arcade gun shooter. But because there is no gun shooter for the switch, it is taking advantage of Switch’s out-the-box multiplayer by having each player use the gyro controls in each individual joycons. Though, the game is still pro controller friendly.

I will point out that although the game is Nintendo Switch friendly now, there supposedly has been leaks that the game with also be ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and hopefully a PC version down the line. Though, you might want to hold off on that after you read this review.

PROS

• Gameplay

House of the Dead was an arcade game, though it did receive a couple of console ports as well as a PC version of two of the first games. The console port being on the Dreamcast. The remake is a complete one-for-one remake, it has the exact same layout, exact same enemies, pretty much the exact same everything. The big difference being an extra mode and how it handles lives- in the original game, it was designed to be topped up with coins. In this game, it starts you with about 9 ‘continues’ on normal difficulty, though you can buy extra credit to use for extra continues through the scores you make in the game. You lower your overall score, but you add extra time to potentially beat a level.

The game actually will let you choose what your starting level will be. Though, given the nature of these games I would argue that you should start from the first level. It almost felt like cheating when you started from extra levels!

The gameplay itself works really well, there’s a reason why The House of the Dead is a very addictive game. It’s a very ‘try this now’ type of game, and you get better as you learn each of the levels, something which you can now do without draining your wallet- you can now have almost unlimited redo’s.

The new mode this time is ‘horde mode’ which adds a ton of zombies to screen, and I would really recommend only doing this in multiplayer, single player makes it damn near impossible. The main mode, however, works very well, and I say overall it’s a pretty well put-together game. It’s obviously built off the back of something that’s already been successful, but it’s still commendable that they managed to get the thing running almost exactly like the arcade game.

The game also comes with a gallery option which lets you look into weaknesses of enemies that you’ve already encountered, something I would recommend if you’re struggling with certain areas.

Other than that, there’s not really much change, it’s pretty much The House of the Dead as you would expect it.

MIXED

• Controls

It controls fine for the most part. I tried playing this both portably and when the Switch was docked into the television.

When playing this game portably, I would not recommend using the gyro controls. It really doesn’t work that well and if you’ve got a table, it’s not improved by the fact that you’re trying to aim on a small screen. I played this on a Switch OLED and even with the wider screen it was quite difficult to aim. Though that being said, you should gyro aim pretty much at all times.

I did play this game with the pro controller, using the analogue sticks to aim and the A and B buttons to fire and load respectively. It does work and it’s good for if you don’t want your arms to get tired, but you will not gain the level of aim that you really need in order to be precise in this game. For example, one of the mini games is to save as many scientists as possible and I definitely missed out on more of those when I didn’t have the gyro aiming options.

The gyro aiming is fine in this one, though you do have to select it from the menu as it’s not the default option annoyingly. You also have to take both joycons out of the Switch before it would recognise it which I found rather annoying. Now when I got it working it was fine, it aimed precisely and was enjoyable, but my arm did get quite tired from constantly pointing it at the screen. You can adjust it by pressing the Y button to change the gyroscopic aim, very similar to that to Legends of Zelda: Skyward Sword as well as the port of Super Mario Galaxy that we got in Super Mario 3D All Stars.

I complained a ton that in Mario 3D All Stars that I had to recalibrate the gyro quite a bit, but I didn’t have to do it as much as in this game. I feel like I had to recalibrate it almost every 2 minutes- it was definitely a lot more temperamental than I would like, especially for a game like this one. If your aiming falls off at the wrong time, it could be the difference between getting a successful hit in or dying. Given the fact that this game is on rails, there’s not a lot of time to recalibrate. When it does work, it works very well, but it did annoy me how often I had to essentially relearn how to aim my gun.

CONS

• Graphical hiccups

The graphics in The House of the Dead remake look alright, there’s nothing amazing overall, but I can forgive it considering it’s a small studio working on this one. Even though its a remake, I wasn’t expecting a massive improvement on the original.

The frame rate also runs relatively fine, I didn’t notice many framerate hiccups. I did notice a fair few graphical hiccups though. There was an excessive amount of popping in several scenes that was very visible, and the game often would struggle with rendering multiple enemies. I didn’t really suffer from much slow down fortunately, but the graphics on this game don’t look amazing.

The biggest thing for me wrong with this game is the textures- they just look really off to me. It doesn’t feel like they were taking full advantage of the hardware. Now, that being said, I don’t think the lower level of graphics will affect the gameplay too much; I definitely noticed it more here than I did on a game like Cruising Blast, for example- which was also aiming to replicate old arcade games but does a really good job overall that you kind of don’t notice it’s mistakes.

The House of the Dead I think has a fair few issues in it that means that you notice the graphical issues a little bit more.

• Setting up multiplayer gameplay

Multiplayer is the best way to play House of the Dead. I had a ton of fun whenever I got to play co-op or multiplayer, however getting a game set up is really annoying. It’s not hard to get two joycons to work, that’s fine. Where it does fall down is the fact that you had to go into the pause menu almost as soon as you start the game… and once again, even if you turned on gyro aim in the options menu before the start of the game, it does not turn on automatically if you select multiplayer for the friend you’re playing with. You have to go into the pause menu at the start of the game when you turn it on.

This really annoyed me, because it threw our gameplay off on multiple occasions. There were times where we started new games and as a result, it meant that the game had a really stop and start nature. We didn’t exactly have a hard time but it was just really a drag! I think that the team could have done better in creating a better set up option in the beginning menus so you don’t have to press the start menu at the beginning of the game and select the gyro menu if you want it.

CONCLUSION

House of the Dead remake is a valiant attempt to make an arcade classic and it’s gameplay is good fun, especially if you have a friend to join you. By yourself, however, I think you notice way more of the issues within this game particularly on the controls and graphics front. Not to mention that in some of the boss fights their weaknesses only work when they feel like it. I’m referring particularly to the boss of the second level. I swear, their weaknesses only works half of the time!

I actually think that this game would have worked well if it had come with a simultaneous PC release, I feel like a mouse controller would have done well for this game, though the Switch was sort of perfect for this game, with the instant multiplayer with the consoles purchase as well as the gyro aiming. Though, as I mentioned, the gyro aiming is a little more temperamental that I would have liked.

If you enjoyed the original game, you should pick this game up at least for a nostalgia boost. Maybe wait for a sale on this one, since the content isn’t amazing. I actually wish that they had waited longer to release this game and they had done a double pack with a remake of the sequel attached since that game is actually a bit better. Though I would actually be kind of excited if Megapixel were working on a remake of House of the Dead 2, I certainly have no idea how this game is going to function on Xbox and PS4 if the data leak is to be believed.

My verdict really is that you should wait for a sale on this one. It’s not a bad game but it’s not exactly a good game either.

Final score 6.3/10

Kirby and the Forgotten Land

(available for Nintendo Switch only)

Kirby is celebrating its huge anniversary milestone by doing something that since its creation it has never done- a full 3D platformer! Whilst it’s not the first 3D Kirby game, (that would be Kirby Air Ride for the Gamecube) Kirby and the Forgotten Land looks to be one of the most ambitious Kirby games in years. Not only being the first time the game has become a 3D platformer, but looks to have implemented a lot of quality of life improvements that will warrant a new experience, something the series really needed, since to be honest it had kind of become a bit stale. Nothing against the previous Switch entries, such as Kirby Star Allies, but that did feel like it was a Kirby game that was playing it safe.

This new Kirby game does have a similar structure to a traditional Kirby game. This isn’t exactly like Super Mario Odyssey where you have vast open environments to explore. The levels are mostly linear with a few branching off pathways, each level containing tons of captured Waddle Dees to free to send back to the Waddle Dee Town, you’re guaranteed a minimum of three of them by the end of the level. The game in that sense is a lot similar to Super Mario Galaxy, though unlike Galaxy where you could only obtain one star at a time, in this game you can obtain all three Waddle Dees in one go.

So how does Kirby transition to 3D?

PROS

• Gameplay

The gameplay is excellent! The various collectible Waddle Dees certainly give you reasons to retry levels, and I did collect all 300 Waddle Dees for this playthrough, that being said, I would say do so, but only for the sense of completion, don’t expect a massive reward for collecting all of them. However, collecting as many as possible does expand the Waddle Dee Town which gives you a bunch of mini games for doing so. Other than that, there’s other collectibles in each level that also warrant replays, such as blueprints for upgrades to copy abilities (more on that later) as well as the collectible figurines. Though you might want to save your coins from each level, since with the exception for the first volume series, you can pick up all of them just by placing the coins in the dispenser machines. You will be able to finish volumes 2, 3, and 4 that way.

The levels do contain a large amount of Waddle Dees, usually between 10 or 11 but I came across a few with 9 early on. Another thing that makes level repeats worthwhile, is that the game doesn’t always repeat where they are or what you have to do to get some of them. The only thing that is guaranteed is that you get 3 for finishing the level and that there are 3, 4, or 5 in various hiding spots that usually require a bit of light exploration or puzzle solving. The rest are hidden behind extra challenges, these can result in things like removing wanted posters, finding a couple of secret passages, completing a certain challenge without falling into lava, reuniting a group of ducklings with their mum, etc. The variety is really quite good! What makes it more interesting is that you have to discover them for yourself, they are not revealed at the beginning of the level and you may end up figuring them out part way through- by which point you’ve only done a couple of tasks. For example, you might find out you need to remove a group of wanted posters, but by that point you may realise you missed one at the start of the level, meaning you’d have to replay it. If you discover a bunch of them but miss one at the end of the level, the completion of the level will actually reveal where the ones you missed were. The only ones that were guaranteed apart from completing the level and finding the hidden Waddle Dees were on the boss levels which all came with a beat the boss without taking damage achievement.

Not only was this a good incentive to replay levels, the gameplay itself was such fun it really warranted replaying. Kirby controls like a dream in this game, the team have done a brilliant job translating Kirby’s 2D moves to a 3D format, and all of the copy abilities came over very well also to improve combat. Trust me, as a platformer, this is one of the best ones in terms of gameplay and controls on the Switch.

The platforming challenges are so well designed without compromising Kirby’s accessibility that has given him the popular reputation. Even if you turn on the harder difficulty, this is not too hard of a game. I had it on the hard difficulty for most of the playthrough and I didn’t die too much at all, most of my deaths were during the boss fights. Most of Kirby’s moves are intact, you still have the floating jumps, the swallowing and blast back, and considering how many Kirby games I have played, it didn’t feel like a massive transition from 2D to 3D. This really does feel like a good job taking the 2D Kirby and changing it to a 3D perspective.

• Graphics

I wouldn’t say that Kirby is a graphical powerhouse, I will say that the art style looks fantastic. A smart decision was made to not go to the typical dreamland setting of the 2D games, to really give a sense of this new perspective they’ve chosen an overgrown, post-apocalyptic setting. Not to the extent where it feels like a Mad Max movie, the new setting does feel like it works for this series and doesn’t feel out of place. It feels like an abandoned world rather than a destroyed one.

The game has a few different themed environments this time around, there’s everything from a carnival to an ice world, a desert world, so your typical Kirby worlds are still there, and they pop out with some brilliant colour palettes as well. The team did a brilliant job making the levels feel distinct from one another, something I noticed was starting to disappear from the 2D games. What’s more, I think the game actually looks great when you play on a big TV as well as handheld. I have a Switch OLED and the game is really great playing on an OLED screen, the colours pop so much and it’s a beautiful looking game as a result.

I really can’t fault it in the graphics department, the art style is great and it’s graphically one of the better-looking games on the switch. As for the framerate, it works pretty well. It is locked at 30 frames per second but the game is built around it, so you won’t notice that so much.

• Copy abilities and mouthful mode

The copy abilities are nothing new in this game, but what is new is that you can find blueprints for upgrades, which you will have to pay for in the Waddle Dee Town. The upgrades can be switched in and out due to your tastes, but you really probably should be sticking with the final stage version of each of these, since the abilities do get better each time. A couple of new abilities have been added, most of them are the same as previous games but with the upgrades they do get a major boost in effectivity, so it really is worth going out of your way to get them.

Some of my new favourites are the Dragon Fire and Space Ranger ability, both of which made mincemeat of some of the bosses.

But the thing that has made the biggest splash since its announcement is Mouthful Mode, where Kirby swallows objects way larger than himself to take control of them, including things like cars, vending machines, traffic cones, and a few extras that haven’t been shown off in demos that I won’t spoil.

One of the things that surprised me the most was that I thought mouthful mode would be way more situational and only show up a few times, but it was a lot more widespread than I was expecting. You certainly can’t use it all the time, and they are capped to certain areas, but they are much more of an overall presence in the game than I expected. It’s certainly the most distinctive part of this game and it’s so much fun! I’m so glad these abilities weren’t so restricted because they are some of the best parts of the game. I won’t give away too much but my favourite part was the Lightbulb Kirby which added some extra vigilance to platform challenges.

Between these features, they all add to the gameplay which has allowed this game to stand out from other games in the series, which I think need to be incorporated in future games also.

• Level design

While the levels are linear, there are so many secrets to find in each level. It doesn’t feel like this is a team that has just started making 3D games, it feels like they’ve been making 3D Kirby games for years. Simple aspects like how the camera is positioned adds extra dimension to these levels. While it’s easy to go from Point A to Point B, it really encourages you to explore every aspect of the environment to get those Waddle Dees. As a result, this game has some of the best level design I’ve seen in years- it’s really well thought out. It’s one of those things you have to see to believe!

• Mini games

The mini games aren’t too distracting since they are completely optional in the Waddle Dee Town, but they are a nice distraction between levels! I particularly enjoyed the fishing game, as well as the fast-food joint game and the coliseum was a nice challenge, too. But if I had to point out a negative, I wasn’t a fan of the bull roll mini game. It functioned well in handheld mode but when I played it docked the gyro of the pro controller, it did not work as well as I would have liked, and I ended up failing more than succeeding this way as a result.

You don’t really need to do these mini games, but I would suggest giving them a go at least once.

• Soundtrack

It can’t be understated how much I really liked Kirby’s soundtrack in this game. There are some excellent song pieces here. One of the things I found interesting was that there weren’t too many remixes of old songs in the series, the team behind the music have really given this game its own identity. A couple of songs are used a few times repeatedly, but they’re really good so you won’t be too upset by that.

MIXED

• Boss fights

The boss fights are fine in this game and some do elevate themselves, but some can be really annoying. I’m looking at you, Sillydillo. It was a real challenge to get the Waddle Dee in your boss fight for not taking any damage!

The boss fights aren’t particularly tough apart from the Sillydillo and the final boss, I didn’t die to any of the others too often. Most of them weren’t too difficult to get the no damage Waddle Dee. They also really range in quality. The gorilla you fight at the beginning, for example, is remarkably uneventful and unchallenging… But then you get some excellent ones down the line.

I’m kind of bored of the fact that all Kirby games have some sort of fight with a giant tree, but hey, it’s tradition at this point. The way that they do it in this game is really excellent, I thought they did a brilliant job of changing the formula to fit the 3D perspective, and as a result, the move set is kind of interesting.

The only thing I’d say as a massive complaint for some of the boss fights is that they have some cheap attacks at times, and they can be kind of annoying.

CONS

• Art style in the post-game

Obviously, there is a post-game, most Kirby games in the past few years have a post-game so I’m not spoiling that. Without giving away why I think like this, I think that my previous compliments to the art style and the graphics are void from this part of the game. I did find most of the post-game rather forced, and this part also has a lot of repeated stuff in it. It’s certainly one of the most challenging aspects of the game, but once I did the bare minimum for this, I only wanted to get all of the Waddle Dees and take a break from all of it afterwards. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing really wrong with the post-game, but apart from the final boss of it, it’s not as eventful as I would have liked, but it did at least keep the game going for a bit longer and more of this gameplay is a plus for me.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land isn’t just one of the best games to release this year so far, it’s also one of the best Kirby games in the series to date! It does have a few cheap boss fights and the post-game isn’t as good as I’d like it to be, but I really enjoyed my time with it. This is a great platformer with some lovely challenges, and I really enjoyed my time playing each and every level. This is a joy to play, and I really think this is one of the best platformers you can get on the Switch, up there with things like Mario Odyssey. If this is what direction the Kirby team is taking, then I’m completely on board for it. This is now without a doubt the best game in the Kirby franchise.

Final Score 9.5/10

And now Reece’s review

My experience with Kirby and the Forgotten Land is that I have completed the post-game 100% and have gotten all the Copy Abilities upgraded to their final forms, the only things I haven’t done was finish the final colosseum cup and collect every figurine from the Gacha machines.

I played the entirety of the game using my Switch OLED, so performance may not reflect what occurs on the standard Switch or Switch Lite.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is the latest platformer game in the long running Kirby franchise that recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, It is developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo. It is also the first full platformer game that is in a 3D world, since all previous Kirby mainline games have been 2D only.

Pro:

3D control.

Kirby feels extremely fluid in Forgotten Land and I never had any issues controlling him as the controls are very simplistic and not very complicated.

This is shown in the fact that for multiplayer that you can play as Kirby just using a single Joy-Con and not lose access to any buttons or abilities.

Graphics.

Kirby has always had a fantastic art style in the older games with adorable animals all the way to more eldritch style abominations, and in Forgotten Lands they have definitely continued with this trend.

Even the animated cutscenes look like they are from the PlayStation 5 as they are all extremely polished, and it really makes me wish Nintendo would release an animated Kirby film in the future.

All the creatures feel vibrant and distinct to help set them apart from the usual residents of Dream Land, with most of the minor enemies looking like they could be Pokémon especially with one of the first enemies with the “Awoofy” and this continues till the end of the game with new enemies being introduced.

Copy Abilities.

12 Copy Abilities are in the game with 2 brand new ones (Drill and Ranger), and while there are less Copy Abilities than previous Kirby games the new “Mouthful Mode” mechanic definitely makes up for it.

The Copy Abilities all feel great to control, and each Copy Ability can also be upgraded with the use of Blueprints found in the level and the Rare Stones which are found at the end of the Treasure Road challenges and parts of the hub town.

There is also great variety in the Copy Abilities with not much overlap as each one can do a variety of moves with each ability having several attacks e.g. Fire has its standard fire breathing attack but also a jump attack that turns Kirby into a fiery comet as you fly forward to crash into anything in your way.

It also helps replay ability for the levels by using different Copy Abilities to see how you can get through a level differently using the different Abilities and plus different abilities can help complete the secret missions for the levels.

Mouthful Mode.

The new big mechanic that many players will recognise from the trailers is the “Mouthful Mode” in which Kirby attempts to swallow items that are too big for him and instead partly envelopes them to use to expand his combat and exploration abilities.

There are 14 forms for the players to discover during the game, and combined with the 12 Copy Abilities adds up to give players a lot of variety and the new Mouthful Mode forms interact with levels in a larger way than the normal Copy Abilities e.g. Car Mouth or Ring Mouth Kirby.

One of my favourites is the new “Car Mouth” Kirby where he partially inhaled a car and this allows the player to speed around using boosts and are able to quickly navigate more track styled courses. It is similar to the old Wheel ability from previous Kirby games but Car Mouth has even more utility as the game is no longer constrained to a 2D plane.

Music.

Forgotten Lands continues of the tradition of having one of the best Nintendo soundtracks for its games, as it’s not just the boss fights that have great songs but also the normal background songs for the levels that are mostly atmospheric.

As now it even has its own Anime styled opening song after you clear the tutorial, which plays quite often normally during climatic moments and over the credits but is probably my favourite main theme in a Kirby and would highly recommend people listen to it in full.

Then when you beat the main story then you can unlock a band in the main hub, so you can relisten to all songs when you are back and in-between levels and the band can be upgraded to play more songs and perform on a grander stage.

Levels.

There is a great variety in the worlds (and therefore the levels within the worlds) as across 6 main worlds during the story mode. It sees Kirby travel across different locales from standard grassy plains and cities in “Natural Plains” at the beginning of the game until the late game areas that consist of a volcanic landscape.

The level layouts are more similar to Super Mario 3D World but they work great for Kirby and are adapted to his new abilities to allow a greater degree of exploration than 3D World did.

Within these worlds there normally at least 4 levels followed by a boss fight level, but the levels are very vast in scope and due to the 3D element added have much more verticality and are packed with collectibles and content for players to discover. Plus unlike 3D World levels and other Kirby games, the levels here are more based on real life locations like Kirby can explore a shopping centre or an amusement park and not just random floating platforms like 3D World had.

So while the amount of levels is low they definitely take longer to complete than multiple 2D levels from previous Kirby games.

Collectibles.

During the main story the player is tasked with rescuing 300 Waddle Dee’s which the player can find by clearing a level and then getting extra Waddle Dee’s by completing secret missions during the levels.

The player also gets access to several Gacha machines during your playthrough that become accessible during the main hub that you can return to at any time. There are 4 machines in total and each has a large stock of figurines for the player to get, and while the player can find them randomly in levels through organic play they are can try their luck at the Gacha machines and using the in-game currency they pick up.

So when the story is over then the player can keep playing to try and collect all the Waddle Dee’s and all the figurines as the main collectibles, and if you don’t look up a guide then some of these Waddle Dee’s can be very tricky to find and really test the observational skills of players to pay attention to the environment and see if anything looks out of place or interactable to find the secrets of each level.

Main hub.

The main hub for this game is Waddle Dee Town, and as the player rescues more of them then the town gets more developed and new shops become available for the player.

One of the most important buildings gets unlocked at the end of the first world is the Weapon’s Shop. This allows Kirby to swap his current Copy Ability for any other one that he has already unlocked from the main game. Then when the player has new blueprint and a Rare Stone then talking to the blacksmith will upgrade that ability into a more powerful version, so I would always recommend returning to the Weapon’s Shop whenever you return to town or before going into a level.

The first one being Kirby’s house that allows the player to enter and display their figurines from the gacha machines as well as a bed that the player can sleep in to fully restore Kirby’s health outside of the levels for free.

More useful shops open up later including a café which allows you to buy food items that you can take into the levels and use it to recover health or a level game shop that allows you to buy temporary stat buffs in that increase your Health, Attack power or movement speed.

Mini-games also get unlocked as you rescue more Waddle Dee’s with my favourite being the Fishing pond mini-game but other mini-games include working at the café serving food or using motion controls to do a ball puzzle by rotating the Switch itself. These are fun breaks from the main game and I would recommend players to try them as you can unlock figurines by completing the highest difficulty levels for these mini-games.

When more story progress is made by defeating bosses then new facilities will open like the Colosseum allowing the player to rematch previous bosses in for extra coins and Rare Stones and the further into the game more cups are unlocked with the final cup being unlocked after completing the post-game.

Treasure Roads.

As players rescue more Waddle Dee’s Treasure Roads get unlocked and these are very short challenges that focus around one Copy ability and act as more of a time trial to finish the challenge as quickly as you can.

For beating each Treasure Road then the player is guaranteed to get at least one Rare Stone, so I recommend players complete them all to get enough Rare Stones to upgrade every Copy Ability.

These are a small fun distraction from the main game as they are only short as they last from between 30 seconds to 300 seconds, so they don’t take long to finish and help teach the player how to get the most out of their Copy Abilities.

Post game.

After the player has finished the main story and got through the credits then a picture frame lingers on a picture of a certain spot in Waddle Dee Town. Then if the player goes there then the post-game begins where the player can now journey through 6 more world’s that are only 1 level long, but each level contains truncated versions of all levels and the boss fight into 1 long level with a greatly increased difficulty.

A new set of collectibles are also contained in these levels and if they player collects 250 of them out of 300, then the final boss gets unlocked in 7th world and the true ending becomes available when this boss is beaten.

So if the player finds the main story too easy then I would recommend trying to complete the post-game as the bosses there have much more health, deal more damage and have more moves than the main story bosses and can give the player a real challenge.

Multiplayer.

A fun feature is the ability to have local co-op with a 2nd player joining and takes control of “Bandana Waddle Dee” and while he can’t use Copy abilities the other player has access to a unique spear weapon that increases in damage to match the level of the Copy ability that Kirby currently has.

This feature is how I would recommend parents play the game with younger players since the game is not too challenging for the main story but can help children get into the world of gaming and move on to more difficult games.

Con:

Frame rate.

While the game looks great it is locked to 30fps during normal gameplay, and I found that during combat this could drop when more particle effects happened.

The biggest showcase of the poor frame rate though is for background enemies that are further away from Kirby, as they movement cycle slows down the further away they are and becomes very choppy and easily below 10fps which just isn’t a good look for the game.

To help this I would of suggested having the enemies pop-in when Kirby is closer to them but disguise it by a smoke cloud effect to hide them spawning in, or just lower the level of detail on the character models to save processing power as they are still fully rendered in at a distance.

It is also jarring going from the menu back into gameplay as all the menu’s operate at 60fps, so they are very fluid and snappy to use but then when you unpause it goes back to 30fps for the main gameplay.

No voice acting in cutscenes.

While Kirby and the Forgotten Land does not have many cutscenes due to the limited plot. There are large sections of Kirby talking with NPC’s or his travelling companion for the game where the plot and text is told through static text boxes that becomes more of a chore to get through.

This becomes even more apparent as in the final main story level there is suddenly an A.I speaking English over a speaker system that gives a long speech and serves as cramming all the lore into the final section as is a tonal whiplash since the rest of the game is silent.

Ranger cursor movement.

The only problem I have with a Copy Ability is using the new Ranger form and when trying to move the cursor to change where Kirby shoots I find the cursor very sluggish to move and not very responsive.

This came to ahead as one of the secret mission involves using Ranger in a fast paced small arena and you have to then hit something high up before you take damage, so I found myself struggling to do this and I wish there was an option to increase the sensitivity for the cursor movement to alleviate this problem.

Conclusion:

This is definitely of my favourite Kirby games and is now only 2nd just behind Planet Robobot on the Nintendo 3DS.

I would highly recommend this game to younger players or for parents who want to play a multiplayer game with children due to the low difficulty of the game until the post-game.

If Kirby continues with more 3D games in the future then I can’t wait to see how they improve on this game as HAL Laboratory did an amazing job on the first full 3D Kirby game.

Score: 9.0

And finally, Elliot’s review

I’m pretty sure that at this point we all know who Kirby is. First created by Masahiro Sakurai and HAL Laboratories in the early 90’s, the series has since become beloved by Nintendo fans. Which makes it all the more surprising that the Kirby series has only had 2D side scrollers and has never had one that was fully 3D. That is until the September 2021 Nintendo Direct when we finally got the announcement that we were finally getting that with Kirby: The Forgotten Land. The game was released on the 25th March 2022 for the Nintendo Switch.

One day on Planet Popstar, Kirby’s wandering around with a big smile on his face, when all of the sudden a dark vortex appears in the sky and starts sucking up the denizens of Dreamland. Kirby awakens to find himself in a completely new world and learns that the Waddle Dees that ended up there are being kidnapped by a group of beasts. With the help of his new friend Elfilin, they set off to explore this new world and rescue the Waddle Dees. Like a Metroid game, the story doesn’t really have much of a presence in this game, it’s more just a reason for the new setting. Not that I’m complaining about that, when the story does show up it’s still a lot of fun and a story doesn’t need to be constantly there to be fun.

The presentation is pretty much what you’d expect from any Kirby game. The world is very colourful and upbeat, with each separate area looking very different from one another. It does an amazing job at combining the urban setting that the world takes with the light tone that Kirby’s well known for. The music is also very good, the music is very upbeat and peppy, with a number of tracks being surprisingly action heavy and epic, to the point where it almost felt like I was playing a different game, and it still fits with the game. If there’s anything I’m not a big fan of with the presentation, it’s the cutscenes. While they are entertaining and do a good job on developing the story – despite there being no dialog – in a good number of them there is an apparent lack of sound effects. I’m not sure if it’s a problem with audio mixing or if there just wasn’t any to begin with, but it’s really distracting and takes you out of it somewhat. 

The game is a 3D platformer, where you go through small linear stages to reach the end, while doing optional mini objectives along the way. As said before, this is Kirby’s first dive into 3D, which considering how well the game plays in its new dimension you probably wouldn’t believe. The move sets and gameplay that you would normally play in a 2D environment has translated really well really well in the shift and works surprisingly really well. The level design gives you the room to be able to use all of Kirby’s abilities and to experiment with new ones you likely haven’t used before. 

Of course, Kirby’s usual abilities have returned from previous games. The main one being the ability to float, allowing yourself to elongate the time spent in the air with the sacrifice of reduced speed. Once again making the platforming easier for newcomers to platformers, while still ensuring that it doesn’t lessen the challenge too much. 

Also from previous games is Kirby’s Copy Abilities. Kirby has the ability to swallow enemies, afterwards you’ll either spit them out and launch them as a ranged attack, or you’ll absorb their ability and be able to use them for yourself. These range from melee ones like Sword and Hammer to ranged ones like Bomb or Ranger, even ones that will do a small AOE attack like Tornado or Needle. Though that is majorly over-simplifying it, all of these are incredibly unique from one another, and while I obviously had my favourites, I never found myself disliking any of them. 

What makes these power-ups different from other games is that you can actually upgrade them. Within certain stages, you’ll find items called blueprints, once found you’ll have unlocked the means to upgrade whatever ability the blueprint allows. Though that’s not all you’ll need, it’ll also cost coins that you’ll find naturally as you play and Rare Stones. These are mostly found in mini stages that will unlock once you finish the stage or will be hidden on the level select called Treasure Roads. These challenges will require you to use a certain Copy Ability or Mouthful Mode (more on that later) to beat the level, reach the end and collect the Rare Stone. They also have an optional target time that you have to finish the level in, these times require near perfection from you in order to be completed. I often found myself spending a good hour trying to achieve these times, and considering the reward for getting them is a meagre ten coins, I really don’t think it’s worth it. 

The biggest new addition to this game (outside of the 3D) is Mouthful Mode. In some levels you’ll find objects from our own world that you’ll be able to swallow, by doing so you’ll gain new abilities depending on what object you absorb. The most well-known one is Car Mouth Kirby, but there are plenty more than that. For example, there’s Vending Mouth Kirby that will shoot soda cans allowing you to deal heavy damage to enemies and break seemingly unbreakable objects, or there’s Stairs Mouth Kirby which is more used for puzzles and will let you squash enemies by flopping onto your side. There are even some that will have you enter small on rails sections. The only one of these that I’m not a fan of is Water-Balloon Mouth Kirby, but that’s mostly just because it’s difficult to aim with it. Aside from that though I really like this new addition.

The main collectable that you’ll find throughout the game is the Waddle Dees. As mentioned in the story section, the Waddle Dees have been captured that it’s your job to find them. You’ll collect three of them just by beating the level, but to go along with that, you’ll find a handful of them hidden within each stage, some you’ll likely just stumble upon as you run through the level while others you may have to go out of your way for, though they’re not that difficult to find. The other way you’ll collect them is by completing a number of mini objectives within each level. Some require you to find a certain number of a particular kind of food or to defeat a mini-boss is a certain power-up, while others are much more difficult and may require a few goes until you get it. These objectives will remain hidden the first time you go through, though with each run through of the level, a new objective that you haven’t completed yet will be revealed to you. While I would prefer if you were just able to unlock them all the first time through, it gives way to replay ability and encourages experimentation, so it’s not too much of a problem. 

Also able to collect are the Gotcha Capsules. These little capsules contain a figurine of characters, enemies and bosses that you would have encountered up to that point. You can collect these from finding them in levels, collecting them from the Gotcha Machines or by completing mini games. Surprisingly, these aren’t as difficult to gather as you might think, duplicates aren’t as common as you would believe it to be, and if you have the funds you’ll be able to collect all of them just by spending at the Gotcha Machines.

As you play through the game, you’ll likely find yourself frequently returning to the small hub area Waddle Dee Town. This tiny section of the world is probably one of my favourite parts of the game. Here you’ll be able to do and collect things to give you a bit of an edge in the rest of the game, like equipping a power-up that you’ve unlocked of your choice from the Weapon’s shop, or giving yourself a useful healing item from the Cafe. This place will start off small at first, but will expand as you collect more Waddle Dees, unlocking not only more shops, but also more mini-games and challenges for you to do. I honestly cannot state how much fun it is seeing this tiny town expand into something to really help you. 

Finally let’s talk about the bosses. This game has a surprisingly decent number of bosses, and while I can’t say they’re spectacular, they’re all a lot of fun. You have room to be able to fight them with whatever Copy Ability you want and they’re a decent challenge. And I just have to mention the last boss of the main game, because holy hell that boss is amazing, I’d argue that the game is worth beating just to fight it. 

So despite all the praise I’ve been giving it, why do I not feel as excited about this game as I feel like I should. Honestly, while I did find this game a lot of fun, I also found myself getting a bit tired of it after only a couple of hours. Having to go back through each mission because I’ve missed a Waddle Dee or trying and failing over and over to get the target time in the Treasure Road stages just left me winded somewhat quickly. I know it’s partly my own fault for stubbornly trying to get 100% completion, but it still left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

I admit that I haven’t played much of Kirby, but if the other games in this series are as good as this one, then it’s a decision that I very much regret. Despite not having the best time playing through some of the completion requirements, I still had a ton of fun with Kirby: The Forgotten Land and very much encourage anyone who’s interested to give it a go. If you’re a fan of platformers or are just looking for a simple fun game to wind down with, then this is a game that I highly recommend. 

8.9/10

Triangle Strategy

(Available for Nintendo Switch only)

Triangle Strategy is the newest game from Square Enix using their HD2D engine, which was previously used in Octopath Traveller- which was a roaring success, creating a throwback to Super Nintendo era Final Fantasy games. Many people, including myself, were really big fans of it. Triangle Strategy is one of three games that have been announced for this new engine to create very exquisite looking 2D games that also act as throwbacks to their classic games, the other two being Dragon Quest 3 as well as a remake of the game Live Alive, which like this game and Octopath Traveller will be published by Nintendo.

Triangle Strategy is a throwback to classical tactical RPGs that Square Enix made, such as Tactics Ogre, but most notably, Final Fantasy Tactics. Rather like Octopath Traveller, which took those classic tropes and expanded upon them, it looks like Triangle Strategy would do the same. The game has done relatively well out of the batch, selling over 800,000 copies in its first month despite the fact that both Nintendo and Square Enix lowered the marketing push for the game due to the conflicts in Ukraine, since the beginning of the story involves one nation invading another.

This review took a long time to come out, and this is due to the fact that I actually did two full playthroughs of the game- I played it for one playthrough and was intending to do another one in my spare time, however, New Game Plus is a new feature in the game and it actually adds a bunch of new stuff to the game, so I felt that I had to see this through. As a result, after 80 hours of gameplay I pretty much did two full campaigns, including the 3 hours headstart I got from playing the demo in February, which gives you 3 chapters of the game. (each campaign had a total of 20 chapters with one exception)

I will stress, I won’t be spoiling any plot elements and I will keep gameplay spoilers to a minimum also.

PROS

• Gameplay

The one thing that Triangle Strategy needed to nail was the gameplay.. Tactical RPGs really live and die by this, and I can safely say Triangle Strategy has expertly designed mechanics. It’s very much ‘easy to learn, difficult to master’. There’s a lot of risk and reward put in place, for example, you gain extra hits if you put two characters either side of an opponent, if they attack the other one will gain a follow up hit. It’s a good idea to do so, since you will gain experience, plus you really want to learn how to specifically benefit from levelling up abilities.

While characters do level up in the conventional sense as in other RPGs, they don’t always automatically gain the abilities or stat buffs- extras can be bought from the encampment, but those require materials to utilise, and some of them can’t be accessed without upgrading a class by using medals of bravery or medals of valour.

There is a huge portion of characters in the game, you have archers, some mages, a couple of healers, some tanks, and you want to really balance who you bring into battle- though, story missions all come with the game recommending units, and while I don’t think you should follow it completely to the letter, it is good advice in my experience.

The gameplay has been expanded from the likes of Final Fantasy Tactics in many ways, for example, elemental magic can often play into one another. If you perform an ice attack, it’s not going to leave immediately- the floor gets frozen, and if you follow up with a fire attack it will melt into a puddle of water. If an enemy then stands on that area and then you use a lightning attack, it will potentially do double the damage! There’s lots of factors like that that you will have to learn. You also have to think about positioning based upon what the area of the map looks like, how many healers are you going to bring into battle? And of course, you’re restricted on how many units you can bring in. At the very minimum, the game restricts you to 7 units, though most battles allow 10 and some 12 (obviously battle depending).

It’s all very addictive. I lost hours just honing my units abilities so that they would be perfect for battle, and it really felt by the end of the game that no character was wasted. I unfortunately didn’t unlock all of them, but I did unlock the majority. I only fell short on a couple because some characters are restricted by decisions you make in the story. But, man, did this game nail the battle system. I really loved playing it! I never played it on the hardest difficulty, but this game still gave me a challenge. I think even on easy mode this game has some real challenges. It’s not the ‘win button’ that some reviewers have made it out to be (I’d say Very Easy mode definitely is that). Though if you’re not used to tactical RPGs I would suggest toning down the difficulty for this game, it pulls no punches! That being said, grinding is not too difficult, and don’t be afraid to take under levelled units into battles where they’re quite below the recommended battle level. They actually gain larger amounts of experience by doing very remedial tasks faster in these battles than the higher level counterparts would. Grinding is definitely not an issue in the game. You can also access the mock battles which act as side quests at pretty much any point. You can even do a side quest just before you enter a story mission.

Because I’m a moron, I actually didn’t level up a few characters that I didn’t think were too useful but then got stuck with them for the final battles. I thought that I would be in real trouble but they actually levelled up faster than I would have expected and they became more useful than I had anticipated.

The combat is incredibly well thought out, and once you understand it, you’re going to want to experiment with it. You’ll want to learn how to get your archers to high ground and get extra advantage and damage or how to attack from safer spaces. The smarter you are with the battle, the more points you earn to buy items for weapons upgrades which come in a separate currency. You’re rewarded for your fractions in battle, as well as the fact that battles affect the conviction system, but the game doesn’t initially tell you how, so if you’re aiming for a particular outcome in the story I would suggest looking that one up prior to playing.

• Graphics

The HD2D engine already looked spectacular in Octopath Traveller, and it has pretty much been replicated brilliantly here. Square Enix brought in Studio Artdink to make this game, and they definitely did an excellent job. Square Enix obviously supported the team on it, and it seems as though they learnt what worked well in Octopath Traveller and applied it well here. They were able to add a lot of details and small elements into the environments and make a lot of it work because they didn’t have to design too many unique environments, a lot of them are repeated. Everything is rather square and of course in a grid format because a majority of them have to be used for the tactical battles, you have to make it so you can limit a character’s movement in battle.

The areas are explorable during exploration phases, and the fully functioning camera means that none of the environments are fixed, which makes it really impressive.

This game is gorgeous! This is definitely one of the best looking games on the Switch and is making great use of its engine. It of course doesn’t stand up to some of the 3D mega brands that this console has, but what it does within the confines of its engine looks great! There’s a reason that everyone wants every classic Square Enix RPG to be remade in this engine. It makes grass look really lush, and water effects look great too. The way it displays magic and powerful attacks also looks great. It actually does a really good job delivering heightened expressions for characters, so as a result it can make pixelated characters deliver small facial expressions that really help to aid the vocal performances.

Bottom line, it’s an excellent game in terms of its graphics.

• Story

Unlike Octopath Traveller which was a combination of 8 character stories, Triangle Strategy has a more central story and is a lot more focused. There’s definitely a bigger focus on character interaction this time around, which helps to increase your convictions in certain fields, not only enables you to recruit more characters, but you can also gain insight to their individual stories. Each one of them comes with excellent stories and character arcs.

The main story is excellent, it centres around three kingdoms on the brink of a war. In the midst of it all, the main character Serenoa who is the new Lord of a house that acts as a prime military aide to the Kingdom of Glenbrook and is very good friends with the second prince Roland, who is currently engaged to a sister of one of the leaders of another Kingdom.

You also have several other characters from the house that Serenoa leads that act as his advisors in the game. The story takes several twists and turns, it’s not exactly a ‘this whole thing is completely justified’ story, it kind of takes you down several different routes depending on which story decisions you make. The game eventually does pan out to several votes, and you can try to make decisions throughout the game- but during your first playthrough, I wouldn’t count on always getting the choice you want. Because Serenoa is an arch democrat and believes that he needs his advisors on his side for his decisions, every single decision goes down to a vote- and your job is to convince our allies to go down that route. This is one of the reasons I have to do a New Game Plus playthrough on this, and as a result, the game does have multiple endings (four, to be exact). Although, because Nintendo doesn’t have a trophy system, you don’t need to worry about getting them all if you don’t want to.

Because the story itself has a lot of great character moments and arcs, I really found myself getting invested! It’s very much a story of getting your desired outcome, but realising that no decision is without its risks and its costs. It certainly paints a very interesting picture of the world that it creates. In fact, by the end of the game it can be emotionally devastating,  particularly if you got the ending that I got the first time.. I think though, if you get the true ending you will see the most satisfying stories. Having all of the individual characters’ stories to back it up if you can unlock them also really benefits the game.

• Mock battles

Mock battles are essentially this game’s side quests, you won’t unlock any of this game’s side missions otherwise. You unlock these through the encampment feature in the game which also acts where you go to upgrade characters abilities and weapons.

The mock battles are very interesting because they essentially are designed to replicate several situations that you’re going to face in the story mission, like if you are surrounded by enemies or if one of your characters is cut off from the rest and left vulnerable.

The game does a brilliant job with these. The good news is that you can access these and you can repeat them as many times as you want, and the rewards always stay the same! So you can use these to grind for certain materials you need to upgrade certain abilities. Also, you can use these to collect the spoils that enemies drop for new materials, plus, you can use these to upgrade your convictions in certain areas which can come in handy before a vote.

The mock battles are really good fun, apart from the fact that they keep the same battle system from the story missions which essentially means you get more gameplay, they were genuinely really good for challenging my thought process when I was going into battles, and I came out with a bunch of extra strategies. You unlock a certain amount on your first playthrough, but you un;okc some harder ones when you start a new game plus. And believe me, the harder ones are not kidding around- they are really challenging. I even found some of them more difficult than the main story missions. They do make for excellent downtime combat, and I would really urge you to give it a go, not only because it’s a great way to level up your characters before battles, but because they will train you for different scenarios really well.

MIXED

• Multiple Endings

I said that the story was good, but the multiple endings confused me considering that outside of the true ending, it didn’t really feel like the story was aiming for this direction. You’ll have to experience it for yourself to see what I mean completely, but one of the things I found interesting was when you get to the point where you’re going to be locked into one of the four endings, the three that aren’t the true ending kind of feel incomplete. In fact, to a certain extent, some characters were none-factors by the end of the story..

That being said, by getting the true ending on my second playthrough (yes, I did look up a guide, and believe me; you’re going to need one, it’s not too complex but it’s very specific) there was an emotional gut-punch, and you have the canonical ending as far as the developers were concerned, it does feel like it nails the story and no stone is left unturned. As a prime example, there’s one story arc that isn’t answered unless you specifically get the ‘golden route’ ending.

• The conviction system and voting

I actually quite liked these systems when I first started the game. Basically, your convictions are divided into Utility, Morality, and Liberty and are represented by different colours (yellow, green, and red respectively). You gain them through doing different actions in battles like excessive healing gives you extra mortality points whereas placing characters on different tiles to gather spoils dropped in battles will gain you extra utility points. These points are also gained through dialogue choices in cutscenes or during the exploration missions where you go out for extra materials and talk to travelling vendors.

My biggest issue with this is while I think this is interesting from a plot standpoint, a democracy will decide for you which also suits the game narratively in some ways. It led to some really infuriating moments, I actually knew when I was locked out of the gold ending early on because I couldn’t get a vote to go my way- you have to convince others to go your way. You can sometimes convince them to change their mind, in my new game plus playthrough I managed to convince them to change their mind pretty much every time, I only failed once, I think. Though usually, the best route is to get the undecided persons onto your side. But if your score isn’t high enough in a certain area, it’s almost impossible to convince them. The problem I have with this is that it kinda cheapens these moments slightly for me. It kind of forces you into a new game plus as you’ll never get all the votes to go your way the first time around.. It can leave you in a state of feeling powerless.

That being said, I do think that it’s an excellent way of doing things, and it tells you your chances of convincing people to your side- if it says ‘I have a better chance talking to a stone wall’ underneath the characters, don’t even bother under any circumstances. If you want the vote to go exactly the way you want, look up a guide. It will tell you the exact character interactions you need to do. Remember that you need to take advantage of the exploration phases, some dialogue phrases are locked off if you don’t have certain information and as a result, you can be completely locked out of certain decisions. Talk to everyone! Leave no stone unturned.

CONS

• Information held off until New Game Plus

I really didn’t like the fact that most of the information is held off until New Game Plus.. mainly because it doesn’t tell you about the conviction system. There is no way to tell what your score is in each of the three convictions in your first convictions- it doesn’t even tell you how many you’re scoring in, it just tells you ‘Serenoa’s convictions have been strengthened’. In New Game Plus it tells you exactly how much conviction you have scored and in what field, and it also tells you which dialogue options will increase your scores. It also gives you the information of which new characters are available to be scouted, and what your score needs to be in each field to do so.

This is all information that I could have used in my first playthrough, and if I had them early on I probably would have made better decisions. The game really implies that you just need to make certain dialogue choices for things to go your way, but that’s not the case. It didn’t tell me how I increased each of the convictions in my battles.

The game does tell you in the New Game Plus, so you can make better choices, so I think the game is actually designed for you to get the golden route ending during your second playthrough. Considering how hard some of the battles are and you have extra battles in the golden route ending, I would insist you get it in your second go- some of these fights are ridiculously difficult. You’re going to be put in a position where you have to make some difficult battle choices.

I just wish that the conviction system was put to the forefront in the first playthrough, I don’t think it was a good idea to withhold information from the player in this regard.

CONCLUSION

Triangle Strategy is probably one of my favourite tactical RPGs ever. I really, really liked it. I think it’s up there with the Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem games. I didn’t even mention some of the other factors that I really liked, I think that the English voice acting was really good as well as the soundtrack. I can’t stress how good the battle system is, the various characters, the story nails what it needs to do to gain that emotional impact from the player, and it really does feel like an epic.

It’s a game that’s a joy to play, although I will say that this game is really dialogue heavy and there’s a lot of times where the game can feel like a visual novel. Though obviously, on a second playthrough, you can skip any of the cutscenes. You’re going to have a few repeats no matter what.

It’s a game that does invite multiple playthroughs, and you’ll obviously need to do that to see all four endings. I think that the golden ending is impossible to figure out without a guide, but I will say that this game is excellent. If you love good RPGs, this is one to try out. I think it’s an excellent start point for newcomers, especially because of the fact that the difficulty system is very much tailored to them and you can change it at any time. It’s a great tactical RPG from start to finish and despite the fact I had some misgivings about the conviction system, I had a great time playing.

Ghostwire Tokyo

(available for PlayStation 5 and PC)
(PlayStation 5 version used for review)

Ghostwire Tokyo has had a long and tricky development. I was first hearing about this game in 2019 and it has had numerous development issues in the time it’s taken to come out. It’s the latest game from Tango Gameworks, the studio created by Resident Evil creator Shinji Mekami, and prior to this, they had also made the two Evil Within games.

Now of course, this is a Bethesda owned studio, which means that now this studio is owned by Microsoft. But this was still part of a two-game deal that Bethesda had made with Sony to really prop up the PS5’s first year on the market. Although of course this game was hit with several delays in its development, hence it’s 2022 release. However, despite the Microsoft purchase, this will remain a PlayStation exclusive for at least a year- so Xbox owners will have a long time to wait before they can enjoy this game. Although I suspect Xbox owners will get to play this and Death Loop relatively soon.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Death Loop, I actually tried to review it, but it was a game that really didn’t pique my interest, and I really didn’t have any desire to continue playing it. Ghostwire Tokyo (as I previously mentioned) comes from the Evil Within team and that does interest me! As much as the first one didn’t do much for me, the minimal amount I played of the second one showed me that the studio was capable of growth, and I wondered what they would do with the PS5 technology. This is one of the few major Sony titles this year, whether it be from a third part or a first party, that would be PS5 exclusive and not receive a PS4 release- something I’ve often wondered if it has been holding back the developers of truly harnessing the console.

Ghostwire Tokyo, unlike Evil Within, is not a survival horror game; it’s an action horror game. You play as a young salary man named Akito, who’s rather unwittingly partnered with a spirit named KK, and now fights their way through an almost apocalyptic Tokyo after a fog has wiped out much of the population and has turned them into spirits. The cult behind this has kidnapped Akito’s sister, Mari, with the intention of using her for some kind of ritual- more on the story later on in the review because I do have quite a bit to say about it.

The combat is linked to a new power set that KK gives Akito, he uses spirit magic of one of three elements: wind, fire, and water. Each has different strengths and weaknesses and are used towards different ghosts that are wandering throughout deserted Tokyo. The game is also open world, so you are able to freely go about the map to a certain extent, you do need to cleanse various shrines in order to lift the fog which opens up more parts of the world. It’s a bit similar to filling in the map in Assassin’s Creed.

So how does the game stack up when all is said and done?

PROS

• Ghost design

While they’re not entirely original since many of them resemble Slenderman, and it’s very clear movies like The Grudge and particularly The Ring were big influences (to such an extent that a couple of them look exactly like Sadako from Ring) They are very well designed and very well put together, you can tell a lot of thought has gone into them.

A lot of people said that when this was being developed that they thought it might be similar to that of Silent Hill and be some sort of spiritual successor. It’s definitely not a spiritual successor in the tone, but it certainly takes some elements from Silent Hill in the ghost designs, because it has the idea of mixing the mundane with the macabre that that game developed. Although, Silent Hill did that in the way of expressing the main character’s innermost thoughts- the point of the world in that game was that it was meant to be their personal tailored hell for whichever character was to go into it. Ghostwire Tokyo isn’t going for that, it’s more going for something very different, but it does feel rather unnerving to have these faceless spirits wandering around this deserted Tokyo, almost like they’re re-enacting the lives they once lived and want to destroy you to not face the reality that they can no longer carry out those lives.

• Frame rate

For crying out loud, play this game in either Performance mode or particularly Performance V Sync mode (if you have a monitor that supports it) But whether you’re going for 60FPS option or you go for the higher frame rate option, you really should do so, because the frame rate is actually really good in this game. I barely noticed any frame rate drops or anything like screen tearing. It was amazing how well it all functioned together, the game is very well built especially considering the fact that the open world isn’t exactly small, the game does have to generate a lot going on. I found it remarkable how well it functioned.

MIXED

• Graphics

The graphics are fine, they worked very well, and they looked very good, but I wouldn’t exactly describe them as PlayStation 5 necessary. Graphically, I think that this game could function just fine on PS4 and this really goes to other points about the game, too. I don’t understand what part of this game is taking advantage of the PS5’s technology.

The major one I noticed was the fact that despite how big the open world is, when fast travel was used it had almost instant loading. And while the graphics were particularly good, I won’t exactly describe them as amazing. This game is built in Unreal Engine 4, and almost any game built in that engine is going to look good on some level, but I definitely would not say it matches up with a lot of the first party games that PlayStation has been bringing out themselves, particularly that of games like Returnal and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.

The only other advantage I noticed it use was the haptic triggers of the PS5’s Dual Sense controller. But even then, it’s not the most amazing use of them. Speaking of which:

• Controls

While this game controls perfectly fine, you use the left triggers to aim and switch weapons, and the right triggers to fire. The controls can often feel quite sluggish at times, there was a whole bunch of times where I wanted to use the guard command, only to find it was a bit of a lucky draw to whether it would actually be pulled off in time. I also found it a bit stiff to do a full turn with my character. Now these are not game destroying! The game functions fine, and it does help that this game is phenomenally easy- I barely died in this game. But there were a few slight moments where I wished this game controlled better.

• Open world design

The game is attempting to recreate Tokyo, though the most recognisable areas of Tokyo that you can travel to during the early portions is the famous Shibuya district. That being said, there is a lot of great attention to detail here. I’ve actually been to Tokyo and in many ways, it really replicated my experience of being there.

You will not be taking the underground, you’ll be going everywhere on foot with a bit of gliding involved, and of course, parts of the map are cut off to you without cleansing shrines to remove fog. As a result, the game often feels a lot more linear than most open worlds do, it ends up cutting off parts of the world so that you unlock parts at specific times. Side quests are also held off without reason. This made me feel like you were just ticking things off as you go, and it doesn’t help that the map is really overloaded with icons from shops, shrines, locations for prayers to recover health, SP, etc.

There certainly is a lot to do but they end up repeating themselves quite a bit, and the open world is not the best to explore. For one thing, there are a lot of shrines that are on rooftops, and getting to these can be a puzzle! As a result, I often ended up wandering through the map looking for any high places I could find just to glide over in hopes that I’d hit the top of the roof. It certainly felt rewarding once you had got there, but this was not an open world that I felt that I really wanted to explore.

The map is also not incredibly huge, it’s about the size of an early Assassin’s Creed game in my opinion. The size of the open world was something that I was a bit worried about when I got the preload of this game and noticed that it was less than 20GB.. While my fears were not completely justified, there’s certainly something there.

• Game length

Now game length for me here is fine if you’re going for 100% completion, you’re looking at about 20 hours of gameplay. I don’t think that this game gives you much for your money though, if you’re like me and you’re just going for the main story with a few side quests along the way. Which I did! I did quite a few side quests on my route to it, but I was also getting rather jarred with the game and decided in the latter portion to just abandon it and only go for the main mission.

As a result, I beat the game in just over 10 hours, and again, I didn’t die that much! So, I’m not sure you’re getting as much content as you’d really like for a game that’s charging £50. It fortunately isn’t charging the full £70 that a Sony first party title would. If that was the case, I would have said in no circumstances purchase this- this game would not be worth £70. As it stands, I think it can justify a £50 price tag. But I also am not sure that the content of just the main story really feels like it makes the most of its time, I think in order to get the most out of the game you should really consider going for 100% completion, especially if this is going to be the only PS5 game you play for some time.

CONS

• Story

As mentioned, Ghostwire Tokyo is an action horror game, not a survival horror. So obviously, I wasn’t expecting to be really scared by this game. The best parts, in my opinion, are when you’re not in combat and you’re wandering through these rather trippy scripted events. There’s a lot of remnants of the ‘PT’ demo that was on PlayStation that I can see are influencing this one. It never reaches the heights of that, but there’s certainly a commendable effort put in.

Where it fails, however, is that the story is all over the place. The cult that causes the crisis are really not interesting as villains, I don’t even know what the plot is. They put so much into their motivations that they never really explain what they are actually doing and how kidnapping the main character’s sister is actually going to help them. Also, for as much emphasis that is put on rescuing her, they really don’t emphasise her character and her and Akito’s relationship until very near the end of the game, which I actually think are some of the best parts of the story and probably the biggest emotional crux in the whole plot, since Ghostwire a Tokyo is trying to tell a story about grieving over people that we lose.

But wow, it doesn’t really hit that note until the very end, which made me feel like it was too little too late. It was very well done but you needed to hit this note way sooner. It also doesn’t help that the characters feel half-baked, most of them only get slight character arcs, and as soon as it is done, they just disappear from the story. It almost feels like that bit from the Simpsons, “I have to go now, my planet needs me”.

• Side quest handling

The side quests in this game felt like such busy work; most of them don’t last very long and they’re mostly used to gain experience and money. But I don’t really understand why, because if you don’t do them, you’re still swimming in money. It also didn’t help that I gained a lot of money as a pre-order bonus in the game, so I was never short on healing items. Even then, I think that that’s another problem that the game has, it gives you far too many healing items and far too much money. You’re never going to be short on these items so you’re never going to potentially conserve, which obviously makes sense on some levels, it’s meant to be an action game, but I hardly ever felt jeopardy as a result.

I never even really tried much stealth apart from the few times I was cut off from my magic and I had to resort to using a bow and arrow, which really isn’t as effective a weapon as the game makes it out to be.

The game also has a ton of collectibles that you can trade in at some of the various cat stalls throughout town in exchange for big bonus pay-outs, but like I already mentioned, the game pays you out fairly already, so you don’t really need to do this. I ended the game with tons of cash left over. The side quests just feel like a lot of work, since for some of them you have to find the exact right artefact to take to a store, you can’t just go to a store and say, “I found this, gimme money”.

As a result, I really didn’t enjoy doing the side quests, I pretty much abandoned them really early on, since they were so repetitive, and they didn’t do anything to inform my opinion on the characters.

• Customisation options and upgrades

I don’t understand why this game even has customisation options. You’ll only be seeing them in the rare cutscenes, and they don’t really provide many stack differences. Again, I got a lot for my pre-order bonus, but I barely used any of them! I certainly didn’t go out of my way to do side quests to get any of them. The only customisation option that makes a difference are the various prayer beads that you can get, which can emphasise your abilities to a better degree. So, for example, you can have a bead that improves water magic or fire magic.

The upgrades really don’t feel like they add much, they certainly boost your abilities for levelling up but spending those skill points in the tech tree didn’t feel like it made much of a difference. I only really noticed it with things like gliding and gaining access to a few extra abilities, such as finishing moves to end fights quicker. As a result, it made the combat feel even less thought out and made it all feel like a bit of a chore. The combat is fine for the most part, but it’s nothing that interesting.

Ghostwire Tokyo is pretty much a purely average game. It’s not terrible, but I didn’t really have that much enjoyment going into it, and I think that’s because this game has a lot of half-baked ideas that needed a bit longer in the oven. I’m beginning to wonder if this was a case of too many people having too many ideas and no one really knew when to say stop.

If anything, I actually think that this game would have been better if it had been a more linear game and had stuck to more scripted moments. Those are the best moments in the game, and I think it would make for a good push for the upcoming VR support.

While Ghostwire Tokyo doesn’t really do anything wrong, (I personally have misgivings with the story and I find the combat very repetitive considering the upgrades don’t really do much), I wouldn’t exactly say it doesn’t do much right either. It doesn’t feel like this game was made with the PlayStation 5 in mind and it seems to really have an identity issue overall. The controls definitely could be better, in fact I would probably recommend the PC version to play with a keyboard and mouse, so you have better aim since the entire game is seen in first person.

I would say it doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it also feels like a game that doesn’t really do much that I enjoy about open world games, especially considering that there’s not much jeopardy to going round and exploring the open world- once you clear an area of ghosts they’re mostly gone forever.

I wouldn’t describe this game as a mess, but I wouldn’t describe it as great either. It’s perfectly average, but I don’t think I’ll be playing it again. I reckon you should wait for it to go on sale.

Score: 6.8/10