Game Title: Bloodstained – Curse of the Moon
Developer: Inti Creates
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PS Vita / PlayStation TV
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 4.5 – 7 hours
Download: 45.3 MB (Switch), 24 MB (Vita)

There have been several Kickstarter “spiritual successor” games that people were incredibly-excited for but ultimately fell short of expectations. Mighty No 9 felt lackluster and has been easily shadowed by its own cross-over game, Mighty Gunvolt Burst. Yooka-Laylee had a difficult launch and had several issues at launch that had to be patched out.

One that is still on the horizon and looking to be one of the greats, however, is Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. While its release is still a ways away, we have a Bloodstained game out now for both the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation Vita that can be played and enjoyed.

Being a throw-back to even more classic Castlevania games from the NES era, here is my review of the spin-off title, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon!

Story

While light on story, Curse of the Moon is a spin-off that chronologically takes place before the events of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Zangetsu is a Demon Hunter who ventures off into the Night in his life-long hatred and hunt for all of Demonkind. On the journey, he runs into and rescues three allies from Demons that use their own abilities to help Zangetsu in his quest, including Miriam, the protagonist of Ritual of the Night.

Now, story here is pretty light, but you do get some story during each short stage in the game. One thing that is worth noting is that this is more of a spin-off and was said to not really be in the same ‘canon’ as Ritual of the Night. All four playable characters are from Ritual of the Night, but play different roles than they do in the main game.

Gameplay

While Ritual of the Night is emulating 2D Castlevania titles from the PlayStation era, Curse of the Moon is a stage-based 2D side-scroller with light exploration elements. To be more specific, it is emulating the NES-era Castlevania games, like Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse.

Basic game progression is through 8 different stages, where you navigate side-scrolling environments filled with enemies, alternate paths, and secrets that contain item pickups. The goal of each stage is to reach the boss and defeat it to move onto the next stage.

Although the game feels very much like the older Castlevania games, it does mix things up in that you recruit 3 additional playable characters as you go through the first half of the game. Each one has different movement speeds and ranges, health gauges, and exclusive weapons and sub-weapon pickups, making using them feel different. Cycling between them also is the key to fight certain bosses and navigating to some of the alternate paths that you could not reach, otherwise. But, as a price, if you die as one specific character, you can’t use that character until you get a Game Over or you restart the stage.

Speaking of bosses, this is one aspect that really raises a bit of the game’s difficulty. Each boss has patterns that are relatively easy to learn and remember for dodging their attacks. However, upon dying, every boss of the game does a last-ditch attack as it goes out, meaning that if that attack kills you, it’s Game Over and you’ve got to repeat the battle from the last checkpoint. It’s a feature that I don’t see often in platformers and helps keep you on your toes, from beginning to end.

Though that doesn’t mean that platformer newbies can’t play the game and enjoy it. When you go in, you have difficulty options as well as a “Style” option. You have the normal style where you have limited lives and have knock-back from every attack that hits you. The game also offers a Casual Style, which gives you infinite continues and no knock-back. These can be toggled every time you boot up the game, so you’re free to hop back and forth.

Now, in terms of all this, Curse of the Moon is a very faithful and fun NES-style platformer. But, the only thing you won’t get here is any sense of length. One run through the game will be done in about 1.5 hours, give or take. The game then unlocks Nightmare Mode, a higher-difficulty mode where you play only as the 3 allies and the only way of unlocking the secret 9th stage and the True Ending. But, even with this replay added in, you still clock in around 3 hours at the most.

Controls

The great thing about this game is how simple it controls, but also that all versions of the game have the same control scheme. For example, the jump button is B on the Switch and X on the Vita, so if you get both versions, you don’t have to learn a new scheme for one or the other. It’s also compatible with the PlayStation TV, so both Switch and Vita versions can be played on the go and on your TV.

Moving around is done with the D-Pad/Arrow Buttons and the Left Analog Stick. Switching characters is done with the L and R triggers. The rest is with the face buttons/action buttons. You jump with A on Switch and X on the Vita, and do your melee attacks with Y on the Switch / Square on the Vita. Triangle/X uses your sub-weapon, and Circle/A don’t do anything outside of menus.

All in all, it’s a very easy control scheme to learn.

Presentation

Visually, the game recreates the old NES-style pretty well. Everything looks retro and the recreation of many enemy types and especially the animated bosses really looks great in handheld mode on the Switch as well as on the Vita’s smaller screen.

Performance-wise, it’s great on both platforms. The fps is flawless from start to finish on the Switch as well as the Vita and PSTV. So, if you’re looking for a reason to buy it for one or the other, the only thing I could mention to sway you is that the Vita version has trophies. Outside of that, there is no difference if you have a Vita TV available.

Battery Life

Being such a simple game, visually, Switch owners can expect to get quite a bit of time out of this game in handheld mode. Here are my Battery Times, from 100% to 0%:

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 39 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 04 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 6 hours, 27 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 6 hours, 50 minutes

Definitely on the high end of the spectrum. Getting almost 7 hours out of a Switch game is great, and getting it out of this game just helps push that Bloodstained name for handheld fans.

Game Titles: Mega Man Legacy Collection, Mega Man Legacy Collection 2
Developer: Capcom
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail (Bundle), Digital Download (Separate Collections)
Battery Life: 3.5 – 5 hours
Download: 343 MB (Legacy Collection 1), 3.2 GB (Legacy Collection 2)

The Blue Bomber may still have his newest entry a ways off in release, but handheld fans just got a whole lot of him to play around with. Although I am really anticipating the release of the Mega Man X collections in handheld form, I’ve been knee-deep in shooting and weakness-exploiting, thanks to the Switch now having Mega Mans 1-10 to play around with.

As such, it’s time to talk about them. Since the retail release of these games is a collection, I am opting to make one review rather than two. So, here is my review of Mega Man Legacy Collection and Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Mega Man games never really had much story in their origin. It wasn’t until the later games and the X Series that really got narratives going. Though there is a story to it.

The basic premise that most of the games don’t tell you is that Dr. Wily is an evil scientist that uses robots for acts of terrorism and control over the world. Mega Man, a robot created for good, is sent to stop those robots and Dr. Wily. This is pretty much like the Mario series. Dr Wily tries to take over, you stop him, he escapes prison and tries again, and the process repeats itself across several games.

So, if you like story with your platformers, this isn’t really the place to look. If you want story in your Mega Man games, you should check out games like the X, Zero, and Legends series. (The Zero series is available on handhelds via the Zero Collection on the DS and all 3 Legends games are available as backwards-compatible PS One Classics for the PlayStation Vita / PS Vita TV).

Gameplay

Although we do have 10 games across 23 years, the gameplay of these games hasn’t changed much. Each title of these collections is a side-scrolling platformer with combat shooting elements thrown into the mix.

These Collections are, well, Collections of Mega Man games. Legacy Collection 1 contained Mega Mans 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 while Legacy Collection 2 contains Mega Mans 7, 8, 9, and 10. Outside of just playing through each game, you also have dozens of Challenges around those games you can take part in for special challenge runs if the oldschool difficulty of these games isn’t enough challenge for you.

One thing I will say is that these collections are basically two big emulators. The older games are being emulated on the Switch with no changes from their original releases, outside of emulator options like screen modes and the ability to make Save Points at pretty much any point you encounter.

The big thing about emulation options that we need to note here is what is different between these games on the Switch and these games on other platforms. Legacy Collection 2 doesn’t really have any differences between platforms, but Legacy Collection 1 does.

First of all, it has a Rewind feature, not unlike the feature of the same name from Gear.Club Unlimited. At any time, you can tap and hold L to rewind time and undo any amount of seconds and actions. This is exclusive to the Switch version of the game, as far as I am aware.

Second, the emulation options now have a Turbo feature for CPU. This gives the game more power to run Mega Mans 1-6, eliminating all of the slowdown and lag issues that the other versions of this collection have, due to the games being emulated as vanilla NES titles rather than being stabilized and enhanced for new consoles.

As far as the games, themselves, they’re pretty straight-forward. You go through stages, fighting through enemies and navigating platforms until you reach the Boss Room and take down the boss to clear the stage and steal their special weapon abilities. Then, you go to other stages and use those special weapons to exploit boss weaknesses to repeat the process until you have access to Dr Wily to take him down.

Now, this is much easier said than done. I, myself, had forgotten just how difficult these games were until I replayed them in this collection. Even with the Rewind Feature and Save States, don’t expect any of these games to be on the easy side. Enemies do a lot of damage to you and, until the Charge Shot was introduced in Mega Man 4, you do very little damage to them. There’s a huge difficulty curve in these older games and, unlike newer games of the series, fighting bosses just isn’t viable without utilizing weaknesses or having a mastery of everything each boss can do to you.

Of course, we all know about these systems because Mega Man has been around for over 30 years and has had over half a dozen different sets of series to teach us. If you’re new to Mega Man, though, be prepared for an incredibly-difficult set of games, as Mega Man games didn’t become more ‘casual’ until Mega Man 8. This is why I really like the Rewind Feature. Without it, newbies can get all the way to a boss, have the high difficulty set in and suddenly have to redo the entire stage because they don’t have the right sub-weapon to take them out without the battle being a tedious lesson in learning boss patterns.

The only thing that I don’t like about this is the lack of explanation. NES games were notorious for just throwing you to the wolves, but even this collection does nothing to prepare you for the difficulty of the games, outside of the “Easy Mode” thrown into Mega Man 10, giving you more platforms over pits so you don’t fall and die as often.

But, getting past difficulty, are you getting a good amount of content for your money? To be more technical about it, each of these games takes roughly 2.5-3 hours to clear, assuming you don’t die too often. Given that Legacy Collection is $15 and Legacy Collection 2 is $20, that gives you a minimum of around 25 hours for around $35. Add in Challenges and the minimum will likely go up to around 30 hours, meaning you’re getting plenty of bang for your buck.

Controls

Controlling these games isn’t hard to do. But, there is an issue regarding Legacy Collection 1 that I want to get out of the way before diving into the control scheme: Input Lag. Whenever you play through Mega Mans 1-6, there is a slight delay in movement after you put in commands on the controller or joy-cons. This could be due to emulation, but it’s worth noting that Legacy Collection 2 does not have any sort of input lag, making those games feel very different.

As far as controls go, it’s pretty simple. The D-Pad / Arrow Buttons can be used to move around. B lets you jump while A and Y are used for attacks. In some of the games, X is used for certain sub-weapons, notably the Mega Ball from Mega Man 8.

Presentation

Visually, I don’t know what to say about these games. They look the same as they did originally. On one hand, the developers give you lots of different display options, so you can display it in its original resolution, completely full-screen, or scaled-up to fit the height of your display while retaining the original 4:3 ratio.

Some of the later games, though, didn’t look too great with visuals. Mega Mans 7 and 8 have a lot of weird, blurred pixels in its renders. These were made like this when they originally released and look very strange when the pixels from the other eight titles look pretty crisp. It’s not this collection’s fault, but rather the original games.

Battery Life

Since these games are pretty old, visually, I expected a ton of Battery Life out of both collections. What we got was pretty good. Not as much as I was expecting, but still good. Here are Battery Summaries for each Collection:

Legacy Collection: 3.5 – 5 hours
Legacy Collection 2: 4 – 5.5 hours

I find it pretty interesting that the newer games in Legacy Collection 2 have more Battery Life than Legacy Collection 1. But, either way, you’ll get up and over 5 hours in both of these collections and all 10 of these games.

Game Title: Harvest Moon Light of Hope -Special Edition-
Developer: Natsume
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail | Digital Download
Battery Life: 4-5 hours
Download: 667 MB

Harvest Moon is a series that hasn’t been a big thing in the console world very much, ever since the franchise got split up between it and Story of Seasons. I remember trying some HM games on the PS Vita, but only through PS One and PSP backwards-compatibility.

Handheld owners have had a similar experience available, through Stardew Valley. Although it felt more of a mix of Harvest Moon and Rune Factory, it provided farming, mining, and getting married on the go through the Switch for quite some time now and for the Vita and PSTV as of a couple weeks ago.

The actual Harvest Moon series, however, has released a new game for handheld fans to enjoy. Originally released on PC last year, the newest entry has come to both PS4 and the Nintendo Switch with new and, so far, exclusive features. Here is my review of Harvest Moon: Light of Hope Special Edition for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Light of Hope has you, the protagonist, washing up on the shore of a seemingly-deserted island. After being found and cared for by the local doctor, you find that the storm that washed you ashore dislodged tablets around its lighthouse, disrupting the powers of nature with the majority of its inhabitants having moved with their homes destroyed and nowhere to go.

After finding this out and being given a small farm to live on, you decide to repair and fix up the island to bring the villagers back and restore nature’s balance by retrieving the stone tablets.

As far as a story, I like that it has a bigger goal than just “Here’s a farm. You’re responsible for building it up” and having a larger goal to accomplish.

The only thing that is a downer about the story is the character roster. Almost the entire main cast is made up of returning characters from Harvest Moon: Skytree Village. Outside of the future DLC packs, there’s only one or two marriage candidates that are new characters, one of which was made specifically for Special Edition (meaning PC owners didn’t have access to them last year).

Gameplay

Like all of the games like this, Harvest Moon is a Farming Simulation Adventure game with time management and dating sim elements thrown into the mix. Across each of your days, you’re going to be managing crops, animals, collecting materials, and selling your product to make money for expansions and more for you to do.

First of all, this is “Special Edition”, so there’s new content here that isn’t available in the PC version. Getting the game on the Switch (or PS4) gets you Soleil, a character that enables local co-op play as well as being a new Marriage Candidate that wasn’t in the original release. Co-Op lets another player use a Joy-Con or Pro Controller to run around with you and help you gather materials as Soleil until her Stamina runs out.

Now, main progression in this game is basically done through farming, material collecting, and Quests. Unlike Stardew Valley, Light of Hope has a clear story that you’re being pushed through with clear objectives to teach you to find and make specific items as you restore the island. While the quests don’t have time limitations, it does keep the story going strong throughout the entire game with pretty quick pacing and a story outside of just character-based events as you give them gifts and create relationships.

There’s a problem with the system this game uses, though. While you do have a vast array of methods to collecting and farming, it’s built in a way that you don’t really have to farm. It’s easy to tell that a full day of fishing or gathering ore and refining gemstones from the mines is dramatically more efficient than growing crops. Would you rather grow crops, tile by tile, for half a week and make a bit of cash or spend half a day in the mines and end up with a daily income that is exponentially higher than that half-week crop sale?

The problem isn’t that you have a variety, but the fact that the game really pushes the idea that you’re farming to bring back the power of nature, even though you barely have to do any farming for the Main Story quests. There are some quests that require a specific flower or plant, but even those can be easily picked up around town during certain seasons. For a game so centered around farming, it’s strange that farming is one of the least-productive ways of progressing through the game.

Now, everything else about the game is like SDV. It is very task-oriented with people and shops open and around at certain times of the day and certain days of the week, and you’ve only got so much time and stamina each day to collect, farm, give gifts to your favorite marriage candidate, take care of your animals, etc. With so much to do, task management is a big factor. You go into each day, planning what you want to do based on what is available, when you can go to certain shops, etc.

Despite the fast-paced story, the one thing the game isn’t short of is content and length. While we are getting new side stories and marriage candidates through the game’s upcoming DLC packs, the base game itself is quite lengthy. It took me around 17-18 hours to clear the main story, and around 11-12 more hours to do the post-game quest-chain for proposing and getting married. That gives the game a minimum of 25-30 hours of content to go through.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too difficult, and it does have a variety of options to you. Many of the menus can be opened with the touchscreen in handheld mode, but have button alternatives for when you’ve got the game docked or just want to use the buttons instead.

You move around with the D-Pad / Arrow Buttons or the Left Analog Stick. The ZL and ZR triggers can be used to zoom the camera in and out while the L/R triggers are used for cycling through menu categories.

Then, the face / action buttons. A lets you interact with objects and B lets you cancel options. X pulls up the Map and Request Menus while Y brings up the inventory menu.

Overall, it’s pretty simple and is a good call, since the co-op supports single joy-con play.

Presentation

Graphically, I’m not sure what to say about this game. It follows the same design as the Harvest Moon Mobile game, with environments being 2D and characters being 3D models. This is a unique way of seeing it, as it gives it a modern and retro look at the same time. But the image quality and the renders don’t look all that refined. Honestly, it looks like a game that would be released on the 3DS. It doesn’t look terrible, but with the details, and the jagged edges/blurred backgrounds that are immediately available as soon as a zoomed-in event happens, it just looks strange.

Performance-wise, it’s mostly good. The frame-rate is nice and smooth the entire time, but the game has been known to crash from time to time. It’s crashed several times on me from opening to the title screen to the starting of certain special events throughout the various seasons. I wouldn’t say it happens really often, but often enough to be an annoyance and cause me to be careful about saving often.

Battery Life

As far as Battery Life goes, the results I got were pretty good. Here are my Battery Times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 48 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 54 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 48 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 52 minutes

4-5 hours is a pretty good amount of battery life. Granted, it’s not super-HD graphics, but it’s still a good battery range.

Game Title: BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle
Developer: Arc System Works
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail | Digital Download
Battery Life: 3 – 4 hours
Download: 6.4 GB

Arc System Works really makes interesting fighters, both in gameplay and in plot. The BlazBlue series is one of my favorites of recent years, mostly due to its anime style and in-depth storyline, offering both a fighter experience and a Visual Novel one. Another one is Under Night In-Birth, whose latest release came out to handheld fans via the PS Vita, and offering an incredibly-extensive Story Mode that added tons and tons of lore to a game that really didn’t have much explanation to it.

To make things even better, the Switch just got the newest game in the BlazBlue series, which is a cross-over of not only BlazBlue, but also Under Night In-Birth, the Persona 4 fighting game, and the popular web series RWBY.

Having extensively played through its various game modes, here is my review of BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

The plot behind Cross Tag Battle takes place in a realm known as a “Phantom Field”, where people from various worlds are collected and forced to participate in 2 vs 2 matches to fight for magical items known as Keystones. Once Ragna the Bloodedge, Yu Narukami, Ruby Rose, and Hyde Kino find themselves in this strange place, they go on journies to get through the tournament they’ve been forced into and get back home.

The plot of this game does have a bit of length to it, but it’s not that great of a story. The latter chapters really flesh out the lore and character representation to a pretty good degree, but its starting scenarios with the BlazBlue characters are really weak and have scenarios, cliches, and representation that feel completely out of place and unlike the actual characters being shown.

On top of this is the fact that there is no “Teach Me” mode in this game to explain the background lore behind each of these games. The story scenes reference events that expect you to be familiar with all games/series involved and does little to nothing as far as explaining who these characters are and what their worlds were like before they got dumped into the Phantom Field.

Gameplay

BlazBlue: CTB is a 2D fighting game with visual novel elements involved in its story mode. In this manner, it’s like most previous games in the BlazBlue series. When you’re not going through story scenes, you’ll be in a 2D arena, fighting it out with an opponent.

First of all, let’s talk about the roster situation here. From early in its development, we knew that Arc System was going to go the DLC route for characters and that’s where we’re at. From launch, there are 20 characters available to play as with 20 more on the go via mostly-paid DLC. One interesting bit is that some of these DLC characters make appearances in Episode Mode, but the fact is that it is set up so you need to pay for the DLC to have more than the default 20-character roster the game’s launched with.

As far as game modes are concerned, the main mode of the game’s plot is Episode Mode, which has you playing through 4 story scenarios, one for each of the games involved in this cross-over: BlazBlue: Central Fiction, Under Night In-Birth Late[st], Persona 4 Arena, and RWBY. It’s also worth noting that the BlazBlue scenario has several different endings, one of which is the “True” ending, only achieveable when all other scenarios have been cleared.

Outside of this mode, you’ve got a shop to buy custom characters and icons for your profile and the hub world (similar to the avatars from Dragon Ball FighterZ), Online Lobby for multiplayer, Training Mode for practice, Tactics Mode for Tutorials and Missions, and Survival Mode for fighting the AI in a gauntlet until you end up losing a match.

The one thing I like about Tactics Mode is that it’s a Tutorial like Pokken’s. You have tutorial lessons for the basics of combat and doing combos, but there are also tutorials for each playable character (including DLC characters), so you essentiually have in-game guides on learning how each character works and how to string their combos together.

As far as actual combat goes, things are very simplified in how you fight. Instead of trying to meld several different combat systems into one game, they’ve opted to have one system with relatively-simple combo commands to make the game accessible to veterans to fighters as well as newbies. Every character has combos that can be stringed together by mashing the action buttons, but also special moves that require a combination of simple directional input. It’s not nearly as complicated as BlazBlue is known for, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The big gimmick with this being about Tag Battles is that you fight as a 2-character team. You can summon your partner for Assist Attacks or have them take over, completely. You also auto-switch if one character loses all of their health in the fight. This also ties into the energy gauge, where you build up bars of energy to use special attacks, be it character-specific or Assist Specials. I view it being very similar to the system that Marvel vs Capcom 3 used back on consoles as well as the Vita/PSTV.

Everything in gameplay comes together pretty smoothly. You proceed through the tutorial to learn the mechanics, play Episode Mode to enjoy the story and gradually-increasing difficulty, and then you’re let loose to use the money earned in Episode Mode for Custom Avatar and Title items and can then jump into the online to start playing other players.

One thing, though, is length. BlazBlue games are known for having incredibly-lengthy story modes that make them in and of themselves, a legitimate game. This game doesn’t have that. There is a good bit of story, but across the tutorials, and Episode Modes (including the True Ending), you’ll likely only get around 7-8 hours of actual gameplay. This can be increased if you wanna play online and do Survival Mode, but in terms of overall story content, there’s not that much here for a game that costs $49.99.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t hard. It’s the same in docked and handheld, so no need to worry about touch or motion-oriented controls. The control scheme is also customizable, so you can remap any of the commands that use the action buttons, triggers, and analog triggers to create a scheme to your liking.

By default, you move around the hub world and battlefields with the Arrow Buttons / D-Pad and/or the Left Analog Stick. Note that the Arrow Buttons/Left Stick are also used for Guarding, as there is no set button for that. The Right Stick is only used in the Hub World for rotating the camera.

The L and R triggers are used for dashing and summoning your partner for an Assist Attack. The L2 and R2 triggers aren’t used, but I use them for some of the button-combo commands like Throw and Cross Bursts. Then the action buttons. By default, B changes the party members out in battle and A, X, Y use the three different attack types.

It’s not a bad control scheme, but it is customizeable if you don’t like it.

Presentation

The graphics of this game are alright. The Switch version definitely has some downscaled character models, with each one having a lot of jagged edges around them, even in docked mode. The visual novel character artwork is top-notch, but the in-game renders and many of the environment backgrounds definitely look much prettier in the PS4 version.

The trade-off to that is performance. The game is pretty much flawless when it comes to performance and stability. I encountered no crashing, no frame-drops, no stuttering, no freezing, etc. Be it in Episode Mode, Offline, or Online, the game plays wonderfully.

Battery Life

Being a 2D game, you might think you’ll get a lot of Battery Life out of it. Well, you’re not wrong but you’re not completely right, either. Here are my Battery Times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 11 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 22 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 05 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 17 minutes

It certainly isn’t terrible, but 3-4 hours is a little under what I was expecting.

Game Title: Pokemon Quest
Developer: Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 4.5 – 6.5 hours
Download: 221 MB

Out of all of the games coming out for the Switch, a lot of people have been most excited for Pokemon games. Sure, we got Pokken Tournament DX, but ever since the announcement of a Pokemon RPG being in development, everyone’s been wanting more information. When we got it, though, it was a bit polarizing in the more vocal parts of the community. Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee are something I’m really excited for, but others aren’t so excited.

Either way, we don’t have to wait for that to come out for more Pokemon on the Switch. A new Free-to-Play Pokemon title has released for the Switch with a Mobile version coming out soon as well.

I wasn’t sure how to handle a review of this game at first, so let’s see how I can do. Here is my review of Pokemon Quest for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

There is little to no story to this game. You arrive to explore a special island in the PokeWorld where all Pokemon inhabitants have strange block-like bodies. Your goal is to explore the island and research these new “variations” while befriending some of them for your expeditions.

I wasn’t really expecting there to be a story in this game, and that’s pretty much what I got. A small tidbit at the start to get you going and 100% gameplay from there on out.

Gameplay

Pokemon Quest is, well, I’m not sure what it is. It’s a free-to-play game that takes place in dungeons with waves of enemies that are fought in a semi-automated fashion. There’s also equipment management, leveling and evolving like in traditional Pokemon games, and a cooking system for recruiting new Pokemon into your roster. So, its basically….that. I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but that’s what it is.

The goal of the game is to clear these mini-dungeons to unlock more and explore the whole island. This is done through picking a starter Pokemon and sending them out on these expeditions to dungeons. Upon completion, you gain Power Stones to equip and power-up your Pokepals and ingredients to cook into meals that will attract new Pokemon to be added to your roster.

These mini-dungeons are pretty neat, as it’s semi-automated. You start your expedition and your Pokemon run off to fight waves of enemies. This really sets the casual feel for the game as the only interaction you have during this is clicking on moves for them to use, though you don’t need to do that, either. With the Auto feature that’s constantly staring you in the face, all but the most difficult dungeons can be cleared with literally no user input, letting you just watch as your team takes out all that stands before them.

Party Management is the biggest interaction-based part of the game, though. As you collect new Pokemon, you’ll be managing who your party is but also choosing who you may want to sacrifice along the way. Every Pokemon comes with different moves and if you want to learn a new one, you must Train your Pokemon with others. These others are wiped out for the sake of learning that new move (or leveling). The more Pokemon you use, the higher the chance of learning that new move. It’s not a matter of catching them all if you get an Abra that only knows Teleport and Light Screen. If you want him to be useful in battle, you gotta dive into your crew and choose some to give up for the sake of making that Abra useful.

All of these features are pretty interesting and fun. But, there’s a catch. This is a F2P game and all of the typical F2P elements are here. You’ve got a Battery with limited uses, restricting how many times you can go on expeditions before it recharges every 30 minutes, and each food item you cook to attract a new Pokemon requires you to go on several expeditions to complete. So, if you want to get a big roster to sacrifice for a guaranteed new move, expect that to happen in the not-so-immediate future.

This, of course, is helped with the special currency the game has. You get 50 of this currency each day and can use it to buy decorations for your base, or you can spend 25 for a full Battery Recharge, or 10 per expedition slot for cooking meals. Or….Paid DLC can give you free items and large quantities of this currency.

This DLC varies in price, from $2.99 packs that give you the currency and Power Stones that can be obtained pretty easily in-game to $9.99-$17.99 for special upgrades to the Battery as well as special Pokemon that come with unique moves for the DLC versions. Or, you can buy all of it for a whopping $29.99.

It’s fine, right? I’ll just go at my own pace and not pay a dime. I don’t need that Paid DLC. My Pokemon are my friends that love my homemade meals. I don’t need to pay for them. But that’s where the problem lies. For the first half of the game, the pacing is pretty consistent. As long as you always have meals going and manage your Power Stones, you can get through pretty much all new dungeons with little to no actual grinding. You also get rewards left and right for doing micro-tasks as you go on expeditions.

At that half-way point, though, things slow to an absolute crawl. When I tackled Areas 7-10 (out of 12 areas total), it turned from clearing each stage one after another to beat a stage and then grind it for several battery cycles until I either get a Pokemon that gets a bonus in the area or eventually level enough and get enough rare stone drops from grinding this one mission to be able to manage the next one and start the process all over again.

That’s really the point where Pokemon Quest goes from being a fun little time-waster with constant progress to a fun little time-waster with not expecting to progress to the next area for a good few days or more. Even with buying the DLC for all that premium currency and upgrades, it doesn’t speed up this process all that much. You’ll still have to grind a lot in the second half, whether you pay nothing or chuck out that full $30 for the DLC Bundle.

Granted, that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun. I really enjoy the casual micro play-sessions that comes with only having so many uses per time and collection/evolving my team of Gen 1 Pokemon. It just means that the pacing of progress is incredibly unbalanced and made to give you certain expectations and throws you for a loop when you go from a racing speed to a crawling speed.

This also has a dramatic effect on content and length. This is a bit strange to gauge since it’s a free game, but as far as time goes, each area would likely take you around 30-40 minutes to clear, giving all 12 areas a play time of around 6-8 hours. But that’s easily multiplied exponentially, given all the constant grinding you’ll be doing. It’s a game that you have to set your mind to just taking one day at a time, rather than trying to progress and get to the end. Sure, that means you’ll get a lot of time out of it, but not the good kind of time, if you want to get things done.

Controls

Controlling the game is pretty versatile. Being a game designed for Mobile platforms as well as the Switch, you can tap the screen for anything and everything you can do. ALternateively, you can select options with the buttons by dragging a cursor around the screen and tapping on them that way.

But, it’s pretty clear that the development of this game had iOS and Android in mind far more than the Switch.

Presentation

Visually, it’s got a unique design, which I view as “Minecraft meets Pokemon”. Everything is designed as blocks and it’s really cute and funny to see some pokemon look like this, like seeing a Koffing or Electrode that just look like giant cubes with faces on them.

Performance-wise, I don’t really have any complaints. The opening menu has some slight lag as it loads, but it’s nothing really worth noting or worrying about. It plays nicely.

Battery Life

Battery Life I expected to get quite a bit out of. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 34 minutea
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 43 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 6 hours, 19 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 6 hours, 40 minutes

As expected, you get a ton of Battery out of Pokemon Quest.

Game Title: Paladins
Developer: Hi-Rez Studios
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 2-3.5 hours
Download: 5.8 GB

Multiplayer-Only games have never really been my forte. I love stories in games and there are just not many games I really get into solely for the aspect of doing MP. Games like Paladins, Fortnite, Overwatch, and the like came to consoles I own, but I just kinda shrugged and never paid them much attention.

When they came to the Switch, though, things seemed much more interesting to me. Since we just got two fairly large games in this little “slice” of the gaming world, there was no way I could just not dive into them, see what they’re all about, and cover them.

To start this duo of MP reviews, here is my review of Paladins: Champions of the Realm for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

The story of Paladins is, well…there is no story. There is no Campaign Mode or Story Mode or Side Mode, or anything that relays a plot to you. There was some plot related to the Siege of Ascension Peak event that other platforms got early this year, but that is no longer available, and thus, not in the Switch version.

There is Lore for each character, but no story in the sense of anything told to you via gameplay or cutscenes. Each Champion has a brief backstory on their Character Page, but reading that is all the ‘story’ you’re going to get from Paladins. It’s a game solely based around Multiplayer Matches, through and through.

Gameplay

Paladins is a team-based “Hero Shooter”. based around fighting off enemy teams in Online First-Person and Third-Person Shooting battles.

The first thing that needs to be covered is that Paladins is a Free-to-Play game on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 with the Founder’s Pack available for purchase that will unlock all playable characters for you. On the Switch, however, Hi-Rez Studios opted to delay the Free version to a later date and only release the Founder’s Pack version for $29.99, meaning that if you want to play it now, you gotta pay to have everyone unlocked until the still TBA release date of the F2P version of the game.

This hurts the game in 2 aspects: 1st, the obvious reasons that they’ve released a F2P game with no current means to play it for Free as it was originally intended. 2nd, the Founder’s Pack unlocks everyone from the start, which will considerably affect the content and length of the overall experience, which I’ll get to at the end of this section. But, the main point here is that they’re throwing out the paid version first, trying to get more money out of Switch owners that currently have no other way to play the game.

As far as the game goes, you basically have 2 Game Modes you can play through: Siege Mode and Team Deathmatch Mode. Deathmatch is what you’d expect it to be from other shooting games: 2 teams running around an arena, gunning each other down until a score is achieved and one team wins.

Siege Mode is the game’s more trademark and ‘unique’ way of playing. You are split into teams and the goal is to capture an area in the map to spawn a large payload that is intended to explode in the enemy team’s base. You and the enemy team start by fighting over the Capture Point and once a winner is determined, the Payload appears and begins moving towards the enemy base, at which point the Payload’s Team must stay near it for it to move forward or it will roll back and a timer will count down until it is destroyed. Then, one team will be awarded a point and the process will start anew.

The game also has Ranked Mode, which is unlocked once you’ve leveled your profile from playing matches and is a variant of Siege Mode that allows players to climb up Ranks in accordance to their performance in matches.

For those not wanting to always fight online opponents, there is also a Training Mode, where you can practice the different game modes against AI ‘bots’ or the Shooting Range where you can freely swap playable characters without enemy interference to learn their skills and playstyles. Do note that these modes do require an Internet Connection to play, outside of Shooting Range, which can be played offline if you’re already in the game mode when you swap into Airplane Mode or lose your Wi-Fi connection.

The thing that separates these “Hero Shooters” from other shooting games, like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Halo is the uniqueness and skill systems that each playable character in the game utilizes. In most shooting games, you pretty much have the same types of skills, movement, weapons, etc no matter what player you are playing as. In these games, each character has unique skills, weapons, fighting styles, and abilities.

For starters, not everyone uses ‘guns’ in the traditional sense. A few run around with shotguns and assault rifles, but others use more unique weapons, like Skye’s Wrist-fitted Crossbow or Willow’s Flower Cannon. On top of that are skills. Grenades and other sub-weapons from other shooters are replaced with magical abilities, like temporary invisibility, healing moves to support teammates, or the ability to fly high above the battlefield and take out enemies from the skies.

This is where the more MOBA and MMO elements come into play. Outside of the main weapon which fires and reloads like a gun, all abilities have a cooldown phase, so you can only use each one once during a certain time-frame. This pushes the player towards finding good combinations of abilities and strategies to implement as they wait for their next charge for the ability they want to use again.

This is how the game is unique. Each of the couple-dozen characters plays differently, has different weapons and abilities, and can be customized with different, exclusive skills through leveling them up and setting up custom loadouts to utilize and enhance the abilities you use more often than others and in what kind of player you wish to be for your team, be it a front-lines fighter or a rear-line supporter and healer.

This is a really interesting and great part of the game, but the one thing that I cover that I’ve had so much confusion and confliction on is content and length. This is a game that has no story mode, no campaign, no “task” outside of daily challenges that give you more experience. It’s about just diving into Multiplayer Battles in the moment and has no ‘task’ in that sense.

This is even more apparent in that Paladins on the Switch only has the Founder’s Pack available, which means there is no sense of unlocking characters because all of them are unlocked by default. The only sense of unlocking content is special skills and skins for characters that are unlocked by leveling them up through constant matches (and using earned money to instant-level them).

By this standard, picking one character to main and unlocking each of their skills will likely take you several hours to do. But, at the same time, I don’t think I can properly gauge play-time for that because not everyone will want to just grind out matches to get their favorite character’s skills unlocked.

So, I’m still at a loss on content. You could get several hours out of unlocking character skills, or you could play the game for just an hour or two and decide you don’t like the game. Without a F2P version, this section of the review is difficult to make.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too hard to do, mostly in part that despite there not being a “tutorial” in the game, all of the skills you can do and most other functions have their buttons displayed to you on-screen during gameplay, so there’s never a big confusion on how to do all of the things you can do as you play.

Moving around in arenas is done with the Left Analog Stick and the Right Analog is used for moving the camera. B is used to jump and A is used to purchase upgrades mid-battle. THe four triggers are used for your skills with ZR always being your primary weapon/gun and the others being your separate abilities.

All in all, it works pretty well.

Presentation

In a way, the method Hi-Rez used graphics and presentation on the Switch is genius, when it comes to performance and smoothness. Basically, graphics look great at times and a little under-great other times.

To ensure constant 60 fps in both Docked and Handheld Modes, Paladins has a Dynamic Resolution, meaning that the resolution of the game changes in accordance to how much power it’s using and will lower a bit, creating some blurriness if the frame-rate is about to drop under 60 fps.

So, it looks pretty nice most of the time and, the times it doesn’t, it maintains that perfect super-smooth frame-rate throughout, so you never have to worry about adjusting between 60 and 30 fps.

The only real issue with performance is Loading. Paladins on the PS4, Xbox One, and PC both have much faster load times for getting into matches than on the Switch. While it could take as little as 20-30 seconds to load a match on other consoles, it can take 1-2 minutes for one to load on the Switch. This is the same for loading previews in the Store for Skins and other cosmetics.

Battery Life

I wasn’t expecting much out of Battery Life, but we got about what I expected. Here are my Battery Times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 21 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 46 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 13 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 42 minutes

Pretty low on the standard scale, but that’s about what I expected out of an Online-based shooting game, especially one that is constantly locked at 60 fps.

Game Title: Fortnite
Developer: Epic Games
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 1.95-2.5 hours
Download: 2 GB

As far as the big, new online trends in gaming are concerned, the Battle Royale trend is very big right now. These games chuck a massive amount of players onto a huge map and they must survive and fight off other players until there is only one player, or one team remaining.

The biggest of these games right now is, of course, Fortnite. The game that just came to the Switch as is shown all over YouTube ads via its trailer with the energizing song, “Right Now” by Confetti.

With it arriving with Paladins, I thought to continue my Online-Games reviews this week by diving straight into it yet again. Here is my review of Fortnite for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Fortnite has a story, but doesn’t have a story. Fortnite originated as a co-op survival game known as Fortnite: Save the World and later got the ever-popular Battle Royale mode added later on. Save the World had a Story Mode about players defending themselves from hordes of zombies.

But, we don’t need to go into that because the Switch version of Fortnite had that mode completely removed. This means that the Switch version, which only consists of Battle Royale, has no story attached to it.

Gameplay

Fortnite: Battle Royale is an Online Sandbox Shooting game with building and survival elements thrown into the mix. It’s all about dropping 100 players onto a giant map and having them collect resources and weapons and fight off other players by means of using weapons and building fortifications to protect both themselves and their friends/teammates.

First of all, let’s go over the Save the World situation again. As I said in the previous section, the Switch version had the Story Campaign Mode removed, meaning that Battle Royale is all Switch users can play. When asked about this, the devs stated that they had no plans on adding it in, so it’s likely that Switch will never get Save the World.

What we’re left with is Fortnite: Battle Royal, which consists of the 100-player free-for-all sandbox shooting experience. Although you’re all dropped onto the map no matter how you play, there are 6 different variations. You can play solo, where all 100 players are playing for themselves or the Team-based modes where you can team up with a buddy or a squad of 4-5 players. These also have variations known as “Sniper Shootout” which are the same but only with long-range firearms, promoting sniper-based play.

There’s also the 50v50 mode, where you’ve got massive fortresses and two 50-player teams, fighting one another.

Now, actual gameplay is very different than what I expected. You sky-dive into this massive sandbox island with tons of areas and environments you can choose to land in. From your landing, your task is to find weapons to defend yourself and use your pickaxe to tear apart anything around you from fences, trees, cars, and buildings to be able to build fortifications to protect yourself or your team. All of these items are randomly-generated, so you can’t go to the place you found a shotgun in your last session and expect another one to be there. That house might have a pistol, or no weapons at all.

The only thing that keeps you from just hiding in your fortress, though, is the Storm. The island is constantly in the process of being ripped apart by a storm and incrementally covers more of the island. All players have to move to where the storm isn’t at or they’ll die from the Storm, alone. This makes games much more intense and not just little sessions of everyone camping inside houses and fortifications. You can’t camp for very long before you’re forced to move to a new area by the storm.

While this is surprisingly fun and addicting on its own, you can do a lot more in Fortnite than run around, shooting each other. There are lots of small vehicles and areas on the island that have their own little things in them. You can grab shopping carts and ride them around hills just like kids want to do. There’s also a newly-added soccer stadium, where players can hold legitimate soccer matches with a scoreboard nearby that will count and tally goals in each of the nets. The more I explored in Fortnite, the more small little things I found that I could find and do that weren’t just running and gunning people down with the biggest gun I could find.

Items and Cosmetics, however, are the big meat of the game’s progression system. You don’t have a Character Select screen when you start your game sessions. You play as a randomly-generated character, but you can earn items in-game to equip and use with that character, like different pickaxes and cosmetic costumes and spray to label your fortress with.

However, this is also where the F2P model kicks in and Fortnite starts expecting you to shovel out real money. The way progression works is that you have items that unlock at certain Tiers/Levels that are earned as you play through sessions. The bad side is that most of the unlockable items are hidden behind a regularly-scheduled “Season Pass” known as the Battle Pass and the only “Free Pass” unlockables are small cosmetics like stickers.

This isn’t a case where you can grind it out and unlock these same items later on. All of the items, upgrades, and challenges locked behind the Battle Pass can only be obtained by buying that Battle Pass as well as reaching those Tiers. They can’t be obtained any other way and, with Save the World excluded from the Switch release, there’s no way to earn credits in-game for these items and passes outside of eShop Micro-Transaction purchases.

Now, where does all of this leave us in terms of length? Fortnite is built so that you’re constantly unlocking new content through the Battle Pass, with the Battle Pass renewing with new unlockables nearly every month or so. So, if you opt to chuck out for those Passes, you’ll pretty much never stop unlocking new cosmetics, experience upgrades, challenges to complete, tool upgrades, etc.

But that’s all on whether or not you wish to spend actual money on this game. As a F2P player, you’ll unlock stickers every so often, but nowhere near as often as the constantly-unlocking content for Paid Players.

Controls

Controlling Fortnite isn’t too tough, though figuring that out might be. This game has its settings options hidden well in menus and has no tutorial to speak of, so you just kind of figure everything out yourself, from how the game controls to how gameplay mechanics work.

Moving around is done with the Left Analog Stick and you can move the camera with the Right Analog Stick. Additionally, you can click the Right Trigger down to switch between Standing and Crouching stances. The D-Pad is used for team commands, taunts/dances, and cycling information. ZL and ZR are used for aiming and firing your weapons/pickaxe while L and R are used to cycle through your equipped items and building recipes in Build Mode.

That just leaves the face buttons/action buttons. B is used for jumping and Y is used for reloading. X automaitcally toggled the Pickaxe Tool, and A toggles between combat mode and Build Mode.

Presentation

Graphically, the game doesn’t look bad. The renders look pretty nice most of the time, and there are very few if any jagged edges around you when you’re playing through a match.

The bigger things to talk about here are performance aspects. Fortnite on the Switch, much like its original release on the PS4 and Xbox One runs at 30 frames per second, with having small dips in gameplay, especially when a lot of other players are around. These dips aren’t very large, but they do happen relatively often.

Battery Life

Here is where things get really critical. I did extra Battery Tests on this game after the latest patch, just to make sure they hadn’t changed how this was optimized. You’ll see why in just a moment. Here are my Battery Times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 1 hours, 58 minutes
Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 36 minutes

This is amazingly-bad. I’ve never had a single Switch title ever last less than 2 hours on a single charge of Battery Life, but Fortnite drains it so fast that, unless you have the brightness down to the bottom, you can’t even squeeze 2 hours out of it.

This game seems very unoptimized for the Switch, especially from a handheld perspective.

DLC Title: Splatoon 2 – Octo Expansion
DLC Type: Story Campaign/New Character
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Price: $19.99 USD

Splatoon’s story and lore has always intrigued me. I knew that it was some sort of post-apocalypse early on thanks to Game Theory’s videos on the biology of the Inklings. Past getting into the series, though, I was kinda sad that Splatoon 2 didn’t really go into the backstory and the lore in its Story Mode, outside of just little references to the first game and its villains.

That is also why I recently got back into playing the game. During E3, Nintendo announced that the new Story Expansion for Splatoon 2 was about to be released, so I got interested and bought the DLC as soon as it dropped.

Now that I’ve had time to thoroughly play through this new mode, I’m ready to talk about it. Here is my review of Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion!

Story

Octo Expansion takes place in a subway system buried deep underneath Inkopolis. Awakening inside the subway with no memories, you play as an Octoling known as Agent 8. You come to find out that you’d been fighting with Agent 3, the protagonist from the original Splatoon game, when you both were attacked and fell into this subway system. Assisted by Agent 3’s captain as well as Pearl and Marina, you go through the trials of the Subway System Experiments in order to gain your freedom to return to the surface.

Story is the biggest thing I was looking forward to in this expansion. I liked it, but I was underwhelmed by how they did it. Across most of the DLC< you get background info through Chat Logs given to you every so often when you’re clearing stages. These mostly boil down to diving into the backgrounds of the characters supporting you ie Pearl and Marina, and very little is actually done to give you information on Agent 8, themselves.

Granted, the ending areas of the expansion do a great job of showcasing some of the lore behind humanity before they go extinct in a way that I think outdoes anything Splatoon 1 or 2’s story campaigns did. I just think that they set up the story point of Agent 8 being void of memories and didn’t do much with it.

Gameplay

As far as gameplay goes, not much has changed. Octo Expansion is still a third-person shooting game with platforming elements thrown into the mix.

The thing about this DLC, though, is that it’s like an extensive “Challenge Mode” of sorts. You’ve got 80 different stages you can play through in a constantly-unlocking map that put you through various combat challenges while you search for key items that are needed to reach the surface.

The difference between this and Story Mode is that it’s a bit less linear. You can go in any order you want as you clear stages to unlock nearby stages. It’s also much more challenging, with each stage pitting you against intricate challenges against enemies, platforming, and a lot of times, both. The objectives are also varied and few are just “get to the goal”. A lot of levels require puzzle-solving through escort missions, combat missions, rail-riding missions, or puzzles as simple as destroying crates to match a statue, very similar to how you make intricate statues in Minecraft.

To add to the challenge, you also are given choices between weapons to take with you, the rewards being much higher for clearing the stage with a more difficult weapon type. This ties into the Point System that this DLC uses. Every time you clear a stage, outside of collectibles, you earn points and every time you attempt a stage, you pay a fee in points. This means that you can only attempt stages so many times if you constantly fail them before you run out of points and need to go back to easier stages to earn them back up.

Thankfully, this DLC gives workarounds for that very situation. Once you attempt a stage twice and lose all of your lives both times, you are given the choice of letting the game auto-clear it for a third fee so you can basically skip that stage and move onto the next. This is useful with how intricate and precise some levels are, so you don’t have to just sit there and rage for hours on that one stage that’s giving you problems.

Given the sheer number of stages here, you can expect this DLC to last you quite some time. I didn’t clear anywhere near all 80 of the stages involved by the time I found all 4 Key Items and worked my way to the Final Boss and I’d logged a little over 8 hours by the time I’d gotten the credits. So, you should expect to spend at least that long over the course of this DLC Campaign.

If you’re an Online Player for Splatoon 2, do note that this campaign does allow you to play the game as a custom Octoling as well as an Inkling, along with gaining exclusive pieces of equipment/gear for clearing all of the stages in the campaign.

Game Title: Fallout Shelter
Developer: Bethesda
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital
Battery Life: 4-6 hours
Download: 1.4 GB

Fallout has come to the Switch, but it isn’t what many people had expected it to be. After some false rumors dropped a few weeks before E3 about a supposed Fallout 3: Anniversary Edition, people were hoping to get some nice, fps, Fallout action on the go. At least, outside of PC handhelds like the GPD WIn / Win 2.

What we got was a little different. Bethesda thought to expand its Vault-sim past Mobile, PC, and Xbox One and bring it for PlayStation 4 fans as well as Nintendo Switch fans. So, without further delay, here is my review of Fallout Shelter for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

The story of Shelter is that you are the Overseer of one of the many Vaults built to shield humanity from going extinct during a Nuclear War. As the Overseer, your task is to recruit people to live in your vault and keep the vault running by running power generators, creating weapons for defending your home, and expanding to make it a good place to live.

There’s not a “Main” story to this game, but once you unlock Quests, you do have a very Fallout-esque feel to the Quest Chains. Each Quest gives you information about stuff that’s going on and the further you get into the chain, the more you learn about the areas you visit and the plot around those people.

It certainly won’t be winning any awards, but it does have some interesting tidbits to keep you occupied and interested in the Quests/Raids you’re doing.

Gameplay

Fallout Shelter is a free-to-play “City-building” Simulation game. Across the entirety of the game, you will be building and expanding a vault by recruiting residents and creating rooms to not only keep the vault running, but ever-expanding.

The basics of the game is that you’re in a sim. Your goal is to create a good vault environment to attract residents to expand it and keep the process going. You bring residents in and assign them jobs to keep the vault going. Some can provide power to keep it up and running while others can be assigned to Diners and Water Treatment Plants to maintain food and water to keep the residents alive to keep maintainig the vault.

This is a much more complex process than it sounds. Every new room you unlock and make adds more to the game, like Weapon and Item Development or Living Quarters for increasing your population. It’s an ongoing process of increasing resources and needing other resources to increase those resources. New rooms need new residents and more power to the vault, who need more food and water to work properly. The more you unlock and build, the more you need to stabilize the vault for those new resources.

This makes the beginning of the game pretty difficult. The game gives you residents to get started but, until you have enough residents to unlock the room that recruits more, the only way to expand is to throw boys and girls into the living quarters until they start having kids that can grow up and be the new residents to use those new rooms and provide power to those new rooms.

But that’s the beauty about this game. In most F2P Mobile-origin games, you get incredibly-fast pacing that eventually turns into super-slow pacing hidden behind massive Micro-Transactions for speeding things up. Fallout Shelter does the opposite. Like many simulation games, it has pretty slow pacing to start out, but the further you get in and make, the faster the pacing gets and the more you can do. While there are wait times for everything that can be shortened with IAP items, the pacing effectively just keeps increasing with the more you do.

That also brings us to the fact that this game is not meant to be left alone for too long. The game has an internal clock and will continue to run when it or even the console is shut off. So, if you put the game down for a day and start it back up, a day’s worth of questing, resource-generation, and accidents will happen. Being originally a mobile game, it’s meant for you to keep a constant eye on. If you don’t play for days on end, you’ll come back to a Vault full of dead Dwellers that either starved to death or were killed during Raider attacks, meaning you’ll have to spend a boatload of caps to bring them back to life and continue with their lives.

This is really my main concern with this version of the game. The Switch is a handheld platform, making this work, but with needing to check in every few hours and no way to turn off the constant internal clock from the Mobile release, it can be very difficult to effectively manage your vault, especially if you have a job that you don’t take your Switch to (which I imagine would be even more awkward in the PS4 version that released along with this one).

This isn’t just a sim game, though. Once you unlock the Overseer’s Office, you can start sending your Vault Dwellers on Quests to the Wasteland, where you can raid and plunder dungeons, from Vaults and Stores to Warehouses and Factories. This is where combat starts going into play, as your characters level as the game progresses and can be equipped with armor and weapons. In these dungeons, you have lots of enemies they fight and there’s a big focus on watching their health and giving them Medkits and Radaway when they need it.

This adds variety to the game. If you’re not that into Sim games but love Fallout, you won’t be constantly-bored with doing sim stuff with power and water when you can swap back and forth between the sim stuff and Questing when your party of Dwellers reach the destinations for those quests.

This also takes away from the typical F2P “Pay to Win” model. Caps are slowly earned as you progress the game, which can push you towards spending real money on resources, not only to speed up Quests, but give you more Caps to spend on new rooms and room upgrades. Thanks to Quests, though, you’ll have a constant inventory of items and junk, which can be sold for large amounts of Caps, easily outweighing how much you get through normal progression.

I mention that it takes away from it because when Shelter first released on Mobile platforms, it didn’t have quests and Caps were gained at a very, very slow rate. Ever since they added in Quests, though, there’s very little need to spend any money and still keep that increasing pace for progression. Even moreso because many Quests reward you with all of the special items you can buy through micro-transactions.

Now, all of this comes down to the game having tons and tons of stuff for you to do. There are two dozen different room types to unlock and a lot of quest-chains for you to navigate through. While you never will need to play for long at any given time, there’s enough content, variety, and pressure to keep checking on your dwellers to keep you occupied for a long time.

Controls

Controlling the game has variety to it in that it can be controlled with both the Joy-Con/Pro Controller buttons or the touch screen, like the mobile versions of the game.

But, this isn’t perfect, either. When using the touch controls or the button controls, it doesn’t always respond right away. This is much more apparent with the button controls. It’s not a huge issue, but it can be annoying when using the Left Analog to navigate rooms.

Basically, the controls go like this. The Left Analog Stick can move the “cursor” between rooms and people to select and take a look at information while the Right Analog Stick will move the camera/FOV around different parts of whatever area you’re currently looking at. The D-Pad is used quite a bit, as it is used to take a look at Quest Progress, Upgrades for Rooms, and using Stimpacks / Radaway on injured people.

The ZL and ZR triggers can be used to zoom in and out to look at different levels of detail, while the L/R triggers can be used to look at information like how happy your Vault Dwellers are, in terms of how much needed resources you’re keeping them supplied. with. Then, the face buttons. A is used to select options or drag dwellers around to different rooms. B is used to cancel options. X and Y can be used to check on Dweller info or change their equipment when you’ve selected them.

It’s not a bad control scheme. It’s just that it doesn’t always take your inputs correctly that is the problem with this aspect of the game.

Presentation

Visually, the game looks great. It’s all in 2D sprites, but they look very detailed and crisp, whether zoomed in on one room or zoomed out. It looks really nice.

The game performs great as well. There are never any freezing, stuttering, or dropped frame. It’s optimized well, as I expected it would be.

Battery Life

With this, I expected quite a bit of Battery Life, and that’s exactly what Fallout Shelter gives us. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 10 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 34 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 49 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 6 hours, 13 minutes

As expected, you get a ton of Battery Life. While you don’t spend much time in each session, you won’t be running out of Battery anytime soon with Fallout Shelter

Game Title: RBI Baseball 18
Developer: MLB Advanced Media
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 2.5 – 3 hours
Download: 5.3 GB

Good baseball games on non-PlayStation platforms has been a bit of an odd and rare find for the longest time. The MLB The Show series that is exclusive to Sony’s platforms has a ton of features to it, even when it was still releasing on the PS Vita and PSTV, but as many handheld fans know, they haven’t released a handheld The Show game in a couple years now.

The RBI Baseball franchise’s revival was a big point of promise for non-PlayStation gamers and current-age handheld fans to get good baseball games to play. After all, the new RBI Baseball games are developed and published by the Club Owners of the MLB, itself. When you’ve got the MLB, themselves, making the game, you think it will be as close to the real thing as you can get.

Unfortunately, the Nintendo Switch version of RBI 17 turned out to be a disappointment in terms of a lack of feature, both in terms of every version of the game and the content that was pulled out of the Switch version.

With another attempt now available to handheld fans, let’s see how they have improved. Here is my review of RBI Baseball 18 for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Due to this game having no story, this shall remain blank.

Gameplay

Like its predecessors, RBI Baseball 18 is an arcade-style baseball simulation game. Across the different game modes, you’ll be pitching, batting, throwing, and everything else involved in a typical American Baseball game.

First of all, let’s get into Game Modes available in this new game. RBI 17 was severely lacking in this department, having access to Exhibition Matches along with Seasons and Post-Seasons that allowed you to do little outside of playing games.

18 does have more available to it. We still have Exhibition, which can be toggled between Single Player and Local Multiplayer Modes. Season/Post-Season have also been expanded into Franchise Mode and Post-Season Modes. Additionally, we also have a Home Run Derby Mode, giving you limited times to get home runs, also available in Single Player and Local Multiplayer.

Franchise Mode lets you take a team and go through Seasons of games, not only playing the games, but also recruiting and trading players at any time, be it players from the current season or “Legends” from decades long past. Post-Season is a little different in that Trading is not possible, like it was in the previous game.

However, they’ve taken some content out of the Switch version. Once again, the Online Multiplayer Mode in the other versions of the game is not available on the Switch, meaning this is a game meant to be played alone or with someone sitting right next to you. Oddly enough, some of the beginning screens of the game mentions the Online, despite it not being in this version.

Now, as far as the actual gameplay, not much is different from 17. You primarily play as a Pitcher or Hitter and the options available to you are pretty limited. You only have a normal throw and a fast ball, so there’s not much you can do as a Pitcher, and with batting, you basically can either bunt or strike the ball, guiding it with angling the Left Analog Stick.

I can really see this coming down to the MLBAM wanting to make this as much like the original RBI games as possible, even down to having the same camera angles on-screen as the original did back on the NES. But, it feels like there’s just not much depth to the gameplay.

So, with content. it’s really the same as any other sports game. A full Franchise Mode could take hours upon hours with dozens of games to play through. At the very least, there is more to do here than the previous game, even with the Online Multiplayer being removed.

Controls

Controlling the game is pretty simple, just like the previous game.

You can move your player around their area with the D-Pad / Arrow Buttons or the Left Analog Stick. The L and R triggers can be used for Substituting players out for plays. Finally, the Action Buttons control what you do. B is used for Pitching/Swinging. and the other 3 are used for the bases aligned with those positions with stealing bases and throwing the ball to try to get an Out.

Presentation

Visually, the game has improved a bit upon what 17 had. There are a lot more details on the character models and parts of the ball fields, but there are jagged edges around a lot of areas, even in Docked Mode. In one area of the presentation, there’s improvement. In others, not so much.

Performance is also an issue here. Not in terms of frame-rate, but in terms of freezing and hanging loading screens. The game hesitates and lags when going through most of its loading screens. Sometimes, though, it will freeze and get stuck in the middle of a loading screen. I’ve had several times when I’d be loading a game up in Franchise Mode and it would never load unless I closed out of the game and went back in.

Battery Life

This was an interesting part of this review. RBI 17 had decent Battery Life, and so does this game. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 41 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 46 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 00 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 05 minutes

This is interesting because it’s actually a bit lower than the times for RBI 17. Not by a lot, but around 10-20 minutes less on most settings.

Game Title: Paranautical Activity
Company: Digerati Distribution
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 3.5 – 4.5 hours
Download: 431 MB

Rogue games are fun little games in that they have random elements to them. The Binding of Isaac is fun to do runs because they’re never the same. All of the rooms, enemies, bosses, and items are all different from run to run. It got so popular that other genres started mimicking the formula for a set of time. Some had success and others did not.

One genre that tried this out was the first-person shooting genre. There were a few “Random Generated” FPS games, but one indie game that I played and covered before was called Paranautical Activity, a Rogue FPS that had more pixel-style graphics and the gritty difficulty that many rogue games are known for.

While the Vita version of PA was fun, it had problems with not only the frame-rate but a lack of PSTV Support. so how different is it on the Switch? Let’s find out. Here is my review of Paranautical Activity for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Due to this game having no story, this section shall remain blank.

Gameplay

PA is a Rogue FPS, as many people call it. In other words, it’s a first-person shooting game with randomly-generated levels, providing each ‘run’ of the game with different enemies, items, bosses, and weapons.

Like games like The Binding of Isaac, PA is played in ‘runs’. You start on Floor 1 of the dungeon and play until you clear the 8 floors the game offers or you die. After that, you restart from the start and play again, with the hopes of reaching the end on any run you didn’t reach it the first time.

The idea here is that you play the game and learn from experience. The goal of each floor is to locate the boss, kill it, and then take the elevator to the next floor. But that’s easier said than done. Every enemy and boss type has patterns and ways to move around them, but actually learning those patterns is very difficult. 2D rogue games are hard to master, but PA proves that 3D rogue games are the same way. Even after playing the Vita version so much, I had incredible amounts of trouble relearning the game when I got it for the Switch.

Thankfully, you have different characters and loadouts to choose from, so you’re not always using the same weapon type. Each character has set stats and set weapons they start with. One is the primary weapon that has unlimited ammo and the other is a Power Weapon which is significantly stronger but has very limited ammunition.

You can collect items and other weapons as you progress, though. Whenever you kill enemies, they drop Gold, which can be used in Shop Rooms to buy items to boost your abilities as well as weapons to trade into your arsenal. Items can also be obtained by defeating bosses.

This is where the longevituy really comes into play. Outside of the high difficulty increasing your time through attempts and learning, the game has dozens of achievements that you unlock as you accomplish certain feats. These achievements unlock new items that will appear in the dungeons as you replay the game. This is also a bit of a thing for Rogues, as Isaac also has this feature of unlocking new items for use in future runs.

However, there is also a downside to the game, in terms of variety. While there are lots of items for you to unlock, the enemy variety placement is a bit lacking. While there are around a dozen mob types and boss types, the more you play, the more you see the same enemies and bosses again and again. The fact that a third of the bosses don’t unlock until you clear several floors certainly doesn’t help, but by my 3rd run on the Switch, I’d already seen mostly everything I’d seen in my first and second runs, repeated. It took me almost a dozen runs to start seeing bosses I hadn’t already fought.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too hard, but learning is. The game doesn’t do anything to explain how you do anything, so everything is just learn-as-you-go. Of course, the menu is there for you, but there is no tutorial in the intro to push you along.

Moving is done with the Left Analog Stick and Aiming with the Right Analog Stick. The ZL/ZR triggers are not used, but the L trigger is used for grenades and the R trigger for shooting your weapon.

The face buttons are used for the rest. You can Jump with A, use a power-up you’ve picked up with B, switch weapons with X, and use an Item with Y.

Overall, it’s pretty easy to understand. It’s just that the game doesn’t really do anything to inform you of any of this.

Presentation

Visually, the game looks pretty smooth and crisp in both Docked and Handheld modes. With its more pixel-like design, this wasn’t hard to do. The Vita version also looked nice, in this regard.

The performance is very nice here as well. The Vita version struggled a lot with frame-rate, dipping down into the 20s very often. Outside of the still-annoying loading sequences when entering a new room, the game stays at a nice, steady frame-rate from start to finish.

Battery Life

Battery Life is pretty nice in this game. Sure, it’s a 3D game, but the pixel-like design just might have helped this out. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 28 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 36 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 09 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 17 minutes

That’s a good amount of Battery Life. Funny how this is yet another game with longer Battery Life, yet each run won’t take that long to finish.

Game Title: Ys VIII Lacrimosa of Dana
Company: Nihon Falcom, NIS America
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail | Digital Download
Battery Life: 2.5 – 3.75 hours
Download: 14.2 GB

The Ys series is one that I’ve come to love, ever since playing Ys Seven on the PSP, though its newest entry has really brought the series to a closer place of my heart. Playing Ys VIII on the Vita and PSTV was a wonderful and emotional experience with how Falcom upped their game on the series from both a gameplay and story perspective.

When the game was announced that it was coming to the Switch with all of the PS4-exclusive features, I was really looking forward to it. So, here we go. This is my review of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Taking place between the events of Ys V and Ys VII, Lacrimosa has Adol on his way to the country of Altago (where Ys Seven takes place) when the ship he is on gets attacked by a sea monster, stranding him and all of the other passengers on a cursed island filled with monsters and mystery. Trying to recover, he gathers and leads other Castaways in creating a village and living on the dangerous island as they hunt down a means to escape the island.

As far as story goes, VIII is the best the series has done to date. While the first half of the game is really slow in terms of story and background information, the second half ramps things up on a major scale, providing lots of backstory and history as well as a set of endings that brought me to tears for the second platform I experienced this game on.

As a final note, the Switch version of the game has the re-translated script and voice-work that NISA worked on since the initial Vita/PSTV launch. While many early Switch reviews noted translation problems, these were all updated with the Day 1 patch. I’ve seen the entire game and didn’t find a single issue.

Gameplay

Ys VIII is an Action-RPG, which the series has pretty much always been. Building off of the gameplay mechanics of Ys Seven and Ys: Memories of Celceta, it involves exploring a huge overworld map and taking part in real-time party-based combat.

First of all, the Nintendo Switch version of Ys VIII has all of the new content that was previously exclusive to the PS4 version of the game. This means that all of the new Questlines, Dungeons, Bosses, Story Scenes, and Transformations granted to Dana’s side of the story are now available on the go. This also includes the “Silver Armor” costume for Adol from the first Ys game, which has been exclusive to PS4 Pre-Orders until now.

Now, Ys VIII basically progresses in two-halves. The first half of the game focuses a lot on gameplay and especially exploration. You have a massive island overworld to explore as you try to find and rescue your fellow Castaways and then using those same Castaways not only as facilities in your town (like weapon upgrades and material shops), but building your numbers to free up obstacles on the map to access new areas and rescue more castaways. Since story is pretty light in the first half, it plays like a traditional Ys game.

It isn’t until the second half kicks off and you’re able to explore the world as both Adol and Dana in their respective Timeline Eras that things start expanding more. You still explore and rescue, but the focus is more spent on exploring new areas as Adol and fulfilling story-oriented quests and digging into the island’s backstory as Dana. In essence, you have a lot more you can do once you hit that halfway point.

Combat, itself, should be familiar to anyone who has plays Ys: Memories of Celceta on the PS Vita (or PSTV since that compatibility has since been added to that game). You have a party of 3 characters with you and you dish out combos in real-time battles. The main strategy here is that each character has an attack Type, and a lot of enemies are strong against everything but one Type. This encourages you to not just stick to controlling one character but swapping around to exploit weaknesses. Doing this also helps each character grow and learn new skills, as Leveling Up only really affects your base stats.

Now, the other thing I wanted to mention is Raid Battles. Since you make a village on an island full of monsters, said monsters make a habit of attacking your village in an attempt to grab your friends as dinner. During these times, you will be called back to the village to take part in wave-based battles where you defend the village from these attacks. As I said in my Vita review, this feature is interesting and would be a nice addition if it didn’t happen so often and didn’t always happen right when something really crucial is about to happen in the story. The further I got in the game, the more it felt more like an annoyance that I started to ignore when the game let me.

Finally, let’s talk about length. When I played the Vita version, I managed to beat the game in around 30-35 hours. On the Switch, I went through all of the extra content and dungeons added to the game and finished the game in the same amount of time. Considering I knew where most things were this time around, if you’re a newcomer to Ys 8, I would say the Play Time would be more around 40 hours or so to get to the end of the game and do enough Quests and Exploring to get the True Ending.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too hard, though if you’ve played the Vita or PS4 versions, I highly recommend you jump into settings the moment you boot up the game. A and B are swapped as is the case with most Nintendo games, and it really felt off to me.

The default control scheme has you moving around with the Left Analog Stick and the camera with the Right Stick. The L trigger is used for dodging/dashing and R is used for using skills while the other triggers are used for quick menus. A is used for attacking and B for jumping. X is used for locking onto enemies and Y is used for switching playable characters.

It’s a bit different from your normal Ys console control scheme, but thankfully, every command can be mapped to any button so you’re free to set it up however you wish.

Presentation

This section is difficult to make. Ys 8 looked better than the Vita version did, but only in some areas. For the majority of the game, Docked Mode gives the games a few jagged edges less than on the Vita while Handheld Mode mostly resembles how the Vita version looks.

But, there are a couple issues here. First off, Handheld Mode gives grass a strange distortion and flickering effect when running around. Also, some of Dana’s dungeons tank the resolution and picture quality, quickly going from very-detailed to very blurry. If you tie this with some small frame drops in her dungeons, we have a situation where performance isn’t really much different from the Vita release while in handheld mode.

Battery Life

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but here’s what I got. Here are my Battery Times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 36 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 00 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 19 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 47 minutes

That’s not terrible, but not wonderful, either. It’s about standard with 3D games on the Switch.

Game Title: Angels of Death
Company: Playism
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 4 – 5.5 hours
Download: 808 MB

Every time I hear “RPG Maker Horror Game”, I think of Corpse Party and get pretty interested in whatever’s being talked about. Even though Corpse Party is not an RPG, it is a great Japanese horror game, filled with tons of shocking moments and a very interesting backstory.

So, when this new game popped up on the Switch’s eShop, I read “Horror Game” and “RPG Maker” in the same description and couldn’t hit Pre-Order fast enough. Now that I’ve played through it with little regret, here is my review of Angels of Death for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Angels of Death surrounds Rachel Gardner, a 13-year old girl that goes to counseling after witnessing a murder, only to awaken in a strange place full of riddles and killers hellbent on ending her life. After being rescued from one killer by another, she emotionlessly calls out, requesting to be killed, herself. The two of them work together for their common goals: He wants out of this place, and she wants to be killed.

The plot of this game is very odd at first and some things had me scratching my head, but the further you get into the game, the more everything makes sense and the more strange and weird plot twists appear, not only about this place and Rachel’s friend, but Rachel, herself. And by the end of the game’s story, it’s one shocking revelation after another that kept me on the edge of my seat through the entirety of the last chapter.

There’s only one problem with the game’s story. A couple scenes and sequences of the game aren’t translated into English. It seems that on its way to consoles and handhelds for the first time, AoD accidentally had about half a dozen lines of dialogue missed and skipped over, as they remain in Japanese symbols, illegible to anyone who only speaks English.

Gameplay

Like Corpse Party before it, Angels of Death is a horror-themed adventure game with platforming and puzzle elements thrown into the mix. As you explore the 2D environments of the game, you’ll be navigating areas, collecting items to solve puzzles, and running from various people and things that want you dead.

An interesting tidbit of info is that the Switch is the first time this game has released on any console or handheld. The game was originally Japanese-only, but was localized for PC through Steam. Until now, it’s been a PC-only game. Switch is the only console that this game can be played on right now.

The game is serialized in chapters, as its original, Japanese release was released like many Telltale games, or Resident Evil Revelations 2. The goal of each of the game’s Chapters is to solve puzzles and survive each floor of the game’s setting, unlocking the elevator to the next floor and taking one step closer to escape.

Doing that is a mixture of puzzle-solving and navigation/platforming. Most rooms in the game are puzzles that lock you in upon entering with sparkling items around that you need and other objects that need to be interacted with, both by themselves and combined with items. Whether you’re trying to hide from a killer or trying to find the key to a locked door, you’ll be doing plenty of exploring and puzzle-solving over the course of this game.

What makes the game more unique is how it changes things up when threats happen on each floor. These start out as simple chase sequences, where you have to outrun the killer long enough to either find a place to hide or jump into the next floor. As you work your way up, though, they become different. Some of them have you running around and destroying objects in rooms while others are closer to QTEs from more cinematic games of today’s generation. This constant change keeps all of these high-stress situations fresh from the others.

These sequences are also often challenging, giving you instant death if you fail the puzzle or your time limit runs out. However, with the ability to save anywhere in the game and having the game automatically bring up the Save Menu whenever these sequences start, there’s plenty given to you to help you manage through all of these.

Overall, this brings us to the game’s length. I cleared the final chapter and got the game’s Ending and Epilogue in a little over 8 hours of game time. For a game that is priced $15 for its NA release, that’s a pretty good amount of time to get out of it. As far as replayability is concerned, though, there is a reason to replay the game, but I cannot say why because of story spoilers.

Controls

Controlling the game is very simple. Moving is done with the Arrow Buttons or Left Analog Stick. Interacting with objects and NPCs is done with the A button. B cancels menu options. Finally, you can open the menu with the + button or the X button.

And, that’s pretty much it. It’s an extremely simple control scheme.

Presentation

I wouldn’t say this game is terrible, visually, but I also wouldn’t call it great. A lot of the renders in the game definitely have some jaggies on them, and this was the same in the PC version. You’ll rarely notice this in handheld mode. It was more when it was shown on my TV that I noticed this, especially with the character artwork during scenes.

The little nitpick I have with presentation is the lack of full-screen scenes. The entire game is basically set to a 4:3 ratio, where everything is cropped in the middle of the screen. Most of the time, I didn’t even notice this, but when certain scenes start, it’s very apparent and looks rather strange. Once again, this is the same in the PC version, but it’s still strange.

Battery Life

Based on how the game looks, it’s pretty easy to gauge the kind of Battery Life we’re talking with Angels of Death. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 15 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 19 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 24 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 29 minutes

Even being expected, it’s quite a bit. You’re gonna get a good 4-5 hours out of a single charge with Angels of Death.

Game Title: Shining Resonance Refrain
Company: SEGA
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail | Digital
Battery Life: 3-4 hours
Download: 6.6 GB

The “Shining” series of RPGs from Sega is one of those series that haven’t left Japan much in recent times. There are occasional side games and spin-offs that are available on PC now, but in the console world, they threw a PS3 RPG out in Japan and never did much with it, in terms of a Western release.

Thankfully, that changed last week. Shining Resonance for the PS3 was not only translated to be brought to the West, but it was fully dubbed in both Japanese and English and brought to consoles as well as handhelds.

So, let’s dive into this colorful anime RPG. Here is my review of Shining Resonance Refrain for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

The story of Resonance centers around Yuma, a young boy that serves as the vessel for a legendary being from an ancient war, known as the Shining Dragon. As the vessel, he became the target of an invading army that wishes to use the dragons as tools of war as well as the country being invaded, whom revere the Dragons. Upon being rescued from the invaders, Yuma swears to use the power of the Shining Dragon to fight and bring peace to the world.

The story of this game isn’t what I would call bad, in any way, but it’s a bit too consistent with its predictability. It’s got great character development, especially with its Affection and Romance features. But they use some JRPG tropes a little too much. Having a boss fight where you end the fight, only to have another enemy show up for a boss fight is an interesting use of story, but when you have that same thing happen in almost every single chapter of the game, it’s a bit too tiring and predictable when you know the fight you’re doing is “the warmup fight”.

Gameplay

Shining Resonance Refrain is an Action-RPG with Dating Sim elements thrown into the mix. As you go through the game, you’ll be exploring areas, fighting monsters in real-time battles, and spending your off-time getting to know your teammates in Dating Sim-like Character Events.

Of course, the first thing of note is that this is an enhanced port of Shining Resonance for the PlayStation 3 which never left Japan. In terms of content, Refrain is packed with all of the DLC that came out for the Japanese PS3 release, mostly consisting of alternate costumes for the playable characters.

It also includes Refrain Mode, which is an alternate way to play the game. But, it’s much simpler than it sounds. Refrain Mode is the same as Original Mode, but with the inclusion of DLC Characters Excella and Jinas, two characters that were not playable in the original game, along with Character Events and Endings you can obtain for each of them. It’s kind of like a New Game Plus mode, but without needing to clear the game first.

Progression in Resonance is pretty simple. You’ve always got story markers on where you need to go to advance the plot, be it a location inside the city of Marge, which serves as the game’s hub world, or a dungeon out in the surrounding areas. This is a very story-driven game, though. All of your objectives will be story-based and the story is constantly pushing you towards the next area, dungeon, and boss fight to push the game forward.

That’s not all you do, though. You do go out into the world, spawn events, and fight bosses, but in your off-time, there’s plenty of other things to do. This game has a large focus on its Affection and Romance elements. Any day at any time, you can talk to your party members around the hub and, depending on how you answer questions they have, their Affection rating can go up or down. This will allow you to invite them to late-night chats and even go on Dates with them to further get closer and learn more about their character.

This is all tied to the Ending system. Every character has their own ending that is only accessible if their Affection Rating is high enough by the time you reach the Final Boss. The thing that’s great about this is that you can go into that part of the game with everyone’s Affection maxed out and the game allows you to choose whichever Character Ending you want and can reload your save to go again to see the other endings.

Now, let’s get into the dungeons and combat of the game. Aside from a facility in the hub city that creates automated dungeons for you to fight through for grinding purposes, the world outside of the hub consists of nothing but dungeons that link into one another. As you go out and explore, there are monster encounters everywhere, and you’ll be navigating dungeon areas to get to other dungeon areas. The game incrementally sends you further and further out into the World Map as the Story progresses and has you visiting different locations.

This isn’t a bad system, as you can see how the whole world is formed as locations connect to one another. However, there is one big Quality-of-Life irritation here. The game has no form of Fast Travel, outside of an item that returns you to town. The further you get into the game, the more dungeons you have to run through to get to new objectives. This starts out pretty simple, but the later you get, running through one or two dungeons to get to your objective starts turning into running through three to five dungeons to get to where you need to go for your next scene and boss fight.

It gets quite tiring, knowing that you have to leave town and chug your way through lots of dungeons to get to where you need to go. Sure, the game does offer camp locations across the World Map to save and resupply, but there’s no way to quickly travel to those locations. So, it feels like a task, just running around dungeons to get to the new dungeon.

Combat, itself, is comparable to that of the Tales franchise, but not quite as in-depth. When in combat, you run around an arena in real-time, and can attack enemies with normal attacks, heavy/break attacks that can stun enemies after some time, and skills that use your MP. This is mostly comparable to Tales because it is very easy to chain attacks and skills together to make long combos. It’s not quite as extensive as the system Tales uses, but it’s similar.

The real uniqueness comes from the BAND system and the Shining Dragon. With all of the characters’ weapons being musical instruments, you can build up a gauge and do group songs to affect a lot of things in battle, like reducing damage the party takes or preventing status ailments for as long as the song plays.

This is further expanded in the Shining Dragon. Whenever Yuma has MP, he can tap into and transform into the Shining Dragon and fight in Dragon Form, where all of his stats increase but with a chance of him losing control and becoming berserk. This adds a bit of strategy for players to not just spam the Dragon Form and Ethers to go through each fight and use it wisely and carefully.

Upon winning battles, you gain experience points like most RPGs, both for your characters and their weapons to level up, giving you two ways to raise stats.

That brings me to one thing: Difficulty. This game is like a lot of retro RPGs in a way. This is especially the case with boss fights, but the game is full of huge difficulty spikes for you to overcome. There will rarely be a time in the game when bosses aren’t 10-20+ levels higher than your party and most of them require a lot of attention to learning patterns as they hit much harder than normal enemies around as well as previous bosses.

The thing about it is that this is an Action RPG, so with proper timing and evasion, you can take down enemies that much higher level than you. In fact, I beat the Level 83 Final Boss only around Level 53. However, that isn’t enough as your party still needs to be significantly powered to handle all of the damage those bosses dish out. This requires you to do a good bit of grinding when these spikes happen, even if you know the patterns.

This is another Quality-of-Life thing, because not only do these difficulty spikes happen, but EXP is not shared across all playable characters. Only Active Party Members level, so when you get later in the game when you’re forced to use certain characters, you’ll be in trouble if those particular characters aren’t levels and are thrown into battles with enemies that are absurdly strong in comparison.

This is where the Hub City’s Dungeon Generator comes in handy, as you can customize dungeons you run into by level as well as what kinds of enemies you run across. You don’t have to trek across the World Map, either, so you can just run by your save point and jump right in to send your party grinding it up to gain levels. But, be that as it may, it still requires a significant amount of grinding to keep up with many of these bosses.

That brings us to the game’s length. I managed to beat the game’s Final Boss is around 32 hours, mostly due to switch to the Casual Difficulty for a fair part of the game when the difficulty spikes got too ridiculous and I found myself spending hours of grinding, only to have the boss after require even more grinding. I’d say out of those 32 hours, about 5 were grinding. I’d gauge the Casual Difficulty around 30 hours of play and the Normal Difficulty around 40 hours, so there’s certainly a lot of time to be spent here.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too difficult. No touch controls in handheld mode, so there’s no need to change how you play when you undock your Switch.

Moving around is done with the Left Analog Stick and moving the camera is done with the Right Analog Stick. The Arrow Buttons / D-Pad are used for issuing commands to your party members. The four triggers are all used here as well. Holding L brings up Skills you can use, while R brings up the BAND/Song menu in combat. ZR is used for locking onto nearby enemies.

Finally, the action buttons have their uses. A and X are used for physical attacks, while B and Y are used for blocking and evading. It’s not too hard to get, plus the game has lots of tutorials to explain how everything works.

Presentation

Graphically, this game looks absolutely beautiful. When you’ve got the game docked, it has little to no blemishes or jaggies. Even in handheld mode, there are some jaggies here and there, but it still looks colorful and beautifully optimized for the Switch.

The only hindrance on this is performance. During some fights, the frames will drop upon striking enemies. There has been a patch that has helped with this, but you can see stuttering if you ever strike more than one enemy at once with physical attacks. It returns to normal by the time the attack is over, but it is a bit odd to look at.

Oddly enough, these drops are far more noticeable in Docked Mode than Handheld Mode.

Battery Life

Given how beautiful the game is, I was surprised at the Battery Times. Here they are, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 11 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 22 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 56 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 08 minutes

3-4 hours is not what I was expecting. Kudos to Sega for optimizing this game very well.

Game Title: Nekopara Vol. 1
Company: CFK
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 5-7 hours
Download: 1.9 GB

So, what happens when you have a Hentai Visual Novel and you want to sell it to Western Audiences? Well, as Steam owners have seen, you transform that Hentai VN into a Lewd Romancy VN by removing the Hentai from it and see how well you can edit it to pass as something that doesn’t have sex scenes in it.

There have been plenty of these games on Steam, but how many games like this do you see on consoles and handhelds? Better yet, how many of these do you see on Nintendo handhelds? Well, due to its popularity, a certain Catgirl-themed Erotic series has come to the Nintendo Switch! Crazy, right?

But let’s go away from leading up to it and start talking about it. This is my review of Neko Para Volume 1 for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Neko Para revolves around a young man named Kashou, who moves out of his family’s Sweet Shop to start his own business in selling Cakes. As soon as he moves into his new place, however, he finds that two of the family’s humanoid Cat-Girls have stowed away and found their way to his new place to live with him. He then finds himself in the tough spot of opening his Cake Shop with two pushy Cat-Girls working their way into the shop’s employ, and his love life.

The plot of Neko Para is a very typical type of storyline when you dive into Harem Anime Cliches. In that manner, it’s a pretty entertaining one with a fair amount of comedy built in. However, its Erotic and Hentai roots are heavily emphasized throughout the game. While this “Censored Version” of the game is edited with all of its Graphic Hentai Scenes removed, there is a large emphasis on talk with the girls climaxing and insinuated sex that happens between all 3 of them.

It’s emphasized a little too heavily in balance with the rest of the game’s storyline. While the writers definitely tried to make this H-Game a non-H-game, the erotic side is pushed a bit too far for those wanting a game that isn’t just about a guy having sex with catgirls.

This is a little redeemed with the “Extra Story” added to the game, which is Uncensored because it contained no Erotic Content, Neko Para Volume 0. This is far more tame and is packed with a lot more comedy in diving into the daily life of the other catgirls of the game, which otherwise are introduced and given no real development until Neko Para’s sequels.

In terms of the story being good or bad, I would say that the story of Volume 0 is good and Volume 1 is decent. Aside from the overly-emphasized sex themes, the world that is depicted and the personal growth of the main characters is quite entertaining and interesting to get into. Volume 0 is a great comedy fest that I really enjoyed. Had the sex implications not been as strong in Volume 1, it would be far better as an overall story instead of a leadup to sex scenes.

As a final note, though, the translation isn’t perfect, either. There are dozens of typos and mistakes littered across the half-dozen hours this game will last. It doesn’t keep you from understanding what is being said, but there’s a lot there.

Gameplay

Neko Para is a Visual Novel with little to no interaction from the player. As such, you will be spending the game either watching, reading, or both as the story unfolds and you’re taken into this catgirl-filled world.

Before diving into the gameplay mechanics, let’s discuss differences between the two versions as well as how the console version differs from the Steam/PC version. First off, there are 2 versions of Neko Para. One is Censored, and One is not. The Switch gets the Censored version, which removes all of the graphic sex scenes from the game and has some slight edits to dialogue around those scenes to try to cover them up.

Secondly, there are some additions in the console version that the PC version doesn’t have by itself. First of all, this contains two games and not just one: Neko Para Volume 1 and Neko Para Volume 0. The latter was a short prequel made before Volumes 2 and 3. As far as I have looked, Volume 0 has to be bought separately on PC, while it’s built into the console release.

The final addition is the “Petting” feature. Neko Para added a Petting feature in its later games that lets you stall any story scene and use a pointer to pet the characters on-screen to get cute, bashful reactions out of them. This has not been a part of Volume 1 until this version of the game, so while this has no affect on the events of the game, it’s a fun little feature that was added on the transition to consoles.

Now, onto the game mechanics, or lackthereof. You can’t really do much in this game. There are no dialogue options or separate endings, so it’s basically here for you to sit and enjoy the story. You have typical Visual Novel controls like Auto-Advance, Pause, Removing the dialogue to take screenshots, and a Save/Load feature, but that’s about it. I’ll have more on that later on.

If nothing else, you do unlock Music and Artwork as you progress through the title’s two games, but there’s not much else here. You enjoy the story, and that’s about it.

In terms of time, you’ll probably be spending about 5-6 hours on this game, across both titles. Volume 1 lasts around 4-5 hours with its couple hours of hentai content taken out, while Volume 0 should last you around 1 hour to get through. This isn’t a bad time for the price they’re asking, but it’s certainly short for a Visual Novel.

And as far as replayability is concerned, there isn’t any. There aren’t any alternate endings or branching paths. It’s just a straight story that you go through and, once it’s over, you’ve unlocked everything and are done unless you want to re-read it later.

Controls

Here’s where things get a little confusing. There are buttons for each type of input and feature that you have in the game, but this is a case where the PC version explains it far better than the console version.

There is no tutorial built into the game, so all features, like Skipping or Auto-Advancing text are found by randomly hitting buttons. The only features that are blatantly shown to you are using the – button to repeat voice dialogue, B to hide the HUD, and L to enter Petting Mode. The other controls are on you to find, whereas in the PC version, all options were shown on your screen to be interacted with.

Presentation

Graphically, it’s not hard for a Visual Novel to look good. Neko Para has beautiful artwork, from the backgrounds and Semi-3D character models to the actual artwork for bigger and more prominent scenes from the game.

Performance is the same. It runs flawlessly without any hiccups, drops, freezing, or crashing issues. It runs nicely, as expected of a VN.

Battery Life

Being a VN, you would expect a lot of Battery Life out of Neko Para. Well, here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 48 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 06 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 6 hours, 40 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 6houts, 56 minutes

5-7 hours is a lot. More than enough time to finish both of the games in this release.

Game Title: Anima Arcane Edition
Company: Badland Games
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 2-2.5 hours
Download: 6.1 GB

Hearing the word, Anima, what comes to mind? For me, it’s that dark, secret OP summon from Final Fantasy X. For others, it could be the set of tabletop games that have made a franchise for themselves.

I’m not really into tabletop games so much, but when I saw Anima: Gate of Memories pop up on the Nintendo eShop, my eyes sparkled. I saw Action RPG, 3D, and very colorful visuals and was already set on playing through not only Gate of Memories but the 2nd game of the Anima video game series and jumped on the bundle.

Released along with its “sequel”, The Nameless Chronicles, here is my review of Anima: Arcane Edition for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Gate of Memories centers around “The Bearer”, a nameless woman whom made a pact with an Evil Entity locked away in a magic book. While chasing a thief that stole an ancient artifact from her organization, she finds herself trapped in a magical tower, cut off from her own world and dimension. She is then tasked with taking out the powerful entities gathered there to prevent an Apocalyptic Prophecy from coming true.

Gate of Memories has a pretty interesting story towards the end, but the early half is very sloppy and doesn’t make a lot of sense. While all the backstories for the 5 evil entities has some really nice storytelling and development, the overall plot around Bearer is pretty offputting until the very end, which is brought down even more by lacluster voice acting.

The newly-release game, The Nameless Chronicles, serves as less of a sequel and more as a backstory and perspective change. It takes place during the events of Gate of Memories, but from the perspective of Nameless, one of the antagonists of the original game. It serves as a broader explanation of who pulled the strings and what was going on in the background while Bearer was navigating the tower.

Nameless Chronicles definitely did better at storytelling, but also suffered form lackluster voice-acting, even to the point where different actors would pronounce the same names and terms different from one another.

Gameplay

Both of the Anima games are third-person Action RPGs with platforming and exploration elements thrown into the mix. You’ll be running around 3D environments in a very Devil May Cry-style of movement and combat.

In terms of content here, Arcane Edition is a bundle of both Anima games. You get Anima: Gate of Memories along with Anima: The Nameless Chronicles (like on other consoles, this bundle is $29.99 vs paying $19.99 for each of the two titles).

Progression in these games is a matter of exploration. Gate of Memories has several different sets of areas to its tower, and you have free roam to explore and clear them in any order you wish. While there are some areas locked behind defeating so many of the game’s boss fights, but you can otherwise explore at your own leisure and clear the bosses in whatever order you wish. Nameless is a bit more linear, but does have a fair amount of exploration involved.

To get through these areas, you have to locate the “Core” where the boss awaits and find that entity’s memories. These are used not only to teach you their backstory but as keys to unlock the Boss Room, so you can fight them and move onto new areas of the tower. These memories are found around each wing, mostly from solving puzzles and exploring the large areas the game offers.

When you’re not exploring and platforming, you’ll be fighting off enemies in real-time battles. These fights feel straight out of games like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry. All enemies have attacks to be learned and dodged around, while you have both physical and magic attacks to use against them. Gate of Memories also has a Character system where you can switch characters for different combat styles while Nameless has a Power-Up feature to mimic it.

Ending combat is where the RPG elements come into play. You gain EXP from defeating enemies and eventually level up. Leveling up gives you Skill Points, which are used to learn new abilities and upgrade previous ones through an in-depth skill tree. These abilities range from new attacks to stats.

Of course, this game isn’t as simple or easy as Bayonetta or Devil May Cry. Anima is a very difficult set of games that requires a lot of pattern-learning, utilizing dodging and countering over just running forward and attacking at will. Kind of like Bayonetta’s system, but without the slow-mo dodge mechanic.

As far as time is concerned, it isn’t massively-meaty like Xenoblade Chronicles or Disgaea, but it’s got a decent amount of length to it. Each of the two games should take you around 12-14 hours to complete a piece. That puts the bundle at around 25 hours of content for $29.99, which is a great deal.

Controls

The game is pretty involved with how many buttons are used, but it’s not too hard to get accustomed to. But know that this goes off the PlayStation-style of action buttons, so the B button is the select/confirm option and A is the cancel option.

The Left Analog Stick is used to move around and the Right Stick for the camera. The D-Pad / Arrow Buttons are used as shortcuts for items and viewing the map. The four triggers are used for combat. The L trigger is used for launch attacks and the R button is used to swap characters. ZL is used for ranged attacks while ZR is used to lock onto nearby enemies.

The action buttons can be customized, but by default, here’s what it has: A is used for magic attacks and B is used for jumping. X is used for dash / homing attacks while Y is used for dodging.

Presentation

Graphically, the game looks nice. The renders are nice and smooth, and many of the environments look quite colorful and beautiful, especially the more open ones.

The game’s true shine, though, is the music. Every area of the game is filled with beautifully-crafted background music. From the fast-paced battle music to the calming music from pre-boss rooms, I found myself stopping countless times to just sit back and listen to the amazing soundtrack both of these games offer.

Optimization is also superb, as both games offer a buttery-smooth 60 frames per second in and out of Docked Mode. For a game that was made by only a handful of people, they really know their stuff.

Battery Life

All that great optimization seems to have come at a cost, though. Here are my Battery Times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 11 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 13 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 18 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 21 minutes

So, pretty low on the Battery spectrum. Definitely worth it for that amazing frame-rate, but pretty low all the same.

Game Title: Vertical Strike Endless Challenge
Company: Project ICKX
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital
Battery Life: 3-4 hours
Download: 448 MB

The lack of good air combat games on handhelds in recent years has really bummed out the Ace Combat fan deep within me. The 3DS did get a remake of Ace Combat 2, but handhelds haven’t gotten a new Ace Combat game since the PSP and DS era with X and Joint Assault, both of which I really enjoyed playing on Sony’s PlayStation Portable.

The Switch has gotten some flight sims, but none of them looked overly polished or exceptional. That is, until I saw Vertical Strike on the eShop’s Coming Soon section. It was only five dollars, but it looked identical to the gameplay of the Ace Combat series. The AC fan in me couldn’t help but to chuck out a few dollars to buy it.

So, is it a good air combat game? Let’s find out. Here is my review of Vertical Strike: Endless Challenge!

Story

This game has no story, so this section shall remain blank.

Gameplay

Vertical Strike is a Air Combat game, much like the Ace Combat series. During gameplay, you’ll be flying fighter planes and shooting down waves of land and air-based enemies.

The thing about this game is that there is no story campaign, like most Ace Combat games showcase. There are 2 Game Modes to play through: Arcade Mode for Air Combat and Arcade Mode for Land/Sea Combat. These two modes are essentially the same thing, except that in Air Combat, you only fight other jets, while Land Combat has you fighting both Airplanes and Boats on the water.

THe way this goes down is pretty simple. You start in your Hangar, where you choose the Aircraft you want to use on the mission, as well as the different weapons you can equip to that plane. This is pretty limited, as you only have 2 planes as options. Granted, one of these is modeled after the F-22 Raptor, my favorite fighter from the Ace Combat series, but only having 2 different planes available is pretty restrictive.

The weapons are a lot more in-depth, though. While we only have a couple planes, we have a good dozen or more weapon options that range from different types of missiles to bombs that can be dropped, offering diverse gameplay options for jumping into Arcade Mode.

Once you’re in Arcade Mode, it’s pretty simple. You fight endless waves of enemies until you get shot down or get tired and end your game session. This is where the game starts to feel like Ace Combat. You’re flying through the skies in a HUD system that looks like it was ripped straight out of the popular series all the way down to the camera angles of the plane’s third and first-person camera options.

The actual dogfighting feels right at home, but there are things good and bad about this. You get a lot of different gameplay options when in dogfights, notably an option for your plane to automatically fire off flares to ward off incoming missiles. That’s a feature that I really appreciate. However, the locking and aiming seems very unbalanced. The missiles have absurd accuracy ratings to the point where it took me a long time before I could launch missiles and noot instantly kill anything in front of me. On the other hand, the machine guns have incredibly slow aim-assists to the point where it’s difficult to even use them. It lacks a lot of the polish that Ace Combat has.

The ease of the missiles definitely makes the game fun to fly through and massacre incoming planes, but it won’t take long for you to realize that shooting down the planes in Wave 1 aren’t much different from Wave 10. You do get some “boss” enemies later on, but instead of being bigger or different planes, they’re just the same planes you fought before, but with more health and requiring more missiles to take down. Just like with the your arsenal, there’s not much variety in what and who you fight.

Adding in the fact that it has no multiplayer options and you don’t get rewards, outside of higher scores than before, the game starts to feel pretty old pretty quick. It’s good for quick sessions, but any Ace Pilot out there that wants customization and progression won’t find it here. It feels more like a technical demo of something that could come later than an actual completed project.

As such, don’t expect this game to last a long time. A single match could last as long as hours, or as little as a couple minutes. It’s a game built for quick-play sessions without any in-depth customization or progression involved.

Controls

I won’t say the controls are necessarily “bad”, but the way they’re laid out to you isn’t great, either. The default control scheme doesn’t have every option mapped to a button, requiring you to go into the menu to set it, yourself. That is, assuming you think of the features. I did this when I tried to switch camera perspectives and ventured into the menu, only to find it was there and wasn’t assigned to any of the buttons.

By default, the ZL and ZR buttons are used for brakes and acceleration. The Left Analog Stick is used for moving your plane around and spinning for turns, while the Right moves the camera for cinematic shots of your plane. The A button is used for firing off your missiles while B is used for firing your machine gun. Y is used for swapping your missile weapons.

It’s similar to Ace Combat’s system, but the lack of good optimization (and hint on how you do anything) makes starting out a very strange experience.

Presentation

Graphically, the game doesn’t look half-bad. The environments definitely have a lack of polish and detail, but the planes have a lot of polish and detail to them. That’s another factor in me purchasing this, as the planes are smoother and have little to no jagged edges, making it look far more visually-pretty than the PSP and 3DS Ace Combat games.

Presentation is also pretty good, as there aren’t any frame drops or freezing. The game runs quite well.

Battery Life

Being such a simplistic game, I expected a fair amount of Battery Life. Here’s what we got. These are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 33 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 36 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 11 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 15 minutes

Pretty much what I expected. 3-4 hours isn’t too bad for a 3D game.

Game Title: Wolfenstein II The New Colossus
Company: Panic Button, Machinegame Studios, Bethesda
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail | Digital
Battery Life: 2.5 – 3 hours
Download: 23 GB

Last year, Panic Button made the impossible possible when they brought the new reboot of DOOM to a handheld in a viable, playable format. That also started Bethesda’s willingness to bring Mature AAA games to Nintendo’s new handheld, and also bringing one of the the most highly-rated sci-fi shooters in recent history to this DOOM Fan’s handheld adventures.

Since then, Panic Button has been spending a lot of time with bringing more experiences to the Switch, including a more recent and far more resource-heavy shooting game. The most recent entry in the Wolfenstein franchise, here is my review of Wolfenstein II: The New Collossus for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Wolfenstein 2 picks up right at the end of Wolfenstein: The New Order. As such, if you haven’t played TNO, I highly suggest you do so or research it before touching this game. 2 has a recap in its intro, but it’s a recap that isn’t done very well.

If you haven’t played it, here’s a summary of TNO:

In the world of Wolfenstein, Nazi Germany won World War II by dropping a nuke on New York City, easily getting the USA to surrender to them and fall under their rule. Two decades later, Billy Joseph Blazkowicz wakes up from a coma from fighting the war and joins a Resistance Group with the Nurse he’s fallen in love with to fight back against the still-in-power Nazi Forces.

At the very end of the game, he is critically wounded in the abdomen and issues an order for his allies to drop a nuclear bomb on the fortress he infiltrated.

In Wolfenstein 2, we find the still-wounded BJ rescued from that very facility and into a stolen U-Boat. He awakens months later, as the U-Boat is under attack and has to join his allies in his wounded state to fight back and seek out other Resistance Leaders to liberate America from Nazi Control.

The overall storyline of Wolfenstein 2 has a lot of really dark and well-written character and overall development. The world under Nazi control is a dark and grim one where heavy racist, sexist, and other ways of thinking did not slowly die out and be deemed immoral.

This has lead Wolfenstein 2 to be a very political-heavy game. Within the first hour I played, I’d already seen Racism, Sexism, Animal Abuse, Child Abuse, Fat Shaming, and a lot more thrown in my face in ways that seemed unnecessary. They do fit with the world the story shows and do help the dark feel, but I felt very uncomfortable whenever those story scenes would come up. It’s certainly not a story for everyone.

Gameplay

Wolfenstein 2 is a first-person shooting game with a lot of stealth elements. Across the game’s various levels, you’re going to be running and sneaking through Nazi-filled environments as you hunt down items as well as targets to acquire and take out.

First, let’s just be frank. This is Wolfenstein 2 vanilla. None of the DLC expansions are here, and we have no word of if/when we will be getting them. I pretty much view this as Borderlands 2 on the Vita. Game released, they said DLC might be on the way, and it never happened, so I don’t think we will see the DLC Expansions here at all.

As a shooter, the game has a pretty typical way in comparison with Military Shooters, like Call of Duty. You go on missions, and when you complete missions, you are returned to your U-Boat Home Base. In terms of linearity, all of the game’s levels are very linear in progression, not offering many side areas while the hub is pretty open, with lots of mini-games to play and side-quests to get from the NPCs.

The biggest part of the hub, though, is Wolfstone 3D. There’s an Arcade Cabinet that allows you to play a full and complete port of Wolfenstein 3D but slightly altered to be you as the Nazi’s hunting down BJ instead of BJ hunting down them. However, there is an issue here that I’ll explain in the Presentation section.

When you go out into the game’s levels, you’ll be navigating pretty large areas, filled with enemies. The way it’s set up is with you having clear location markers on where to go and having you traverse platforming areas and getting past enemies. The nice thing here is that this is a game that encourages stealth, but doesn’t require it.

In each area, there are patrols and commanders. When you’re noticed, Commanders will set off an alarm, bringing in reinforcements. This is very similar to how the Alert system works in Metal Gear, and is tied to the stealth elements. On the other hand, you can run and gun if your weapon has a silencer or you just don’t care and want to kill as many Nazis as possible. Ever since the difficulty got balanced, the game isn’t overly difficult, even during these alert combat situations.

The combat, itself, is very good and very satisfying. The weapons can be used in single or dual-weilding fashion, and all of the melee kills are very easy to pull off and as satisfying as Doom’s Glory Kills. Whether you’re a stealth killer or a Dual-Shotgun Nut, the gameplay is fun, intense, and satisfying, from start to finish.

The way enemies are presented to you is a bit odd, though. As I played through the game, I thought “Where are the boss fights? I’m just fighting enemy waves over and over”. Even at the end of the game, I went through waves of these enemies, big and small, got a cutscene and suddenly the Epilogue started. I thought “That’s it? Where’s the Final Boss? Wait, that fight WAS the final boss?”

That’s not to say that part of the game is bad, but there are a bunch of little things about that just seems “off”, like the game having very little indication of you losing health until you actually die, the objective marker needing a button held down to consistently see, among other things.

Now, as far as content is concerned, the Main Campaign will take you around 15 hours or so to finish. On top of that, the post-game has a bunch of side missions that are used to unlock the Secret Final Level that will likely take you another 4-6 hours to complete. So, even with the DLC taken out, you’ve got a little over 20 hours of content to go through. You can also repeat the campaign for the separate timeline that alters some scenes throughout the game.

Controls

As far as controls go, the setup here is the same as the setup you get on the PS4. One nice thing is that they decided to add Gyro/Motion Aiming which helps accuracy out a ton. I didn’t use it much in Doom on Switch, but I found it significantly better than strict analog aiming in Wolfenstein 2.

The Left Analog is used for moving around while the Right is used for moving the camera. The Arrow Buttons / D-Pad are used for upgrades, Dual Weilding, and viewing your objective marker. The four triggers are also used. ZL is used for aiming down the sights, and ZR for firing your weapon. L is used for leaning out of cover while R is used for throwing grenades.

Finally, the action buttons. A is for crouching and B for jumping. X switches weapons and Y lets you interact for QTEs. Also, Clicking the Left Stick lets you sprint while clicking the Right lets you do melee kills.

Presentation

Graphically, I think Panic Button improved upon what they did with Doom. When you’ve got the game docked, most of the time, there is a blur effect, but a far milder one. To the point where you won’t have any problems reading any of the text on screen.

In Handheld Mode, though, it’s far worse than Doom’s blurring. I didn’t play any time in handheld mode that didn’t make the game look really blurry and almost too hard on the eyes to concentrate on what I was doing. In essence, they improved with Docked Mode, not so much in handheld mode.

Performance is much better, though. It stays at that smooth 30 fps outside of one small area of the game. Thankfully, said area has no enemies in it, so once you get back to combat, it’s back to that smooth 30 fps.

However, Wolfstone 3D presents a problem here. I don’t know if it’s because the fps of the main game was halved on the Switch, but the Wolfenstein 3D “port” runs at a very slow frame-rate, feeling like the whole experience is presented in slow motion. It is playable in its current form, but not very comfortably.

Battery Life

I didn’t expect much Battery Life, especially knowing what Doom had. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 28 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 39 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 58 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 06 minutes

A little less than Doom, but still not too bad.

Game Title: Mega Man X Legacy Collection
Company: Capcom
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail | Digital
Battery Life: 4 – 5.5 hours
Download: 2.9 GB

I’ve been waiting so long for all of the Mega Man X games to be made available on a handheld. Ever since Capcom threw X4 and X5 onto the PS Vita, I loved the nostalgia of revisiting my favorite 2D platformer and couldn’t get enough of Mega Man X Series on the go.

For that reason, I was super-hyped when they announced the Switch would be getting the entire X series in the new collections, alongside PS4 and Xbox One and I’ve been in the middle of X Fever since it came out.

Do note that I’m dividing these into two, separate reviews instead of one. As such, here is my review of the Mega Man X Legacy Collection for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Unlike the original series, Mega Man X and its sequels brought in-depth storylines, character development, and serious tones and themes to the series. Hundreds of years after the events of the original series, Reploids (Robots) live alongside humans in peace until something causes them to go berserk and attack humans, becoming a threat to the stability of the world. These robots are called Mavericks and a special strike team called the Maverick Hunters deals with these threats.

The series centers around Mega Man X, the last creation from Dr. Light from the original series and his Reploid buddy, Zero, as they tackle challenge after challenge from former-Hunter Sigma, who seems to revive and come back just as much as Dr. Wily did in the original series.

The stories from these games is good in that you get a lot more depth and character development. X and Zero aren’t just fighitng to protect the world, but they are also constantly left with questions on whether peace can really be achieved, and what sort of sacrifice will have to be made to ensure it. There is an overall theme of sacrifice throughout the entire series and it’s at the core of X and Zero’s characters.

Gameplay

All of the games in this collection are 2D Platformers with combat elements and heavy “Metroidvania” elements with a heavy emphasis on replaying levels and searching for secret areas to find hidden items and collectibles. Imagine it like the Shantae games, but not requiring it for finishing each game.

This is the first of the two collections, and contains the origins of the X series: Mega Man X, X2, and X3 from the SNES, along with Mega Man X4 from the PlayStation. This part is unique for fans because of the inclusion of X3, which is extremely difficult to find in its original form now. The only way to get it handheld at a decent price outside of this collection is Virtual Console on the 3DS. There’s also a new Challenge Mode, letting you Boss RUsh through multi-boss fights.

They also include a huge range of media to look at in the Museum, from game trailers to physical merchandise released for each of the games. The Day of Sigma anime prequel to Mega Man X was also included here, which was previous exclusive to the PSP game, Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X.

But that’s not the best part.  For all of you people who want Achievements and Trophies on the Switch, all of the PS4 Trophies and Xbox One Achievements are built into the Switch version of the game and unlock the same way trophies/achievements appear on the other consoles, giving you that same Trophy-Unlocking feeling as you complete challenges.

The main progression point of Mega Man hasn’t really changed that much in the decades it’s been around. You have 8 stages to go through with bosses to fight and you utilize other boss’s weapons to take advantage of weaknesses to fight them with an advantage. However, X series really added a lot to the formula. X added wall jumping, collectible energy tanks, and armor upgrades, X2 added collectibles for different endings, X3 added an in-depth Ride Armor system, and X4 added a new visual style and separate story campaigns for both X and Zero, complete with Voice Acting and Anime Event Scenes.

And it’s all these little things that keep it so interesting. You’re shooting your way through stages, but also looking for secret areas to get power-ups, raise your maximum health, and the reusable E-Tanks for refilling health during boss fights. Little things that add up to making the games much more doable and not as difficult as the original Mega Man games. Plus there’s the fact that X1-3 now have a manual save feature built into this collection so you don’t have to use the repetitive Password system every time you exit out of the game.

That’s not to say these games aren’t difficult, because they are. X, X2, and X3 in particular are extremely difficult games, especially when it comes to bosses and the damage enemies do to you vs what you do to them. Thankfully, there’s this handy feature called “Rookie Hunter Mode” for all of the games, which makes things easier. Essentially, this mode just reduces the damage you receive from enemies. In Mega Man X, it functions like the armor upgrade, while in X2 it appears to be much more substantial a decrease. Either way, if you ever have trouble with a boss, you can pop that feature on and off whenever you need it.

One last thing to say is that all of the tricks and glitches from these games’ original releases are intact here, so if you want to do the Iceless jump in Mega Man X or input the cheat codes for Black Armor Zero in Mega Man X4, you can enjoy all of them. They are straight emulation, just as they were when they originally came out.

In terms of time, you’ll have plenty of time to do everything in these games. Each game should take you around 3-5 hours a piece, giving you a total of around 12-20 hours of content, plus the Challenge Mode and the 24-minute Anime Short, The Day of Sigma.

Controls

Controlling the games are pretty simple, though I do often question why Capcom opted to have A being the dash button in the X series, when you’ve got all the other buttons to worry about holding and pressing at any moment on that side of the controller.

The great thing about these games is that they all have re-mappable controls from the Options menu. Although it’s strange that the game won’t let you direct anything to ZL or ZR in the pre-X4 games, it’s easy to remap and create a button scheme that’s to your liking (in my case, redirecting Dash to the R trigger like I always used in the Mega Man Zero games on the GBA).

Presentation

Visually, the games look wonderful. Capcom made a default smoothing filter that makes all of these games look very crisp, clear, and smooth on both the handheld screen and the TV. It’s got the old filters as well, replicating both the original graphics and a CRT screen and when you check those, you can really see a huge difference in the quality and beauty, especially in X4. The filter really does wonders for the visuals of these games.

However, there are some things that filtering didn’t quite fix. X1-3 had built-in slowdowns during item collection and some full-screen animations, which are still here and very present whenever you encounter any of these. A lot of this is intentional, but it does take from the experience, especially in Docked Mode.

The other is X4’s laughably-bad voice acting and anime scene picture quality. All of the animated scenes have a lot of blur and degrade to them. It looked like this on the PS1 as well, but you really just can’t get past some scenes in the voice-acting department. While I have a love for Capcom’s cheesy Resident Evil voice-acting of the 90s, X4’s Voice-Acting probably shouldn’ve just not been there at all.

Battery Life

This collection does quite well in terms of Battery Life. Unlike the 2nd Mega Man X Collection, all 4 games here use the same amount of Battery Life. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 56 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 18 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 58 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 20 minutes

A nice, big, chunk of time for Battery Life that might get you one full game out a single charge, if you’re lucky.

Game Title: Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2
Company: Capcom
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital (Code included in retail release of X Collection 1)
Battery Life (X5, x6, x7): 3.5 – 5 hours
Battery Life (X8): 2.5 – 4 hours
Download: 6.6 GB

I had opted to divide the Mega Man X Legacy Collections into separated reviews, mostly because I have never experienced post-X5 and have heard a lot of conflicting things about those games. So, to hold off the risk of having a lot of problems with the later games lowering the score far too low for the entire set of collections, I divided them in two.

I quickly found that this worry was well-founded, but here’s not the place to discuss it. Let’s get past the intro and get right to it. Here is my review of Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2 for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

The story of Mega Man X5-X8 continues the world of the X series, where Reploids try to live in peace with humans, only to mysteriously turn into violent Mavericks, requiring the Maverick Hunters to track them down and put a stop to their violence.

The individual stories of these games are very good, especially the stories of Mega Man X5 and X8. Due note that this is also where the continuity-confusion began with the X series, as X5 was meant to be the end of the X series and bridge into the Zero series, but Capcom decided to continue it, anyways, creating more and more confusion on the connection between the two sub-series.

This lead to a lot of plotholes, inconsistencies, and plot points that don’t make much sense, mostly in terms of the explanation for Zero’s return in X6, not to mention the fact that X6 had a very poorly-done plot translation to begin with.

Gameplay

Like the previous collection, this is a Collection of 4 action-based platform games, consisting of both 2D and 3D gameplay. The core Mega Man formula is the same, though, as you’ll be constantly running through environments and striking down enemies with some light exploration elements.

Keeping side-games out of this, Legacy Collection 2 contains 4 games: Mega Man X5 and X6 for the PlayStation, along with X7 and X8 for the PlayStation 2. Oddly enough, it also contains the Day of Sigma Anime Prequel in addition to the other Museum artwork, trailers, and X Challenge Mini-Game.

As with the previous collection, the Xbox One and PS4 Achievements/Trophies are built into the Switch version as Trophy Medals, so if you want the feeling of unlocking Trophies on the go, this collection has 52 different ones to unlock.

Progression in these games isn’t much different from the previous ones, but they do contain some differences. Just as the first 4 each added elements, so did these. X5 added Reploids to rescue in each stage for special customization parts. X6 added alternate routes and bosses to each of the stages as well as different ending routes, based on key items you collect as you play. X7 added 3d gameplay segments and a new playable character. Finally, X8 added an in-game currency and shop that was used for upgrades and characters, be it from items found in stages or post-game unlocks from your previous play-through.

However, not all of these additions were for the better. There are problems with a lot of these games and features that ramped up the difficulty. While Rookie Hunter Mode returning for Collection 2 does fix a lot of these issues (like the levels that seemed to be nothing but spike pits in X6 and X8), it doesn’t fix all of them.

To go into detail, here’s the run-down: X5’s issue was an unskippable tutorial constantly interrupting you as you play, sometimes mere seconds after the last conversation they interrupted you with. X6’s main issue was the inclusion of bosses that were invulnerable to everything but very specific attacks without mention. X7’s main problems were that the way it was presented felt extremely slow and clunky and had camera controls that heightened the difficulty much more than it should haves. X8 managed to solidify pretty much everything wrong with X7, but it still is held back by little to no exploration and side-areas due to the nature of the shop system.

These games are still fun for Mega Man fans, but the plethora of problems in X6 and X7 will definitely turn away outside players. I, myself, only really see myself revisiting 5 and 8 in the future. That basically brings it down to this: 2 of these games are good games. The other 2 aren’t.

In terms of time, you’ll have a little less time with this collection than the last. With much less exploration being done in X7 and X8, they aren’t as long as the rest of the series. Each of the games should take you around 3-4 hours to complete, giving you a total of around 12-16 hours of game time. This is still a lot for the price, but not as much as you might get out of Collection 1.

Controls

Controlling these games are mostly the same, with the exception of X7, which adds more buttons for the triggers with its lock-on system and the camera controls.

But the base control scheme is the same as before, and any command can, once again, be moved to any button. You move with the Arrow Buttons / D-Pad or Left Analog Stick. A is the default for Dash and B is for jumping. Y is used for main weapons and X for special weapons.

Presentation

Graphically, most of these games look very good. The filtering options that made X4 look so good in Collection 1 do the same thing for X5 and X6 in this collection. X7 and X8’s graphics have been mostly improved as well. X7’s cell-shaded style looks very smooth and crisp here, and even X8’s graphics have been touched up.

The problems here are the anime cutscenes and X7’s choice in Voice Acting. The anime scenes from X8 are very grainy and blurry to watch and X7’s Voice-Acting performance shows that Capcom didn’t learn much from X4. I muted voiced scenes because of this.

Battery Life

Here’s where things get weird. So, all 4 games in Mega Man X Legacy Collection 1 used the same amount of Battery, right? Well, things don’t do the same thing here. X5, X6, and X7 use the same amount of Battery, but X8 uses significantly more power than any of the others.

So, we have 2 sets of Battery Readings here. First, here are the Battery Times for X5-X7:

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 30 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 36 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 16 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 23 minutes

And here are the Battery Times for Mega Man X8:

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 24 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 51 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 30 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 52 minutes

Why this is the way it is I don’t know. Either way, you’ll be getting lots of Battery Time out of most of this collection.