John Rairdin's Reviews
DarkStar One's greatest strength is in its open (though not seamless) world and its RPG mechanics. Its space combat is passable and enemies are reasonably fun to fight, but it was somewhat simple compared to its contemporaries in 2006 and remains so in 2024. Still, if you enjoyed classic Wing Commander Privateer games or more recent genre standouts such as Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, you're likely to find something to enjoy here.
The love and care with which it has been remastered deserves calling out. Tantalus has done an incredible job here. The original work of Next Level Games really shines as their animation and underlying art direction remain unchanged. This is easily the best way to play Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon.
You can even swap to the dungeon layouts from the later console ports. This is an extremely faithful update of an important game. And if you're willing to give it the opportunity, you find it is just as addictive today as it was forty years ago.
Biomutant is one of those AA games you would have picked up on the Playstation 2 and absolutely loved as a kid. When you return to it as an adult, it may not hold up that well, but the underlying things you loved about it would shine through. This is that sort of low budget experiment that we so rarely see these days, and I can't help but enjoy it. Beneath its flaws is an interesting open-world action RPG that manages to hold up fairly well on Switch.
If you come in looking for an exciting third-person action title, you'll find a passable game here. If you're just into vaguely Biblical video game fan fictions and want something with slightly less "dude bro" energy than Dante's Inferno or Darksiders, this is probably up your alley. But if you just want a bizarre fever dream to show off the incredibly beautiful yet abstractly unsettling worlds a video game can create, El Shaddai is absolutely your game.
How they have maintained the rights and how Dark Forces somehow escaped to Nightdive instead (thank the maker) I'll never know. It is time to put more care into re-releasing these games. These games are iconic, oftentimes genre shifting, and they deserve better than this.
It's not quite like any other narrative adventure game I've ever played. Combat and menu design can be a little clunky, but ultimately every encounter serves as a deliberate and well crafted puzzle. This is a very fresh take on a post apocalyptic story that oozes with satire, dark humor, and some oddly cozy end of the world vibes.
undefined.Star Wars Dark Forces Remastered is an excellent and faithful remaster that honors the original while touching it up just enough for modern platforms. While there are a couple areas where I feel they could have done just a little more, I can't deny that this is the best way to play an excellent first person shooter. Whether you're returning to it after three decades, or playing for the first time, there has never been a better version of Star Wars Dark Forces.
It's noticeable how some of the platforming can be a little stiff, making certain precise platforming challenges a little more frustrating than they should be. However, at the end of the day Promenade is an absolute gem that will appeal to any kind of platforming fan. Don't let this one sneak past you.
If you want to play using the original graphics, with optional modernized controls, at a high resolution, and with widescreen support, this is essentially perfect. But if you're looking for a remastered experience, Tomb Raider I-III is both an artistic mess, and a remarkable misunderstanding of some of the original visual game design. So come for the genre-defining original trilogy, but I wouldn't recommend staying for their remastered incarnations.
And with each one of these you'll be picking up buildings and moving them from one part of the city to another to meet that unit's specific needs. Once you make it underground, SteamWorld Build is a delight, but any time spent on the surface is filled with mild frustrations that slowly add up and leave me yearning for the mines. It should come as no surprise, I suppose, that SteamWorld is at its best when you're digging.
It is almost as if Air Twister has a lot of secondary depth in its systems that isn't really supported by its short simple campaign. That being said, even while being highly aware of these flaws I still had a really good time playing through it. Everything about Air Twister is bizarre and often flawed, but I can't say it isn't fun.
It is hard not to be absolutely blown away by Super Mario Bros. Wonder. It is easily the best 2D Mario in over thirty years. It does this by not trying so hard to match the past, and instead focus on new ideas and learn from how Mario has evolved in other dimensions since then. That being said, it does make the areas where Wonder gets tripped up feel all the more egregious. Not because there are issues to be solved, but because none of them are inherent to any of the new ideas. Gating difficulty options behind certain characters, the locked-in multiplayer camera, and the extreme lack of boss variety are all issues that have been with Mario for years. It is one thing when bold new design brings up new challenges, but these are just old complaints that don't really have an excuse for not being fixed by now. Of course that doesn't take away from the excellence of this title, but they do stand out. However, even with these blemishes, at the end of the day Super Mario Bros. Wonder is an incredible breath of fresh air overall. It has reaffirmed that 2D Mario has the potential to be more than just good, it can be incredible. It sweeps away any concerns I had that my love of the best games in the series isn't just nostalgia and that a truly original 2D Mario absolutely has the potential to stand alongside Super Mario Bros. 3, and Super Mario World. While Super Mario Bros. Wonder isn't quite perfect, it is a gleaming star we can hopefully follow into a new era for 2D Mario.
I like Dementium a lot. This and Renegade Kid's next DS release Moon were staples of this era for me. While I appreciate that I can access it on a new platform, seeing it dumped here so unceremoniously without even an adjustment to the internal resolution is very disappointing.
It still isn't on the same level as other versions, but this is the narrowest the gap has been in more than a decade. If you're looking for a way to play a great soccer game on a portable system with a few compromises, this will get the job done. Hopefully this is the start of EA Sports putting out more of their library on Nintendo platforms, because I'm heartened by how EA Sports FC turned out.
undefined.Wartales is a game that I very much want to like, and suspect I would, were I playing it on PC or presumably a more powerful console. I have plenty of positive things to say about it but at the end of the day, it just doesn't run well on Switch. Wartales is a very interesting game, but between poor tutorialization and awful performance on Switch, it may be buried a bit too deep to be worth playing on this platform.
I also encountered several puzzles where I was able to move into an essentially unwinnable position, forcing me to restart the puzzle from the menu. Nonetheless, it is hard not to fall in love with what feels like an interactive, biographical art gallery. The ways in which Monet's paintings are intertwined into levels only gets better as the game goes on, resulting in a simple but unique adventure.
Your mileage with the Switch port will depend on your individual tolerance for asset streaming stutter. For those looking for a smoother experience, the Xbox version (and presumably the Playstation port) can offer that. But the Switch provides a flawed though still highly enjoyable time overall.
This is a game that shows the value of a game being given time to cook and of a studio that has supported a consistent group of developers working on the same series for decades. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is not a game anyone else could make. This is why you bought your Switch, even if you didn't know it at the time.
Future Redeemed feels like a final piece to a story more than a decade in the making. It re-unites old friends, reminds you that N is still one of the best villains the series has ever come up with, and reignites that feeling you had when the original Xenoblade suddenly cut to a space station and your perception of the game permanently shifted. If Takahashi decides to revisit this universe in the future, I'll happily join in, but if this truely does mark the end for the Klaus trilogy, I leave happy.