Kerry Brunskill
ZZZ is a shallow, polished front for a relentless online store.
Kunitsu-Gami's a gorgeous and engaging take on the tower defence formula.
Riven is as impressive, immersive, and unmissable as it's ever been.
Vengeance combines the fresh, familiar, and the fiendish into one incredible RPG.
Sand Land is just another forgettable tie-in to add to the existing anime game pile.
Relink offers fluid combat against inventive bosses in gorgeous landscapes-this is an essential ARPG.
Tomb Raider Remastered is an impressive and authentic update. Too authentic in some places, though.
The Last Faith is a beautiful but inconsistent rehash of older, better games.
Atmospheric, imaginative, and enjoyably unpredictable-this is one of the year's best horror games.
Sea of Stars may not truly recapture the magic of '90s RPGs, but it's still a polished, enjoyable blend of old and new.
Lakeburg Legacies is an awkward, goalless mix of contradictions and impersonal systems.
Ghost Trick is an essential and engrossing experience for any PC gamer.
An excellent remake, prequel, and game in its own right-Crisis Core has it all.
A fun and engaging RPG with beautiful graphics and a bouncy pace.
A bland alternative to a genre-defining game millions of people are very familiar with.
Unexplored 2 has potential, but right now the adventure's unreliable and storytelling's seriously flawed.
The blend of all-out action, deep strategy, and Ancient's irreverent humour is as enjoyable as ever here, and smashing a huge castle-tank into evil things never stops being fun. Gotta Protectors: Cart of Darkness plays its story for laughs but the game itself is an expertly crafted challenge with lots to do and plenty more to keep coming back for.
There may not be many games in here, but they do cover a broad range of genres and most of them are still great fun to play today. It's just a shame Switch owners have already had access to the majority of them, with the exact same features, for years already. The glaring lack of any extra features make it hard to appreciate the significance of the more obscure or basic titles unless you're prepared to go off and do some homework, and there are some very obvious milestones missing for no reason other than it allows Taito to make more money by splitting the games across multiple collections.
Many of the avoidable snags found in GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon were solved by genre predecessors long before this game was announced. There is no doubt that in a few patches time this could be a fantastic game - but that's if Konami, which hasn't been in many gamer's good books for a long time, actually grants the development team the time and the funding to work on it. As it stands the game could end up being something special, the trouble is other similar Switch titles already are.
If you're going to release something titled Valis: The Phantasm Soldier Collection it's not unreasonable to expect it to contain a full complement of Valis games, even if only for one format. Unfortunately, those hoping for a one-stop Yuko (and friends) shop are going to be disappointed. What's here is delivered in a no-nonsense, serviceable fashion, and newcomers may well fall in love with the action heroine's slightly awkward games... only to find they're missing the final entry.