Nintendo Switch Review

Sonic Mania Plus – Nintendo Switch Review

August 7, 2018 By ausretrogamer

Imagine it’s 1992 and someone said to you, “Sonic The Hedgehog will end up on a Nintendo console and it will kick ass”. Your immediate reaction would have been a hefty scoff followed up with telling the peep espousing such absurdity to seek medical advice!

Well, it’s 2018 and Sega’s blue mascot has appeared on many a Nintendo systems, some hits and some misses. Thankfully, Sonic Mania Plus has hit the bulls-eye on the the Nintendo Switch. Seriously, this game is something else – it feels, dare we say, at home on the Switch.

In a nutshell, Sonic Mania Plus is a greatest hits collection and a love-letter to the original Sonic games with a healthy dose of remixed action coupled with new experiences to hook you right in. The game, for the most part, has you playing levels from the originals that have been revamped with additional routes and fun new bosses and twists. Make no bones about it, this package goes right for the player’s sense of 16-bit platforming nostalgia, which there is plenty.

The visuals are nothing short of gorgeous running at a solid 60 fps (docked at 1080p or 720p in handheld mode). Coupled with the visuals is the awesomely cool and funky soundtrack by Tee Lopes. Of course a good looking and funky sounding game doesn’t get too far if its controls aren’t up to standard. Luckily the development team rounded out the package with tight and responsive controls, with the weighting of jumps and game tempo being nigh on perfect. To be honest, we are running out of superlatives to use for this game. The whole package comes together so well that you get an immediate sense of satisfaction as soon as you press play – it is that damn good!

So what’s with the Plus you ask? Well, a few things. For starters, this release introduces two new playable characters, Mighty the Armadillo and Ray the Flying Squirrel. Both characters have their own unique talents which make them play differently from the rest of the characters. Plus also provides not two, but four-player simultaneous racing action through the campaign levels, splitting the TV into quadrants, a la Mari Kart 64 style.

Oh yeah, the physical Sonic Mania Plus edition also comes with a 32-page art book. The emphasis on this companion piece is on the production artwork – very cool indeed. Another pretty cool surprise is the reversible cover that looks like a late-era Mega Drive game. We had to reverse our cover immediately to give us that 16-bit feels.

If you have been holding onto your Sega Mega Drive to just play Sonic The Hedgehog games, the good news is you can now either pack it away or get rid of it! Sonic’s new home is on the Nintendo Switch, and it’s brilliant.

We don’t usually provide scores for our reviews, but if we did, this would be a solid gold 9.99/10! Sonic Mania Plus on the Nintendo Switch should be an insta-buy!

Buy Sonic Mania Plus here.

Disclosure: Sonic Mania Plus [Nintendo Switch] was kindly provided by Five Star Games for this review.

Review: Hand of Fate 2 – Nintendo Switch

July 24, 2018 By ausretrogamer

Hand of Fate 2 is yet another demonstration of how good the Nintendo Switch can be, it is the perfect game to sink your teeth into at home with the console docked to your TV, then pick it up and continue the adventure when you need to be on the move.

Having never played or even heard of the first game, Hand of Fate 2 for the Nintendo Switch has been a pleasant surprise for me. The best way I can describe the game is that it is a hybrid action RPG card building choose your own adventure game (yes, seriously). The basic premise involves pitting the player against a mysterious card dealer across 22 missions, with each mission containing various encounter cards which the dealer reveals as the player traverses across them. Each mission is essentially a mini text story driven adventure with various end and bonus objectives to complete. One involved rescuing residents of a town ravaged by zombie-like plague monsters, while another tasks the player to recover four artefacts, with each inflicting a ‘curse’ condition on the player so it becomes more difficult as more artefacts are recovered.

As the player advances through the story missions, you are rewarded various cards (depending on how well you do), including encounters, equipment, resources and companions with which the player then can effectively build a custom deck to use for each mission. The game has the option of auto building decks but I found customising card decks to be much more fun and makes each mission unique and interesting; bring the card that rewards the armour that grants additional food resources for every other resource card received or just bring more encounters that dish out gold and health as rewards and a high damage sword reward card instead, the choice is yours.

However, even with careful planning, many encounters can still rely on chance. There are several mini games within encounters that help determine their results, such as throwing dice to match or exceed a target number, timing a laser pendulum to stop on a tiny moving box or spinning a wheel of cards that grant or take away valuable resources. I feel this mechanism adds to the excitement of the game and introduces a much-needed unpredictability given the player is usually well aware of what’s coming should they have constructed the decks to their liking for a particular mission. The tension of trying to execute an impeccably timed button press to escape starvation (effectively avoids restarting the entire mission) and the resulting joy of actually pulling it off is what makes this system so great.

When combat is the only way to influence encounter outcomes, the game whisks you away from the card table and into a ring-fenced battle arena for some real time combat utilising a system not too dissimilar from the Batman Arkham games, with an emphasis on building hit combos for a weapon specific special move whilst dodging and blocking enemy attacks. Here the game tosses in a diverse set of enemy and weapon types as well as companions (all with unique abilities). Although challenging, these scenarios play out much the same and proved to be somewhat a distraction from the card table, which I felt was by far the more interesting part of the game.

Presentation wise, Hand of Fate 2 is top notch, from fantastic voice acting (card dealer especially) to the beautiful Game of Thrones like campaign map to the well-designed character models, it is an impressive showing on the Nintendo Switch, especially in handheld mode. The only complaint I have here is the rather long load times when transitioning from the card table to a combat arena.

Since starting the game for this review, Hand of Fate 2 has become one of my personal top 5 games to play on the Nintendo Switch. Once the somewhat steep initial learning curve is overcome, it becomes simple to pick up and play but very difficult to put down. Highly recommend that you all add this title to your Switch games library.

image source: Defiant Development

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House
House plays pretty much anything and everything but has almost time for nothing. A devout beat’em up fan, House enjoys a round of captain commando every now and then and can never forget spending hours in dark arcades playing warriors of fate after school. Oh yeah, his favourite console of all time is the original Famicom!

Review – Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles

June 20, 2018 By ausretrogamer

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles opens up like a mix of Sea of Thieves and Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild; both excelled in creating a beautiful world with a sense of wonder and adventure, which is also Yonder’s greatest strength.

After creating a character with some very basic options (although you can customise him or her throughout the game with a wealth of cosmetic options such as clothes, hair dyes and other accessories to keep things interesting) you are thrown onto the island of Gemea where the game is set and free to explore the open world at your leisure. The game world is beautifully realised; whist it doesn’t surpass Breath of the Wild (but to be fair not many have), it does an admirable job in creating a large, interesting and vibrant world with lush forests, sunny beaches and snowy mountains. Graphically, it is one of the best on the Switch.

How it looks is where the similarities end between Yonder and the aforementioned games. With no enemies to kill or levels to grind, Yonder presents itself as a slow-paced exploration game filled with rather mundane tasks. The game’s myriad of largely lifeless NPCs dish out most of the side quests, usually involving collecting various resources around the world such as fodder, wood, stones, seeds etc using a set of contextual tools introduced early on in the game. For example, using sickles to cut grass, axe to chop trees, pickaxe to mine ore and so on. There is also the ability to run your own farm by building simple structures and rearing the exotic animals found in the game to store and generate resources.

The main story quest is painstakingly simple and the only real sense of progression comes from unlocking previously inaccessible areas of the map by dispersing the ‘murk’ (a mysterious dark shroud covering certain areas) by finding enough pet fairy ‘sprites’. There is no real sense of urgency to this though, as the Murk is not at all dangerous and there is no time limit or any order in which part of the map needs to be uncovered first.

I must confess that I usually like my games with a mature and engaging storyline, deep combat mechanics and RPG-like progression systems. However, I recently played through Yonder during a month long overseas holiday and found it to be the perfect companion game for such an occasion. It is something I could pick up and enjoy for a few minutes to half an hour at a time without the stress of levelling up or acquiring better gear to take on bigger bosses. Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is all about discovering its world at your own pace and having the most relaxed time doing so, and like what my 3-year-old daughter said when she watched me play, “it’s beautiful”.

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Crawl Review – Nintendo Switch

December 18, 2017 By ausretrogamer

Crawl is an innovative and refreshing take on an indie dungeon crawler; your friends are your enemies. Up to a group of 4 players can play together locally (AI replaces the other 3 in single player) and as the human player moves through each room and each level (reminiscent of Diablo), every object/trap/monster summoning circle can be manipulated by your 3 ghostly friends to bring about your demise so they can take your place as the human. The aim being to become the first player to get to level 10 as human so they can tackle the final boss (which is also controlled by the other 3 players).

Mutually inclusive levelling mechanics along with upgradeable monsters and purchasable weapons/items (there is a safe-room like shop on every level to provide some much required reprieve) adds depth to the game so that it’s not simply about who can be human for as long as possible; it is imperative to be powerful both as ghost and human to give you the best shot at making it to the final boss first. There is a deeper level of strategy involved here that I feel would be advantageous to the players who can best exploit them.

From the moment you boot up the game, where it asks you to ‘insert coin’ rather than the ubiquitous ‘press any key’, to the hectic race to level 10 to the exhilarating final boss battle, Crawl is wonderfully retro and a joy to behold. The pixelated graphics brings back memories of classic beat’em ups whilst the cheesy announcer and pumping music reminds of the best of the 90s era arcade games. It is also punishingly difficult; you are supposed to die…a lot, as foreshadowed by the introduction, where you are pitted against powerful monsters with impossible odds of survival.

A typical session may only last 15 to 30 minutes, however with randomly generated dungeons and the frantic moment to moment gameplay, each round is refreshing and getting to the end is often greeted with a sense of achievement and relief at the same time; I beat the boss with what must have been the last sliver of health left on my first try.

I played the review copy of Crawl on the Nintendo Switch (scheduled for released tomorrow – 19^th of December), and the game is perfectly suited to the system with the joy cons enabling easy local multiplayer and further solidifies Nintendo’s focus on quality indie games with the Switch system.

Crawl is not a game for everyone, however if you have a few mates around and enjoy a fun retro inspired local multiplayer game (at time of writing there wasn’t any online multiplayer features), then Crawl is an easy recommendation.

Release Date: December 19, 2017
Price: $19.99 AUD, $14.99 USD, €14,99 EU, £12.99 GBP

*Crawl was supplied for review by Powerhoof

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