Although there’s no standout heavy hitter like Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, or Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, we’re still pretty stoked about the rest of 2019 when it comes to Nintendo Switch games. The console/handheld hybrid has a varied lineup to look forward to, with Nintendo themselves publishing like half a dozen games in the summer months alone. And of course Pokemon Sword and Shield are looming over the horizon beckoning us to catch them all this holiday.
But in the meantime, here are some cooler, smaller Switch games to play right now, on the original Switch or the new Nintendo Switch Lite.
Pillars of Eternity
Developer Obsidian’s understanding of Western role-playing games is so complete they can make everything from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic sequels to Fallout spin-offs to tactical RPGs based on South Park. And with their Kickstarter success Pillars of Eternity they go back to the roots of the genre. This is a very old-school game in all aspects. The lore is well-written with sympathetic characters but full of dense fantasy concepts and history you’ll either get totally into to or completely bounce off of. And the throwback isometric gameplay recalls D&D PC classics like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. Even weird texts bugs look like something you’d see on a PC.
But the Nintendo Switch is a new console, not an old computer. Even when you fast forward, exploring the world moves at a measured and engrossing pace that works well on the go with a screen big enough to hold all the information. The various radial menus are also a fine enough control compromise for all the fiddling you’ll have to do. The combat, with its mix of semi real-time action and tactical pausing, is never exactly smooth with this system. But chalk that up once again to the appreciated but overwhelming old genre this game faithfully emulates.
DC Universe Online
Take out the MMO component and DC Universe Online almost feels like DC’s answer to the recent Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3. It’s a colorful, chaotic, somewhat dumb comic book romp through the world of DC superheroes, only now you’re part of a whole community along from the ride. And there’s just something about watching a janky online war between caped villains and cops in neon Hell Gotham City that just feels so appropriate.
But you can’t actually take out the MMO component. DC Universe Online gives you a fair amount of legacy content to play for free, but to get up to date you’ll need to start paying and keep paying. And while you’ll be interacting with DC characters nonstop in various missions, you’ll only play as your single new hero with a handful of abilities and costumes choices that can only at best become bootleg versions of real DC characters. I saw a pretty good Deadpool walking around, too.
Chroma Squad
Legal action eventually forced the developers of Chroma Squad to explicitly say they were inspired by Power Rangers. But just one look at these guys gives the game away. What’s more charming though is that this game cares more Power Rangers as a real-world TV show rather than whatever happens in the lore. And the gameplay reflects this offbeat take on the material.
Players control their own indie studio producing a very pixelated Power Rangers-esque TV show. Filming takes the form of little turn-based tactics battles. They’re straightforward and get repetitive but gain depth from nice touches like morphing into your costumes, choosing to help teammates with your turn, and getting bonuses when the director asks all five of you to gang up on the boss monster at once. Outside of battles you lightly manage the studio by buying new gear for actors, setting aside budget to increase audience engagement, answering bizarre email. It’s a super sentai sim.
Friday the 13th: The Game
From Resident Evil to PUBG, horror is huge in gaming. So it’s weird we don’t see more games based directly on famous horror movies. Why haven’t the Mortal Kombat developers gone all in on a slasher fighting game instead of just DLC? Afters its original troubled release, Friday the 13th: The Game had us scared the slasher game had no future. Darkness can only cover up so many flaws. But now the Switch version (available as a physical release as well) benefits from later updates and is scary in a good way.
Friday the 13th just does such a clever job turning the mechanics of the film genre into satisfying gameplay mechanics. It’s an asymmetrical multiplayer game where a group of counselors try to escape one Jason Voorhees as he hunts them down. The counselors are weaker but more numerous and more nimble. Jason is unwieldy but has a sick set of powers like teleporting and silently stalking and sensing fear and hearing his mom’s voice. And even if you don’t want to kill or be killed online, you can at least play as Jason offline in little crafted vignettes that give you a taste of the game’s surprisingly robust progression.
Dragon Quest Builders 2
Like the original, Dragon Quest Builders 2 adds some much appreciated polish, JRPG structure, and adorable Akira Toriyama art to the open-ended building genre. The sequel just expands the formula with bigger worlds made up of interconnected islands. It’s got a fun nautical Wind Waker vibe, even while your character remarks on dead bodies washing up on shore. The islands and their objectives are pretty distinct, too. Live out some Harvest Moon farming fantasies before sailing off to a prison colony or even alternate worlds dreamt up by other players, this time with a friend to help with building or combat or both. But while I do like the game’s strong guiding hand, the trade-off is you lose some of the sense of freedom you find in Minecraft.
Blazing Chrome
The Switch already has a collection of classic Contra games, and it’s getting the iffy looking new 3D Contra Rogue Corps later this year. But the best new Contra experience you’ll play on the system is Blazing Chrome. From its chunky weapons, steep challenge, hardcore 80s energy, and beautiful 16-bit aesthetic it’s basically a love letter to Contra III: The Alien Wars. So it’s a love letter to me, too. Just don’t go in expecting anything much more than a blast from the past.
Dream Daddy
While a queer dad dating simulator could’ve easily been just a cheap meme, Dream Daddy gets to have its irony cake and eat it too just on the strength of its sincerely heartfelt writing. The frisky fathers have all have fun and unique personalities befitting their iconic artwork. But in-between all the flirting the game never forgets that you are a parent and makes caring for your child the number one priority. Outside of some clever minigame metaphors (comparing daughters like battling Pokemon) you need to be okay with the fact that the gameplay in this genre largely consists of reading. And while your personal Dream Daddy is ultimately your choice, I wish you had more meaningful choices to make during the dates themselves.
Red Faction: Guerilla Re-Mars-tered
Can an otherwise fine open-world rise to greatness thanks to a single mechanic? Red Faction: Guerilla will have you asking that question. On paper, the missions are fairly generic and repetitive. But it’s hard to notice because they mostly revolve around the unbelievably cool destruction mechanic. Basically every structure can be demolished with some strategic explosives or whacks from your sledgehammer. It’s very tactile and satisfying, especially paired with the antifa storyline that has you liberating Mars from tyrants by literally tearing their houses down. The working-class Mars colony world is also pretty well-realized in a Total Recall kind of way.
SolSeraph
Ace Team are the Chilean weirdos behind Zeno Clash, so them making a spiritual successor to ActRaiser seemed totally random and therefore completely appropriate. It makes even more sense too once you realize that ActRaiser’s split between action and strategy is basically what the team was already getting at in Rock of Ages. In SolSeraph players become god to both fight monsters directly in short sidescrolling bits and help their followers flourish in real-time strategy tower defense bits. It can be a lot to handle. The action sections give you plenty of abilities that feel good but can’t always overcome enemies that feel a bit cheap. Meanwhile, the strategy sections give you little time to rest as monster waves come fast and furious while you manage resources, speed development along with god powers, build defenses, and work toward your ultimate goal of dispelling the darkness at the end of each area. It’s very stressful and not that rewarding. Something like Castlestorm integrates its hero and strategy elements a little more elegantly. But being a god is also probably stressful and not rewarding.
Lethal League Blaze
Lethal League Blaze is the best game since Kung Foot in Rayman Legends to blur the lines between arcade sports game and straight-up fighting game. Instead of hitting each other directly, players bounce a ball around a tight arena. After you hit the ball, it will hurt your opponent on contact. But if they hit it back, you’re now vulnerable. Hit the ball in different directions, grab it, or bunt to set up proper positioning. And the wildest riskiest plays have you turning your opponent’s momentum against them, knocking back a fast ball to kill them with one hit. It’s all presented with a super stylish punk art style like Jet Set Radio meets Windjammers.
Slay The Spire
A deckbuilding roguelike sounds like something I wouldn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole but Slay the Spire is one of the best games I’ve played all year. It has me wondering if solitaire was a roguelike this whole time. Opportunities for creative strategic depth from the different cards you collect feel almost limitless. The infinite potential encounters against monsters let you play out all those possibilities. With the right hand you can unleash ridiculous combo attacks or perfectly shield yourself from whatever a boss can throw at you. You can upgrade cards and augment your character with bonus runes. But having to ditch your deck each run is a good bulwark against the dumb hoarding aspect of other card games. And like the similarly fantastic Into the Breach, a single early run is still long, varied, and satisfying enough to not feel like a complete roguelike waste of time.
Note: Slay the Spire is published by Humble Bundle, which is part of the same company that owns Geek.com.
My Friend Pedro
My Friend Pedro has you slaughtering hundreds of goons with the help of your talking banana friend. Sure! And to make that slaughtering look as cool as possible, the game gives you plenty of guns to play with and various tricks for stringing together stylish combos. Split your aim when duel-wielding. Slow down time. Hop off walls. Ricochet bullets to snipe foes from tricky angles. It’s all very slick when it works. But when it doesn’t work there’s a kind of weird mushiness to the mechanics, like the game is too physics-dependent to be as crisp as it wants to be. And with a few exceptions, the industrial levels are disappointingly bland for a game trying to be so crazy.
Verlet Swing
As someone who wrote the book on vaporwave for this website, Hell yes I was excited for Verlet Swing and its ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ. Swinging around pink and turquoise 90s digital dreamscapes littered with marble busts feels like swinging into a Floral Shoppe album cover, all set to some incredibly chill tunes. But the gameplay doesn’t quite have the same appropriately laid-back mood. Even in the short levels, swinging around in first-person like a cross-between Mirror’s Edge and Bionic Commando feels awkward as I’m never totally sure where my body is. And even the tiniest collision results in a game over. It’s frustrating, the one thing vaporwave should never be.
Slender: The Arrival
Slender: The Arrival has more legitimately cool spooky atmosphere and lore than this dumb meme deserves, frankly. The found footage look and creepy audio design make you forget that you’re running away from 4chan Boogeyman. But you can see the same production value in a lot of those streaming-focused first-person jump scare horror games. Slender starts off pretty strong, almost feeling like a horror version of Firewatch. But eventually the repetitive gameplay reminds you this is an expanded version of a demo. It doesn’t have the creativity of something like the fake Christmas Furbies in Tattletail or playing as a literal baby in Among the Sleep.
A Duel Hand Disaster: Trackher
A Duel Hand Disaster: Trackher’s title is just the start of the confusion. I enjoy the unique shoot ‘em up premise. On one half of the screen you control a ship with infinite health but limited resources shooting enemies for points. On the other half you control a vulnerable ship avoiding enemies to collect resources. And clever design tricks keep your brain from splitting to much, like locking the offensive ship on one axis and making you wait to gather material. It creates natural rhythms for safely switching views. But the specifics of how the game actually works, including its risk/reward scoring system that only counts if you stay alive, aren’t clearly conveyed leading to unnecessary confusion in a game that’s already hard to wrap your brain around.
We. The Revolution
Read our full review for more on this dense simulation of the French Revolution legal system, but suffice it to say being able to send rich jerks to the guillotine in a video game feels pretty good these days. Like a dream Phoenix Wright game, We. The Revolution focuses just on the courtroom stuff. You can pour through documents and testimonies to make informed decisions. Or be as sloppy and passionate as a real revolutionary judge soaking up the restless energy of the people. The short cases are also perfect for portable play. But if you don’t care about the time period it can feel a bit like homework.
Graveyard Keeper
Graveyard Keeper isn’t shy about its inspiration. It’s Stardew Valley but in a cemetery. Instead of farming crops, you tend to dead bodies. But the idyllic, relaxed pacing and vibe remain. And that morbid combo of tones is pretty fun in an Addams Family kind of way. Along with your regular duties of removing flesh and preparing burial sites, you can become a preacher and talk to an anti-capitalist donkey. It’s addictive, but not always in a healthy way. The tech trees for the different crafting skills, from chopping firewood to melting iron ore into nails, are about twice as long as they need to be. It always feels like there are dozens of arbitrary steps to go through to build the thing you really want. At least the dead get to rest.
Realm Royale
It’s a shame Realm Royale won’t reach the same popularity of PUBG or Fortnite or Apex Legends because this Paladins spin-off addresses basically all of my issues with those other bigger battle royale games. There’s a tutorial and the gunfeel isn’t overly realistic. There’s a colorful fantasy aesthetic but no stupid building. You can gain different wacky character abilities on the battlefield but aren’t locked into any of them and can play solo. And before you die you can run away as a chicken so every match doesn’t end with an awkward confusing skirmish where you don’t even know what happened and don’t learn anything. It’s still a battle royale game which will never be my favorite genre, and I didn’t get deeper into mechanics like breaking down weapons for currency to craft better ones, but Realm Royale is just streamlined in a way I hope more players appreciate.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
Not to be a Castlevania elitist, but Koji Igarashi’s spiritual successor to the dead Konami franchise is closer to his last DS game, Order of Ecclesia, than the more famous and influential Symphony of the Night. Thank god Dracula is in the public domain. But whatever, I agree with our full review that Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is bloody great. The subtle difference between Metroid and Castlevania is that Castlevania uses nonlinearity to bolster its RPG loot nature along with clever twisty level progression. It’s as compelling here as it has ever been. We just hope the Switch version irons out its host of technical issues.
Catan
Like many others, Catan was my gateway drug into more serious tabletop gaming. It’s accessible but has more fun strategic depth than, say, Candy Land. And while translating a complex physical game into the digital space is always tricky, this Switch conversion is pretty good! Once I got the controls I easily fell back in the groove. There’s no local multiplayer with one system since players can’t hide cards on the TV, but there is online play. And the single-player campaign offers a variety of different boards with different potential economies. Playing with real people in person will always be better (why doesn’t the A.I. trade with me?) but this is a suitable portable alternative.
