Lagging Behind Greatness

A decade ago, Metroid fans were starving for exploration-based action/platformers. These days, that drought is over. Many developers are taking cues from Nintendo’s sci-fi classic, and Bit Kid is one of them. This studio’s take on the formula features a young knight on a journey to rescue a wayward mining town from the imposing creatures that occupy its caverns. Chasm features all of the Metroid hallmarks: creative upgrades, fearsome enemies, and gorgeous backdrops. Unfortunately, its twisting labyrinths feel randomly slapped together – which they are.

When you first set foot in this remote mountain town, it appears to be abandoned. The townsfolk have been kidnapped by monsters and locked away in a dangerous tangle of underground mines. You explore the depths to rescue the citizens, earning unique tools that allow you to overcome obstacles as you delve into haunted burial chambers and moss-covered underground waterways. Some of these upgrades are mundane, such as the lantern that lets you see in the dark. Others, like the climbing gear that lets you wall-jump up vertical shafts, are fun to use and open up a variety of new areas to explore.

Combat is straightforward, and each cavern is teeming with unique monsters like rock golems, mining ghosts, and scythe-wielding rats. Chasm’s attack-and-dodge battles are intuitive, and getting a handle on most creatures’ attack patterns is easy. However, your equipment can make a big difference during these encounters, and new weapon drops are frustratingly few and far between. I battled for every inch through two whole zones before I finally gained a new piece of armor that turned a previously unpassable hallway into a breeze.

These chasms are full of more than old mining equipment and ghouls, and you encounter plenty of townsfolk looking for a way out. Saving these civilians restores the above-ground town and gives you access to new stores like the blacksmith or the -alchemist. Rescuing these people was nearly as rewarding as finding a new piece of gear, and I loved seeing my town slowly come back to life.

Aside from battling monsters, Chasm features a number of exciting, handcrafted platforming sequences, and I held my breath as I white-knuckled my way across a series of spike traps or jumped across crumbling platforms above a poison-filled pit. Memorable sequences like these make Chasm’s moment-to-moment action compelling, but that occasional excitement doesn’t hold the entire package together.

In an effort to create an endlessly repayable game, Bit Kid designed Chasm as a procedurally generated experience. When you begin, the entire network of caves is randomly stitched together to provide a unique playthrough. The longer you play, the more issues stem from this lack of curated content. For example, save points are often spaced too far apart. The random nature also kills the pacing; I went for one long stretch without finding any upgrades and then hit three in quick succession. This approach to design can keep things fresh in games designed for quick runs, but Chasm doesn’t operate that way. One playthrough takes about 12 hours, which means you’re stuck with the same dull, random configurations that entire time.

I was happy to find new equipment and other treasures, but these caves don’t have enough hidden secrets to make scouring them interesting. You also backtrack a lot, which becomes a slog. On the whole, Bit Kid’s randomized structure undoes so much of what Chasm has going for it, and it drained my enthusiasm for seeing what was around the next corner, because I knew it was just another random chamber.

Chasm is full of great platforming moments and environments, but these elements are randomly assembled into an uneven experience. Bit Kid succeeded in creating a Metroid-style experience that unfolds in a new way every time you play it, but I would have rather had one playthrough that was consistently entertaining.

 

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Only The Hits

When the original WarioWare released in 2003, descriptions made it sound like a bizarre Nintendo fever dream. Pre-release screenshots showed giant robot versions of Mario fighting Bowser right next to an image of fingers flying toward a pair of open nostrils. Playing the game led to similarly delightful confusion as you blazed through microgames doing tasks like twirling spaghetti or sniffing a runny nose at night in front of a lighthouse. WarioWare has always been strange and joyous, and WarioWare Gold rounds-up the best from its history while delivering enough new microgames to feel like a new installment.

A microgame is usually about three to five seconds and tasks you with completing a specific task as quickly as possible. You might have to insert a finger into a nose, or roll an egg under a chicken so it can be hatched. Plenty tasks veer into downright strange territory, like when you tickle a strong man’s armpit so he opens his mouth, releasing a rubber band to snap another strong man in the face. You also play snippets of Nintendo classics that include shooting an enemy in Metroid, tossing a shell at a goomba on the Virtual Boy, and using motion controls to squash Pikmin. Each one of the 300-plus microgames is a quick spike of weird joy, and even if you run into a few that don’t interest you, they’re off the screen before you can get annoyed.

WarioWare Gold splits its microgames into four types: button-pressing, motion controls, touch-screen, and microphone. All work well, and later modes that force you to swap between the types are frantic and fun. The microphone games are the weakest, as they all involve blowing into the microphone. Even though that is less enjoyable than rotating the 3DS or simply pressing buttons, they do still hit the goofy, absurd heights of comparable microgames.

 

The story offers fully voiced animated cutscenes, something few first-party Nintendo games have done. Wario speaks in full sentences, and characters like Jimmy T, Mona, and 9-volt (who in the past would say nothing more than their names) have goals and motivations that they share out loud. To hear all these characters is shocking and strange, but I like it. Hearing Wario formulate a plan to buy pizza using earnings from a questionable video game tournament is the perfect amount of weird.

Outside of the microgames in the main story, you can unlock additional modes, strange interactive toys, and details about Nintendo’s history. My favorite is a fantastic mode from Game & Wario where you play as a child sneaking extra video game time under his covers while his mom checks to make sure he is asleep. You also find oddities like a mode that speeds up or slows down the microgames depending on the angle you hold the 3DS. These extras are fun to play with, and mix up the typical gameplay while letting you still pursue coins.

Toys and additional games unlocked with the coins from a capsule machine are also worthwhile pursuits. Mewtroid is a game that plays a meow-infused version of the Metroid theme while you roll around as a cat shooting human faces for a high score. You can also get alarm clocks you can set to wake you up that won’t turn off until you complete three microgames, and unlock scenes from the story mode and use the microphone to re-record them with your own dialogue. Not every toy is as exciting as these examples (some are just cards with details about the characters), but each one is unique. Seeing what weird thing you get from the capsule machine makes replaying the microgames to earn coins worthwhile – and replay them you will.

For everything WarioWare Gold does well, it struggles to escape repetitious gameplay that surfaces the lack or legitimate depth. Longtime fans of the series will see plenty of new games but getting through the story only takes about two hours, and if you want to see every microgame and grab every unlock, you must replay the same modes over and over. Playing the same microgames to hopefully see one or two new ones isn’t ideal, and I lost my motivation to open every capsule shortly after finishing the story.

WarioWare has always been a fantastic oddity in Nintendo’s library and to gather much of what has made the franchise such a joy into one large collection is great. For anyone new to WarioWare, this is a great place to start. For veterans, it has more than enough new content to make playing it worthwhile, plus you get to have a greatest hits compilation of the best microgames.

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Hit And Run

Three Fields Entertainment’s games so far (Danger Zone and Dangerous Golf) haven’t strayed from the studios’ roots as the creators of the Burnout series and its fabled Crash mode. Danger Zone 2 is no exception: You hurtle your car towards an intersection and hope to create as much chaos and damage as possible when you detonate your explosive Smashbreaker and blow up everything around you. But this sequel adds on to the formula by also emphasizing what you do before you get there, and in the process, expands the playing field – if only a little.

The new objectives added to the levels (which are now set in outside environments) are not surprising, but they’re effective. They don’t just give you something extra to do, they fit nicely into the game’s existing framework. Who doesn’t want more ways to spread destruction? Destroying a requisite number of a certain vehicle type is often about controlling a semi and punting cars ahead of you like auto-projectiles. Racing through timed gates sounds boring, but when it’s into oncoming traffic in a fast-but-fragile formula-one-type car, you may actually look to scrub off speed just to stay alive rather than get to the gate as fast as you can. Increasing your speed also ups the fear factor when you chain together boosts, which is the only way to win in some levels. These examples also highlight how Danger Zone 2’s various vehicles influence gameplay in their own way, another welcome addition.

Regardless of how appropriate it all fits together, the gameplay isn’t deep enough to allow you to construct outcomes that lead to lasting satisfaction. For instance, the way you interact with cars and environment is limited, and the linear levels always end in a Smashbreaker detonation in a pre-designed zone. The reliance on a mixture of randomness and carefully orchestrated set pieces is definitely part of its charm, but the predominance of randomness only exacerbates the sense of shallowness and lack of thrills that go beyond an ephemeral dopamine hit.

Like the first game, Danger Zone 2 isn’t helped by its sparse feature set. Multiplayer consists only of leaderboards (not even pass-the-controller multiplayer) and there’s no progression system apart from medaling to unlock the next level.

Danger Zone 2 takes necessary, if limited, steps beyond its predecessor with new pieces that fit nicely into the structure of chaos. It makes a spectacle all right, but it’s fleeting.

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An Epic Epoch

Occasionally, a game comes along that takes off in a way that defies all expectations, breaking into the mainstream consciousness, enveloping pop culture and audiences worldwide. Fortnite is one of those experiences. With two disparate game options, a plethora of llamas, and unlimited replayability, Epic Games is leading the charge in an era that promises to redefine what it means to be a live-service game. While both modes are enjoyable solo, they are far better with friends.

 

The first game mode, Save the World, is a cooperative experience that tasks players with defending various points and structures via building, blasting, and traps. A variety of husk (zombie) enemies keep spawning and trying to take down your defenses, but a wide array of weaponry and savvy crafting can save the day. Save the World is fun but ultimately repetitive, with many of the hooks revolving around a massive skill tree, busting open llamas to unlock new characters and weapon recipes, and collecting resources. The endless mass of foes and the drip unlock system are enticing at first, but ultimately get can feel like a chore and unsatisfying.

 

 

The standard premise of each stage is fun: Build a giant base from raw materials, Home Alone the hell out of it with traps, and sit back and pop off a ton of headshots on the unrelenting swarm. Depending on your tolerance for horde modes and home defense, Save the World mode might be perfect for you, especially if you’d rather play with other players instead of against them. Depending on your mood, you can take on more relaxing missions, or put yourself up against some heavy husks, so you can choose your own level of engagement with the terrible tide.

The real star of the show is Fornite Battle Royale and its sub-modes. The core concept is immediately understandable and offers intense replayability. Dropping out of the party bus, you rocket to the ground, scramble to be first to a weapon among other players, and take out the early competition before they can take out you.  You can’t respawn after death, so it’s one and done. However, you can immediately hop right into another match if you die, an aspect that greatly removes some of the sting of defeat.

 

Should you survive the furtive opening moments, the middle segment of survival and scavenging tasks you with moving from landmark to landmark, looking for weapons, shields, and health to get you though to the next encounter. The walls begin to close in as the storm pushes players together, reducing the field of play over time and forcing action. If you run into another player, the battle is often decided in mere moments, so paying attention to sound and environmental clues (like discarded weapons, broken down structures, or crudely constructed defenses) is paramount. This point of the game is intense and action-packed as you battle for prime loot and seek a spot in the shrinking circle. The final stage of each match (assuming you survive that long) is an often-frenzied combination of building and explosions as powerful guns shred rapidly constructed defenses. Sometimes the best play is just to hide in a bush and let everyone else fight it out, and then clean house. You may get to enjoy a sweet victory rush for being the last person standing or be sent unceremoniously packing by a staircase-jumping tactical shotgun to the face – either way, the adrenaline of every game carries over to the next match, again and again.

The sheer replayability of Fortnite Battle Royale is one of its greatest strengths. Despite there only being one map, nothing ever plays out the same from game to game. Your learned experience about chest spawns, terrain, and weapon functionality carries over, but how these aspects intersect is fresh every time. Maybe you land with 10 other players in the middle of a house, forcing you to decide whether to book it to the next area or go Rambo, hoping to reap the rewards as the lone survivor of a grim melee. Maybe you get a great weapon right away, but wander into the middle of a skirmish between two snipers. Like Dota 2 or League of Legends, despite the single primary playspace, the rest of the variables mean that one map is more than enough.

Combine this with the fact that the landscape of the map is continuing to change with every season and you have a winning recipe, one rooted in core gameplay aspects but always adding new quirks and perks. Whether it’s a thermal scope, a ridable golf cart, or turning a swamp into a desert, the never-ending new additions to Fortnite set it far above the curve with constant, consistent updates. Bring a team along and play in squads to experience new tactics and thrills, like building walls around downed enemies or allies to prevent others from reaching them.

New weapons, gadgets, and map locales are not the only things that are always changing. In a 50v50 all out war mode or an actual battle against Thanos from the Marvel universe, you always have a new limited-time experience to try out if you’re suffering from fatigue with the standard brawl. As palate cleansers and diversions, these alternative modes give you something to do after a frustrating loss, with a new playgroup, or just messing around.

Fortnite is an ever-shifting entity, but strong footing has solidified it as a verified phenomenon with fast, fun gameplay and ubiquitous reach. Anyone can play it and have a great time, and although Save the World might get grindy and shotgun climb-and-dives might get a little tiresome, there’s real magic here along with the promise of more in the months and years to come.

This review pertains to the PC version of Fortnite. Fornite is also available on PS4, Xbox One, Switch, Mac, iOS, and Android

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An Arduous But Rewarding Journey

At its best, Octopath Traveler reminds me of my favorite 16-bit role-playing games. Strategic turn-based combat tests your skills, a job system gives you the freedom to tinker and optimize, and a fantastic retro aesthetic brings the world and creatures to life. However, Octopath Traveler isn’t always at its best. Over the course of its 60-plus hours, the adventure has wild variations in pacing and narrative, and has trouble settling into a groove. The result is a series of tantalizing highs and brutal lows, with the highs ultimately winning out.

Octopath Traveler’s problems take a long time to surface. The early hours are amazing, with the dreamlike presentation and 2D/3D hybrid visuals drawing you in. After choosing one of eight characters as your hero, you visit other towns to recruit the seven others. In every case, you play through a vignette (which lasts about an hour) that introduces the hero and their quest – a thief needs to steal jewels to salvage his pride, while a cleric embarks on a religious pilgrimage. This structure is unconventional and intriguing at first, but it doesn’t stay that way for long.

In subsequent chapters, the narrative squanders its potential through dull repetition. Each character has four chapters (32 in total), and almost all of those follow the exact same formula: Arrive in town, watch a scene, use a character-specific ability to accomplish a minor task like stealing a letter, then go into a short dungeon and fight a boss. I was often interested in the stories being told on a conceptual level (especially Primrose’s quest for revenge), but the predictable format and writing saps them of their surprises. Every character is exactly who they appear to be, and every betrayal and plot twist is immediately apparent. That doesn’t necessarily make them bad stories, but it makes them feel unremarkable.

The eight main heroes rarely interact or acknowledge each other, and their tales never converge to unite the group in any common purpose. This approach does a good job putting specific characters in the spotlight with vignettes tailored to their personalities and strengths, but results in a disappointing lack of comradery or cooperation among party members. They’re just strangers who fight together sometimes.

Combat is Octopath Traveler’s great redeeming force. The battles are fun and tactical, focused on coordinating your attacks to break an enemy’s defense to create the opening for an onslaught. This means carefully planning your attacks using the action queue, exploiting weaknesses, and reserving boost points for critical moments. I like how each character has access to a unique suite of abilities, like how H’aanit the hunter tames animals, or how Alfyn the apothecary mixes concoctions. This largely avoids redundant skills and ensures every character has an interesting role to occupy. Your foes don’t pull punches, so fights provide a satisfying challenge. This is especially true of the boss fights, which often inject twists like disabling the attack command or draining your max HP every turn to apply pressure, forcing you to develop new strategies. In addition, these adversaries look uniformly fantastic; even a regular human boss becomes a stylish and imposing pixel-art masterpiece.

 

Behind the scenes, a compelling job system gives your characters the flexibility they need to succeed. Once you unlock them, you can assign and swap secondary jobs as needed. This provides your party access to additional weapons, helps them shore up stat weaknesses, and allows them to learn new passive skills they can equip regardless of their current job, like breaking the 9,999 damage limit or decreasing enemy-encounter rate. I loved experimenting with these possibilities (and hunting for the advanced secondary jobs), and the need to rotate party members prevents you from getting entrenched with a single configuration.

As much as I enjoyed the battle system, it doesn’t always feel fresh. After you finish one set of vignettes, your party probably won’t be strong enough to access the new content. The only solution is to spend hours fighting the same monsters until you have enough experience to survive the next story chapters. This concept is an ancient relic of RPG design, and many fans have made peace with it, but that doesn’t make it fun. The grinding bloats Octopath Traveler and wastes your time, but once you’re past it, the frustration quickly abates as you renew your focus on what the game does well.

Octopath Traveler almost feels like a game from an alternate timeline – one in which titles like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI gave rise to a continuing lineage of RPGs that never strayed far from their 16-bit roots. Yes, Octopath Traveler occasionally adheres too closely to antiquated ideas, but with its retro charm and inventive combat, it also takes exciting leaps you won’t see anywhere else.

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Unrealized Potential In A Flooded World

The prospect of exploring the cartoon apocalypse of Adventure Time’s Ooo in a video game is incredibly enticing. Pirates of the Enchiridion turns Ooo into a world where you can go off and explore in any direction at nearly any time, which is what I want from a game taking advantage of the Adventure Time license, but it fails to deliver an engaging adventure within that framework. Covering the world in water limits potential exploration opportunities, you have little reason to do more than just the main story missions, and technical problems make the whole thing feel unstable.

Pirates of the Enchiridion begins with the land of Ooo getting flooded after the Ice King’s kingdom inexplicably melts. Jake the dog and Finn the human procure a boat to figure out what happened, and it sends them on a trip to familiar locations like the Fire Kingdom to fight bad guys and complete simple missions like finding Princess Bubblegum and returning her to her Candy Kingdom.

The strange humor of Adventure Time comes through in the story, thanks in large part to the cast reprising all of their roles. The crew sings silly shanties recounting what is happening in the story, and Jake makes frequent jokes about how their adventures usually end in about 20 minutes and how he expects once they complete this adventure, it will be like Ooo never flooded. I was also a fan of the narrative’s conclusive reveal that is played for one final, solid joke.

Calling this version of Ooo an open-world is only technically accurate. You can go anywhere on the map after completing the opening tutorial, but only a few islands are truly accessible and slowdown and excessive load times make everything feel disconnected. A compass at the top of the screen points you in the right direction as you travel, but no on-screen minimap is present to guide you. This means you must frequently pause to check the map, and pausing the game interrupts your ship’s momentum. Every time I checked the map, I basically had to start my boat from a stop, which was annoying.

Incentives for exploring while on your boat are rare, so you generally just beeline to the next story mission. It gets more interesting when you leave the boat to roam the handful of kingdoms and complete missions. In these moments you can hot swap between your team of Jake, Finn, Marceline, and BMO to run around the small kingdoms to pick fights, find treasure, and use abilities. For example, Jake can grow to carry everyone to higher ground, and BMO can hack locked doors. In the kingdoms, going off the critical path can pay off, but the rewards are generally additional healing or combat items, which are helpful but underwhelming.

The turn-based combat fighting is one of Pirates of Enchiridion’s strongest elements. Each of your four characters has distinct abilities that play well to support one another, and they power up their ultimate attacks in different ways. Finn charges by attacking, Jake charges by taking damage, BMO charges by using items, and Marceline charges by delivering killing blows. This dynamic forces you to be thoughtful about your actions and go beyond the basic attack command. The combat isn’t challenging, but it had enough depth to keep me from getting bored.

 

Technical issues drag it the total Enchiridion experience down. The load times and slowdown are annoying, misplaced or oddly mixed sound cues are frequent, and I experienced two full crashes. Good checkpoints made getting back into the action quick, but the crashes made me nervously cross my fingers at every loading screen. I also noticed strange, transparent lines on the map-screen icons that just lent the whole game a feeling of being unpolished.

Pirates of the Enchiridion is not the open-world game I was hoping for, but it is on the right track. This is a genuine attempt to create the type of experience the Adventure Time license deserves. It comes up short in many ways, but I still did get to have an adventure in Ooo, even if it was flooded with both water and technical issues.

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The Dullest Invasion

You cut through the maze of white picket fences, with a shotgun and only a couple of shells in hand. In the distance, you can hear them chittering. The three friends with you are growing nervous. “Need some health,” one of them says. Suddenly that dreaded alarm bellows and out of the bushes jumps a massive beast, capable of slaughtering you all in a few swipes…only for half of it to suddenly disappear into a wall and become stuck. Its giant hands are swinging but failing to reach you. You all shrug your shoulders, put a hundred rounds into the monster, and then move on.

Earthfall, a co-op shooter in the vein of Left 4 Dead and Warhammer: Vermintide 2, is filled with moments like this where there’s an amorphous sort of potential, a promise of fun or a challenging situation to discover around the corner, only for the game to stumble over its own feet even when it comes to the most basic qualities of a first-person shooter. Earthfall hedges more into the territory of clone than homage, with “Left 4 Dead But With Aliens” being an apt description without caveat or modification.

Set in a world that’s been invaded by aliens after a massive meteor strike, you play as one of four characters (with the other three characters filled by players or bots) trying to survive long enough to gather up enough people to lead a resistance against these extraterrestrial jerks. You progress through linear levels, fending off swarms of aliens to reach the end, occasionally setting up shop with auto turrets and deployable barricades to survive swarms of foes. There are two campaigns, each with five levels, and none of them are particularly memorable. The threadbare story is also backed by ‘lore entries’ that you can collect by shooting enough enemies with weapons. Unless you like reading about random resistance fighters’ fond memories of their assault rifles or clichéd lab reports on enemy foes, these aren’t worth the effort.

Earthfall’s biggest failing is that it apes the conventions and structure of fantastic co-op games without managing to engender the moments that make its influences so interesting. Earthfall’s weapons run the gambit from a machete to shotguns, but the many weapons all look generic and lack a satisfying punch. Enemy designs are also stale, with the countless drones that swarm you, all looking like gray crabs. More powerful, special enemies are capable of pulling players away from your group and doing damage to them until another player intervenes, but they’re also lacking in imagination when it comes to how they look. Like Left 4 Dead, Earthfall randomly sends out these special aliens to give you an extra dose of challenge but the lack of proper optimization, coupled with glitches leads to frustration more than it does excitement.

In certain session, three, high-damage dealing brute monsters would hit one after another in rapid succession, with no way to grab enough ammo between the encounters to fend them off. During one game, my group and I entered a small tunnel only to have one of those giant monsters spawn a few feet in front of us. You can only kill the beast by shooting it in the back so there was no way to escape or fight the monster off. We were trapped in an unwinnable situation; I closed out the session feeling cheated rather than spurred to head back in so that Earthfall could rob me of another 20 minutes of my time due to technical issues or lackluster randomization.

You can play Earthfall as a single-player experience but I can’t recommend it. Even with bots’ skill set up to the highest competency, they’re still aggressively stupid, often letting themselves be beaten to death by monsters or getting stuck in hilly environments. The whole enterprise becomes more about managing the needs of your idiot partners when you’re playing with A.I. allies instead of  actual players, making an experience that already feels like a chore even more of one.

Earthfall just isn’t fun. The game has a solid foundation but that structure doesn’t hold anything that’s entertaining or interesting enough to merit the effort of playing it, especially when there are already several superior games that inhabit the same subgenre.

 

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Nintendo recuts a semiprecious stone

The software lineup for the Switch’s second year doesn’t measure up to its blockbuster opening year. Fortunately, Nintendo still has a volume of critical hits that launched on the underperforming Wii U to help pad out a thin release calendar. Titles like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze are robust ports of their Wii U counterparts. This rerelease of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker isn’t filled with nearly as many new goodies, but it remains a delightful romp for anyone who missed this treasure hunt the first time around.

I first fell in love with Captain Toad’s quirky diorama-like adventures in Super Mario 3D World. I adored helping the mushroom-topped hero dodge traps and enemies in a series of single-screen levels while hunting for rare treasures. When Nintendo expanded on this concept with a stand-alone adventure, I happily joined the expedition. Each level only took around five to ten minutes, and the bite-sized sequences were refreshingly free of fluff. Captain Toad’s levels aren’t challenging, but I discovered a peaceful joy in rotating the camera around each level as I shifted around the pieces of each environment like they were miniature puzzle boxes.

Bizarrely, this Switch version removes a handful of levels based on Super Mario 3D World’s environments. In their place, we get an entire bonus chapter of new levels based on the worlds in Super Mario Odyssey. This is more than a fair trade, because these new levels are some of the best in the game. I got a thrill at seeing my favorite worlds from Super Mario Odyssey again while helping Toad dodge Bullet Bills atop an upside down Pyramid, or finding a way to power the moving lifts underneath New Donk City. I just wish these new levels were available from the start; fans of the original release must play through most of the game again to unlock them, unless they have access to the Super Mario Odyssey wedding Amiibos.

Since Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker originally launched on the Wii U, it made full use of the Wii U controller’s touchpad, asking players to touch sections of the environment to move them around or to tap on enemies to slow them down. Sadly, this feature doesn’t translate perfectly to the Switch. When the system is docked, players use their controller’s motion controls to move a cursor across the screen, which acts as a stand-in for your fingers. These controls feel fine, but I got tired of watching the cursor buzz across the screen like an annoying fly when I wasn’t using it. Alternatively, handheld mode allows you to use the original touchscreen mechanics without a cursor, which is the ideal way to play.

Captain Toad’s only other significant addition is a two-player mode. Sorry, did I say, “significant?” I meant trivial. Like many of the two-player modes in other Nintendo games, this is simply a tweak to the single player campaign, where one player controls Toad and the second player controls the camera while throwing turnips at enemies from off-screen. This is far from a destination mode, but it technically meets the back of the box requirements of allowing two players to interact with the game at the same time.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker was a fun time when it hit the Wii U, and it’s still a fun time today. The new levels are easily some of the best in the game, but they don’t really justify a second purchase. I’m thrilled Nintendo wants to make use of this well-traveled fungi, but I hope the next time I see Captain Toad, he’s going on a completely new adventure.

 

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Diving To More Difficult Depths

Splatoon has always keenly focused on multiplayer; every free update over the series’ three-year history has delivered new gear, maps, and weapons to the competitive suite. As the first paid expansion in series history, Octo Expansion defies that trend, instead adding a new single-player story. For fans of the Splatoon’s Hero modes, Octo Expansion acts as a terrific test of skill.

Splatoon’s core gameplay carries over into Octo Expansion: ink flies as you shoot, swim, and splat your way through 80 single-player tests. You step into the shoes of Agent 8, an Octoling trapped in an underground test facility with chambers connected by a series of subway lines. Your mission is to travel between the lines, collecting key items needed to escape. I enjoy the narrative, but there isn't much meat on the bones; you learn backstory about characters like Pearl, Marina, and Cap’n Cuttlefish through entertaining chatroom logs. These chats are optional, but the dialogue is humorous and those interested in the lore of Splatoon have plenty of new material to fuel those fan theories. However, the tests are the main attraction.

You aren’t facing off against other players, but the challenges are even more daunting. From navigating solitary platforms dangling over an instant-death pit while sniping enemies with minimal cover to pushing a ball along a treacherous, enemy-laden path toward a goal, Octo Expansion does not mess around when it comes to creativity or difficulty.

Octo Expansion’s many challenges often home in on one element of your Splatoon skillset and push it further than you’ve likely experienced. Stages, like one that requires you to grind on rails while hitting targets, with one wrong move meaning failure had me yelling at my Switch in frustration. Despite this, they’re so much fun I was happy to keep trying until I was successful. The levels are tough, but always fair, and the feeling of surmounting a stage you’ve been stuck on can be close to euphoric.

Most levels give you a small collection of weapons to choose from, while others demand you use one particular weapon. Terrible with sniper rifles? You can likely choose an automatic weapon for that test, but you’re going to need to get creative with how you approach some of the sequences designed with long-range weapons in mind. My favorite moments are when you’re given an ultimate ability to use infinitely as you make it through platforms and enemies; these often aren’t the most challenging sequences, but I love how powerful they make you feel.

The variety of distinct obstacles in each stage makes for a fresh experience through to the end. Several gimmicks repeat by the campaign’s conclusion, but typically these repeats expand on the original concept’s formula substantially enough to warrant an encore.

With Octo Expansion serving up such difficult gauntlets, you can avoid troublesome levels through a couple of different methods. If you fail enough times, you’re given the option to outright skip that level. While I’m glad that option is available, I always opted to use the subway-style hub world to jump to another line and circumvent the one I was stuck on. This felt like I wasn’t giving myself an easy out, plus finding an alternate route around the road-block stage is rewarding.

 

The majority of the levels are creative, but I’m disappointed by the lack of original boss battles. The bosses you encounter (save for the intense final sequence) are more difficult variants of encounters in Splatoon 2’s base campaign. With how unique and compelling the rest of the expansion is, it’s disappointing to see the series’ typically inventive boss battles be so derivative.

While Octo Expansion focuses entirely on single-player content, you receive cosmetic multiplayer rewards for progress earned. As you complete lines of the hub world, you earn new gear to equip to your multiplayer character. However, making it to the end of the story and completing the final sequence yields the best reward: being able to play as an Octoling online.

Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion is a reminder of how good the series’ single-player content can be. Brimming with tense, precision-based challenges and creative ways to force you out of your gameplay comfort zone, Octo Expansion is a terrific reason to once again take the plunge into Splatoon 2.

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A Compromised Masterpiece

Bethesda was one of the few third-party publishers to embrace the Switch early and bring over games geared toward older audiences, releasing robust ports of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and the reboot of Doom. The latest port to join the fray is Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, a game I adored when it originally released last year. So how does the version designed for Switch stack up? It captures everything that makes this tale of revolution and adventure so satisfying — with only a few compromises to bear.

Woflenstein II picks up immediately after the conclusion of the first game. After conquering the evil Dr. Deathshead at a high cost, hero BJ Blazkowicz is crippled and the Kreisau Circle is on the run, trying to keep the revolution alive as the Nazis hunt them. Players are thrown into a strange world where Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan hobnob in the streets of Roswell, and actors board shuttles to fly to planets for auditions in propaganda films. The New Colossus goes all in, offering heartbreak and wild, weird moments in equal measure. One minute, you’re watching a drunk BJ ride a pig through the belly of a U-Boat. Another minute, he is comforting a woman mourning the loss of her husband. Though this mixture of tragedy and insanity might not be for everyone, the powerful concoction makes The New Colossus unlike any other shooter.

The Switch version of Wolfenstein II is solid no matter which way you choose to play it. The docked version of the game looks the best, nearly 1:1 with the original release. Fuzzy draw distance for larger areas and uglier textures for weapons and enemies are compromises, but they aren’t big ones. Visuals take an even bigger hit on handheld mode, amplifying the issues. However, even with these graphical downgrades in mind, Wolfenstein II is a fantastic-looking game, especially with regards to art design. Roswell remains a vivid, chilling portrait of a country that’s willingly given its soul to fascism, with all its propaganda art and exaggerated ‘50s-style décor. Firefights are still as intense as ever, with impressive particle effects firing off in every direction, and I never encountered a single framerate slowdown during the whole campaign. Cutscenes in Wolfenstein II look great, but there are a handful of in-game sequences that have close-ups on characters’ faces that serve as the most egregious visual hit. Luckily, these sequences are few and far between. 

The New Colossus also plays surprisingly well on the Joy-Cons. The Pro Controller is obviously the way to go if you have one, but the Joy-Cons do an admirable enough job letting you control BJ’s movements both in and out of tense combat situations. I played through the majority of the game in handheld mode using the Joy-Cons, and never felt frustration with the control scheme.
 
My biggest disappointment with this incarnation of Wolfenstein II is that it only contains content from the original retail release, and doesn’t integrate any post-launch enhancements. That means the combat simulations that were added into the base game are missing (essentially an Arcade Mode where you could replay levels from the game to build scores with bloody Nazi-killing combos), as are quality-of-life updates like a more generous grenade indicator. The Freedom Chronicles DLC is also not included (and there’s no way to buy it). Bethesda says that none of this post-release content is currently planned for the Switch version. While these components aren’t an essential part of what makes Wolfenstein II so special, leaving them out makes little sense. Expecting a full-priced retail port of a game released last year to include at least some improvements made to other versions is not unreasonable – especially when the Switch ports of both Doom and Skyrim do. 

Make no bloody, broken Nazi bones about it: The Switch version is the least visually appealing version of Wolfenstein II. However, for me, that compromise is easy to accept when I can take Machinegames’ opus with me wherever I go. Even the worst version of The New Colossus is an incredible, must-play game for anyone who loves zany action and honest, powerful stories about the cost of hope.

 

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D.K.’s Detour Is Fun While It Lasts

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