The Switch gains a trio of big hitters this week, including the timed console exclusive The House of the Dead: Remake. Just like the Panzer Dragoon Remake, it comes from Polish publisher Forever Entertainment, rather than SEGA itself. And just like that game, reviews have been wildly mixed.
It’s able to deliver a hit of nostalgia, but performance and control issues drag the package down, swapping precise light guns for the Switch’s gyro controls. Nintendo World Report dished out an 8.5 while Gaming Bible could only muster a mediocre 5/10.
Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition appears to be a more successful re-release, adding modern improvements and bundling The Radical Dreamers – a SNES Satellaview text-based visual novel adventure. This also marks the first time Chrono Cross has gained an official release in Europe – the 1999 PSone original was US and Japan only. This remaster is going down well with critics, even gaining a lofty 9.5 from God is a Geek.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is arguably the biggest release of the week, if not the entire month. First revealed in 2019, it has been a long time coming. Improved combat, laugh-out-loud cut-scenes, and a generous amount of content has won critics over, with review scores mostly clocking in at 8/10.
“LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga provides some rollicking reimaginings of Star Wars’ most iconic moments and seats them inside a series of interplanetary playgrounds that are dense with discovery and entertaining diversions,†said IGN.
Then there’s MLB The Show 22, the first handheld version since 2015’s PS Vita iteration. Nintendo Life reports that it’s ideal for offline play, but if you’re looking to play online in Diamond Dynasty mode, then you may want to play on Xbox or PlayStation.
Crusin’ on a wave of nostalgia, this week also dishes up Slipstream – an arcade racer drawing inspiration from SEGA’s Super Scaler line. Nintendo Life, who awarded it a 7/10, also reported an odd and distracting obsession with Sonic. That makes us even more curious.
The anime-style Mokoko X name-checks Volfied, Qix and Gals Panic, so if you’re a fan of any of those, you may want to take a look. Eastasiasoft’s retro shooter Z-Warp is reportedly a blast too, gaining a 4/5 from Hey Poor Player and a 7/10 from PlayStation Country.
Astrodogs, meanwhile, channels good old Star Fox. Visually, it uses vibrant colour schemes, and it sounds like it could offer some silly fun – it sees a group of dogs out to stop Woofer, a corporation that has turned rogue and started attacking planets.
Atari is also back with Kombinera, a brain-bending puzzle platformer based around coloured balls. “With parallels to be found in excellent indie puzzle games like Baba Is You and Thomas Was Alone, Kombinera is a clever little game that is excellently suited to the on-the-go nature of the Switch,†said Screen Rant.
Others to consider include futuristic gumshoe adventure Chinatown Detective Agency and its old-fashioned counterpart Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter, survival horror Outbreak: Contagious Memories, match-three puzzler/visual novel hybrid Princess Farmer, PSone style adventure Boreal Tenebrae, and the fast food horror Happy’s Humble Burger Farm.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga – £49.99
Play through all nine Star Wars saga films in a brand-new LEGO video game unlike any other. Experience fun-filled adventures, whimsical humour, and the freedom to fully immerse yourself in the LEGO Star Wars galaxy.
Want to play as a Jedi? A Sith? Rebel, bounty hunter, or droid? LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga features hundreds of playable characters from throughout the galaxy. Whether on land or in space, a variety of vehicles are yours to command. Jump to lightspeed in the Millennium Falcon, fly the T-47 Airspeeder and battle TIE fighters in Resistance X-wings… it’s the ULTIMATE LEGO Star Wars experience.
– Create and use multiple Ballplayers, beyond your Road to the Show personalized Baseball RPG experience, and customize your Ballplayers how you want to aid in your progression.
– Diamond Dynasty is back and better than ever! Play, collect, and build on your fantasy card collection and bring to life on the diamond.* Try the new Mini Seasons mode, where each season brings new challenges as you face off against a new set of competition!
– Face your friends with cross-platform play.** With cross progression, continue your progress and earn and use content on other console platforms.***
– Stepping up to the plate for the first time? Tailor your experience with gameplay styles and two new difficulty settings to help you get the hang of the basics.
– New Intro Presentations provide the most immersive ballpark experience yet.
– Play March to October in your style, with updated mode tools to utilize custom uniforms, logos, and created stadiums.
– Live out your dream Baseball matchups with new Legends joining the diamond.
Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter – £25.99
SOMETHING DARKER IS TAKING ROOT IN LONDON
Is it just smoke and mirrors from cunning crooks or is something darker at play here? Each case will require you to strike the right balance between logic, gut instinct, morality, and superstitious beliefs. Track down evil in the darkest corners of London and the human soul, be it from this world or possibly another.
PUT YOUR DETECTIVE SKILLS TO THE TEST
While playing as the great detective gifted with exceptional powers of observation, you will untangle a web of intrigue, lies and misdirection, all culminating in one final grand revelation. For the first time in his mind-boggling career, he must fight to keep a secret, rather than to reveal it.
Princess Farmer is a match3 puzzle and visual novel game with easy to learn action mechanics and different difficulty levels that let you breeze through the game or challenge you to earn more rewards. The story is played in episodes, much like magical-girl anime, with each lasting between 20 minutes to 1 hour, depending on your chosen difficulty level, your skills, and whether you decide to skip dialogue interactions. Different level goals keep you on your toes and bring a fresh approach to the match3 genre. Dialogue options let you choose how Princess Farmer interacts with her friends, affecting your relationships with them. Make them your BFF and they may reward you with gifts!
Princess Farmer was just an ordinary farmer when one day she woke up under the Gaia Tree. Now through the magic of Mother Gaia, she can hoist up whole rows of veggies with ease to make matches and smash obstacles by herself, in co-op, or even with an AI companion! Something mysterious is happening in the woods and it’s your job to puzzle your way to uncover it! You’ll learn about the world around you as you talk and build relationships with the loveable characters including: Mother Gaia, Garlic, Shoppe Keeper Rowan, and even Bot Bunny!
Harness the classic fun of riding bumper cars in this unique party game! Let nothing stand in your way as you compete against your friends in a selection of completely destructible environments.
Choose one of two game modes and adapt them to your liking to keep the game fresh for game after game after game!
* This game contains no text and can be played regardless of language.
Spingram is an exciting puzzle game that will blow your brain, with hundreds of levels and an extraordinary design. Our minds love challenges, and Spingram goes the extra mile to challenge players’ gray matter.
The goal of the game is to reconstruct the pattern presented in the preview by rotating the blocks in any direction.
To align the trace perfectly you will need to examine the position and orientation of the original. If you are in trouble, you can always start over or undo the last move.
Experience Lydia’s desperate escape from a city overrun with the undead. Meet fellow survivors, scrounge for supplies, fight off undead monstrosities in brutally gory combat, and manage extremely limited resources in this soft reboot of the Outbreak series.
Attempt to survive the nightmare with your choice of retro fixed camera, over-the-shoulder, and first-person shooter views, which you can change at any time during gameplay. Mo-cap animations, cheesy voiceovers and enhanced visuals await as you solve puzzles and fight for your life. Play the entire game in optional split-screen co-op or face the darkness alone. The entire experience is designed to play and feel like a late ’90s survival horror nightmare including rigid controls, crushing difficulty and much more.
Can you survive the outbreak, or will you become yet another victim of the undead hordes?
Worm Run is an exciting endless arcade game in which you move the worm right or left, trying to avoid obstacles standing in your way, break the blocks to achieve the goal, collect the worm body items to increase its length, collect coins to unlocks new worms and complete the levels.
20 different characters to unlock and infinite levels guarantee you long hours of fun!
In the Year 21XX, a starship capable of space-time warping was constructed and launched, only to be lost to the unknown depths of space on its maiden voyage. When a distress signal is received, it falls to you, the most accomplished pilot in Z-Division, to find the experimental ship and retrieve its black box for investigation. This mission will take you into a hellish realm where you’ll have to survive waves of fiendish foes if you hope to return alive and victorious!
Z-Warp is an intense vertical shoot’em up presented in retro pixel art style, featuring frenetic arcade-inspired action where blasters, bombs and KILLER specials are your only allies. Shoot down demonic enemies as they try to overwhelm your ship with bullet hell salvos and turn the tide of battle by charging your KILLER weapon capable of instantly wiping out anything in a tight radius around your ship! Face massive boss abominations and aim for high scores in Story or Endless modes.
THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD: Remake – £22.49
THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD: Remake is a remade version of the game introduced in 1997 in arcade platform. A classic arcade rail-shooter receives a whole new entourage and gameplay changes to suit modern gaming standards.
CHRONO CROSS: THE RADICAL DREAMERS EDITION – £15.99
“CHRONO CROSS: THE RADICAL DREAMERS EDITION” is a remaster of “CHRONO CROSS”.
The 3D models have been upgraded to HD, new illustrations have added, and all kinds of new features are now included. Additionally, the game that formed the bedrock of the story, “RADICAL DREAMERS – Le Trésor Interdit -“, is included in this edition!
CHRONO CROSS is an RPG that transcends time and space, unfolding across two interlinked parallel worlds.
With over 40 party members to meet, people and dimensions will intertwine in this epic drama about the planet itself.
Mokoko X was inspired from the arcade games from 1980s and 1990s, a popular gaming style back in the time. Mokoko X looks to resurrect the soul of the arcade genre while adding a modern touch. There are 32 levels in Mokoko X; each level has its own unique boss and minions. The main goal is assisting the girls that need help from the weird bosses. This is sometimes passing a mobile game level, sometimes helping out with the insects in the kitchen.
Control multiple colored balls simultaneously in this brain-bending puzzle platformer. It’s up to you to combine every ball and complete each perilous level. Can you solve them all? Can you save King Kombine from the Kave of Kaos?
A country life, raising animals on a ranch.
You’ve been living in this tiny fantasy countryside, a very relaxing environment, but suddenly something unusual happened.
You wake up one day and all the animal farms are now floating like little islands in the sky!
The paths were shuffled and the baby animals were spread.
To fix this, slide the blocks to rebuild the broken paths. So you help moms unite the families again and bring the farms back to land.
Midnight in Singapore. Your contact’s a no show, your client wants answers and your empty bank balance hangs over you like a neon-tinted Sword of Damocles. Welcome to 2037. Welcome to Chinatown Detective Agency.
The world is in a state of flux as the global economy nears the nadir of its decade-long collapse. Singapore stands as a last refuge of order but even here the government struggles on the brink of chaos. That’s where you come in. You are Amira Darma, once a rising star at INTERPOL, now a freshly minted Private Investigator in the heart of Chinatown, and your first client is about to walk through your door…
This is turn-based Simulation RPG. Rules are simple and reasonable, but never easy. We made the new Thinking Program “SESS-AI”, so enemies are very strong. Probably, stronger than other SRPG you know.
Enemies do many many actions. Normal Attack, Magic Attack, Healing, Pull, Pushing, Exchange, Lifting, Disturb, Increase and Decrease parameters, Create and Remove Jamming Area, Blocking, Guarding, Inviting, and… Run Away! You will be surprised at them. Of course, you can also do these actions. Beat the Thinking Program “SESS-AI” in the simulation battle!
Happy’s Humble Burger Farm – £17.99
Congratulations, you’ve just been hired to work the night shift! You’ll be all by yourself, but we trust you can handle it…
You’ll be grilling patties, operating deep fryers, and pouring drinks at our quiet restaurant on the edge of town. The customers sure do love the menu; they can’t get enough of the Happy’s Deluxe, Fantastic Fowl, and Poppin’ Pork sandwiches.
The fries and salmon nugs are also a big hit. I hear rumors of Happy-Dogs and desserts in the near future, too! When each customer makes an order, it’s up to you to make a plan and execute it well.
If you give customers the wrong order, or take too long, it’ll count as an infraction. If you get three of those infractions, well… let’s just say Happy the Humble Heifer isn’t as joyful when the customers are upset. DO NOT UPSET HAPPY. TRUST US.
But hey, you’ll do fine! Just as long as you don’t upset Happy, you’ll do great! We believe in you!
Radioactive Dwarfs: Evil From the Sewers – £4.49
Old-timers just keep saying that they don’t do old-school action games anymore like they used to. Well, that’s not totally true — Radioactive Dwarfs is an epic example of the fact that these games are still alive and kicking! Right from the box you’ll get top-down retro-action with a thrilling story of mutated dwarfs that kidnap, kill and eat people. Our heroine has decided to stop the dwarf threat on her own. She’ll venture deep down and below to find every dwarf and shoot it with her trusty gun. Grenades will come in handy as well. We can assure you that this game is a blast for every person who likes retro games, and always in a mood for some jokes with B-movie flavour.
This is a falling puzzle in which six blocks of three different colors are lined up and erased.
The blocks can only be erased in order.
Blocks of indelible colors can be aligned first to form a chain.
BGM is played while the block disappears and until the next block disappears.
In the meantime, you can keep the BGM playing by aligning the next block and continuing to erase it.
Urban Cards is a new fresh take on the deck-building genre, where your goal is to make money faster than your opponent while keeping an eye on your debt and your enemies in check.
In this roguelike tabletop deckbuilder, you’ll fight against sharkmen, developers, lenders, casino gangsters… and finally, compete against the oppressing power of the Government.
This is a satire-themed game with 3 factions and playstyles to choose from.
What happens when cars are no longer around? Gigantic robots take over! Powerful, destructive and strong… They are used in sports, at war… and for you, they are moneymakers.
Become Mech Mechanic and open your own workshop to dismantle, fix and rebuild gigantic robots.
Every mech has its own special purpose and as a Mech Mechanic not only will you be able to diagnose, repair or change the parts but also paint, update and accommodate mechs for their new function.
Step right up! After a hard and busy week, tonight was supposed to be a fun night in the fairgrounds of Paradise Park.
However, things don’t always go according to plan, so here begins this bizarre and sexy story! Complete with small narrative scenes, Double Shot Gals focuses on ecchi themed carnival adventure with arcade gameplay to create hilarious and sexy experiences.
Unlock prizes including new skins and artwork.
Strap rockets to cows and take out those abducting little aliens in this destructive physics game!
Aim and lauch to smash down the aliens structures or go for a direct hit.
Rotate freely around the island to search for hidden aliens and TNT barrels.
80 Great levels and hours of fun!
Ease your stress: place colorful shapes and enjoy beautiful images. Take your time, breathe and relax.
You play as multiple characters, each with their own story, and travel to actual locations in town and dark versions of them.
In this nightmare, you have to solve the murder, search for your missing sister Sarah, and complete the mysterious ritual to save the dying town. Will you be able to unravel all the dark secrets of Boreal Tenebrae?
Boreal Tenebrae was nominated for Best Art Direction and Best Narrative at the Canadian Game Awards 2021.
3D Box Sokoban is a logic game that will exercise your brain, helping developing its capabilities.
Everything seemed to be in its place across the Galaxy until one day WOOFER, a giant corporation providing all sorts of services, went rogue and began attacking planets all over the System.
Enter ASTRODOGS, a crew of freelance bounty hunters and possibly our only hope to defeat WOOFER. Play as Kombo, the Shiba Ace Pilot and join the crew in this adventure through the stars to save all of puppydom. Find out the mysterious reasons behind Woofer’s treason as you discover the secrets they definitely don’t want you to know!
Battle WOOFER’s army through 10 beautiful levels made with replayability in mind. Featuring a wide arsenal of weapons like remote controlled bombs, homing missiles, hyperbeam and parry-shield. It also has “Slow-Mo” mechanics that are sure to make every moment of the game a lot of fun. Unlock special ships and skins with your high scores!
Is magical kingdom doomed, having only Wizard Mike as its protector? Yes. Most likely.
But there’s a chance, small one but still – Mike might not be the smartest guy in the room. Maybe he failed alchemy classes 17 times in a row. Maybe he almost destroyed the entire University of Magic causing an explosion during the potions class. But he doesn’t lack self-confidence! He just needs your help. Guide him through the battle with evil forces and save the kingdom!
Wizard Mike is an insanely addictive logic game.
Micro Stunt Machina is a casual game perfect mix of puzzle and arcade. On 80 Levels, get your micro-cars to the finish line going through obstacles over micro-tracks. Use the correct actions to get your vehicules throughout the different housing sceneries.
With a very high depth of play, you’ll enjoy long hours of fun guaranteed.
Explore over 50 different areas while trying to manage your stamina, passing through many types of traps!
Cool off the little elephant in the water.
Slipstream is a racing game inspired by the visuals, music, games and cars from the late 80s and early 90s. It’s built on a custom game engine, with an authentic retro feel and unique graphics that allows the player to -literally- go back in time. The soundtrack, drawing from synth pop and jazz fusion influences, sets the tone for a race across a variety of exotic locations from all around the world, including cities, deserts, forests, mountains and beaches. Drifting, rewind and slipstreaming mechanics add depth to the driving gameplay, and the result is a challenging and exciting experience.
Next week: 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, Nobody Saves the World, TAITO Milestones, Formula Retro Racing, Lumberhill, Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook, Defend the Rook, Tormented Souls, Death Park 2, Shooting Star Island, Cat Cafe Manager, Bush Hockey League, Toodee and Topdee, Rotund Rebound, Pinball Freedom, Labyrinth of the Chaka King, Gotta Protectors: Cart of Darkness, Bunny Mahjo, Sockventure, RUN: The World In-Between, Moorhuhn Jump and Run ‘Traps and Treasures 2’, Pretty Girls Rivers, Inner Voices, and Pad of Time.
Matt is Games Asylum's most prolific writer, having produced a non-stop stream of articles since 2001. A retro collector and bargain hunter, his knowledge has been found in the pages of tree-based publication Retro Gamer.