New Game Releases: February 15th-21st, 2018

With both Bayonetta titles arriving on Switch this week, Nintendo’s hybrid continues to be driven with a momentum that was largely absent from the company’s last hardware. Beyond the Witch on Switch, ports of Fatal Fury 3, Aqua Kitty UDX, and Xeodrifter are some of the digital headliners arriving this week. For those who haven’t succumbed to the Switch, a HD version of Secret of Mana looks tempting, and possibly Metal Gear’s traditional into the survival genre might be worth a look.

Header image: Bayonetta, Switch

PlayStation 4
Fe (digital, $19.99)
Metal Gear Survive (physical and digital, $39.99)
Rad Rodgers (physical and digital, $19.99)
Secret of Mana (digital, $39.99)

Switch
ACA NeoGeo Fatal Fury 3 (digital, $7.99)
Aqua Kitty UDX (digital, $8.99)
Bayonetta (digital, $29.99)
Bayonetta 2 (digital, $49.99)
Bayonetta 2+Bayonetta (physical and digital, $59.99)
ESCAPE TRICK: 35 Fateful Enigmas (digital, $19.99)
Fe (digital, $19.99)
Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf (digital, $12.99)
Johnny Turbo’s Arcade: Gate of Doom (digital, $7.99)
Millie (digital, $4.99)
Old Man’s Journey (digital, $9.99)
Layers of Fear: Legacy (digital, $19.99)
Pool Billiard (digital, $7.99)
Puzzle Puppers (digital, $4.99)
Quest of Dungeons (digital, $8.99)
Samurai Aces (digital, $7.99)
TorqueL: Physics Modified Edition (digital, $9.99)
WanderjahR: TryAgainOrWalkAway (digital, $9.99)
Xeodrifter (digital, $9.99)

Xbox One
Metal Gear Survive (physical and digital, $39.99)
Rad Rodgers (physical and digital, $19.99)

3DS
Machine Knight (digital, $9.99)
RTO 2 (digital, $9.99, New 3DS only)

PS Vita
Secret of Mana ($29.99)

PC
Ambition of the Slimes ($4.99)
Fe (Origin, $19.99)
I, Hope
Metal Gear Survive ($39.99)
Secret of Mana ($39.99)

Ryan’s Pick: My pick this week goes to Johnny Turbo’s Arcade: Gate of Doom. I grew up playing a ton of Data East games and I’m really happy to see that some of their early 90’s arcade games are making it to the Switch. Gate of Doom, at times also called Dark Seal, released in 1990 in Western arcades as a 2P isometric RPG/fighter. The sound from the game hits a ton of nostalgia notes with me, and it’s awesome to be almost able to make out what the in-game digitized voices are saying this time without all the ambient arcade noise. It reminds me a lot of hearing the Robocop arcade machine yell “DROP IT,” over and over again while its intro looped at the local roller skating rink.

The game itself has some classic quirky design choices, with a very eclectic cast of characters including a ninja, a knight in armor, a mage, and a bard that spams a pike at his enemies at breakneck speed. The enemies are equally as strange, with a mix of standard western RPG fodder mobs and Japanese kaiju monsters. This game just cracks me up, from the digitized voicing, the monsters, to the power-up that lets you become a medusa head that shoots lasers out of its eyes. For $7.99 on eShop it’s definitely worth checking out.

Matt’s Pick: (Editor, DigitallyDownloaded): Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf: Lone Wolf has been kicking around on mobile and the other consoles for a while. It’s great to see it come to Switch as well, though, and is a game that is well worth playing. Lone Wolf was a series of gamebooks (Choose-your-own-adventure novels with RPG-like combat systems built into them). For people who grew up in the 80s and 90s, these gamebooks were one of the best ways to go on single player high fantasy adventures when computer games struggled to render more than a few pixels. Now things have come full circle, and Lone Wolf is an amazing little game. It combines plenty of quality text reading and decision making with a clever and intense turn-based combat system, a stiff level of challenge, and some great dark fantasy art. The result is a game that does the books justice, while also offering something that people who never read the books (perhaps being born after their run… I feel old now) can also really enjoy.

Robert’s Pick: Despite a pint-size marketing push from Square, I managed to play Secret of Mana during the SNES era, lured in by the real-time combat, innovative menu system, and of course, Hiroki Kikuta’s magnificent score. But the ensuing years, I got my fix for Mana fulfilled, having played it on the Wii, Wii U, iPad, and the Super NES Classic Edition. If that’s the case for you as well, then the nod goes to PlatinumGame’s pugnacious witch, who will be arriving on Switch this week.

The physical release of Bayonetta 2 bundles a digital copy of the first game, giving a heaping serving of director’s Hideki Kamiya trademark hectic action. I loved the over-the-top, impish gameplay on console, and being able to play on-the-go makes this a compulsory purchase for active gamers.  Years later, shooting bullets from your stiletto remains one of coolest moves around, and as such, resisting the Witch remains just as futile as ever.