I love my Nintendo Switch. I have been obsessed with it ever since its release and I’ve made sure to cover as many games on the console as I possibly could for TiCGN. There are so many fun titles to talk about and experience on it…yet, there are some sicklier titles that sneak by the radar. Let’s call those out, shall we? Now, I haven’t played every single game on the Nintendo Switch, so games like 1-2 Switch and NBA 2k18 won’t show up. Nevertheless, I feel the following titles should be avoided at all costs if you don’t want to hamper your Switch library.
I’m sorry, but I will never be able to grasp this game. Has Been Heroes is a rogue-like strategy title that was nearly good. NEARLY! If it weren’t for one of the most unnecessarily steep “difficulty curves” eating up all my hours at the very first world, I probably would have been able to enjoy it. The trial-and-error play is simply at its worst in this game and it really makes me afraid to try anything else in the genre.
The saddest thing about including Has Been Heroes on here is you can tell there was effort put into it. You can see that the graphics are vibrant, cartoon-y, and appealing. You can see that the sound is crunchy and atmospheric. Unfortunately, the gameplay fatally screwed up on balancing things out correctly and efficiently. It’s not fun; it’s agonizing.
RBI Baseball 17 provided the answer to the question nobody needed answered: How could one screw up a baseball game? With the MLB: The Show series being the Playstation 4’s heavy-hitting franchise, you would think someone would at least try to give other consoles a decent homage to the sport.
Instead, RBI Baseball 17 was a lazy, soulless representation, providing not even the bare necessities. If batting and playing on the field could be frustrating, then something is mechanically wrong with the game. At the time of this writing, it STILL doesn’t have the online play that was said to be patched in sometime after its release.
Vaccine is a Resident Evil homage that showed a lot of promise, but ended up delivering an unbearable result. It borrows the gameplay and primitive visual style of the original RE and adds rogue-like elements to it. Sounds neato, right? Well, it turns out a lot of the game is littered with enemies that can eat up your health or kill you quickly. And weaponry is sparse.
More often than not, they will show up when least expected, resulting in cheap death after cheap death every time. If you’re extremely lucky, Vaccine may spawn a few important items in rooms near you; yet, that luck will instantly change for the worst right after the fact. The least the game could have done was give the player a gun filled with ammo at the very beginning instead of an unreliable knife!
I have no idea what the right translated name would be for 翔べよ!!ドラゴン, so I’m just going to call it “Dragon“. Anyway, Dragon is a game that’s only released in the Japanese eShop so far; it’s also only priced at 300 yen ($3). As soon as curiosity kills the cat and the yen is spent, though, you’ll want a refund faster than you can analyze the very little gameplay this has to offer.
It’s an endless mobile/arcade-style game where all you do is climb a waterfall by platforming from log to log. There is no challenge whatsoever, unless you consider enemy birds unexpectedly popping into your view and causing cheap deaths to be challenging. Also, it looks absolutely disgusting. I could make something like this in about an hour or less.
For me, this wasn’t at all surprising. Nothing compares to the awfulness that is Vroom in the Night Sky. If you didn’t hear about this title, however, allow me to clue you in. It’s a laughably terrible series of levels where you just fly through rings. Broken English, barely textured graphics, and lacking gameplay are just part of the tip of the iceberg in this wreck. Easily the worst offender is the fact that you have to grind for in-game currency for potential hours just to unlock a couple extra levels. There isn’t even an ending, so what’s the point?
The game’s existence is a question in of itself. This was somehow on the Nintendo eShop on launch day in Japan and released a month later internationally despite Nintendo supposedly having stricter quality control for releases (which is why games like Axiom Verge didn’t get to be announced for the system until much later). Who thought this was worthy of a $9.99 price tag, and who decided anything in the game was an okay thing to do? I don’t think even the folks at Poisoft knew how they let this slide, given that this is the only game of its kind under their name.
With all of this out of the way, I will be sure to provide a Top 5 Favorite Nintendo Switch Games list in the future as well. I just gotta wait for a certain mustachioed fellow to deliver his latest 3D adventure before I can make it official.
