Pokémon Duel – originally released in Japan as Pokémon Co-master – is the strategic board-game fix that The Pokémon Company offers to mobile players. It’s still getting major updates, and the latest overhaul is rolling out right now.
It makes some notable changes to the UI, and also adds various things that probably make sense to those that play the game – details are below.
New Look, New Feel: In addition to an all new look in the app’s home screen, the game now has an improved UI and a combined information and messages box, making in-app navigation easier for players.
New Mega Evolutions: New Mega Evolution figures for existing figures of Sceptile, Blaziken, and Swampert.
New Items, [UX] Rare Metal, [UX] Ingot, and [UX] Cube: With the introduction of UX materials, figures can more easily be powered up. Players will be able to further strengthen their existing figures even faster or make their Mega Evolution figures even more powerful.
Improved Fourth Booster Case Slot!: The fourth booster case slot that players can open through purchase will now also be guaranteed to drop materials. With the addition of the above UX materials, players will be able to boost their figures even faster.
Commemorative Update Login Bonus: In addition to the regular login bonus, players can also receive additional diamonds, items, and/or figures.
Improved Featured Duels: Players will now be able to browse by category making the feature easier to use.
We gave this a modest recommendation in our original review, though updates will have tweaked a lot since then. Let us know if you’re still playing this one.
Personally, if I have one major gripe about Xenoblade Chronicles 2 it’s the fact that the characters all have verbal diarrhoea seemingly all of the time. A lot of the time it’s not too big of a deal, but when you start going up against enemies clever enough to also spout their own vocal nonsense it rapidly starts to become a nuisance.
Well, thankfully the developers have included and option to entirely disable any character’s speech during gameplay, but without affecting their performance during cutscenes. We wouldn’t want to be entirely without Nia’s velvety Welsh accent now would we?
Byt heading into the start menu and selecting System, Options, and then Sound Settings, you can bring the incessant chirping of all characters to an end by sliding the Game Voice Volume slider all the way to the left.
In truth it does make the game feel a little bit more barren and various moments really do cry out for some verbal cue, such as executing a level 3 Fusion Combo, but it’s a small price to pay. Is this something you might employ? Let us know down there in the comments.
It’s easy to instantly compare any sandbox-type game with crafting, combat and building elements to Minecraft; many games have tried – to varying degrees of success – to re-create what Mojang’s mammoth franchise has done so well over the last few years. Luckily, though, whilst Portal Knights does have a number of features that will instantly remind you of the Minecraft universe, it actually takes things in a slightly different direction.
The world within Portal Knights has been fractured; instead of building and roaming around one giant expanse of land, you are tasked with finding and building portals that will grant you access to new levels. Each level, or world, is already full and alive when you arrive with other humans, shops, farms, mines and enemies making each world seem like a real, new place to visit. Despite this, you can build – or completely rip apart – any of these worlds as you see fit, adding your own blocky skyscrapers or digging down to the eerie void below whenever you like.
The emphasis of Portal Knights isn’t placed upon building, though; it is instead focused on exploration, crafting materials, and working your way through the game’s story. The game is ‘built’ around RPG-like elements; your character can be one of three classes (Warrior, Ranger, or Mage) and you gain experience points by exploring mines or defeating monsters. These experience points can be used to upgrade certain skills which will improve your combat and exploration, and you’ll also level up throughout, providing you with extra class-specific skills to help with your chosen play-style.
It is a strange blend in a way, as spending lots of your time and energy building can feel a little pointless – you’ll soon be moving on to a new world and leaving your current one behind. If you look at it as a nice additional feature, though, it makes a little more sense. The crafting of items to use on your adventure, the harvesting of the materials to do so, and the combat itself all work really nicely, and you’ll likely have a great time exploring the worlds that already exist before you, rather than trying to build features of your own.
As well as each world containing various monsters for you to either defeat or run away from, you are occasionally thrown in front of giant bosses with a successful battle being required to progress. Enemies in the game get tougher and tougher as time goes on and, in some cases, they can feel pretty overwhelming. Dying from these fights doesn’t cause any issues or loss of progress, but it can feel a little frustrating if you are underpowered. To combat this, you’ll likely find yourself doing quite a bit of grinding to gain experience, or searching across the worlds you’ve unlocked for specific materials that can bring you some higher quality armour and weapons, especially if you are playing alone.
You see, Portal Knights can either be played completely by yourself, with one other person in local split-screen co-op, or with up to three other players online, and players can drop in and out as they please. The tasks you’ll be completing are the same in every case, but taking on tricky enemies altogether from various angles feels a lot less daunting than going it alone.
It isn’t just battles that are shared, though. Every aspect becomes a joint adventure if you team up, meaning that your tasks, rewards and – essentially – the availability of crafting items and supplies from the world you are exploring must be shared between the group. In some ways, playing alone is a much tougher experience as you’ll have to figure everything out yourself and spend an awful lot of time working towards the harder fights. On the flipside to this, though, playing alone means that you have full control over each world and the materials within, therefore allowing you to create the strongest character possible to suit your needs.
A combination of the pleasing art-style and incredibly extensive menus and crafting options (which do take some getting used to) give Portal Knights that addictive quality that can result in long hours disappearing without you even realising. We’ve spent many hours simply exploring each new world as we arrive, discovering new materials and mining deep underground to discover exciting, secret treasures. If you have the time to lose yourself in exploration, and especially if you have a friend (or three) that is just as enthusiastic about the game as you, there is every possibility that you’ll find yourself craving more time with the game each time you turn it off.
The Switch version of the game offers touchscreen controls should you wish to play the game in Handheld mode (which plays just as well as on the TV), but this is strangely slightly limited; you can use it to cycle through menus and even use your weapons and tools, but you’ll still have to make use of the control stick to aim where your tool will interact with the world, rather than just tapping the block you wish to break open. That, and some pretty lengthy load times when you are travelling between worlds, are the only real faults we found in terms of the game’s execution, though. For the most part (when you have familiarised yourself with the slightly crazy menus), everything runs very smoothly indeed.
Conclusion
Portal Knights has been designed in such a way that encourages co-operative play; sharing the fun of exploring the worlds and discovering new things together is undoubtedly one of the game’s largest selling points. If you would rather play the game alone, though, there is nothing stopping you from doing so and you’ll still find that there is an enjoyable adventure to be had (albeit with a slightly different focus on how to go about completing tasks).
Sitting somewhere between the Minecraft-type gameplay of building and exploring, and the RPG-like features of crafting, battling, and upgrading your character’s skills and abilities, Portal Knights feels like it would most suit families, friends or even distant friends online, who wish to explore either of these genres of gaming together in a sometimes challenging – but usually charming – package.
Still, the wait is nearly over, with a tweet confirming the news that the roll-out starts on 6th December.
Taking a look at the full news page there’s a lot of the same information given before – it looks like a fully featured iteration, and there are multiple incentives and DLC options. Retail pre-orders are still promised the “Kurt Angle pack” as a bonus, but if you gave up your pre-order long ago you can in theory pick up the eShop version and get that pack for free up to 13th December. If you download it you’ll need plenty of space, however…
A microSD card (sold separately) with free storage space of minimum 32GB is required to download this game, plus 1GB on the system memory. You must have your microSD card inserted before beginning the download.
We’re a little baffled by the ‘starts on 6th December’ language – this should be fine if you’re in North America, with regional versions of the official website leading to the same post with US prices. Hopefully all major territories will get the game on the same date; at the time of writing the eShop and Nintendo’s game pages are yet to be updated.
Above is a teaser trailer from last year for Tobu Tobu Girl by Tangram Games, a game in which you try to continually go higher by bouncing off enemies and flapping your arms. It’s pretty darn charming, and it’s out now.
Yep, it’s a freshly released Game Boy title, which can be downloaded for free via its official website. As it’s actual Game Boy code you’ll need “to either flash the game to a Game Boy flash cart or use a Game Boy emulator”. There’s even a physical retail edition at 35 euros, but it’s limited to just 75 copies in the first run with more to come later.
Tobu Tobu Girl will release as a limited edition Game Boy cartridge. The package comes with a full-color Japanese style cardboard box and a full-color 12 page manual. The first batch will be limited to 75 copies with a second batch to follow soon after.
It’s always fun to see enthusiast developers keep retro hardware and their distinctive games alive. If you have the kit to run this game it could be a fun little diversion – let us know if you’re planning to try it out.
From touchscreen jams like Deemo and VOEZ to the button-based beats of Thumper and Dark Witch Music Episode: Rudymical, the Switch has already assembled an impressive collection of music games in its first year, and that trend doesn’t look set to end anytime soon. Superbeat: Xonic is the latest début to hit the system, coming from Korean developer Nurijoy of DJMax fame. Ported over after its earlier appearances on the Vita and PlayStation 4, it’s absolutely worth another spin on the Switch; though some unfortunate control issues (especially with the touchscreen) hold it back from going platinum, Xonic is still a chart-topping music game experience and an easy recommendation for rhythm fans.
If you’re familiar with its DJMax pedigree, you’ll recognise Superbeat’s same singular, arcade-like focus right from the start. There’s no story or larger setup to rationalise the rhythm action; Xonic is all about the music, and that music is made up of a stellar selection of bespoke beats from Korean and Japanese composers. The soundtrack lays a rock-solid foundation for the rhythm game ahead, running the gamut from house and vocal pop to jazz, techno, trance, samba, dubstep and virtuosic metal over its nearly 70 tracks. It’s a wide variety of genres, but tends towards dancefloor-friendly anthems, which gives it a sense of club-ready cohesion — in fact, more than anything, the stylistic mix reminded us of classic Dance Dance Revolution or Beatmania sets, and that’s high praise.
The gameplay takes after the classics as well; it’s pure tap-along action, with charts presented in a tunnel-like setup. Notes flow outwards from the centre of the screen in discrete tracks, and as they pass over the outer edges of a circle you’ll need to hit the appropriate button on the beat. The easier ‘4track’ mode divides the circle into two lanes per side, so that lower notes are hit with the D-Pad ‘Down’ or the ‘B’ button and high notes with D-Pad ‘Left/Up’ or ‘A/X’, while the harder ’6track’ mode splits each half of the circle into three, making for an easy low-medium-high mapping of D-Pad ‘Down-Left-Up’ on the left side and ‘B-A-X’ on the right. As you might imagine, the Switch’s discrete D-Pad buttons make this arrangement work beautifully. You can also play Xonic with the touchscreen, and while we have some issues with the touch controls — more on that later — it feels incredibly natural to play in tablet mode with the Joy-Con detached.
In addition to plain notes, which only require a single tap, there are also held notes (where you’ll hold down the button for the duration), flick notes (where you’ll flick the left or right analogue stick up or down), and slide notes (where you’ll hold the left or right analogue stick in the direction shown for the duration). The hardest ‘6trackFX’ mode adds ‘FX notes’ (which you’ll hit with the ‘L’ or ‘R’ buttons) to the mix, and on all three difficulties you’ll have linked notes, which need to be hit or held at the same time on opposite sides of the circle.
There’s a lot going on, then, but Superbeat balances its large number of note types by being quite forgiving in terms of timing. It’s a welcome leniency that allows for long combos with plenty of moving parts, and it feels fantastic when it gets going. The charts are exciting and imaginative, with lots of call-and-response and movement between the two sides. They tend not to focus exclusively on the main melodic or vocal line, but rather on providing an accompanying rhythm, which means your taps, flicks, and slides can slot into the music in all sorts of beautiful ways, with rhythmic echoes and syncopation galore. It’s far from easy, but mastering tough sections after repeated play is an absolute joy, and one of the most satisfying rhythm game experiences we’ve come across.
Superbeat: Xonic also does an excellent job of building up as it goes, as different note types and patterns present themselves organically as you work your way through its two interlinked modes. The first mode, ‘Stage’, consists of three levels in sequence. After choosing your difficulty (4trax, 6trax, or 6traxFX), in each level, you’ll be able to pick a song to play from a subset of the total, with later stages offering more difficult songs. You’ll be graded and scored on each song, depending on your timing and combo, and also for the run as a whole, with your performance earning you ‘XP’ to raise your DJ level.
It’s a great system that feels halfway between the full-songlist freedom of rhythm games like VOEZ and the sequential gating of others (like Hatsune Miku: Project Diva X). It always gives you a choice in what you play, but it nudges you towards trying harder songs when you’re ready, making for a natural difficulty curve that helps improve your skills as you go. You’ll also unlock new songs, button sounds and DJ Icons as you level up, which creates a nice feedback loop — DJ Icons grant bonuses when they’re equipped, such as XP multipliers, health boosts, and shields to protect against dropped combos, and so helpfully let you try out harder songs without failing before you’d otherwise be ready.
DJ Icons are also a godsend in Xonic’s second main mode, the mission-based World Tour. In World Tour, you’ll bring your DJ skills to different ‘nightclubs’ around the globe — there are 14 in all, unlocked as you level up — each of which will have three in-house challenges to test your prowess. These missions could feature a single song or a string of several, and involve clearing specific goals as you play: holding down a hundred-note combo, or missing fewer than five notes, for instance. To make things trickier they can also add in handicaps to the mix, like note fading in or out, random patterns, or a brain-melting mirror mode.
As you might expect, these get very difficult very fast, and while DJ Icon superpowers can help quite a bit, memorising charts will make the biggest difference on harder levels. There’s Free Play available for practice, but we actually found that that chart familiarity came quite naturally by bouncing back and forth between the main modes — if a mission song was giving us fits from fade-in, choosing it on a few runs through Stage play was usually all it took. Alternating between Stage and World Tour, unlocking songs in the former and challenges in the later as you go, it’s easy to happily lose hours at a time jamming out to Xonic without feeling the least bit bored, and global leaderboards are there to help quantify your rise to the top.
We love Superbeat: Xonic’s rhythm gameplay and satisfying sense of challenge, but some unfortunate control issues also get in its way from time to time. One of these is down to the system itself, and you may have already guessed it reading about the use of analogue sticks above: the Switch’s asymmetrical controller layout, with the left stick above the D-Pad buttons and the right stick below the face buttons, can be tricky to reconcile with their triggers’ symmetrical placement in Xonic’s charts, originally designed with the PlayStation Vita & DualShock 4 layouts in mind.
This asymmetry isn’t just a conceptual problem, either. Because of where both sticks fall in your hands, the right Switch stick can be flicked up or down without moving your thumb from the face buttons, but the left one requires a reach away from the D-Pad buttons, and in quicker sections with lots going on, that extra split-second can make a difference. Slide notes make the gap even more apparent, and while playing with separated Joy-Con or using a ‘claw’ formation with our second finger on the left stick helped a bit, neither of these were complete fixes. Still, your milage may vary, and while we flubbed more flick and slide notes than we’d have liked on harder songs, it didn’t dampen our overall enjoyment of the game.
More of an issue, unfortunately, is that the flick, slide, and hold notes seem susceptible to dropped inputs when using the touchscreen controls. Fairly frequently, we’d have flicks fail to catch (especially the second or third of a few in quick succession), or slide/hold notes stop registering in the middle of their path, even with a finger still in place on the screen. It’s unpredictable but not infrequent, and when it pops up in the middle of a long combo it’s deeply frustrating. The Switch’s stick placement can be thought of as an extra bit of challenge, surmountable with skill, but randomly dropped inputs are a real problem in a rhythm game where precision is key.
It’s disappointing, especially because in other ways Xonic seems made to be played on the Switch’s touchscreen — the screen is the perfect size to be held without Joy-Con and played comfortably with two thumbs, and the inputs are certainly easier to conceptualise in terms of touch than the (wonderfully fun!) “Bop It”-style gymnastics of the button controls. But as much as we enjoyed playing in tablet mode, dropped inputs meant we couldn’t get anywhere near our best scores without buttons.
Similarly, it’s a real shame that there’s no touchscreen mapping for the FX notes; they can only be hit with the ‘L’ & ‘R’ shoulder buttons. That means to play 6traxFX in touch mode, you need to keep the JoyCon on, which requires either reaching over them to play with your thumbs or using fingers instead, neither of which are elegant (or winning!) solutions.
Control issues aside, Xonic otherwise feels supremely polished, and it’s a beautifully presented game. It looks lovely both on the big screen and in handheld mode, with song-specific visualisations providing a soft-focus backdrop behind the appealingly colourful charts. The effect lends a surprisingly different feel to each song — from strobed techno and multicolour rave palettes to sun-drenched pop tones — but is subtle enough to avoid readability issues. Several smaller visual details reinforce that focus as well, including thorough colour-coordination of note types and concurrent hits being highlighted and outlined. Our sole complaint is that the art cards which introduce each song go by much too quickly — a downside of quick load times! — and it would be nice to be able to view them elsewhere to appreciate the personality they bring to each piece. Finally, while the load times are commendably quick, it’s worth mentioning that Xonic takes up around 7GB of your Switch’s potentially precious storage space — that’s seven times the footprint of VOEZ, which packs in several times the tunes.
Phew! Not only has Capcom confirmed a new Mega Man game and the launch of two 8-bit Mega Man collections on Switch, it has also revealed that all of the entries in the popular Mega Man X sub-series are also coming to Nintendo’s hybrid console.
All eight ‘X’ games will be coming to the Switch in Summer 2018, alongside releases on the PS4, Xbox One and PC.
We’ll be getting more info on this particular collection in the coming months, but how’s that for a huge helping of Mega Man goodness? And you thought Capcom had forgotten about the Blue Bomber!
Point-and-click adventure games are something of a rarity nowadays, but they still have their fans and there’s certainly a gap in the Switch eShop library for that niche. Fictiorama Studios’ Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today aims to fill in that gap, providing players with a dark sci-fi story that depicts the fall of mankind. Though it isn’t perfect by any means, Dead Synchronicity is still a fun ride for those that have the patience for it; it’s quite unlike anything else on the eShop at the present.
Dead Synchronicity is a fairly standard point and click adventure game; progress will primarily be made by figuring out how to solve logic puzzles by using environmental clues and collected items. It’s a bit like working through a novel in some respects; the focus is primarily placed on the narrative, with parts of it coming into focus as you progress and meet new characters.
Storytelling is mostly top-notch, delivering a dark and gritty look at what seems to be a post-apocalyptic world. You play the role of Michael — an amnesiac man who wakes up in a dirty trailer, supposedly after having slept for months — and are soon tasked with acquiring a highly sought-after drug that cures a mysterious disease, the victims of which are referred to as “The Dissolved”. Much of this takes place within a concentration camp, filled with mountains of junk and desperate individuals.
Dead Synchronicity certainly doesn’t shy away from depicting some horrifying things; some scenes are straight out of a horror movie, and others are horrifying in theme with some challenging and mature examples. Though there is room for a fair bit of exploration and non-linear progress, it’s a tightly focused narrative that moves at a good clip; you’ll likely be firmly hooked into this one until it’s over.
This is supplemented by the puzzle and gameplay design, which does a great job of funneling the player down the right paths without too much handholding. The cursor can either be freely controlled by the analogue stick or moved directly between interactive objects with the d-pad buttons (no touch screen controls), while all interactive objects on-screen can be highlighted with a tap of one of the shoulder buttons. Though there are a few puzzles that inevitably will lead to some frustrating trial and error and wandering, most have intuitive solutions and are hinted at by characters in conversations. All of this combines for an accessible experience that still makes you work for your success, but it rarely comes off as being unfair or unreasonable.
The graphics are quite nice, creating an engaging, oppressive atmosphere that is seldom interrupted. Environments are dirty and decrepit, and the people that populate them look just as downtrodden and beaten. Though there isn’t a whole lot of colour to the visuals, it’s mostly browns and reds here, the palette does a good job of matching the tone and conveying emotion. Some of the stills are truly beautiful, too; there were a few times where we entered a new area and took a few seconds to just take in all the details.
The sound design isn’t nearly as impressive, but it still gets the job done. Voice acting is rather uneven, Michael (who sounds uncannily like Kevin Conroy) and most of the other main supporting cast members do a fine job, but there’s a notion that some of the characters aren’t strictly having a conversation. Delivery of lines can be monotone or unfitting to the situation the character is in, and this can tend to bring one out of the experience a bit. It’s nothing deal-breaking, but this is an area that could’ve been improved.
One other complaint that bears mentioning is the length. Though the time it takes you to clear will ultimately depend on your puzzle solving prowess, there’s definitely a feeling of the narrative ending much too soon. Just when things are starting to get good, it’s over. What’s more is that the ending is wholly unsatisfying and leaves far too many questions. So, while the ride may be great while it lasts, just be aware that it may be a bit shorter and less satisfying than expected.
Conclusion
All told, Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today is a fun, worthwhile point-and-click adventure that tells an engaging story. Though there are some issues with voice acting and length, this is a tightly driven narrative that you’ll want to see through to the end, and ultimately be glad that you did. We’d give this one a recommendation to anyone who’s interested in this niche genre of games. Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today isn’t the game that’s going to win over those who don’t have much interest in this more deliberate kind of experience, but it’s still a strong example of the genre and is certainly worth the price of admission.
Capcom has just confirmed a new entry in the beloved Mega Man series during a special 30th anniversary livestream event.
Mega Man 11 will launch on Switch, PS4 and Xbox One next year.
Wowzer, eh? We’ll update this story as we hear more. In the meantime, you might want to look out of your window to make sure cats and dogs aren’t living together and all that apocalyptic jazz.
