Best Nintendo Switch Games #49 – Vroom in the Night Sky
Developer: Poisoft
Synopsis: This is a developer-described “Magical Bike Action Game,” with features such as “Fantastic feeling” “Speedy feeling” and “Realistic feeling.”
A better way to explain it is just to tell you that you fly around a town as a Magical Girl on a motorcycle, collecting stardust and conversing with your talking pet Sailor Moon rip-off cat, Luna.
Why it’s one of the best Nintendo Switch games: It’s not.
No, really. The nature of this list in its early stages is naturally going to be that the games at the bottom half of the list are going to drop off very, very quickly. In Vroom in the Night Sky’s case, we’re ready to dump it as soon as the total entry numbers push 51. This game is just awful! It’s boring, for starters–you just fly around and pick up stardust with clumsy controls for awhile and then you’re done. Then there are the god-awful translation errors that permeate every last piece of dialogue you’re forced to endure as you zoom around the blocky town you’re stuck in. Don’t get this game. Watch it vroom its way right off this list.Excelsior! Seriously, folks, embarrassing shit like this is why Kotaku limited their best-of list to 12 entries.
App Trigger's approach does have one advantage, though; since their list includes every single game currently available on the platform, including such bottom-feeders as Vroom in the Night Sky, it is now possible to say, for certain, that a) there are less than 50 games available for the Nintendo Switch, and also that b) some of those games are shovelware-grade crap.
Things don't really improve at #48, either:
Best Nintendo Switch Games #48 – Vaccine
Developer: RNC
Synopsis: Your friend has a deadly illness, and is running out of time. You can find the vaccine in a mysterious house, but you’ll have to hurry before they perish. Of course, it being a roguelike, they’ll just relapse every time and you’ll have to try again to survive in a new, randomly generated house.
Why it’s one of the best Nintendo Switch games: If there is a trope that the horror game genre has done away with, Vaccine probably embraced it at some point. It also does away with any semblance of good design, refusing to offer such staples as a map, or balanced combat, or sound effects for enemies or the ability to do anything reasonable with the camera. Some of these seem to be hearkening back to old Resident Evil, but without the proper combination of elements, Vaccine falls apart. Its roguelike nature means you’ll quickly be frustrated and give up, defeating the addictive point of such a game. There’s “difficult roguelike” and then there’s shoddy, awkward, and unfair.Game #47 on the list is Othello (yes, that Othello), and #46 is currently another port titled, and I swear to God this is verbatim, New Frontier Days ~Founding Pioneers~ (yes, all those tildes are actually in the game's title), which boasts a MetaCritic score of 52%. Only four games in, three of them are shovelware, and one looks like a port from mobile (and is also available on Steam); the only halfway decent game to this point is Othello, which you can currently play for free in a browser window. If you were hoping that Kotaku's list, and the problems that it serves to illustrate, were maybe the result of some sort of sampling bias, then abandon all hope, ye that enter here, because it looks like the problem only gets worse as you work your way further down the list of available Nintendo Switch offerings.
Decent launch aside, if Nintendo don't find a way to turn this situation around, and fast, then the Switch really isn't going to make it.