Monopoly for Nintendo Switch: Demo Review

Seeing as I had recently gotten back into playing traditional board games, I was curious to try out the Nintendo Switch version of the most classic board game of all, Monopoly.  Surely most people are familiar with this game, where you buy property, try to get a monopoly by owning all property of a single color, then build houses and hotels to increase the amount of money your opponents owe you whenever they land on your spaces.  While Monopoly is one of my favorite board games, I went into the demo with low expectations because I feel like physical games lose a lot of their charm once they enter the digital realm.  So perhaps my opinion of this demo was a bit biased from the start…

Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain: Demo Review

Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain is one of those educational games similar to Brain Age that help you to exercise your brain with a variety of activities that challenges your mental prowess in five categories: identify, memorize, analyze, compute, and visualize.  The demo includes three mini games.  Whack Match challenges you to whack moles with the matching picture, Balloon Burst requires you to pop balloons from the lowest value to the highest, and Shadow Shift asks you to match the objects with their shadows.

Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics: Demo Review

Considering Mother Duck and I have accumulated a small collection of physical games to play in recent months, I thought it would also be fun to try out a digital collection of physical games called Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics for the Switch.  While the full game has, well, 51 games, the demo contains four, Connect Four, dominoes, a card game called President, and slot cars, which featured three tracks. 

Arietta of Spirits: Demo Review

Arietta of Spirits follows the story of Arietta and her family as they visit the island where her grandmother once lived before her recent passing.  The demo covers a short jaunt into the woods to gather apples for dessert, which includes a boss fight against a giant bee.  According to the game’s official description, Arietta eventually gains the ability to talk to spirits around the island, and the game supposedly has an emotional story and “no-filler gameplay”.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker: Demo Review

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is a relaxing puzzle game that was released on the Wii U, 3DS, and Switch.  The titular Captain Toad can explore various floating environments that you can view from various angles, with the goal of collecting three gems and a star, alongside one other optional task, like finding the golden mushroom or collecting a certain number of coins.

I and Me: Demo Review

I and Me is an obscure puzzle game for which I could find very little information.  You control two cats who move in unison with each other, and the goal is to figure out how to get both of them into these…boxes?  Picture frames?  Playing demos has exposed me to games of a wide range of quality, from impressive games from both indie and large companies alike to games whose best feature is the fact that I didn’t actually pay for them.  Unfortunately, I and Me falls into that latter category.

Bravely Default 2: Demo Review

Although I am indeed an RPG fan, I feel like there’s just so many RPG’s out there that one would really need to catch my eye in order to entice me to buy it.  One such series that I’ve always passed over was Bravely Default, which, aside from having a rather odd name, didn’t appear to be much different from other RPG’s I’ve already played.  But when I discovered a demo for Bravely Default 2 from 2021, I thought it couldn’t hurt to give it a try, considering money wasn’t involved.  The demo has a five-hour time limit and takes place during part of Chapter 1: Chasing Mirages.  It would seem our four heroes, who are already nicely leveled up, are searching for the stolen Water Crystal in the desert kingdom of Savalon.

Arise: A Simple Story – Demo Review

Arise: A Simple Story is a casual puzzle game about losing the love of one’s life.  The game begins with the death of your own character, and as the demo progresses, you find these statues that seem to be telling the story of how the protagonist and his future wife grew up together.  Gameplay involves manipulating time to change your environment, such as melting the snow to raise and lower the ocean level, moving around giant bugs upon which you can ride, or tilting the flowers as they follow the sun across the sky.

Age of Calamity: Demo Review

Having invested many hours into the original Hyrule Warriors on the Wii U, I thought it would be interesting to try the demo for the next entry in The Legend of Zelda spin-off of Dynasty Warriors, Age of Calamity on the Switch.  Unlike the original, which had a story that stood apart from the rest of the Zelda franchise, Age of Calamity is a prequel set 100 years before Breath of the Wild.

Pokken Tournament DX: Demo Review

I don’t think I’ve played a Pokemon game since the Nintendo 64 and GameBoy Color era.  That finally changed when I tried the demo for Pokken Tournament DX, a Tekken-inspired Pokemon fighting game originally released on the Wii U and later re-released on the Switch.