Nathan Birch
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WCCFtech Latest Reviews
While most folks play Pokémon relatively casually, simply catching critters that look cool and building whatever team suits their fancy, there's always been a more hardcore, competitive side to the franchise. This competitive aspect of Pokémon has traditionally been rather difficult to get into, but the Poké powers that be are looking to change that with Pokémon Champions, the recently released free-to-play battle-focused game designed to be the new home of the franchise’s competitive scene.
Nintendo has two sides -- there's the company that makes broadly appealing, polished entertainment like Mario and Zelda, and then there's that weird side that makes stuff like Tomodachi Life. While the last Tomodachi Life was a surprising success, moving nearly 7 million units on the 3DS, not many expected a follow-up to the Mii-focused life sim, as it kind of felt like the series’ time had come and gone. There's no keeping the weird side of Nintendo tamped down, though, and so, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, a game in development in one form or another for nine years, drops this week.
Pokémon spinoffs have plunged into a lot of different genres and styles of gameplay over the years, but the recently-released Pokémon Pokopia gloms onto several things at once, adding Minecraft, Dragon Quest Builders, and Animal Crossing to the pot along with some new ideas and, of course, plenty of cute critters. It's one of those "Why didn’t they think of this before?" kind of ideas, but just because a game sounds promising on paper doesn't mean it works in execution.
Like many of the wrestlers the franchise lets you play as, the WWE 2K games have been on top of the world, down and out, and everything in between. Last year's WWE 2K25 was not a career high point as the game focused heavily on The Island, a new online hub in the vein of NBA 2K's The City, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Thankfully, as I described in my hands-on impressions, WWE 2K26 seems to be spreading the love a bit more when it comes to new features.
The Resident Evil series has largely gone from strength to strength in recent years, with Capcom serving up a number of distinct takes on the series, from the hardcore horror of Resident Evil 7 to the intense action and zingers of the Resident Evil 4 remake. And now, Capcom is preparing to roll out Resident Evil Requiem, a game that promises to combine a lot of what they’ve been doing with the series recently into one terrifying concoction.
Mario Tennis has become one of Nintendo's most predictable franchises, showing up relatively early in the lifespan of all of the company's recent platforms, and sure enough, Mario Tennis Fever is being served up within the Nintendo Switch 2's first year on the market. Promising more characters and modes than ever before, as well as a wide array of new gameplay-altering "Fever Rackets," this may well be the most feature-rich Mario Tennis to date.
The journey to get here has been as long, challenging, and convoluted as many of Samus Aran’s own adventures. The last original release in the Metroid Prime series came out over 18 years ago, with the fourth entry in the series being announced in 2017 when the Switch was in its infancy. A complete development reboot, which saw original series creators Retro Studios taking back control of the project, followed, and numerous delays got stacked on top of that, so it’s honestly hard to believe Metroid Prime 4: Beyond launches this week. No, really. It’s happening.
Kart racing fans have been eating hearty in 2025, with the arrival of the ambitious Mario Kart World and solidly-entertaining Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, and now they have a chance to end the feast in an unexpected fashion with Kirby Air Riders. Released on the Gamecube back in 2003, the original Kirby Air Ride wasn’t exactly a smash hit, critically or commercially, but series creator Masahiro Sakurai has seen his star rise precipitously thanks to another Smash (Bros.) hit – enough so that he’s managed to make Kirby Air Riders happen after two decades of series dormancy.
Hyrule Warriors has grown from a spinoff to a full-fledged series in its own right relatively quickly, with the soon-to-be-released Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment being the third Zelda-themed Musou game to arrive in roughly a decade. Age of Imprisonment once again serves up a hearty helping of Dynasty-Warriors-style hack ‘n’ slash action while promising to fill in some key details of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s backstory.
In recent years, the trend for core Pokémon RPGs has been to push for ever-larger sandboxes, with the recent Pokémon Scarlet and Violet offering a full-on Breath-of-the-Wild-style open world. The newly-released Pokémon Legends: Z-A bucks that particular trend, instead restricting the critter catching to a single relatively compact city map, while introducing a number of other tweaks to the Pokémon blueprint.