(I'm reviewing this as 'SM3DW' rather than 'SM3DW + BF', Bowser's Fury will be its own separate review)

I always enjoyed 3D World on WiiU but I don't think I'll ever be able to go back to it now.
For one it being on Switch is a plus, but also having it be much faster really did make the whole experience a lot snapper.
Is it worth 60 Dollars eeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I mean you kinda get 2 games out of it, and 3D World is the best entry in "Level Based Mario Games" so yeah sure.

Down in Bermuda is a puzzle game where you manipulate the camera and environment to guide a stranded pilot through strange worlds back home.

Each area has you completing a series of tasks including finding a certain amount of hidden "star pieces" throughout the world and solving puzzles in order to complete certain tasks for residents and combat monsters.

Each level also contains additional collectibles including a map to help you find the star pieces, polaroids that flesh out the story, keys that can unlock areas throughout the various levels and hidden "artifacts" that you must tally up to 100% the game.

Many of the puzzles involve rotating the camera and moving the cursor around to manipulate the perspective and this works best on the macro scale of finding the collectibles but doesn't really ever have a significant impact on the smaller individual puzzles.

The smaller puzzles largely involve identifying and matching some kind of pattern found in the world to activate some device and/or how different mechanisms interact.

The game doesn't necessarily do a fantastic job of tutorializing these themes and some puzzles don't do enough to surface what the end goal is supposed to be but nothing is so frustrating that some trial and error can't get you through it.

Ultimately the way each world is designed leads to a snowball effect where each bit of progress you make winds up making the next step easier and the moments from the climax to the end of a level can feel fantastic.

There IS a story here but it's very sparse, not particularly original and the game doesn't really call too much attention to it.

Tl;dr: Down in Bermuda is a nice puzzler that's fun to sit down on and work on in chunks but doesn't do anything that necessarily sets itself apart.

Playing this in short bursts during downtime at work was a really sweet little treat. Logging in at lunchtime and seeing all my fellow home-working pals pop up around the same time with "ONLINE: SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD + BOWSER'S FURY" notifications was a heartwarming bit of parasocial friendship - it's nice to think of a bunch worn-down Microsoft Teams Miners were getting an injection of joy in the form of Mario flapping his stupid happy little legs in the Tanooki Suit to the jaunty tunes of Pounce Bounce Isle.

I think despite the fact we've all come to take the Nintendo Switch for granted, Nintendo themselves are still actively thinking about the docked/handheld interplay of the console - Bowser's Fury has a gameplay loop that works very similar to Breath of the Wild, where you can leave Mario sitting anywhere in the world when you hit the power button and still have a reasonable chance of standing right next to a new adventure or challenge when the screen next comes back on - or at least see (and quickly get to) the next bit of fun on the literal horizon. No loading in and out of a redundant SMB3 menu or watching of 'lets a go!' animations for the thirtieth time - everything in the game zips right by.

Much has been made of the 'continuous world' idea here, and I think Nintendo did a skilful job of making 3D World Mario's toolkit into something briskly mobile without really changing anything about that game's mechanics - it all just seems to be down to very generous and thoughtful placement of that game's power-set. There may be a little too much time spent wearing the propellor box, but those ad-hoc sequences where you come leaping off Plessie at 80mph, transform into a cat to scale the wall you're about to crash into and then shift to a tanooki to take a quick shortcut feel very very very good.

The only complaints I can really make about this are things that are decidedly anti-Mario in ethos - it's aliased to shit and the frames chug like hell during the (very impressive) Furious Bowser sequences (though weirdly these issues are far less pronounced in handheld mode - again suggesting that Nintendo still give a real shit about how handheld players enjoy games on their console), but I feel weirdly... guilty? about pointing out dry technical flaws in a game where Super Mario is running about having the time of his life. I just wanna join him in the fun instead of counting the grains of polygon around his cap.

I love the idea of taking assets from a game and doing something more with it, and Bowser's Fury is a wonderful little experience. I wouldn't call it open world as not everything is available from the start, but the island exploration is very interesting and there's some well hidden collectables. Playing while dodging Fury Bowser's attacks is crazy and I like how it even opens new paths and possibilities, the gameplay cycle is much appealing to me, the possibility of storing your power ups and exchanging freely between them feels very good and enhances the experience. I was amazed at how much personality everything has, the animations, the music, it just feels good. Having said that, I never had problems with the camera in Mario games, even Sunshine didn't bother me, but this game having a run button and also having to adjust the camera with the right stick is just... weird. Lastly, it is a very short game and I don't think the price is worth just for Bowser's Fury, specially if you already played 3D World.

as a damn good game and could have been in my top 10 of the year if it wasn't full of so many bugs that at points almost halted my progress and at other points completely ruined the immersion the game was trying to give.
I'm just gonna list off each part of the game give my thoughts on each one and give it a number.

The Open World: while it's smaller then GTA 5's map and even GTA SA it still feels super dense and alive with all the detail everything, if it wasn't for the immersion-breaking bugs I'd say Night City would have been the most immersion open worlds I would have ever played. 9/10

The Gameplay: The gameplay is as smooth as butter. The gunplay is fast and heavy with every shot having its own weight to it.
The Melee breaks the game but is still super fun to use.
The Driving to me feels like a mix of both GTA 5 and GTA 4, it has that realistic physics of GTA 4 but has the better handling of GTA 5 making it pretty good but not great.
Overall the Gameplay was hands down the best part of this game. 10/10
The RPG Elements: The upgrade tree while interesting at first falls a bit flat by the end.
The Crafting system is borderline useless and I barely even used it.
Parts of the game depended on wither or not you have upgraded one specific trait like passing a speech test or using force to open a door feels very tacked on almost like they said "well it's an RPG so we need stuff like this because it's not an RPG without this stuff" it's just very meh.
Overall the game plays better as an open-world action game rather than an RPG 4/10

Story: I found the story to be pretty good, but it's not the best story I've seen. My main problem would be the lack of agency the game gives you, so at some point in the game Johnny Silverhand a dead rocker/terrorist is slowly taking over your body and killing you at the same time and the doctor says you only have 2 weeks to live. but since it's an open-world game the game lets me take my sweet time with everything so by the time I make it to the third act I realized "Oh yeah...... I'm gonna die soon.......well shit".
While the writing was good and the performances are pretty great I didn't really have all that much interest in the story.
It's nothing awful but nothing that will blow you away. 6/10
Writing: The writing is pretty good at times; it's not amazing and it's not Hideo Kojima levels of weird, it's just pretty good I don't really have much to say about it. 7/10

Characters: Unlike the story where I didn't care all that much I feel the exact opposite with the Characters.
Almost every character feels super fleshed out and believable thanks to their performances.
I felt genuinely invested in these characters' struggles along with their wants and needs.
I did find some character's performances to feel a little off Keanu Reeves being one of them, he's not awful like post-Matrix but it's more like he's trying to channel Pre Matrix and is not doing a very good job.
While there are some meh characters, it's still a really damn good roster and I'd love to see these characters in a squeal or maybe that TV show that's probably never coming out. 9/10

The Visuals: This is probably the best-looking game I've ever played, I say probably because the game is really poorly optimized so at times my nice smooth 60 FPS can drop to the chunky '40s at points.
The models of the NPCs look just amazing the skin textures look fantastic right down to the smallest minor detail.
I really admire the art direction in this as well. Any average schmo could just look at a screenshot and say something like "Oh it's just like Blade Runner", and in some way that is true but when you can also see influences from other sources of media like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and so many other versions of Cyberpunk that help give the game it's own unique version in the Cyberpunk genre.
While I would prefer to have the game, say at 60 FPS it still doesn't stop me from being amazed at how great the models look and how fantastic the art direction is. 9/10

The Music: I'm not a music guy, so I feel like I'm not in the position to critique this thoroughly, but when I found most of the music in this game to be fucking great that must mean it's doing something right 10/10.

Overall I wanna give this game a 9 given how much fun I had with the game but taking the bugs into account I have to give it an 8
Final Rating 8/10

I really like Sonic Forces. It's kind of like a modern Sonic game mixed with an Adventure Sonic game but wasn't fully realized.
The story definitely feels underdeveloped and I feel Infinite wasn't properly utilized, but what's there is still good and I really like Infinite and hope he returns in future games.
Forces looks amazing and the level design is solid. I love Capital City where Infinite manipulates you and the level as you play it.
The custom character was way more fun than I expected. I really enjoyed customizing them and trying out the different weapons. Their stages have amazing music too.
The free Shadow DLC is great too. It's good to play as him in a main game for the first time since Sonic '06.