By Nelson Schneider - 03/30/25 at 04:54 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April is here, and, naturally, the Fools are out in full force. It won’t be long now until the little darlings who make up the bulk of gaming’s target demographic are out of school for the Summer and the big players in Industrial Gaming decide to turn off the tap again. Let’s see if Mid-Spring has anything for us to get excited about.
Is there shovel-ready crap coming in April? Of course there is! And it’s coming in all three major flavors of Shovelware. In Licensed Swill there’s a new ‘Care Bears’ game… what is this, 1984? In Casual Swill, there’s a new ‘Big Buck Hunter’ title for deer hunting fanatics who would rather bag imaginary trophies during the off season than hunt something else or go to the shooting range, and a “100 in 1 Game Collection” that wouldn’t feel out of place as the pre-installed content on a Chinese bootleg console. Lastly, in Annualized Swill, we’ve got entries in ‘MotoGP’ and ‘Monster Energy Supercross,’ BOTH Racing games about motorcycles. (Maybe they should have staggered those releases a bit.)
In multi-platform releases we’ve got… not a lot, with only 4 new titles coming up. But they are fairly diverse, for what that’s worth. There’s “My Vet Practice in the Zoo,” one of those Sim games that’s supposed to inspire kids to go down a certain career path (or dissuade them if they end up hating the gamified version of that job). Prince Mohammed bin Salman is keeping SNK busy, it seems, as they’re releasing a new entry in one of their hoary old Fighting IPs, “Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves,” which finally looks like the company is catching up to modern standards. “Star Overdrive” is a brand new IP from French Indie publisher Dear Villagers, that looks to combine open-world Sandbox exploration with hoverboarding, keytars, and a heavy dose of Modern Sensibilities to make one of the cringiest things I’ve seen in a while. Lastly, there’s “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33,” another game from France. This one, however, is a new turn-based RPG that looks to fill the niche left abandoned by Square-Enix. It’s also one of the Games to Look Out For that I mentioned at the beginning of the year. Hopefully it turns out better than other, similar attempts!
Exclusives are, once again, somewhat thin on the ground. However, they do equal the also-sparse multi-plat load coming in April, so I guess it’s not that bad… We’ve got Sony’s platforms getting Survival Horror sequel, “Tormented Souls 2” (which is NOT, as far as I know, a Soulslike). Then there’s Nintendo’s Switch getting “The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy,” which looks like it should be a licensed tie-in for one of the worst animes ever produced, but as far as I can tell isn’t. Then there’s a pair of Visual Novels also hitting the Switch: “Battlefield Waltz” and “Him, the Smile & bloom” (no typo), both of which look like the typical dreck of Visual Novels that aren’t going to sell any systems.
Ew. Another yucky month in what seems to be an unending chain of yucky months. At least “Clair Obscure: Expedition 33” has the potential to be interesting, even though it definitely has its work cut out for it.
Backlog Embiggened: +1
