Nintendo Life eShop Selects
Image: Nintendo Life

Welcome to Nintendo Life's eShop Selects!

Here we pick three of the best Switch eShop games we've reviewed in the last month and highlight them on a digital podium. Whether they take home the bronze, silver, or gold, you can be sure that the eShop games below — along with our round-up of runners-up — are worthy of your precious time and money.

Let's take a look at the games that made the grade this month.

Honourable Mentions:

While these titles didn't quite make our top three this month, they're still certainly worth checking out.

3. Retro City Rampage DX (Switch eShop)

This release was the third time we'd played through this game, yet on each occasion a more feature-packed and improved iteration revealed itself.

Despite its 2010 roots — and pop culture references to match that time — it stands up extremely well, as pixels this stylish and action this chaotic don't lose their edge. Retro City Rampage DX is still an anarchic, almost overloaded game that bombards the senses while, at the same time, maintaining impressive polish in its gameplay.

Whether you're playing it for the crazy story, excessive retro-styled violence or a mix of both, Retro City Rampage still has the goods.

2. Severed (Switch eShop)

A joy to behold from start to finish, Severed is an almost perfectly executed action-adventure game with RPG elements, real-time combat, and a whole lot of slicing the body parts from various creatures. With beautifully designed dungeons full of rewarding puzzles and a pleasing combat system, you’ll likely find yourself wishing you could play more of the game when it's over.

That’s the only real downside – you’ll probably be finished with the main story after six hours and left wanting more – although wishing you could play more isn’t necessarily a complaint if you're a time-starved gamer with a backlog. If you have the means to do so, we heartily recommend putting that backlog to one side and giving this one a go.

1. Sonic Mania (Switch eShop)

Sonic Mania was a true return for the mascot's 2D 'Classic' guise. It celebrates the glory days of the original games while also enhancing their qualities and taking on new ideas. From new areas, imaginative second acts, and some delightful boss encounters, the development team poured a lot of passion and talent into this retro-styled project.

With new characters and modes added in the 'Plus' retail version (also available as DLC), some neat tweaks iron out some of the kinks present in the original release. Regardless of the version you pick up, Mania is one of the best 2D platformers in recent memory.


How we decide our eShop Selects top three: To qualify for this list, these games must have been released as a digital-only release on the Nintendo Switch eShop in that particular month, and must have been reviewed on Nintendo Life; we select the qualifying games based on their review scores.

Here, the top three were decided first based on their NL review score, and then by their User Rating on the site.