Our personal picks for the best Switch games of 2024.
As we head into the final week of 2024, it’s time to slay the GOTY monster that devours the Decembers of many a gamer.
While Nintendo itself has been in wind-down mode, with most internal resources focused on the next console and a software lineup to kickstart it, Switch itself has had a pretty great year. Nintendo enlisted its various partner studios to shoulder the first-party load as Switch went into its eighth year, and third parties and indies have continued to keep things interesting.
Here we are, the final voyage of 2024. This is the last advent calendar entry of PC gaming website Rock Paper Shotgun. Days elapsed: 24. Writers employed: 8.
The fell moons rise, and in their cold glare emerges a parcel from the dirt. Bloat and gangrene, crimped as if by tourniquet. A dark promise wriggles within. Grip the fibrous handles, feel its jagged soul imprint upon your palm. Now pull! Rend the sinew, tear muscle from bone, hatch their fetid gift! The yoke draws near! Take up the slip and read the words upon its face.
Time to enjoy your lovely joke!
Q: How can you tell a soulslike fan has fallen in love with a giant ape?
The Good Smile Company has already released all sorts of stunning Fire Emblem figures and the latest reveal is Edelgard from Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
Following Sega’s removal of certain digital titles earlier this month, multiple Cartoon Network Games under the Warner Bros. Discovery label have now been removed from digital stores including Nintendo’s Switch eShop.
There’s no word if they’ll ever return but according to reports, “at least five games” under the Warner Bros. label have been delisted.
It’s the holiday season, which means festive activities, family time, and, most importantly, the Steam Winter Sale. With discounts on everything from massive open world RPGs to pixel-art platformers, it can be tough to limit yourself to just a few games. While I’m all for splurging on 2024 releases, if you’re looking to maximize bang for your buck, you could also pick up a solid bunch of slightly older (but still amazing) PC games. For example, right now you can get over 10 copies of Fallout: New Vegas for the price of one S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.
A starting point for Steam sales should always be checking your Wishlist, but if you’re looking for something new (or want to make sure you’re not missing an obvious deal), I found 33 of the best PC games for $10 or less.
The Complete Edition of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for $10
The Witcher 3’s massive open world, compelling characters, and meaningful approach to player decision-making raised the bar for RPGs back in 2015. After The Witcher 4 was revealed at The Game Awards, what better time to play (or replay) one of the greatest RPGs of all time? Especially now that the Complete Edition, which includes the base game and every DLC, is down to just $9.99.
More RPGs Under $10:
If you’re looking for a narrative-driven RPG, I highly recommend Disco Elysium, which is also down to $10. Other RPGs with deep discounts include Bethesda properties like Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas, and (of course) Skyrim. Meanwhile, Baldur’s Gate 3 fans who have a hankering for more turn-based combat can pick up one of Larian’s older games, Divinity: Original Sin, for just $3.99.
40% Off Stardew Valley
Leave your office job to inherit your grandfather’s farm and help rebuild (or price out) the local town in Stardew Valley. IGN re-reviewed Stardew Valley after the farming game got a massive update and ended up giving it one of the only 10/10 game reviews for all of 2024. Given that Stardew was somehow my most-played game on Steam and Nintendo Switch, I have to agree that “Masterpiece” is a fair assessment.
More Cozy Games Under $10:
Cozy Grove, which I feel is more like Animal Crossing than Stardew, is on sale for under $5. If you’re the type of person who enjoys organizing, I’d recommend Unpacking, while Spiritfarer brings the management game genre to the afterlife.
DOOM Eternal for $10
The DOOM series was pretty foundational to the FPS genre, and one of the best DOOM games of the modern era has dropped to under $10. In IGN’s 9/10 DOOM Eternal review, Ryan McCaffrey highlights the game’s satisfying difficulty: “This excellent refinement of the already outstanding 2016 reboot makes you an unspoken deal: if you can keep up with it, it will keep up with you.”
More FPS Games Under $10:
For more single-player shooting, you can get six Halo games for $10 with The Master Chief Collection. Multiplayer shooters like Siege and Battlefield 2042 are also under $10 for the time being.
50% Off Hollow Knight
Hollow Knight is one of the most rewarding gaming experiences I’ve had, and also the closest I’ve come to throwing my Switch at the wall in frustration (that’s a positive, by the way). Per IGN’s 9/10 review: “The world of Hallownest is compelling and rich, full of story that’s left for you to discover on your own, and built with branching paths that offer an absurd amount of choice in how you go about discovering it.” Now you can find out why there’s always a chorus of comments begging for a Silksong release date for just $8.
More Platformers Under $10:
Like Hollow Knight, Celeste doesn’t shy away from challenging the player, and additional “B-sides” for every level up the ante for even platforming veterans. I recommend Little Nightmares to any horror fan, while the 2020 Ori sequel offers particularly creative puzzles.
Civilization VI for $2.99
With Civ VII set to release in just a couple of months, most of the Sid Meier franchise is on sale. While I prefer Civ V’s map mechanics, Civ VI, in my experience, is better optimized for setting up multiplayer lobbies. Convince your friends to drop a couple of bucks, and you can all lock into an empire-building marathon that will most likely end in some form of betrayal.
More Strategy and Simulation Games Under $10:
Most Total War games and DLCs are discounted, though one of the best deals is the Warhammer base game for $6. And if you’ve ever wanted to travel across the entirety of Europe for $5, now you can (with Euro Truck Simulator 2).
75% Off Overcooked 2
If you’re looking for something cheap you can convince your friends to pick up and play with you, look no further than Overcooked 2. The cooperative cooking game allows up to four players to hop into a campaign that, with arcade-style levels and goofy physics, will probably lead to some screaming. But, as IGN’s Overcooked 2 review describes, this “frantic and inventive co-op game… manages to turn frustration into charm.”
More Co-op Games Under $10:
For larger groups, I also recommend For the King and Castle Crashers. It Takes Two is one of the best games for two-player co-op, and only one person has to buy the game courtesy of Hazelight Studio’s “Friend’s Pass.” And, of course, Portal 2, down to just $2, will always be a co-op classic.
The Fatal Fury series from SNK began back in 1991 as part of the fighting game boom that dominated arcades across the world, and its popularity led to the series releasing several games throughout the ’90s. In the years since, those classic games have been ported to consoles, but there hasn’t been a new entry in the series since 1999.
Until now, that is. The series is returning with Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves in 2025, ending a drought of 26 years without a new title. It will feature the return of characters from past games, most notably series star Terry Bogard and his protege Rock Howard. Other fan favorites, like Mai Shiranui and Billy Kane, will also be included and get updated designs.
City of the Wolves will act as a continuation of the previous game in the series, Garou: Mark of the Wolves. The T.O.P. system, now called the S.P.G. system, makes a return. It allows you to pick a section of your health bar (either the start, middle, or end), and when your health is in that range, your S.P.G. will activate.
When your S.P.G. is active, you’ll regenerate health, have boosted attack power, your power gauge will fill faster, your REV Meter will fill slower, and you can perform REV Blows. Those last two points are part of an important new mechanic in City of the Wolves called the REV System. REV Blows blend together offense and defense, allowing you to strike hard while also shrugging off enemy attacks.
You can combo into these after REV Arts, which can be used after a special move to perform a stronger version of said move. And REV Guard is a unique type of block that creates more space between you and your opponent than a regular block and also eliminates chip damage from special attacks.
All of these actions build up the REV Meter in the bottom left corner of the screen, and once the meter is full, you’ll become overheated. While in this state, you won’t be able to use REV actions anymore and your guard gauge will decrease whenever you block attacks. If the gauge runs out, your guard will be crushed and you’ll take longer to recover from being hit.
Your REV Meter slowly reduces as time passes, as well as when you walk or dash toward your enemy, land an attack, or successfully use Just Defense or Hyper Defense. The former happens when you block an attack at exactly the right moment, while the latter happens when you do a forward input at exactly the right moment of a multi-hit attack.
This REV System adds a strategic layer to each fight, since you can’t simply use powerful REV actions over and over. You need to keep an eye on your REV Meter and balance aggressive offense with well-timed defense to avoid overheating.
For the first time in the series, you’ll also be able to choose between two different control schemes that will determine the button inputs needed to execute each of these moves. Known as Arcade Style and Smart Style, they’re designed to provide options for players experienced with the series as well as newcomers diving in for the first time.
If you’re excited to dive into Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, it’s available to pre-order and wishlist now ahead of its release date of April 24, 2025 on PC, PS4/5, and Xbox Series X/S. Pre-order bonuses include Terry’s classic costume from Fatal Fury 2 and early access to the game on April 21, three days before release.
The base price of $59.99 also includes Season Pass 1 and five DLC characters. We already know who two of those characters will be: Ken and Chun-Li from Street Fighter, the first non-SNK collab characters ever featured in a Fatal Fury game. This marks the continuation of a collaboration between the two franchises after Terry and Mai were featured in Street Fighter 6.
If you’d like to pre-order, you can visit the official website to pick the platform you’d like to play on. Or if you want to join the community, you can follow SNK on Twitter or Discord.
Holding the Guinness World Record for “Most prolific developer of danmaku shooters” — a tenuous plaudit seemingly concocted entirely for their receipt — Cave’s five DonPachi entries form bullet points in the company’s evolution, from Toaplan-esque beginnings to a full-blown, bullet hell renaissance.
SaiDaiOuJou, the series’ final entry and Cave’s last arcade shooting game, makes the clean stylings of its predecessor, DaiFukkatsu, even cleaner; a shiny blue aesthetic wrought from 3D renders and a billion pixels. It also carries over adjustable difficulty options and an auto bomb on/off feature. Its core, however, is similar to DoDonPachi DaiOuJou, the greatest and most beautiful of Cave’s work.
Okay, sure, it’s maybe not the most pressing question ever, but we did have a chance to sit down with Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller to ask where everyone’s favorite fisherman kitty has been all this time. And it turns out, they actually did write a cameo for Big the Cat into the second Sonic the Hedgehog film… only for it to be a bit too grim to make it to the final cut.
“In one draft of Sonic 2, we actually, when they’re going through the snowy mountains to the cave, we had a bit, because Sonic 2 was sort of an Indiana Jones,” Casey told us. “Indiana Jones, it’s a trope that at some point a skeleton pops out at you and scares you. So we were going to do that, but with a skeleton of a, I would say, a Big the Cat, not necessarily-“
Miller cuts in here, “Not necessarily the Big the Cat.”
“But we ended up cutting it,” Casey concludes. “It didn’t make any sense.”
Alas, we almost had a… dead Big the Cat in Sonic 2. The two writers said that “Big the Cat” is usually their joke answer when fans ask them who they want to add to the films, though they also informed me they’ve been unsuccessfully trying to get Rouge the Bat in as well for three fims straight.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
