Valentina

This was a rather underwhelming experience. I didn't expect much, given that this costed me less than £0.50 many months ago, and - as it usually is with impulse purchases - it's always a roll of dice. You never know what you're going to get. Valentina for instance, should never have been released on Switch in my opinion. It was initially out on Android and then made its way to a Nintendo Switch with the developer saying that he wants to see if people are going to like it. I do feel for the guy, it's his first game - there aren't that many great Brazilian titles out there, we all have to start somewhere, but this doesn't make me enjoy Valentina more, unfortunately.

It is an extremely basic action-platformer, that puts you in the shoes of an archer girl called Valentina. You'll be saving the kingdom and searching for your family with evil invasion serving as a backdrop of the story. All of that info is layed out to the player via dialogue boxes, which would be fine, however hardly any of those messages are translated correctly from Portugese (that's my assumption, given where the game originates from). Instead of concentrating on getting into the story by reading interesting text, you are trying to decipher it. Here's an example:

"your brother assume the kingdom, but he are not going save the king and queen because he are afraid for a trap to take the entire Kingdom of GrellFrorest. Now Joao the fool is going after the spirit of fire trying to save all kingdom alone."

It genuinely cracks me up. Platforming is bad, most of the deaths are unfair - you are asked to perform constant leaps of faith when standing on the edge, because you can never see where it is that you are actually jumping to, it's always guesswork. One time it will be a pit of spikes, next time it will be a hole in the ground or a pool of lava. Sometimes it will actually be ground or a safe platform. You just never know.

Combat is virtually non-existent. Yes, there are plenty of enemies, even some bosses are present but jumping virtually renders your character immune to damage, so you can just speed-run through the levels. There's no onus on the player to fight these enemies. Same goes for the bosses at the end of each thematic level (there are four in total) - you can just stand at the edge of your screen, shoot arrows at them until they die - and that's about it. They won't even attack you. There's no need to learn their patterns. Just stand and shoot. That's all you need to do.

Conclusion here is as simple as is this game - do not buy it, even if it costs you peanuts, unless you really want to support this guy. There are much, much better alternatives out there. This one here deserves half of the star, at most.