Out of Space

 Rating: 7/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸😸
Ages: Mainly 8+ but younger kids can have fun with it, too. I'll explain below...

The basic premise of this game is that you and up to three of your friends are a cleaning/moving crew for a spaceship habitat company. Your job is to clean out alien infestations, furnish, and power up a space station habitat. It's harder than it sounds. The controls are simple. The game play, especially on zen mode, is pretty easy but still can cause some challenges.

Hint - it's much easier to be successful if you talk to each other as you're playing so you can coordinate what you're doing.

Younger kids can join in the fun as long as you have two more competent players handling the aliens and cleanup portion of the game. My 3yo grandson enjoys just making his character run around the spaceship with the dog.

It's bright, colorful, fairly laid-back fun for the family. It only got 7 cat faces because it can be pretty repetitive if you try to play a lot of it at a time. A couple of rounds once or twice a month seem to be plenty for us. That said, it has a lot of staying power as a fun group game.

BroForce Forever

 Rating: 7/10 😸😸😸😹😾🙀😸
Ages: 8+

One of my sons exposed me to the chaos that is BroForce. Chaos is the right description. This game is a parody of all the early video games where you had to slaughter lots of enemies, save your friends, then escape on a helicopter. So in this game, you and up to three of your buddies have to slaughter a lot of bad guys, aliens, and a bunch of other things, blow up the landscape but not too much or you end up with bottomless pits you can jump over, die a lot but save each other, then escape on a helicopter. At least on the early levels. The later levels have different win conditions. My son's advice, when I asked what the objective was, was simple, "Go to the right and try not to die."

The characters are hilarious. All of them are puns on 'Bro' and various action heroes. RamBro shoots a machine gun and has a red bandana. McGyBro hurls explosives and has a mullet. Brophy the Vampire Slayer throws wooden stakes and holy water. You get the picture.

Game play with four players is an absolutely chaotic mess of explosions and various weapons firing. You die. A LOT. But it's all okay and fun. We laughed a lot, blew up everything a lot, and generally had a very cathartic time blitzing levels.

*Lots and lots of cartoon violence
*Lots of silliness and bad puns
*Occasional hard levels that caused some outraged cries of "WHY did you just BLOW UP EVERYTHING?"

Bonus - this one is available on a lot of platforms, not just Nintendo Switch.

DragonQuest Treasures

 Rating: 6/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸
Ages: 5+

I've been a fan of the DragonQuest series from the beginning. Big caveat: I've really only played I, II, and III (which are excellent games!). DragonQuest Treasures is okay, but nothing as good as those three. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

The basic storyline is pretty simple. You play as two children, you can swap which one you are playing but you can't play both at the same time, who befriend two glowing winged things, a pink cat and a green pig. They provide infodumps but not much else. They open a wormhole to their world and of course you jump through, as characters do in RPG adventures.

Their world is a series of sky islands that have been overrun with monsters and bad guys. And treasure, which for some reason keeps re-spawning. The treasures are fun nostalgic nods to previous games but have nothing to do with this game other than being a way to keep score. The game is a series of side quests to collect certain types of treasure, beat up certain monsters, collect enough of the right resources, and restore the islands to some kind of order. The monsters never go away, though.

It's fun enough, for a while, but it gets very repetitive. If you are a 100%-er who has to get EVERYTHING, don't play this. The treasure drops are pretty much random and there are hundreds of different items to collect.

Once you finish the main storyline, there are still a few side quests that open up. Most of them are okay, mostly beat up the gangs of rival pirates that are trying to steal all the treasures. I gave up on the one where I had to beat the ghost king pirate. The battle was just too hard, especially compared to the simple fighting that all the other fights had been. You get shut in an arena with the pirate king. You fight really hard and think you've beaten him, but wait! He's not really dead. He comes back bigger and stronger and full of more health. Rinse and repeat a few times. After dying several times in a row, I just gave up. When you aren't having fun, the game needs to end.

So overall, it was fun but not something I'd come back to. It's one to hand to my grandkids and let them have fun with it.