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Hello there, sale fans! Nintendo’s ‘Multiplayer Sale’ is wrapping up this Sunday (21st June), so this is your friendly reminder to make the most of the following discounted delights before they return to full price.
Nintendo is back with another European eShop sale, and this one is all about multiplayer.
Yes, if you have been looking for something to play with your pals, then the fittingly-titled ‘Multiplayer Sale’ is well worth checking out. The discounts are now live and will be sticking around until 21st June, so you still have a couple more weeks to make the most.
As ever, the sale is jam-packed with discounted delights, so we’ve waded through all the games included and presented the cream of the crop below. In this list, you’ll find every game in the multiplayer sale that we gave a 9/10 or higher, plus a personal pick that just fell outside this range.
As ever, if you’re looking to grab some eShop credit before diving in, we’ve got you covered with the following links from our store.
£16.80 (-25% off) £22.49
Absolum is an on-par experience to Vanillaware’s Dragon’s Crown, but a superior game in terms of its key metrics. Its combat, collectible augmentations, and planning are exceptionally well-formulated, ensuring no run is ever quite the same, and its strategic options and play-styles are ever-deepening. It’s incredibly impressive in its reconstitution of arcade, role-playing, and roguelike formats, evolving them into something fresh and exciting.
To that end, it’s one of the best of its kind, whatever that kind may be. If you don’t enjoy the idea of repetition and grind, you may not fall in love with its initial five hours, but the momentum for one-more-go becomes so compelling after a while that it’s impossible to relinquish the pad.
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£8.74 (-75% off) £34.99
BlazBlue CentralFiction Special Edition may have arrived a few years late on Switch, but that delay didn’t dull the sharpness of its 2D fighting package.
Not only does it give the Ragna saga a proper send-off with a story mode that’s so rich in character development it could be a full anime season in its own right, but it offers a staggering number of modes to keep you playing long after the credits roll. It runs silky-smooth docked or in handheld modes and runs like a dream online.
The lack of an English dub still rankles, and new adopters are going to have to do a lot of research to understand what’s going on, but it’s well worth the effort.
£4.49 (-75% off) £17.99
BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle is an utterly accomplished 2D fighting game. It’s bursting with content and featuring the visual spectacle of combat that uses up every single trick in the book. A few strange decisions aside, this title is a must for fighting game fans.
Even if you’re not a fan of any of the franchises represented in this game, you most certainly will be by the time you’re done with this stacked fighting package.
£2.69 (-70% off) £8.99
Clockwork Aquario was a long time coming, but it was definitely worth the wait. An obvious labour of love, this ill-fated arcade gem has been improbably recovered, restored, and reassembled, and it never feels like anything less than a carefully unearthed treasure that’s been polished until it shines.
It won’t take long to beat — and it shouldn’t, because a good 30-year-old arcade platformer is supposed to be short and sweet — but what the game lacks in length it more than makes up for in entertainment and raw creativity, with stages pitting you against everything from mechanical flying fish to a gigantic egg-dropping robo-penguin.
It’s the sort of game you come back to again and again because you want to rather than have to, and we feel lucky to have it.
£6.39 (-60% off) £15.99
While it’s a shame that there are fewer games here than in other Konami collections — we’d have loved to have seen NES title Contra Force or the now-extinct WiiWare title Contra ReBirth — the ones included in the Contra Anniversary Collection are universally brilliant. The 8-bit and 16-bit Contra games are among the finest examples of the run ‘n gun genre, and to have almost all of them included in a single release and emulated flawlessly is an absolute treat.
Whether you’re a fan of the series or a curious onlooker who’s always wanted to see what the fuss was all about, this is essential.
£3.59 (-80% off) £17.99
A roguelike at heart with a rhythm-game soul, Crypt Of The NecroDancer is a sublime experience that’s a must-play for fans of the genre(s).
Its upbeat, uptempo take on dungeon crawling is infectious, and there’s enough content here to last even the savviest of spelunkers for many, many dance-fuelled dives into the depths. If you’ve never tangoed with the NecroDancer, this fully-featured Switch edition is the perfect way to jump in.
For anybody who never played this but loved the Zelda spin-off Cadence of Hyrule and was left wanting more, what are you waiting for?
£24.49 (-30% off) £34.99
While you could certainly argue that Disney Illusion Island is perhaps more of a Metroidvania than it is a straight-up 2D platformer, we reckon it strikes a wonderful balance between the two genres that it could honestly fall into either category.
Its focus on combat-free exploration makes this a great gateway into the genre for younger audiences, and its ability to support up to four players via local co-op means that it’s an excellent option for families who want to spend a bit of time with some of the most iconic Disney characters imaginable. You can also hug each other to regain health. What more could you ask for?
£1.99 (-82% off) £10.99
Enter The Gungeon is a brilliantly tactile, endlessly replayable twin-stick roguelike that sits right up there with the very best indie games on Nintendo Switch. With satisfying combat, random levels, and an endless supply of inventive weapons, items and secrets, it’s always a total joy to play.
Yet another modern indie classic found a natural home on Nintendo’s console.
£1.99 (-75% off) £7.99
Evergate is a wonderfully designed puzzle/platformer that starts off strong and goes from strength to strength over the course of its campaign. Every new world you encounter here adds a new twist to proceedings, gradually becoming more complex as it layers mechanics on top of one each other, enabling you to experiment and come up with your own unique ways to bound across its intricate levels.
Speed-running here, for us, feels like it was tacked on for no real reason but, besides this one little misstep, this really is an essential purchase for puzzle/platforming fans and a standout example of its genre on Switch.
£9.99 (-60% off) £24.99
Brush off that arcade-grade resolve and get ready for an old adventure realised in all-new clarity. This is a shoot ’em up experience like few others, and while it has all the genre hallmarks of intensity and adrenaline-inducing action, it binds it with superlative artistry, epic set-pieces, and an alien world as strange as it is wonderful.
The sense of incrementally increasing in power and being able to turn the tide against the Belsar is what makes G-Darius HD so much fun to play. It’s initially threatening, but once you learn the lay of your first route, get powered up, and figure out how to make practical use of your captures and duelling laser, it’s safe to say G-Darius really hits the spot.
£6.74 (-50% off) £13.49
The blend of all-out action, deep strategy, and Ancient’s irreverent humour is as enjoyable as ever in Gotta Protectors: Cart of Darkness, and smashing a huge castle-tank into evil things never stops being fun.
This ’80s-loving game — which goes beyond standard tower defence territory and ends up somewhere that can only be described as “strategic mayhem” — plays its story for laughs, but the game itself is an expertly crafted challenge with lots to do and plenty more to keep coming back for.
