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[SHIV4]

Introduction & Visuals

I remember playing the game on the PlayStation 4 at 30 FPS, and the image had a heavy filter that made it look blurry. I told myself I just had to replay it on pc.

Technically, the game is still legendary, and the effort put into it is truly unforgettable. After six years, I expected to see a graphical downgrade here and there, but honestly, the graphics are still top-tier, especially indoors. At times, the game looks completely photorealistic.

Gameplay & Difficulty

I played on "Grounded" difficulty, which is the hardest setting. The game became incredibly enjoyable, forcing you to carefully calculate every single encounter. The smooth animations add to the fun, and the impact of the hits on enemies is deeply satisfying. However, the Grounded difficulty did make me spend long hours on certain encounters.

Artificial Intelligence

The AI is acceptable, but it could have been better. The developers clearly relied on randomized enemy patrol paths so the player can't predict them. They also added a clever feature for human enemies: when someone loses their companion, they call out their name, and if they can't find them, they start searching for you. However, I see this as an addition that creates the illusion of good AI, while in reality, it's just average.

The problem with the AI is that enemies sometimes search an area far away from where you were last spotted. This doesn't make sense and significantly weakens the AI's credibility. Furthermore, on this difficulty, the enemies' aim becomes exaggeratedly accurate—they'll instantly give you a headshot and you die quickly. They can also spot you from across the map. Unfortunately, the maximum difficulty doesn't make the enemies any smarter.

Pacing & Story

There is unjustified padding in the game. I felt the island chapter was completely out of place, and it makes no sense for the muscular character to go to such great lengths for people she just met.

As for the story, there are incredibly stupid elements, not to mention the overwhelming agenda:

• The laughable way [****] died, and his sheer naivety right before his death.
• Playing as a character I do not care about, and feeling like the developers are forcing you to sympathize with her.
• The stupid ending that completely contradicts the events of the game.
• The game doesn't have a single character you actually care about.

Final Verdict

I am surprised how Sony gave full creative control and an open budget to the infamous director. The game was supposed to be one of the best in history if it weren't for him.

Final Score: 8/10

1- god of war ragnarok my score 8\10 (Steam)
2- the last of us 2 my score 8\10 (Steam)

 

[falling into hell]

4. Red Dead Redemption Undead Nightmare 5/10

I loved the main game but this dlc was rather underwhelming. There was lots of things you could do in the main game. Here you just have a short story with some quests. There are some site activities but it doesn't seem to be worth doing them.

5. Legend of Heroes Trails to Azure 8/10

The game is awesome it's just that it was a little bit too exaggerated. I wished it was slightly more down to earth. Also it had too many boring quests to do. Somehow it felt like there was too much story and not enough gameplay.

 

[SHIV4]

I finally played and finished AC2. I played it on PC and struggled with the controls because the game wouldn't recognize my controller, but I managed to use a mod to fix the issue.

My impressions are based on my experience today, not by the standards of its release year. The game is outdated in many aspects.

The biggest outdated element which I believe was bad even for its time.. is the missions. Note that I didn't play any side missions or side content, and I don't even know if there are any side missions to begin with. The game presented disastrous missions, and honestly, I didn't expect them to be this bad. They are constantly repetitive, like the chases and the boring eavesdropping missions, which they drag out to the point where you have to walk slowly for five minutes or more just to listen in on someone.

There is also one mission that made me hate the game, and I consider it one of the worst missions I've ever played: assassinating 9 targets without being detected. This is incredibly difficult because the stealth system in the game is practically non-existent. You just have to try your best not to step right in front of the enemies, but even then, they sometimes spot you from impossible angles. Then there are the mandatory Codex-gathering missions, which force you to run all around the game's cities just to collect them.

As for the combat, I initially thought it was good, but over time it became boring because it relies entirely on parrying or timing the enemy's strike to counter it. This means there is no real offense in the game, as enemies will just block all your attacks. However, there are some nice touches, like being able to taunt enemies during a fight. This serves the character's charisma well and makes him a cool, unconventional hero.

There are massive issues with the parkour, the biggest being the character's sudden, unpredictable jumps. Unfortunately, this happened to me a lot during one of the annoying missions; the character would just jump on his own, forcing me to restart the mission all over again. The annoyingly slow climbing is another issue.

The graphics are outdated, but the game compensates with a beautiful vibe and atmosphere. The character models look bad, especially the eyes. I don't know if it's a glitch, but the characters' eyes have a weird shadow over them.

The story is good and simple .. and I'm talking about Ezio's story here, not Desmond's. Ezio is genuinely a great character with a lot of charisma, far better than all the protagonists in recent Assassin's Creed games. The voice acting is also excellent.

Overall, my experience with the game was decent, but the missions, combat, and parkour really dragged down its rating for me.

---

Finished Games & Ratings:

1- God of War - 8/10 steam
2- The Last of Us - 8/10 steam
3- Assassin's Creed II - 6.5/10 Ubisoft store

 

[SpiceRacz]

13. - Super Mario RPG (SNES9X)

Another replay. Completed the holy trinity of SNES RPGs - Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, & Mario RPG. I've never finished FFVI so it's excluded for me.

 

[Cert.in.Death]

Review: 6/10

Spoiler: Final Thoughts

I'm by no means an RE originalist, I only emerged in the fandom after acknowledging it as one of my major gaming blindspots a few years ago and started to become familiar with its offerings with RE2 Remake (which is still my personal favorite). But lord almighty there is some otherwordly degree of buffoonery going on throughout this game that I elect to describe as groan-inducing nonsense (that's being kind). The majority of creations seem to have been developed in isolation from one another before the core creative unit attempted to stitch them together in any way they could, like a grab-bag of dartboard-selected horror genre cliches. The overarching universe feels incoherent and erratic, far more than any other game thus far (out of RE2R, RE4R, RE5, and RE7).

Gun to my head, I found the gameplay to be uncertain of itself. Bouncing between walking-sim horror sections and horde-mode action scenes, RE8 wants to evoke both terror and heroism from its player while achieving neither. Thankfully, it has a pair of saving graces: the weighty approach to player movement/weapon handling sports a novel feel, providing a sense of personality to the way the player moves about the world. Plus - insofar as you can ignore the broader context - the individual environments and enemy types are laced with a high degree of visual intricacy both when static and in motion that make each character/setting a joy to observe.

Perhaps I'm just a crotchety old man nowadays. And yet am I going to just plow into RE9 immediately afterward? Most certainly....

 

[BusierDonkey]

Game 20

Poly Bridge
100% Complete, all achievements - No breaks, under budget

It's a physics-based bridge construction puzzle game, and about the best example of one I've come across. Like Poly Bridge 2, this is about half rehashed puzzles from the previous game and half new stuff. Poly Bridge 3 also uses the same parts as Poly Bridge 2 with no new additions, but there are some very fun puzzles once you get past the halfway mark. Like the previous two games you can come up with some pretty complex solutions to a simple puzzle, or you might just as easily find a simple solution to something that seems impossible. The UI is probably the worst thing about the game, doing certain tasks requires switching off other options before the game will let you do it. Minor annoyances but being unintuitive I kept making the same mistake throughout my time with the game.

Game 21

Floodcore
Complete I guess?

I almost didn't count this, it's another free game on Steam but it's really more of a demo. It's just a few puzzles and walking around but there's a lot of potential for these kinds of puzzles. You have the ability to swap places with blocks as well as swap blocks with each other. You need to get the right colored blocks to the right switches. Great looking art and nice music, but it's literally a half-hour long and ends where I thought it was just starting.

Game 22

Genopanic
Completed playthrough

I was really enjoying this game right up to the end. The platforming is pretty good, nice and tight. The game is a Metroidvania, but barely, while you do backtrack a little, it's about as linear as this genre can get which isn't always a bad thing. The game has a save point in just about every room and each room presents a platforming challenge to clear, thanks to the tight controls the game was a lot of fun to play. There are a handful of bosses with old-school safe spots to fight from. The story was about as simple as they come, perfect for the genre. The low-res pixel art is great as is the ambient music with just a few real tracks kicking in when big events happen. This game has a glaring flaw however. I noticed I missed a pick-up. As with any Metroidvania game, if you miss items, you just do an end-game mop-up. This game unfortunately has an item that you can only pick up once, and if you try to return to collect it later, the elevator leading to the reactor area does not appear. To make matters worse, you can't get back the way you came either in essence locking the game unless you somehow didn't trip the two checkpoints leading to the elevator. I had to find a cheat table to enable infinite jumping to escape. I tried going from another direction to get the item but unfortunately that way is blocked as well, even with cheats it's simply impossible to collect which is kind of shit.

Game 23

Space Expedition
Completed Playthrough, all crystals

This is a free game on Steam made by the same people as Genopanic. It's a short platformer similar to games like Limbo, only without a price tag. It's not bad, but it's very short. Getting all the crystals took just over a half-hour.

 

[Cert.in.Death]

Review: 8/10

Spoiler: Final Thoughts

Now we're talking. Much better outing than Village but lags behind the true zeniths of the franchise (RE2 and RE4), which is understandable given it relies on nostalgia of the former to advance the appeal in this outing. I've likely nothing unique to add other than how refined Capcom games feel in their design when they exhibit their highest craftsmanship and that when Leon is featured RE feels far more at home than it does otherwise (still recovering from Ethan Winters' syndrome over here).

Not to detract from the overall positive takeaway, but it needs to be said: I don't find any of the RE games to be particularly frightening nor are they narratively commendable (there are so many arcs and plot points that are groanworthy). But even so, RE9 further exemplifies that excellence in other aspects more than overcompensate for shortcomings in others.

 

[marcincz]

Game 16 - Professor Layton and the Spectre's Call (NDS) - 35h 48m
Beat 08/03/2026 - my score: 9/10

Game 17 - Amplitude (PS2) - 05h 48m
Beat 14/03/2026 - my score: 8/10

Game 18 - Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon (PS2) - 20h 33m
Beat 21/03/2026 - my score: 7/10

Decided to play older games this month.
PLatSC is probably my fav. Layton title (played each part except Azran Legacy).
Broken Sword is a great adventure series, but Sleeping Dragon has too many "push box" puzzles.
Besides started Burnout Dominator, but I got stuck on 5 level from 7.

 

[Cert.in.Death]

Review: 5/10

Spoiler: Final Thoughts

I'm an admitted mark for "arthouse" games and needed something to cleanse my palette after my recent RE fest, so I rummaged through the backlog and found this lying in wait. Thankfully it's concise and uncomplicated, which is as far as my commendations will go. Outside of some interesting visuals and occasional remixes to the art palette as you cross through each gateway, nothing noteworthy happens. There's no story, no plot, the entire offering is ambience, and mechanically there's little in regard to design (you can throw seeds with L2 and then consume the resulting tree to get a speed boost to character movement, otherwise you have a jump button and that's it).

Were this game any longer, I'd hate it. But fortunately it provided just enough of an intermission to my calendar that I consider it inoffensive. Only beleaguered trophy addicts such as I should consider a stroll through the neon forestry SOTW offers.

 

[BusierDonkey]

Game 24

Dead Island Definitive Edition
Completed all missions and Ryder White arc.

I never really looked into this game before playing it and was expecting a fairly linear FPS set on a resort overrun with zombies. The game does start on a resort on Papua New Guinea, but the world is completely open to explore. What you'll find is a lot of suitcases to loot, weapons every ten feet and a bunch of respawning zombies. Eventually you leave the resort and head into the city slums, the jungle and eventually a prison island. On paper this game has a lot going for it, but unfortunately the gameplay loop is a bunch of fetch quests leading you through the same areas over and over which isn't the end of the world, but everything respawns in exactly the same way every time you leave an area. This game is meant to be played co-op with a group of four, but I have no friends, so I was a lone wolf except in cutscenes. The combat itself is actually pretty fun, but it's easy to get piled on by zombies (unless you hop on a car, they can't hurt you there because they don't want to scratch the paint). There are a bunch of weapon types and upgrades for those weapons. The weapons have a durability factor, so you have to keep an eye on the condition of what you have in your inventory. Luckily there are weapons everywhere, knives, shovels, machetes, you can even rip a pipe off a wall and use it as a club. Guns are a little harder to come by especially early on, but once you get them things speed up a little. The zombies come apart nicely, limbs slice off and chunks can be blown off leaving behind a meaty skeleton. Probably my favorite part of the game is when fast moving zombies come running at you and you kick them square in the face, then lob their head off with a bladed weapon. It's super satisfying. The story for this adventure is cliché, but that's okay because it's a video game. Voice acting is laughably bad, but that's okay because it's a video game. The world is actually pretty cool, the resort area is pretty comprehensive in detail, and you're met with a pretty accurate depiction of what things look like just outside the pretty resort areas. Poverty, dirt and crime. The game actually goes to some lengths to portray the tribes of the game's Papua New Guinea as superstitious and primitive. Rampant aids, ritualistic behaviors, cannibalism and how there are as many languages as there are villages. After finishing the game, I quickly ran through Ryder White's campaign which is a very linear slice of the slums and prison areas from the main campaign, giving more context to the story. The game looks alright but is riddled with overdone effects popular when this game first released. Even turning off chromatic aberration doesn't full defeat it, there is a Vaseline smear over everything and the bloom is nuclear. I did what I could to fix it through ReShade and mods but there's only so much you can alter. Overall, it's a pretty decent game but really could have been about ten hours shorter.

Game 25

Dead Island Riptide Definitive Edition
Completed all missions

The first game was no masterpiece, but I had fun playing through it. This sequel sucked most of that fun out it. Copy/paste locations fill this game, while the first game had plenty of repeating assets, Riptide literally lifts entire areas from the first game and plunks them down all over. Hilariously this carries over to NPCs, expect to see the same crazy-eyed man at every turn with maybe a different haircut. The game suffers from terrible pacing, calling it a slog would be fair. You slowly wading through waist-deep water because the map has been flooded by a monsoon and all the boat spawn locations are poorly placed. The jungle area where this happens takes up a majority of the game. Fast travel points in the game often only work one direction so often times you have no choice but to run back and forth through areas you've already gone through. Like the first game this is meant to be played as a co-op game, and it really shows in Riptide. While they at least exist in the game outside cutscenes unlike the first game, your three other team mates basically do nothing but stand around which makes getting defensible areas ready for horde attacks much more frantic than it should be. After setting up gun turrets for them, they'll continue standing around holding melee weapons instead of using the turrets. Fortunately, this game was about hours shorter than the first, but everything just felt like busy work and fetch quests. The stuff I expected to be cool or fun always disapointed. The story is dumb, but not the fun kind of dumb, all the characters' motivations or reasoning are basically nonsense. On the bright side, there is a fair bit of pretty scenery in the game if you can get past the nuclear bloom that seems to be turned up even higher than in the first game. This game is basically the worst parts of the first game spread out into a sequel.

Game 26

Dead Island 2
Completed all missions

This game could have been a brand-new franchise it has so little to do with the previous games. This takes place a decade after the previous Dead Island games, it takes place in Los Angeles or "Hell-A" as the NPCs keep referring to the city. There are no islands in sight and the only mention of the archipelago from the other games is in a text note you pick up during your travels. The only other real tie-in is you meet up with the playable rapper character from the previous games, and he really doesn't say much about what happened over those ten years. The version of LA in the game is a caricature of the real city but is brimming with cool details and an authenticity I wouldn't have expected from this game. Hollywood, Bel-Air, Venice Beach, Santa Monica and other notable locations are all here and are pretty faithful to the real city. The game is pretty and more importantly runs really well considering the draw distances and amount of detail. The games real showpiece is the gore model which borders on comical. Every enemy type has a skeleton, a full set of organs, skin, clothing and muscle tissue in layers. Depending on the weapon you use damage is portrayed in horrendous detail. Slice with a heavy sword and you can cleave enemies in half, and the cut will follow the angle of your attack. Shotguns blast clothing, skin and flesh away leaving just the bone. Using a fire weapon will scorch the body leaving a blackened crust and using acid literally causes the enemy to rapidly decompose and malt into a puddle. It's both disgusting and amazing. To do all this killing, the game has hundreds of weapons and probably thousands of ways to modify them. Sledge hammers, pole saws, crossbows, revolvers that shoot massive exploding rounds, there's a great weapon for anyone. The weapons do have degradation to consider, and ammo has to be found or made at a workbench, but there are new weapons everywhere so it's not really an issue. The player progression has been changed considerably since Riptide. You get cards now with abilities tied to them and assign those cards as your abilities. Some cards come at a cost but offer huge rewards. The game does suffer some pretty rough pacing; at times; I felt the game started dragging, wondering when I would get back to the fun stuff. Perhaps a few more fast travel points would have helped, I can't remember how many times I went back and forth across Venice Beach just to pick up a small quest item. The writing is abysmal at times as well. A lot of the side characters are just complete shit with some pretty awful dialogue written for them, but the meat and potatoes of the game was absolutely a blast.

 

[DryvBy]

Game Name	Platform	Review	Other
2Xtreme	PS5 (PS1)	What a turd! It's a bunch of sports racing games like skateboarding, biking and snowboarding. You go through these awful obstacle courses and crash multiple times. I ended up finishing the game for the platinum just because I wanted that one on my Platinum list.	Platinum trophy
The House of the Dead 2 Remake	PS5	I don't know why this got a lot of hate except for the price but I really miss these stupid rails shooters. This was fine for me. Lots of gore, lots of zombie brains, and the gyro system worked well for me.
Ball x Pit	PS5	I loved this game. I'm a sucker for brick breaker games and combining this with bullet heaven gameplay was a dream. I liked the city building but it was the weakest part of the game and the part I was most excited about.	Platinum trophy
LEGO Party!	PS5	I'm counting this even though it's an endless game, but I finished all the maps with my family. it's not going to beat some of the newer Mario Parties for me, but it's pretty close. The commentary was weird at first, but I enjoyed it in the end.
Super Mario World 2	SNES	Great graphics for the SNES, but an overall underwhelming game. The crying Mario really drove me up a wall and I was ready for it to end a world before it did.	playing through all of the Mario games
Eight Dragons	PS5	This is a beat-em-up that looked like a Renegade/Double Dragon clone and it was under $10, so I bought it. After a single punch, I was wishing I could refund it. The absolute worst beat-em-up I've ever played with cheap combat, controls, and ugly graphics. Total skip.
Blood: Refreshed Supply	PC & PS5	I've owned Blood forever and never really played it. When Refreshed Supply came out, I decided to go for it and I couldn't put it down. Over the top gore, crazy weapons, great level design (none of that "Doom Maze is the best!" crap, just good levels), and crossplay. Ended up beating it a few times and the expansions.	100% achievements & Platinum trophy
Super Mario 64	N64	Timeless classic that ends with some crappy levels, but it's still a great game with great music, and for it's time, great gameplay.	playing through all of the Mario games
PO'ed: Definitive Edition	PS5	I always wanted to play this as a teen and I'm glad I didn't. I finished the entire game and kept wondering when it would get good. It never did. There's glitches galore in it (and I think that's being authentic to the original from the sounds of it). There's missing textures, the guns suck, and when a game has fart sounds that don't make me laugh, ya dun goofed.	Platinum trophy
Double Dragon Revive	PS5	I beat this with my kid and we had a lot of fun. It's simple without any complexity, but I think that's why I enjoyed it. A modern take on a classic.
Splatter House	PS4 (Arcade)	Another game I've always wanted to play because I'm a fan of gory games. This was a blast to play through. It's simple, but it has a great horror environment with fun "fatalities" like using a bat to slam someone into a wall as they splat.	100% Trophies
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33	PS5	I loved the game last year but I couldn't finish it before the end of the year. I'm not into artsy games, but I really did love the look and characters as well as the weird story. The biggest issue I had is the game is a cakewalk if you don't put limiters on a certain character because I ended up having a build where I'd die at the start of the battle which killed everything on screen, and then I'd resurrect. It made the game super easy.	Platinum trophy
Super Mario Sunshine	GameCube	I wasn't a big fan of this game when I first played it and nothing's changed. It's ok. Graphics look nice and the music is fun, but the game is very short and the FLUDD system gets a little annoying sometimes. There's really only one world I really enjoyed.
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time	PS5	Incredible game. Absolute blast playing through it and it improved on everything I enjoyed about the first game. It's a simple game with a simple story, but the core game feels like a good Nintendo game. Highly recommended.
Dragon's Dogma 2	PS5	I gave up on this after it came out because it kept consuming all my time, so I finally decided to officially beat it and ignore all the fun side stuff you can do. Another recommended game, especially on a killer PC or PS5 Pro.
Scott Pilgrim EX	PS5	A bit disappointed in this after loving the original so much. The levels are really small and the incredible soundtrack is missing from this. It's way too pricey for what it is.
Super Mario Galaxy	Wii	Such a great game, but I don't remember it being as glitchy as I did the first time I played it. Still, a huge improvement over Sunshine and a game I'd love to 100% one day.
Super Mario Land	Game Boy	Ahh, a classic turd. I hate this game. It's awful to play, it's boring, the physics are crap, and everything is scaled weirdly. The best part is the game is short.

 

[Skeptical]

8. Panzer Paladin (5 h, ★★★) - A love letter to the NES, namely Mega Man and Zelda II with a dash of Blaster Master and Castlevania thrown in for good measure. It's a bit of an odd experience. On the one hand, it's a surprisingly easy game, with the only challenge being the somewhat old-school punishing jumping mechanics. The normal joy of modern action platformers - needing to learn enemy patterns and formulate and execute a gameplan to counteract them - is less prevalent here since they are easy enough to win practically on attrition alone. It's not what I'm used to, but the nostalgia bait and the unique hook of collecting weapons of all different sizes and ranging the full spectrum of serious to silly makes it fun. And even if the bosses were easy, I did like their designs.

9. Monument Valley (1 h, ★★) - This is one of those artsy games where you know exactly the kind of music and color palette and art design before you open it up. It's also an interesting concept in that it involves puzzles with MC Escher geometry. That definitely sounds cool on paper, but the execution is never particularly deep (as evidenced by that 1h play time). Meaning this is just a nice experience rather than a truly good game. But hey, at least it was a nice experience.

10. Red Bow (1 h, ★★) - Sometimes small indie games need more quality control. I found one easy programming oversight early on (not a game breaking bug, just plot errors). It's just what you get. But hey, it's a simple adventure game with a simple story, but it does a nice job of providing options that aren't immediately obvious which is the best approach. It's something you can play multiple times to see all the options, or just see the scenarios and be done with it.

11. Ender Magnolia (19 h, ★★★★) - Why must Hollow Knight / Silksong suck up all the oxygen in the Metroidvania room? This game is fantastic and deserved much more attention than it got. One could call it a Souls-lite: it has all the gloomy atmosphere and punishing combat, but without the annoying crap like losing progress if you die or long trips to the boss from the save point or whatever. Oh, and that gloomy atmosphere is tinged in hope and beauty. And beautiful, classical-inspired music. But the combat is great, boss designs are fun (usually about 3 phases with a clear ramp up in challenge for each phase), and there's a lot of variance in your weapon styles and combat choices (perhaps less than Lilies, but this one actually encourages you to experiment more so in many ways it's still better). All with a reasonably solid exploration that gives you generous hints on the map but allows you to get lost on your own (and not a single critical path, either). If you have any interest in Metroidvanias, you owe it to yourself to give this series a try. The one complaint I might have (besides the music not being QUITE as good as Lilies) is that it is pretty derivative of the first game, but I don't really hold that against it. I allow one iterative sequel before I get annoyed.

12. Doom 64 (9 h, ★★) - This is my fault for being ignorant, but for being a few years after Doom and being on a console that was all about 3D, I was honestly expecting this game to be a bit more advanced than just another level pack for Doom. The fact that it is still pseudo-3D through me for a loop (didn't Heretic come out well before this?) Still, it's cool that it is an actual unique game and not just a cheap port. That said, level design was way too much in the "press a random switch, then look through the entire level trying to find the one door that just opened 8 rooms away" for me.

 

[Cert.in.Death]

Review: 7/10

Spoiler: Final Thoughts

Perusing my backlog I discovered this was a game by the Life is Strange studio DONTNOD and was intrigued enough to commit the 5 or so hours it demands to platinum. All in all: pretty good. Great color palette and the visuals are satisfactory for their style (not so much their polygon count) and a novel climbing experience playstyle. A handful of times I was struck with the sensation that the team had to put together whatever they had and ship it to market but its brevity is a plus, IMO. The longer a game like this drags on, the less compelling it remains.

Minus a few frustrations where you can get stuck on geometry and your character doesn't always grip onto the handhold your aiming toward, it's an enjoyable romp for anyone who's into games of this ilk (off the top of my head it's most reminiscent stylistically of RIME or Sword Of The Sea, though more the former and less the latter).

 

[marcincz]

Game 19 - Kena: Bridge of Spirits (PS4) - 13h 21m
Beat 28/03/2026 - my score: 7/10

Game 20 - Shinobi: Art of Vengeance (PS5) - 11h 59m
Beat 31/03/2026 - my score: 9/10

Last two titles in 1Q.
Kena was ok, I expected something much spectacular.
Shinobi? Fantastic game. Lizardcube is a very talented developer. Streets of Rage 4 was very good, but Shinobi is great. Looking forward their next projects.

 

[Pantz]

March Report:

#07: 03/07 - Arc of Alchemist (Switch 2)
It's like a Tales of-lite game. Just take 25% of a Tales game in all aspects and that's it. I liked the characters but not so much the story or the gameplay.

#08: 03/08 - FTL: Faster Than Light (PC/Steam)
So nice I played it thrice. The music is really addictive.

#09: 03/22 - Fluffy Store (PC/Steam)
Pretty straightforward VN with animal spirit girls. Fox, Rabbit, Bear. Only a little fanservice, mostly good vibes.

#10: 03/31 - Planet of Lana II (Xbox Series X) #HatePlay
I really hated the first game. This one is a HUGE improvement. Much less puzzles and stealth puzzles where you have to stop for a long time to solve and pass. Much more movement based puzzles and action platforming. I still hate it because all the characters speak in gibberish language and there are no subtitles. It's annoying and makes the already difficult to follow story even more difficult to follow. Will #HatePlay Planet of Lana III.

Currently playing:
The Lost Child (Switch 2)
Hidden Folks (PC/Steam)
Felvidek (PC/Steam)

 

[Wolzard]

#2 - Final Fantasy V (1992) - SNES

I finished the Final Fantasy game that's least recognized by fans and Square Enix, since it barely had any remakes. The game follows a premise similar to previous games, revolving around 4 elemental crystals, and their destruction causes problems in the world. The turn-based gameplay has ATB, although it's a bit unbalanced because the bar increases the same way for everyone (I know they fixed this in later ports). The game also expands the job system that existed in FFIII, with many options, and it's simpler to switch between jobs, although I've become attached to 4: Knight, White Mage, Black Mage, and Samurai.

The game is quite beautiful for a 1992 SNES game, it makes extensive use of Mode 7 for the overworld and some cutscenes. In fact, I think this is where longer cutscenes that weren't just conversations started to become common.

The soundtrack is fantastic, featuring many memorable tracks by Nobuo Uematsu, showcasing the SNES's audio qualities.

The ending was interesting, depending on how your party survives the final boss, the final cutscene varies, although the ending itself is the same.

Overall, it was a great experience. The only downsides were a few bugs, such as spells failing on certain enemies or behaving differently, and some items not working properly. These bugs were fixed in later ports.

 

[Wolzard]

#3 - Megaman 7 (1995) - SNES

I had played it when I was going through the NES game series, but I stopped because I found the game boring, besides the absurd difficulty. Actually, the difficulty is that the game has more animations and larger sprites, which makes the game seem slower than the older ones. The soundtrack disappointed me, it's not as exciting as the previous ones.

#4 - Rockman & Forte (1998) - SNES

I found this one much better than MM7, the visuals are more reminiscent of the X series, the gameplay is more refined, without the sluggishness of 7, and the enemies and levels are more interesting. The soundtrack is very good, the intro level music is excellent. Now, wow, what a difficult game! I thought I was going to break my controller with the King Plane, it reminded me of MM2, which has a similar level.

 

[applesaucejaxon]

April Update...

7: Judgement - PS5 - Beat 4/8
I've been working on this one off and on for a little while. I had a lot of fun with this one. It's only the second Yakuza/Like a Dragon universe game I've ever beaten. I was a big fan of Like a Dragon 7 and the turn based gameplay, but the brawler gameplay of the series up to that point never really interested me. For whatever reason, I really liked everything this time around. Maybe it's time to revisit some other games in the series.
I enjoyed the story, and I liked all the detective side quests. Solid game.

I doubt I finish 52 games this year at this pace.

8: Deadzone: Rogue - Switch 2/PC - Beat 4/14
First off, I really wish this game had cross saves. I really enjoy it a lot more on my PC, but longer PC sessions aren't practical for me currently. Anyway, I beat it today and it was fantastic. I was happy with how well it held up on the Switch. Only runs at 40 fps, but it's pretty solid and the IQ is better than I was expecting. Obviously PC is the way to go, though. Switch 2 does drop pretty hard when you do the rounds with the waves of enemies, but I never found it unplayable. This feels like one of the few games that I'll still put time in even though I beat it, and I'll probably eventually unlock everything. But on my PC and probably over an extended period of time.

9: A Game About Digging a Hole - Switch 2 - Beat 4/15
I should have just played Donkey Kong Bananza again...
It was fine. Looked like crap on the Switch, but it was cheap. It was addictive to a point. And then the ending just felt tonally out of place.

10: South of Midnight - Xbox and PC - Beat 4/21
Loved it. I was shocked at how linear it was, though. It's been a while since I played a game this levels this linear. But that's not a bad thing. The gameplay was tight and it helped move you along and keep the story chugging. Only thing I kind of didn't like was the songs that would play when you would get close to boss sections. They were super hokey. Looked great on my PC, but was just fine on my Series S.
Honestly, I don't really get the whole stop motion aesthetic. It didn't really add anything to the game and it was very inconsistent. There were times where it ran as smooth as could be with the effect basically gone, and other times it was very exaggerated. It did look great in the cutscenes with anything that wasn't just a human, but in the end it just felt kind of pointless. That was kind of a shame, because that was what really caught my eye when this was revealed and made me interested it play it.

11: The Exit 8 - Switch 2 - Beat 4/23
This was pretty cool. I loved the idea and execution. Definitely worth a play.

 

[SpiceRacz]

14. RE Requiem - I don't know if this really counts since it's not a backlog game. I did finish it though and thought it was quite good. Not sure where to rank it, but probably below RE4 Remake & Village and above 7.

15. Absolum - This is a game that took a bit to get its hooks in then lost me towards the end. With normal settings, it's just way too difficult for me. By the time I was able to make any real progress, I was probably over 6 hours in and still struggling. Had to use the player assists to finish the game. There's a surprising amount of content, upgrades, and branching paths here, but it all just kind of distracts from how short this game actually is in a full run. For a roguelike beat em up, it totally works. I think it just suffers from the shallow and repetitive nature of the genre.

 

[marcincz]

Game 21 - International Karate (NS) - 01h 35m
Beat 06/04/2026 - my score: 9/10

Game 22 - International Karate + (NS) - 02h 02m
Beat 07/04/2026 - my score: 5/10

Game 23 - Hello, Yoshi! (NS) - 00h 18m
Beat 09/04/2026 - my score: 3/10

Game 24 - The Last Ninja (NS) - 03h 41m
Beat 10/04/2026 - my score: 8/10

Three titles from The Last Ninja Collection. Yoshi for free, from eshop.
IK is one of the best titles I've ever played on Atari and one of the best fighting games in my life.
TLN. Finally, almost 40 years later I've beaten it. Music is still incredible, amazing, wonderful. If not clunky control (lost many minutes to pick up things) I will give it 10/10.

 

[SpiceRacz]

16. Guns of Fury - Run n gun metroidvania wrapped in a metal slug-ish visual style. It's on the simplistic side and not even in the same universe as something like Ori or Hollow Knight. Still, the gameplay is satisfying. There's a lot of weapon variety and options for blowing up enemies and the environment. You pick up your usual set of moves along the way like a wall jump, slide, double jump, etc. that open up the map. The game is pretty unremarkable, but solid everywhere, if that makes sense.

 

[Jack Videogames]

April but I'm at 8 games. This sure bodes well!

***

13.48h. About 70% of the game complete I think?

My Score: ★★★★☆

***

33.6h.

A very good sequel to a very good game. While most of the stages are somewhat less inspired than the original game's, some others, like the play park, are very fun. There's a story of sorts, like in the first game, but it's somewhat less inspired.

33.6h? Jaysus.

My Score: ★★★★★

***

∞h. Mostly solo play (Delves, etc.) and some LFRs for story.

I liked it. After the disaster Dragonflight was for me, this one felt much more fun. Oh granted, it's still the same "Girlboss Gaslight" game it has been for the last 5 expansions, but delves are a godsend.

I was super excited to play Midnight. I bought the collectors, leveled a couple levels and haven't touched it yet. More time to play new games! I hope I don't instead waste the time replaying fucking long games I beat 15 years ago.

My Score: ★★★★☆

***

56:58h. Very Last Kiss mod collection. All DLC plus the fan DLC Long 15. Yes-man run.

sigh

My Score:

 

[falling into hell]

6. Needy Streamer Overload 2/10

The game is just nonsense. Apparently it was made by japanese people hating their own culture. It's not even worth talking about this game. Game would have been much better if it was possible to make a manual save.

 

[SpiceRacz]

17. Inscryption (PC) - I've picked this game up multiple times but have never made it past act 1. A friend told me it was worth playing through to the end though and here we are. Not sure on the total time I played. Probably in the 12 hour range with act 1 taking the longest. The game completely shifts in visuals, tone, and style of play between the 3 acts. The story is told through "found footage" as well as through the dialogue and gameplay. It's a super interesting concept as it jumps between card game, 2D pokemon-ish RPG, horror, FMV, etc. all while mixing up the card battle mechanics in each act to keep things fresh. My only gripe is there is a lot of luck involved here, particularly in the first act. It took me at least 6 hours to get through that section and it felt like my success was completely random. Either way, great game and glad I finished it this time.

 

[PlayStaytion]

Dead Space 1 and 2
New Vegas
Scarlet Nexus " Kept beating the final boss for 2 years cause I wasn't used to rpgs yet"
The Witcher 2 " In mid game but I'm progressing quite fast"
Fallout 3 " Same here, I'm progressing quite fast cause I've played New Vegas before"
Dragon Age Origins " Still in the biggening but I feel like I already knew what I'm doing"
Elden Ring " Cohh the YT is the man, now I finally know how to play this game"
Baldur's Gate 3 " Still noob to this game but I already know what to do to get good at it"
Death Stranding " A secondary game"

I'm not the type of guy who buy every game just because there's money to burn, and fortunately, it's not the smartest thing to do to benefit the most out of our hobby.

 

[Cert.in.Death]

Review: 6/10

Spoiler: Final Thoughts

Were there more of a game to Venba, I'd be inclined to raise my topline assessment, but it is at most an hour long if you choose to engage with the text-based story (otherwise it can be blitzed in 20-30 minutes). Even so, there is enough heart and amateur creativity worth praising and it stirs the feels just enough to be worth a recommendation. Granted, the value you draw from this game will hinge wholly on whether you had to pay anything for it but since this was a PS+ offering recently, it's difficult to argue against.

Review: 6/10

Spoiler: Final Thoughts

There is much to be said about how Sons Of Sparta misses the mark. I'll linger on two major gameplay criticisms:
(1) enemies sport hitboxes not unlike those in Mario games, meaning if you collide into them your character will take damage and recoil. This leads to major issues with how AI is coded to edgeguard platforms, leaving it impossible to proceed past them without sniping them, otherwise you have to intentionally disengage and wait for the AI to continue its pathing (and sometimes they simply won't).

(2) The second is how the use of character skills is tied to your Yellow stamina bar and how in order to generate green orbs, you must use specific techniques that deplete one resource in order to replenish another (and it's always more of the possessed resource for less of the other, meaning it's an imbalanced trade). On its face this causes problems with which techniques you can use because as you are learning the combat system, you routinely find yourself depleted of Yellow stamina while trying to recover HP. On its face this would have been detected during QA, which makes me wonder if this game simply needed more time in the oven to address the inconsistencies inherent in its design.

Add to those major issues the sponginess of enemies, a less-than-compelling narrative, and a presentation that constantly takes control away from the player - the last being the game's most egregious sin - and you end up with what is easily the weakest GOW entry.

That said, I am glad this game exists and it wasn't necessarily that far from being much better. The visuals are particularly well done but with some extra attention to design, this could have risen to a quality AA offering. Alas, this is one I suggest you skip.

 

[falling into hell]

7. G-MODEアーカイブス+ 探偵・癸生川凌介事件譚 Vol.1「仮面幻想殺人事件」7/10

To make people's life easier let's call the game Detective Kibukawa Case 1. I'm hopelessly addicted to detective and escape room games. Suddenly I got the urge to play a detective game. This game has a rather old fashioned presentation and minimalistic graphics. You solve cases by choosing commands like talk, observe, think about etc. Yeah you will have to talk to people a lot to solve cases. The game has a lot of weird characters. It's not possible to get stuck you will be asked questions about the case now and then but even a wrong anwer won't cause a game over you will just get a bad rating at the end. In the beginning the case seemed to be complicated but the solution was pretty straight forward. I will certainly play more games from this series.

8. Detective Kibukawa Case 7 5/10
G-MODEアーカイブス+ 探偵・癸生川凌介事件譚 Vol.7「音成刑事の捜査メモ」

Unlike the first case this game was much shorter around three hours perhaps. It felt a bit rushed towards the end.
The culprit pretty much nearly right away told us their reason for the murder and the game came pretty fast to an end.

 

[falling into hell]

9. Tales of Symphonia Dawn of a New World 7,5/10

The game was much more fun than I expected. It was cute how the female heroine fall in love right away and was lovey-dovey the whole game. Like you would expect from an older game there was hardly any filler content. Combat was simple but fun. While the story was not the best ever it was still good enough for me. Now I have finished all Tales games I had in my backlog.

10. Super Mario Odyssey 9/10

Game was incredible. I don't even like Jump 'n' Runs but I still had lots of fun playing it.

 

[SpiceRacz]

18. Final Fantasy III (SNES9X) - After playing through Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, and Mario RPG, I decided to finally finish this one. Approximate time was around 27 hours. I didn't finish all the side quests in world of ruin and did not feel compelled to at all. I would say by the time I finished this game, I was beyond ready for it to be over. The story didn't do much for me. I thought the dialogue was mostly bad and the characters were shallow. I feel like Chrono Trigger did more with it's smaller cast. Didn't seem totally necessary to build the game with this many party members either. They could have skipped the multi-party aspect in dungeons altogether. I don't feel it added anything other than frustration. Which brings me to another point - The difficulty in this game is very uneven. There's weird difficulty spikes with bosses and enemies in dungeons. To the point, I had to grind pretty hard at different points in the game, which ruins the pacing. My understanding from the internet was that grinding wasn't necessary, but there were sections that required it. Which brings me to another complaint. The enemy encounter rate in this game is out of control. I haven't been this frustrated playing an RPG since Lunar on Sega CD.

I don't know, going from Chrono Trigger to this is jarring. Chrono Trigger is such a step up from FFVI in ways that makes it feel totally archaic. Soundtrack, way better pacing, absence of random enemy encounters, the battle system mechanics, easier progression, etc. Just a way more polished game top to bottom. Everything I appreciated about CT is missing from FFVI. I honestly can't come up with much if anything positive to say about it. It was just a profoundly disappointing experience by the time I rolled the credits. I know it's not totally fair to compare it to CT, but it's impossible not to considering they released less than a year apart and both are considered the best RPGs on the system.

 

[Cert.in.Death]

Review: 7/10

Spoiler: Final Thoughts

Best I keep this brief because otherwise I will b*tch for hours on end. In any other era where we weren't starved for quality offerings in the AAA space, popular opinion would lambast Pragmata for embodying many of the worst attributes to come out of narrative-based games. The shortcomings inherent in its design are myriad and frequent (in particular, Lunatic difficulty is nothing more than "turn dial to increase enemies' health meters" and sports the most sponge-heavy bosses I think I've played outside of an MMO).

My memory of this game will not be kind and I'm slapping a 7 on it before I tell myself not to. It is technologically a gem and tries to be experimental, which I commend. It sports both high grade performance and a marked visual design, but those aspects don't overshadow the lackluster elements that accompany them. There is a nugget of a great idea in the remnants of the original pieces, hinting toward what might have been, but what arrived is a far lesser result than what was once intended.

 

[marcincz]

Game 25 - Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy (3DS) - 44h 55m
Beat 21/04/2026 - my score: 9/10

Game 26 - The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (NS) - 22h 14m
Beat 30/04/2026 - my score: 8/10

Last two titles this month.
Finally, finished all Layton games. Last chapters of Azran Legacy was awesome. Looking forward next part in 2026.

Second Zelda I've beaten this year and second overall. Better than Echoes of Wisdom. Quite good game.

 

[BusierDonkey]

I decided to give No Man's Sky a run since it's been a decade since launch and I never tried it. I knew what would happen and it has indeed happened; it's currently about the only thing I'm playing.

Game 27

Neon Inferno
Completed co-op playthrough

This game is full of pixel art goodness. It's immediately apparent that the art is the main focus of this game. The cutscenes, animations and overall presentation of the game are incredible. The game itself is really great too. I'd just say it's a run and gun, but that's not entirely it. It has many elements of a beat 'em up. The way enemies enter the fight and the level structure are straight out of a brawler. Of particular note in the game is the ability to fire in eight directions, but also free fire into the background using the right bumper. The result is a fast-paced run and gun that has you constantly sweeping the backgrounds as you fight foreground enemies while avoiding pitfalls and enemy fire from the both the foreground and background. Boss fights remind me of Wild Guns and used the game's main mechanic well. Bosses required a mix of fire modes to take them down. The game's second big mechanic is the parry system, which affects any green projectiles, they can be not only deflected, but can send the game into bullet time, allowing you to choose the deflected projectile's direction before letting them fly. I'll mention too, we died a lot playing the game, but it was never frustrating as the enemies do have patterns and the fights are set up in a cinematic way, so you'll most likely remember what's coming up. About the only real negative here is that the game is really short at about an hour, but for the genre that's pretty standard.

 

[Pantz]

April Report:

#11: 04/14 - The Lost Child (Switch 2)
I thought it was going to be a VN but it turned out to be a first person dungeon crawler. I guess people like these games to be hardcore with far too many systems? I really liked the art and the story was pretty cool so I forced myself to finish. I kind of get the appeal of going through the labyrinths, filling out the maps. It was all just too much effort for a 2D game like this. I wonder how many people actually made it to the end? There was also a bonus 100F dungeon... nope!

#12: 04/15 - A Building Full of Cats (Xbox Series X)
The first of a few hidden cats games that I bought on sale. Some of the cats were difficult to find! Now there are a million hidden cats games.

#13: 04/17 - Easy Delivery Co. (Xbox Series X)
Don't be fooled. Weird meta story ruins this game. It looks like a cool PS1/N64 game. It's fun for a while and could have had potential but the gameplay never really goes anywhere and the story ruins it.

#14: 04/18 - Hentai Girls (Switch 2)
One of those games where have one free square and rearrange the other squares to restore the image correctly. Then you get to the the boobs. I tried my best to fight censorship on Switch by buying these dumb games.

Currently playing:
Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Switch 2)
Neverness to Everness (PS5 Pro)
Mongil Star Dive (PC)
Citizen Sleeper (Xbox Series X)
Aphelion (Xbox Series X)
Hidden Folks (PC/Steam)
Felvidek (PC/Steam)

 

[Cert.in.Death]

Unexpected left turn while I was waiting for Saros to release (plus I'm a cheap bastard and didn't want to pay for early access) and Mouse: PI For Hire's trophies being busted led me to want to contextualize the quality of the rogue-like design of Housemarque's latest, so I started tinkering with God Of War Valhalla, TLOU II No Return, among others. Here's my report:

Review: 6/10

Spoiler: Final Thoughts

Off the top: the big AAA games from Eastern European studios - 4A, Mundfish, GSC Game World, among others - are far better experienced in their original languages than they are when translated. There are cultural aspects that are wholly lost in translation, though that may have to do more with the vastly different backgrounds of the respective audiences.

That said, this was a couple of repeat boss encounters and a singular dungeon that was shoehorned into the existing story. But from what I've experienced, it's nigh Oscar material compared to the baffling direction the design team went with in the second episode, Trapped In Limbo (as far as I can tell, it may be the most reviled DLC addition of all time, can't wait to suffer my way through that next).

Review: 10/10

Spoiler: Final Thoughts

When you're allowed to just play TLOU, it's immaculate. No Return is not the most mindblowing rogue-like in the world - it's honestly rather simplistic in its setup and execution - but having an excuse to go back and savor ND's gameplay at its best was a welcome intermission, so much so that I'm going to put the 100% pursuit on the calendar for later this year.

Review: 3/10 and 5/10, respectively

Spoiler: Final Thoughts

Truthfully, I'm being overly critical. FFXVI was a good game, not a great one. Thankfully its strongest aspect is its main character; the sterile designs of everyone else in the cast - minus Benedikta - is what bores me to tears.

At one point, there was a great idea at the core of CBU3's maiden mainline effort. But despite the successes of the visual design (which are exceptional), I couldn't bring myself to care about any part of either of these additions. The base story was succinctly concluded and tacking on more story content with some recycled encounters for a basic ladder mode, I truly wish they hadn't bothered at all. At least I got to pet Torgal a couple more times.

 

[Skeptical]

13. Pokémon Legends ZA (25 h, ★★★) - Is it as good as Arceus? No. Could it have been better? Yes. Would I have preferred Arceus 2? Not at all. The combat is genuinely fun, even if it wasn't quite as action-y as I hoped. The night-time trainer battles was a cool idea, keeping me interested through the entire game. Wild areas are poorly named. Sure, the first few are boring, but they eventually become crazy cage matches with Alphas that make a serious challenge. In other words, they are a positive addition to the game, just not like Arceus as the name implies. That said, the battling had better be good, because there is unfortunately nothing else here. Fight, then fight, then fight, and to mix it up, fight. I'm glad it was relatively short and didn't feel motivated to fully engage with side missions or the like by the end because it did end up being repetitive. But thankfully, the game did end at the right time before I got too upset. So Gamefreak has now made an exploration-heavy and a combat-heavy experimental game. Can they put it all together for Legends 3? Or will we get something stranger?

14. Bleed 2 (2h, ★★★) - This is a sidescrolling twin stick run-n-gun. To be honest, I had a hard time with this to start because I'm not too comfortable with twin stick controls (shut up. Back in my day, we had a Dpad and two buttons and we LIKED it that way!). But once I did get more comfortable with it, I could see the value. It's obviously intended as a replayable arcade game, with a casual infinite lives story mode and a more hardcore 1cc mode, along with remix mode. So you have options. There's also a very generous parry system (you can reflect anything purple, including the bosses themselves), a lot of variety in the boss fights, and just plain looks cool. I wouldn't say it's special, but it is a complete package.

15. Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (18h, ★★). Being a remake of an NES game that tries to stay close to the NES roots, of course it feels dated. I respect the desire to show the first game again, but on the flip side, is there anything here that's better than Blazing Blade on the GBA? Sure, there are a couple mechanics that it doesn't have like forging, but that's not enough to feel substantial. The effort to push players to stop resetting every time a character dies may have been noble, but ultimately fruitless (let's be honest, we all reset anyway... my actual time was definitely longer than the official time in the game for, uh, some reason). So while it is still a perfectly solid TRPG, it feels a bit weak for the FE series as a whole.

16. Light It Up (3h, ★★). It's a mobile platformer, which automatically limits its potential. But it takes the most of that limitation to end up being a rather impressive mobile platformer. You can only jump (and double jump) left or right, no actual movement. You use those jumps to land on floating shapes to light them up. Simple enough. But it has its moments; the shapes aren't stationary and thus can be pushed via your momentum, there are several special shapes to liven things up, and the visual appeal of lighting them up is a strong positive feedback for your efforts.

17. Bzzt (4h, ★★★). The biggest complaint you could have about this game is that it's short. But even that isn't really a bad thing. This is a precision platformer, albeit one that is probably more forgiving than the likes of Celeste or Meat Boy. Yet what it does have is variety. The locales keep shifting, you keep gaining new moves, and there's random gameplay shifts (like a shmup level, or boss battles, or whatever) to keep things interesting. Plus random homages to classic games that just appear in the middle of nowhere. Oh, yeah, and it's short. So while the thought of going back and getting unlockables by repeating 100 levels might be daunting in other precision platformers, the juice is worth the squeeze here. So again, even the game being short isn't a bad thing. Is it the best precision platformer out there? Perhaps not, but it is definitely one worth playing.

18. Cuphead (9h, ★★★★★). Everyone knows about the brilliant animation and the crushing difficulty. The reason for the crushing difficulty, of course, is to give the game sufficient length to make it worthwhile, since the animation is so good and also so expensive. But what sometimes gets lost is just how well designed the challenge is in this game. It's not about complicated controls or frame perfect jumps; there are multiple, highly distinct phases in each boss fight, keeping things varied, and just as importantly several different, distinct elements of each phase that is trying to kill you each time. Since simply reacting to random attacks is virtually impossible, you have to keep all of those potential threats at the front of your brain through the entire 2 minutes.

Each boss has multiple (4-ish) segments, and often each segment plays completely differently. When learning to overcome a challenge, there are two phases. There's the conceptual phase, where you are learning the boss' tells, its attacks, and where and when you have to dodge and how to maximize damage. Then it's just the mechanical phase, where you are simply executing the plan without screwing up. If either one of these phases takes too long to master (you can't figure out what you are supposed to do, or you can't seem to get the button presses right), it gets frustrating. But the fight completely changes every 30 seconds or so. So getting both right, the conceptual and the mechanical, is actually relatively simple for each one, the challenge is often in the full gauntlet. But you're doing it in phases, so you might be practicing the mechanical for phase 1 while simultaneously working on the conceptual for phase 2 on the few times you make it that far. Instead of being stuck on one of these phases, you are constantly going back and forth between the two. Which means you still feel like you're making progress every few deaths. Yes, difficulty level is very subjective, but I don't know how they could possibly have made a boss rush game any more approachable without dumbing it down to the point of irrelevency. The execution of that challenge is close to perfection.

It is beautiful. It is hard. And it is fun.

19. Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course (4h ,★★★★). Yep, more Cuphead. Still fun. I will say that these bosses seemed to be more varied in each of the phases than the main game. Which is generally pretty cool, but there was one or two annoying gimmicks in there as well.

 

[Cert.in.Death]

Review: 9/10

Spoiler: Final Thoughts

A wonder to play, a phenomenal approach to narrative presentation (with some incredible cinematography), yet limited by a series of reactionary design choices clearly meant to shorten the difficulty gap (not in a good way, IMO). Personally, this game is an easy recommend and my favorite new release of 2026, but it will need some quality post-release content to elevate it into the same echelon (pun intended) in which its predecessor resides.

 

[Jack Videogames]

Will I catch the calendar? All signs point to... maybe? If I stop playing 60h games, at least.

***

60h. Managed to fill a lot of the Pokédex but got bored during the postgame.

Oh hey speak of the devil! This is a very, very good game. The natural evolution of the DQ Builders formula. The transition from habitats to "human-style" houses was very well done, the gameplay is engaging and addicting,

At least I only sunk 60h into it. My wife is in the low hundreds...

My Score: ★★★★★

***

65:41h. All substories completed, including both Amons.

Well what can I say? I'm a bit of a masochist. Also, I wanted to check out the DC. I didn't mind most additions and changes, though some of them were a bit unnecessary. Kiryu and Nishiki's banter after credits was fun, though too tongue-in-cheek - it felt like they were in a podcast. Still likely the best game in the series, and probably impossible to top.

My Score:

***

14:09h. Standard difficulty.

I understand what Capcom was going for here. And I have to say - everything in this game was really-really high quality. The Grace sections were incredibly tense, particularly the hospital, and had some of the scariest sequences in the whole series. Leon's action sequences were a bit less stellar - nothing as good as RE4, for example - but they were great to let go of some adrenaline after Grace's pant-shitting situations.

Near the end of the game however the story petered out a bit and ended in a somewhat nonsensical end, with two very weak bosses and a "shoot the tumors" final boss. Oh well - at least the rest of the game was mint.

My Score: ★★★★★

***

40:21h. About 32 were for Y3, the rest for Dark Ties. All substories and side activities completed, except for Kanda's Damage Control which I got to rank 14 because Survival Hell is dumb.

As someone that has played Yakuza for two decades I'm going to say it.

This is not a bad game. Not at all. However, this is not Yakuza 3. This is Like a Dragon: Orphanage Yakuza in Okinawa.

The story is there. The graphics are fantastic. The fighting style is a giant improvement over Blockuza 3 (which I love dearly, may be the one I love the most). Some of the new substories are good fun. But the Lalala Mobile thing is dumb. The photography thing is dumb. The Reapers hunt is a watered down version of the HLA. The side activities are rehashes of things already seen in other games. And controversies aside, the new models for Hamazaki, Rikiya and Nakahara are simply... not it. They lack the "strength" those faces had, particularly Hamazaki, who went from a scarred gorilla to a squeaky Frieza.

Also, the game is noticeably less sleazy, which for a Yakuza based game is bad. Michiru is gone, the vacationing couple is gone (why?). No hostesses either. Everything is sanitized, full of celebrity actors... basically, Like a Dragon.

Finally, and while I enjoyed Dark Ties' crime drama, the changes to the ending are stupid. Mine surviving is stupid. Hamazaki not shanking Kiryu is stupid. Richardson surviving is stupid. Lau surviving is stupid. Kashiwagi surviving THAT is extra stupid. Why do people no longer die in a story about mafia wars?

I am curious about where they are taking this, because it was a bit of a trainwreck. A good game no doubt - but a weird direction for the series.

My Score: ★★★★☆

 

[BusierDonkey]

Game 28

Snow Bros.: Nick & Tom Special
Completed co-op playthrough

It's Snow Bros. Pelt enemies with snow, ball them up and kick them into each other. This is a single screen platformer like Bubble Bobble, but I would say this release wasn't quite as special as Bubble Bobble was. It is fun to blast through with a friend (or sibling in my case) though and is certainly worth a playthrough. The new art is fluffy and well animated, and the remixed music fits the game perfectly.

Game 29

No Man's Sky
Completed all major objectives

I was a decade late to this party and thus missed out on the launch day shenanigans. That also meant I stepped into the pool at the deep end. The first few days with this game were just me trying to figure out what I was even supposed to do. This game includes a decade's worth of updates, so you get a lot tossed at you immediately. Once I got my bearings however, the game was mostly smooth sailing. I love the game's mechanical designs; I got distinct 1980's Fisher-Price Alpha Star vibes. The ships are just the right amount of low detail in their design with just the right amount of pointless detail like spinning thrusters, dryer vent ducting and pointless greeble. This really carries across the whole game. The music is also pretty good, with ambient tracks accompanying you on your directionless wanderings. Art aside, the meat and potatoes of this game is the directionless wandering. You go where you want, when you want, and do whatever you want. You can follow waypoints and tick off objectives, but I did what came naturally to me, I went "that way" and farted around for a month. Somehow, I managed to knock off the game's major quests, uncovered the game's pretty decent story, assembled a game-breaking corvette that can one-shot just about anything, built a successful city, built up a massive fleet of ships to take on expeditions, destroyed a massive pirate dreadnaught and reset the entire universe. The game isn't "over", and I will be regularly returning to it, but I feel I've reached the point where I can call the game "done". The game is pretty impressive despite its age but unfortunately there are some major issues as well. Not too long into my adventures, the spaceship radar stopped displaying local points of interest and even mission markers would disappear when I got close. In a game of this scale waypoints aren't really optional and it made finding things difficult. Missions themselves would often bug out too, with either NPCs or objects becoming unresponsive. At one point one of the game's main objectives became impossible because an item I received simply never appeared in my inventory. This issue was made worse by the save system which only has two points per file. Often the game would overwrite both almost simultaneously. Despite the glitches and bugs, the game has been pretty enjoyable and is something I'll return to now and again in the coming years.

 

[applesaucejaxon]

May Update:

12: Vampire Crawlers - Switch 2 - Beat 5/2
Holy crap, this was fun. I'm a big Vampire Survivors fan, so I figured I would check this out. This absolutely blows away Survivors. When things finally started to come together and I threw together my first 10+ combo, everything clicked. I'm already looking forward to whatever expansions come down in the future.

13: Mario Golf Super Rush - Switch - Beat 5/15
It was fine. I remember playing this a bit on my OG Switch, and it definitely runs a lot better on the Switch 2. I've been wanting to play a golf game lately since it's finally that time of year, and I realized that 2k and The Masters just aren't that fun. I was trying to explain it to my son yesterday, but nothing now matches the Tiger Woods games back during the PS2 era. There was just something that they had that nothing today can match. I'm going to go through some bins in my basement and see if I still have a copy of one of them on my PS2 or Gamecube.
Regarding Mario Golf: it's fun, but overly simplistic. I definitely had more fun playing this than 2K or Masters on my PS5, but it still doesn't quite scratch the itch. The mini games are fun to play with my kids, though.

 

[Cert.in.Death]

Review: 4/10

Spoiler: Final Thoughts

Were I not expecting more from Mouse: PI For Hire, I imagine I wouldn't be as dour toward it as I am. Perhaps I should be more lenient since it - very noticeably - is an obvious indie experience, far more than its marketing leads you to believe. It tries to fashion itself as a boomer shooter but its multi-avenue campaign structure favors narrative over gameplay and neither result in anything particularly noteworthy. In other words, both the gameplay and structural designs (excuse the pun) fall flat.

Credit economy is constrained to a maddening degree and the game withholds its available arsenal until the player is already through 90% of all levels. Additionally, whenever I would use the weapon wheel and summon its UI, it would cause the game's framerate to stutter wildly for 1-3 seconds after closure (worse yet, it did this persistently through my entire playthrough). Unsure if I'm alone in this experience but after 20 or so hours I am beyond (excuse this pun too) fed up.

Then there's the writing. Most conversations are soliloquy narrations by Jack (main protagonist) and conclude with either a bad cheese pun or dead-end one-liners (at first it's charming, but it never grows out of it and 10-15 hours later I'm ready to snap). But most maddening is how often it goes to the well of pop culture references for material. Whether it's Star Trek, Tiger King, modern popular music, or ages-old memery, it achieves nothing outside of rank mimicry (I could do this all day).

Admittedly, chasing trophies in this game made it a more volatile experience than it would have been otherwise. But each hour provided greater frustration as the stitching of the disparate segments and the team's struggle to weave them together grew more obvious. The end experience was a worthy equal on the same plane as the aggregate of its cheese puns: tirelessly grating.

(Excuse me or don't for that last one, had to do it).

 

[Cert.in.Death]

Review: 7/10

Spoiler: Final Thoughts

My god the screen-tearing.

Needed to off the Mouse experience from my mind, so decided to try something more aligned with genre expectations in the boomer-shooter lineup. Gameplay comes first in ME - the narrative is cliche cyberpunk dystopia drivel, dismiss it and you'll be all the better off for it - and it leans into supplying as much high-octane action as possible. It's unabashedly attempting to mimic the DOOM reboots of recent memory (primarily the 2016 release) and does just enough to warrant a recommendation from me.

It lacks polish, ambition, and lulls the player into a senseless haze of audio and visual overstimulation, but the feeling of moving through playspaces in Metal Eden is exceptional. It evokes memories of two other games of note: Ghostrunner and Sprawl. It ends up somewhere between the two in terms of quality, but the overlap between them is undeniable.

Still though: the screen-tearing on console is horrific.