GRcade

Blanc (Switch) - 5/10
Picked this up in the sale as my son had been looking to play it since release. It's a charming co-op story with beautiful visuals, but it's just far too slight (took 2hrs to complete) with simplistic puzzling.

Persona 5 Tactica - PS5 - a very enjoyable game, just started new game plus. Which so far is a bit odd as I'm back to character level 1 and now I'm sitting through tutorials again.

Metroid Prime Remaster - 9/10 - I don't need to tell you why. Still excellent.

Ori and the Blind Forest (NSW) - 9/10

Properly got me in the feels.

Hogwarts Legacy

Solid game with decent combat mechanics and quite a range of things to do. Let down slightly by the gear being a chore more than anything particularly strategic and many of the side quests being uninspired. The PS5 haunted shop side quest is probably one of the strongest things in the whole game from a visual design point of view. Not sure how I feel about them putting the best content as a platform exclusive bonus.

Graphics were excellent but I found it would often look a bit jerky if I resumed from sleep - possibly a memory leak issue or something?

8

The Case of the Golden Idol

Good fun puzzler that me an the wife somehow struggled through without using any hints. Gets pretty fiendish by the end.

I liked it quite a lot, but I could not help thinking it was an Obra Dinn light for the majority of the playthrough. Will probably pick up the DLC at some point.

8

Nier: Automata - endings A-E.

8/10

For first half felt like a 9/10 but I wasn't as excited/moved by where the story goes as much as everyone else. Maybe I am the machine.

Lots of interesting game design choices in there, though.

Side-point: I do wish I'd played it on something else except the Switch. Switch version is playable but looking at comparisons I think the lighting and graphics downgrade affects the vibe in some places (like the factory) and smoother combat might be fun too!

Also try pressing Pod and Jump at the same time mid-air for a cool swing jump thing.

A Plague Tale: Requiem.

The gameplay isn't excellent but good enough but bloody hell at the story. It's so tragic. Easily one of my favourite franchises.

Super Mario RPG - 9/10

A wonderful remake of a game I've been wanting to play for ages, the reworked visuals and music are superb, sorry is typical Mario fare but the writing is very good, really nice and short which is a bonus these days when so many games seem to almost demand 100+ hours of your time when its clear the content on offer is stretched so thin.

Paper Mario (N64)



A superb game that has a lot of depth despite initially appearing quite basic. Memorable characters and writing and momentum that keeps up for the entire game. My only quibble is that the environmental puzzles were often just "here's the obvious sign that you need to use a specific partner", but it's to the game's credit that I was still regularly using most of them in the field and in battle up until the end.

Five star pieces out of five

Sniper Elite 4 Deluxe Edition (PS5) - 7/10
Roughly on par with 3, but ended up enjoying the DLC levels more than the actual base game (3 very satisfying Deathstorm missions and a highly replayable Fuhrer mission). Had fun in the main missions, but they just didn't feel quite as well structured; some dragged / were a bit of a pain due to overly alert enemies.

Octopath Traveller 2

I may have enjoyed that more then the first game. Beautiful to look at and the music is just superb! Enjoyable combat and interesting stories. Provides a lot of challenge and you need to learn how the mechanics work to beat the final boss, lots of extra missions and side quests too that actually give you bonuses worth getting. This gets a high 9 from me.

Yakuza Like a Dragon

wrapped this up last night with 60 hours on the clock.

I loved the story of this and thought all the characters were excellent. I also liked the vast majority of the English dub, though a few characters were not great. I thought Ichiban sounded awesome.

The fighting mechanics were OK, nothing even slightly new about them, and sometimes battles would end up going on for far too long because you did not have a certain attack type in your party composition. Nothing that we are not used to by now with JRPGs though.

Almost gave up on the whole thing during the last battle sequence as I did not have a certain skill that would allow recovery from a one hit kill attack. After swapping skills, grinding it up to a level where you get said skill, and then fighting all the way back to the final boss he never even used the attack again

But that was not even close to being able to ruin a fantastic game, and the end story sequence was one of the very best in the "franchise".

It's not as good as 0, and there is something "Shenmuey" I really love about 3, but it's certainly in the upper echelon of games featuring Kiryu (and the Judgment titles, which I also really like). Which, for someone who is not crazy about JRPGS, is quite the achievement.

I might have to play in the Japanese dub for the next couple though - Kiryu sounded strawberry floating awful.

9.

Broken Sword 5 (Switch) - 5/10
Unfortunately, this started to drag for me fairly early on. While it did improve once it got out of Paris, by then I just couldn't really be bothered. The graphics and full speech (not the dialogue!) were great, as were some of the puzzles; however, some were just too obtuse / verging on ridiculous.

Was reading the Nintendo Life review earlier and thought it was pretty much bang on the money:

"But those short on patience and with a low tolerance for bad acting (and worse accents) should seek out the aforementioned superior Switch adventures before investigating this curious concoction of mostly redundant old-school sensibilities mixed with flashes of evergreen flair and modern HD artistry."
https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/ni ... ents_curse

Killzone Shadow Fall - 6/10

+ Looks really nice in places.
+ Some really good music and sound design.
+ Shooting mechanics are solid enough.
+ Nicely varied locations.

- Story is dull and confusingly told.
- Weapons are far too samey and numerous. I've just completed the game and couldn't name one weapon. Utterly generic and forgettable.
- Too many uninteresting collectables.
- Some vaguely interesting gameplay mechanics and features that are introduced, but there's rarely a reason to use some of them.

I really wanted to like this, but it's painfully average and ultimately quite forgettable. Perhaps I'd have been more invested in the plot if I'd played the previous games, but it as it was it was quite dull, and I just didn't care about what was happening. Most of time I had little idea what was going on and was just ticking objectives off. The weapons were very disappointing, and while the shooting itself was fine, it wasn't enough to elevate the experience. I liked how the music kicked in at certain points - that did feel like it elevated things a bit - but that's probably the only interesting thing it did (oh, and the playing of audiologs through the controller's speaker - that was a nice touch).

I've completed the game on normal difficulty, and have absolutely no inclination to go back and play any of the campaign again or get any of the collectables. I might quickly check out the offline multiplayer, but otherwise I'm pretty much done with this one. A couple of bright spots, but very forgettable otherwise.

I loved killzone 2 and 3 but never clicked with this. Think I gave up half way through. Looks pretty but glad the devs moved on to horizon zero dawn which was superb.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong

Very strangely paced game. First few chapters were setting up a real power struggle in the World of Darkness only for the majority of the game to then take place infiltrating and destroying a government-backed organisation of vampire hunters. With any resolutions within the vampire council quickly resolved in a short epilogue.

It reminded me a lot of TellTale's games though and I can see myself playing it again one day just to pick completely opposite choices to see if it changes things much. After each chapter, the game made a point of telling me things I'd missed so it'd be good to go back and find them.

Very difficult to recommend this game to anyone really. I enjoyed it enough but I think that's mainly because I'm already heavily invested in the World of Darkness and enjoy any kind of media in its setting.

Rez Infinite (PS5) - 7/10
Areas 1-4 were on the easy side, but I enjoyed the whole audiovisual experience and the more challenging area 5. Will likely dip back at some point and aim for the best ending.

Star Trek: Resurgence - 7/10

This was a lot better than I was expecting it to be. Any 90s era Star Trek fan who can look past the various shortcomings of the game should take a look at this as the storyline is excellent and the post Nemesis setting is very well realised. It lacks most of the downtime we’d get in a lot of Star Trek TV shows, which hampers getting to see the rest of the characters as a proper crew but what it lacks in B plots it makes up for in a well paced main story that keeps drawing you in for more. Like a lot of Telltale-esque adventure games it’s well set up to be played in chunks.

I’d rate it higher if only it didn’t steer much more toward being a visual novel with QTEs rather than something like The Walking Dead or Life is Strange where you’re generally in more direct control of the characters, plus it has a constant issue with dialogue popping or crackling, which for a game almost entirely about a story being told to you is quite bad. The choices on offer are also pretty straightforward for the most part. There are also a couple of sequences where the laborious controls get completely in the way resulting in the same unskippable cutscenes getting repeated.

But look past all that and you get something that actually makes me want to watch an awful S1 episode of TNG this draws heavily from, which should say enough.

Chants of Sennaar - 7/10

I loved Heaven’s Vault for the story and the central mechanic of translating glyphs in spite of it being an otherwise really quite clunky game. Similarly with this game I really enjoyed the main translation puzzle but I have no idea why the creators of this game thought sticking in annoying stealth sections would add to the game. It all plays out a lot more smoothly than Heaven’s Vault does but is simply not as memorable a game.

TOEM - 8/10

I don’t tend to get on with photography games all that much because they typically try to marry a film/analogue aesthetic with the immediacy and flexibility of digital photography and loses a lot of the friction that is central to photography in the process.

Now TOEM does just do that too but for whatever reason I absolutely loved this game. A fun setting and series of puzzles go a long way to making me want to actually take photos.

Story of Seasons - Friends in Mineral Town - PC/Steam; 8 out of ten

As basic as it was compared to likes of Stardew Valley and Coral Island, I felt that was probably one of good things about it - it's simple farming game where you can chill and play. Going for all achievements does take some fun out of it (I spent ages resetting from platinum sheep to get X Wool) so I can't see how people are going for true 100%, that could take ages.

But aside from that I had lot of fun playing it! The events with NPCs are adorable, especially when my family got a child to look after and getting to know villagers as well learning how to get cashflow going has seen me putting in loads of hours into it. Considering I've not even played GBA original the game is very playable to this day to newcomers who are looking for simple farming game.