I played quite a bit in the second half of this year.

Call Of Duty: Ghosts

When Call Of Duty: Ghosts came out initially in 2013, it was absolutely dogpiled on by everyone for being mediocre at best. Some even went as far as to say that it was trash. I do not share this opinion. The biases from around that time are likely due to how frequently games in the series release, and people just being sick of the same general formula.

Well, more than a decade later, and after a relatively long detachment from the series, I can say that Ghosts is a reasonably OK game. The set pieces are relatively well done, and the story is actually somewhat interesting. But I would say that the lore behind it is lacking explanation and details. It also ends on a cliffhanger that quite obviously has yet to be resolved.

Gameplay-wise, it is more COD. You shoot dudes, move forward, and shoot more dudes. There are a few more stealth sections thrown in there this time. Overall, however, I did enjoy my time with the game. The gunplay is a bit floaty and recoilless compared to the current handling model, but you get used to it.

But to cover the biggest memes from this game, the dog sections are better than I was expecting but front-loaded and don’t appear later in the game. And the fish do in fact swim away if you get close to them.

You can watch my playthrough here.

Vampyr

Where do I even start with this game?

It takes place in London during the latter part of WWI, in 1918. The city is stricken with influenza, and parts of the city are quarantined. This game was made before COVID, but the restrictions that were around during the time the game is set are unsettlingly similar. But you can do your own research into that.

Anyway, the main character wakes up in a pile of bodies after being turned into a vampire. And now has to deal with vampire hunters on top of the now increasing numbers of “Skals”, a mutated vampiric strain. For the record, we are considered an “Ekon”. I don’t know if these are real terms or not in actual vampire lore, but that’s what the game says.

As a vampire, the player has several restrictions placed on them. They can’t go out in the sunlight and cannot enter people’s homes without their permission. But they do get the powers of mesmerisation, along with other combat-specific powers. That said, I found little use for those powers. I’ll get back to the combat in a bit.

Being a doctor in-game, you spend a lot of time running around the city talking to people and giving them medicine. In speaking with the inhabitants of Southwark, Docklands, Whitechapel, Pembroke Hospital, and the West End, you obtain information about all the other characters, often in the form of gossip. However, this information opens up new talking points, which can provide a few alternative ways through encounters. Furthermore, as you unlock more information about a character, the more XP they’ll be worth should you decide to drink their blood.

The gossip is humorous at times, and I will be using the expression “He is of lesser lineage” in the future, but the characters are extremely downtrodden and gloomy most of the time. I know there’s a war and a pandemic on, but the complete lack of traditional British dark humour and wit is noticeable. But seeing as this game was developed by French developer DONTNOD, I can’t say it’s terribly surprising.

Getting back to the gameplay, this is where pretty much all the complaints start piling up. It’s a pseudo-Soulslike. Perhaps more akin to a bargain-bin Bloodborne. You’ve got stamina, health, and blood meters on screen, the last one of which acts as your mana bar for vampiric powers. Enemies are damage sponges to start with, although they become more of a pushover as you get better weapons, at least the general mobs do.

Enemies have levels, and they tend to go up considerably as you progress through story beats. To level yourself up, you need to rest at a hideout and dump XP points into abilities and stats. However, this respawns every enemy on the map. So if you need to go from district to district healing the residents, because they have a tendency to get sick every time you rest as well, you have to clear out the enemies again. This gets extremely tedious, doubly so when they start spawning tougher monsters at higher levels later in the game.

And don’t even think about fast travel. It doesn’t have any whatsoever. You have to leg it around the map.

The crafting system provides minor improvements to weapons. You’re better off finding the best weapons in the game first before dumping resources into them. Said resources are a bunch of chemicals with really long names. I don’t think there’s any actual scientific process involved in the upgrade materials; I think they just picked whatever was “close enough” to what might actually be useful.

The game’s difficulty is one of the biggest issues. The level gaps near the end of the game get quite large. The last boss fight in the game had a 10-level difference between us. It makes those larger fights more of a chore than they need to be and requires more of a reliance on cheesing them rather than engaging with the combat properly.

Unfortunately, unless you want to literally kill everyone in the game for their blood, you’re not going to get enough experience to be able to match them.

Although I enjoyed the social mechanics in the game and the story was good enough to keep me tagging along, the gameplay and other mechanics just make it too tedious to recommend to most people. But you can watch my playthrough here, if you’re interested.

Sushi Ben

I was really excited for this game and had high hopes for it. It’s originally billed as a VR game set in a remote Japanese sea town. You are here to help out a local sushi place get back on its feet. Unfortunately, there’s a real estate agent that’s buying up all the property in the area, driving people away and sabotaging the procurement of ingredients for the sushi.

This real estate agent treats her subordinates as a method of transportation. Walking all over them, using them as a motorcycle, even as a helicopter. A fun character, but barely in the game.

As you can tell from the screenshot, it has a very Mega Man Legends-esque look. It’s what drew me in initially. As you can imagine, performance in the game is fine. It didn’t stress my PC out at all.

I previously mentioned that it was billed as a VR game. The fact of the matter is that you can in fact play it on desktop. And I would highly recommend doing so, as the VR implementation seems to be abandonware. Strewn with bugs and issues not found in the desktop version. Plus, all the activities are infinitely easier on desktop. Fishing, archery, the lot. Table tennis is probably the only one where it’s mostly the same.

On the subject of archery, they originally drew a curve to show where your arrow would land, which worked well in VR. But then they changed it and made it a dot. Which made archery in VR significantly more of a hassle to use.

I’ve also had my fair share of bugs and softlocks with the game. Halting progress and often requiring a restart. It got better after a few patches, but it does add to the many annoyances I had with the game.

But the biggest problem with the game? It’s boring. The mini-games aren’t fun; most of the story missions involve walking slowly across the map to talk to someone, having your annoying frog statue thing turn into some item, and walking somewhere else. Then you go back to your apartment for the night. It becomes tedious, and as fun as some of the characters are, they’re a bit flat, and you can’t interact with them outside of their usual story beats.

And then to top it off, it ends on a really crappy cliffhanger. An utter disappointment. You can watch my playthrough here.

Resident Evil 4 (OG)

I had never played the original Resident Evil 4. My primary experiences with the series involve the remakes of 2 & 3, RE7, and Village. All of which I enjoyed. Seeing as it was Halloween, I decided that it was the perfect time to finally play it.

I did not play it as is, however. I decided to install the HD Texture mod pack and an additional mod that added some tweaks and options to the game, particularly removing the QTEs. I must say, the improved textures are most welcome. They were painstakingly recreated from original sources and replace the old ones near perfectly.

Considering the age of the game, you’re probably wondering how it holds up to modern scrutiny. Well, the tank controls certainly don’t feel great. Turning your entire character around when you move in a direction. But the game was designed around that, and I never found it to be too intrusive. The gunplay, on the other hand, holds up quite well. I’m not sure if the RE4 tweaks mod makes any changes to it, but I had no issues landing headshots. Not being able to move while shooting wasn’t as much of a burden as I was expecting either; I tend to stand my ground when I shoot in games anyway. Probably a holdover from when I played Counter-Strike: Source.

Inventory Tetris is about as fun as it is troublesome. Not a huge deal, but I wish there was an automation feature. Finding the space for items can take a while at times.

As for the game itself, the story is fun enough to keep me hanging on. There’s an appropriate amount of cheese and weirdness to keep me interested. The enemy variety is not too bad either. There are certainly some enemies that are awful, those flying bugs you have to deal with once you get to the castle, for instance, but generally it does a good job at keeping you on your toes.

Babysitting Ashley wasn’t too bad. Some of the heavier combat sequences let her hide in a box or something while you take care of the enemies. Some of the sequences in the castle can get stressful, as you have to look after both her and yourself simultaneously. The actual annoying part of it is if she gets grabbed, you have to make sure you’re not aiming at her directly, or you’ll kill her. As friendly fire is very much present. Once you complete the game, one of the unlockable outfits you get is a full suit of armour that makes her completely invulnerable, likely trivialising the whole game.

Ada is awesome. Absolutely bewitching from the moment I first saw her in a cheongsam doing a cartwheel kick during the first cutscene with her and Leon. She has a whole campaign that becomes available after finishing the main game called Separate Ways. It’s a shorter story, only 5 missions. It takes place concurrently with the main story but covers Ada’s side of it. This includes cutscenes from her perspective, also containing secret cutscenes that you could only view in the main story if you did certain things.

Her story also has unique boss fights, including against the main bad guy. As well as turret sections and more. Her fight against Krauser is a bit of a stain on her campaign. It’s a very small arena, and you have to constantly dodge his attacks. If I didn’t have auto-QTE turned on, I likely would have died multiple times.

You get good guns from the get-go in her campaign, so the merchant doesn’t get used much.

Speaking of good guns, the RPG is completely overpowered. It one-shots almost every boss. So it’s good to have one on you at all times so you can instantly win against any tough enemy it throws at you. But it does make the story bosses an absolute joke.

I enjoyed the game from start to finish. The pacing is excellent, with exploration and puzzles breaking up the high-octane action. There are a few sections, particularly in the caves and sewers, that I didn’t like as much, but thankfully, they don’t last that long. The castle section was easily the best part and looked amazing with the HD Textures mod. I see why this game is held in such high regard.

You can watch my playthrough here.

Ninja Gaiden 4

Ninja Gaiden is a notoriously difficult series. I have been beaten by the first level of Ninja Gaiden Black and Sigma multiple times. It’s put a serious hamper on my progress through the series. But I decided to play through Ninja Gaiden 4, as it was on Game Pass and was developed by Platinum Games. External developers for the series haven’t been positively received in the past (Ninja Gaiden Yaiba springs to mind), but Platinum have done good before.

You play as Yakumo, a generic fuckboy ninja dude. He starts the game by rescuing some lady, although he was sent there to kill her, and then spends the rest of the game fighting bosses to bring back the Black Dragon, some super powerful monster whose sealing has led to constant rain and miserable weather in the area.

Let’s start with the good points.

Firstly, the game runs well. I was getting well above 60 FPS on high settings. I was using DLSS, but it wasn’t required if I wanted to keep the smooth framerate.

Combat is mostly good. The animations are smooth, and attacks can be quite visceral. There are two main stances: normal attacks and then a more powerful stance that can be used to parry enemies’ unblockable attacks. Guarding is extremely powerful too, but the game really wants you to learn how to parry, despite it.

As for the negatives, well, there’s a reason why I said the combat is “mostly good”. Starting with the hitboxes, they’re absolutely massive. The first boss has an attack that completely goes above the character’s head but hits for full damage. And there’s hit stun too. So this attack that visually misses you, stuns you, and then further attacks follow quickly, and you die in three hits. Enemies also have absolutely abhorrent tracking, Dark Souls 2-tier even.

The lock-on system is absolute dogshit, and you should turn it off immediately. In multi-enemy fights, it will always choose the enemies furthest away from you instead of the ones right next to you. It also prevents you from parrying or blocking incoming attacks from other directions. It’s simply broken.

Parry windows are not explained at all. The timing on them is a mystery to me, and the tutorials the game gives you on them do not even remotely help. If there was some kind of visual indicator that could assist me in figuring out when to attack, like a circle or on-screen prompt, it would make it considerably easier to understand.

But even that wouldn’t help, as the animation priority system is the largest dictator as to whether or not you eat shit during a combat encounter. Even if you try to attack or block during an enemy attack, the game will ignore it, as the animation for your character being hit begins several frames before actually being hit. This basically means that parrying becomes virtually impossible. It never works properly for me.

I still managed to power through and finish the game. And I don’t hate it, but I spent most of the game swearing at it for very annoying things. These issues on their own would not warrant that much ire, but combined, they led to a very stressful and irritating experience.

Anyway, if you want to watch my playthrough, you can do so here.

Wanted: Dead

Christ, what a pile of shit this was. I finished it out of sheer spite. The worst part is that I don’t know if it was made to be bad deliberately.

The combat is awful, gun and melee. Bullet-spongy enemies make firefights a chore, and melee combat has the same problem Ninja Gaiden 4 does with animation priority, but made even worse. I barely get ammo for the guns that I use, and the gun customisation stuff is nonsensical, with longer barrels on guns giving you less velocity and changing sights somehow letting you do more damage.

That said, I could probably deal with the melee combat on its own, but when most fights centre around guns, it just makes me wonder why it’s even there. They tried to do both and made both mechanics weaker because of it.

This also extends to the boss fights. The first boss is a giant spider tank that’s easy enough to defeat, but the second boss is a dude with a gun for the first phase and then fights you unarmed for the second. But he has attacks that track your position and stun-lock you to death. It was about as fun as using fibreglass as mouthwash. There’s a fight with a sniper with an invisibility cloak that was somewhat better, and the final fight isn’t too difficult as long as you know when to dodge their instant death attack.

So what’s the draw of this game? Why did I finish it?

Well, I finished it out of spite as a driving force, but I also needed to know how much worse it could get. The combat wasn’t the only awful thing. The story is completely nonsensical, and the dialogue sounded like they just grabbed a bunch of random actors and had them read out all their lines on the first take.

That doesn’t bother me that much, however, because at least that is entertaining. The silliness of the game is certainly something to behold. For example, this is the loading screen:

This is a parody of a well-known GIF that’s derived from a lesser-known parody rap battle from the mid-to-late 2000s. It’s a bizarre addition, but the only one. There’s a bunch of anime cutscenes that are related to the main character’s backstory, but like the rest of the plot, they lack any kind of coherence.

To top off the lunacy of it, there are mini-games. There’s a claw machine, a ramen-eating rhythm mini-game, a karaoke mini-game, and an arcade game. The first and last of which are probably the only ones that aren’t an abomination. The latter two have issues with timings, dropped inputs, and just being overly difficult and complicated with their inputs. But they are at least fun distractions. The arcade game was reasonably competent. Debatably the most polished thing in the game.

One final annoyance worth mentioning is that the collectables do not stay collected if you die and get reset back to the checkpoint. It’s a massive pet peeve of mine, and it’s present in this game too. Just one of many problems with it. Also, the woman who played Quiet in MGSV is in this game; she doesn’t do too much, but she’s there.

You can watch my shambles a playthrough here.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7

Black Ops 7 is a bad video game but interesting in its concept. First of all, it requires people to enable TPM and SecureBoot, which I couldn’t be arsed to do. Instead, I streamed the game over both XCloud and GeForce Now. XCloud ran quite well, with only a bit of latency. Although it didn’t feel like the frame rate was actually 60FPS. GeForce Now ran below 60FPS, and I had frequent lag spikes. However, after finishing that session, I realised I had left something downloading in the background, which likely was the root cause of those problems.

Once you get into the game, you find out that it’s online-only. With a forced co-op campaign, although you can play it solo if you want. That said, I played the majority of the game solo, and the one time I decided to play it in co-op made the game significantly less shit. But we’ll get into that.

But because of the forced co-op, there are no mid-level checkpoints to load back into. If you leave a match, you have to start that level from the beginning. You also cannot pause the game.

And now we get into the meat of the problem, the gameplay. The guns are not terribly interesting; the abilities you unlock are useful but only if you remember to actually use them. However, the most annoying thing in this game, head and shoulders above everything else, is the enemies being massive bullet sponges. These aren’t your typical bullet sponges; these dudes have got health to spare. We’re talking about guys who tank multiple magazines’ worth of bullets.

If you thought that the robot enemies in Black Ops 3 were bad, this game doubles it. But for every enemy. Robot enemies also feature in this game, and guess what, they also have stupid amounts of health. It makes every encounter a chore now. Slow, constant shooting, having to manage a tonne of enemies everywhere because they only did the bare minimum of balancing for solo play.

Playing it is a awful slog. So why I did I say that it was interesting?

Well, you spend the entire game tripping balls. You’re hallucinating all kinds of crazy shit. Zombies, giant machetes falling from the sky, and giant plants as a boss fight. The levels are filled with insane visuals. It’s a complete departure from the military focus that the series is known for. It’s almost as if the Zombies team were told to make something, and they just threw shit at the wall. Every level is followed up by an open-world area, which I believe is the Warzone map that has been repurposed. These levels aren’t all that fun, as you rarely get any respite from the enemies that continuously respawn.

But once you finish the game, that open world turns into an extraction shooter with various objectives thrown about the maps and other players. I don’t know if it’s fully Player vs. Player vs. Environment; I think it’s just Player vs. Environment, as I wasn’t able to harm other players. I didn’t play much of it, unfortunately, but it sounds like an interesting idea.

Don’t bother playing this. Complete waste of time.

Skate Story

I remember seeing the trailer for this years ago and wondered if it would ever come out. After what seemed like an eternity, I can finally play it. It’s fucking awesome.

The vibes are immaculate. Visually wild-looking, with the glass skater and abstract rock and building formations everywhere. As for music, it adds a lot to the surrealist aspect. There are also visual and gameplay sequences synced to the music.

The game’s story is fun. It revolves around the player having to eat moons because the devil demanded it. As part of this deal, you get a skateboard, and your body turns into glass.

It works its way into the gameplay, as every small stumble and bail shatters you into tiny pieces. Thankfully the checkpoints are quite forgiving, so it’s never really that frustrating.

As for the skateboarding itself, it doesn’t play like Skate, but I would hesitate to compare it to Tony Hawk as well. It uses a single button to ollie, with additional button presses to mutate it for other tricks. For example, pressing R1 or L1 will let you do kickflips or heelflips. Double tapping those buttons, plus using R2 and L2 as well, you get a reasonably sized but simple list of tricks you can do. There are no grabs as far as I can tell.

It’s a simple system, but the feel of landing tricks and the general weight of the gameplay certainly do a lot of the heavy lifting. If I were going to complain, I would say that the handling of vert ramps, like quarter pipes and halfpipes, is not as smooth as it could be.

Did I mention the game has boss fights?

They’re quite the highlight. Not necessarily from the gameplay perspective; fighting them is quite straightforward, but rather from the audio/visual aspect.

As I mentioned earlier, the music is often in sync with the visuals. So as the music absolutely envelops you, the tension of the fight heightens, and you get absorbed by what you’re doing.

If someone asked me to describe this game, I would say, “Imagine if Suda51 made a skateboarding game”. It’s super cool, I highly recommend checking it out. You can watch my playthrough here.

Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare

Black Ops 7 wasn’t the only Call Of Duty game I played recently. I also delved into the other COD game I hadn’t touched yet. This one seems to be a bit forgotten. It’s quite a departure from the regular COD games, as it takes place in the far future, and you have dogfights in space and Zero-G shootouts.

It’s a bit of a mix between the movement tech from Titanfall and the dogfighting from Freespace. Actually, the similarities to Freespace are staggering. Missions are picked from a map screen on a hub ship, your personal ship has a launch and subspace jump sequence that is very similar to Freespace 2, and the dogfighting in general feels very similar.

Before I get into more of the gameplay, I should comment on the story.

As I mentioned, it takes place in the far future, the UN has now gained complete control and has become the world’s government (God help us), and Mars is now a space colony. However, the colonists aren’t too happy with the Earthlings and have decided to start a war following a failed recon mission by Earth’s forces.

The main villains’ motivations aren’t really explained. He just seems comically evil, committing war crimes en masse with little to no justification beyond “Earth is bad”. The main villain shares an actor with Jon Snow from Game Of Thrones, so that’s something.

The entire game apparently takes place within 24 hours, which just doesn’t seem feasible considering the distances they need to cover and the fact that the main character ends up getting thrown out into space without oxygen for a while but somehow manages to recover without issue.

I can’t say I cared that much about the characters in the game. Only one is even remotely memorable, and that’s the robot guy. And that’s only because he has some dark-humoured jokes about robots destroying humanity.

As I mentioned, missions are picked up from a map screen on the main hub ship. The side missions consist of dogfights, stealth missions, and sabotage missions. Fairly standard COD stuff, but now in space. You also get to choose your loadout.

The weapons vary from Space AKs to pistols that vaporise people in one shot. The latter of which is called the Eraser pistol. An apt name. That said, besides some of the bigger guns that had obscene damage outputs, I didn’t use that many of the guns.

The levels aren’t much to write home about. Although the skyboxes are gorgeous, the levels themselves aren’t that crazy. But occasionally, there are some mechanics associated with them, like shooting windows on the moonbase to cause enemies to get launched out into the vacuum of space. A level that takes place on Mercury has you avoiding direct sunlight so you don’t get instantly cooked.

Although I liked parts of the game, I do understand why it’s not that popular. It is a massive departure from the normality of the series and goes a bit too far into sci-fi. I still think it’s interesting at least.

You can watch my playthrough here.

RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business

Earlier this year, I played RoboCop: Rogue City and was surprised at just how much I enjoyed it. All the side quests and characters helped flesh out a world I’d only seen in movies. So when Unfinished Business was announced, I was quite excited to jump back in.

Unfortunately, it’s just not anywhere near as good as the base game. Although a lot of my gripes have to do with the performance.

I ran the original RoboCop mostly fine on my rig, with some settings turned down. But here, I need to turn it down further and rely heavily on DLSS. The image quality suffers a lot. But to make matters more confusing, you spend most of the game in an interior. Grey corridors, labs, and offices make up the majority of environments. I suspect the polygon count is way higher than it needs to be.

Not helping matters is the crashing. I streamed my playthrough of this and experienced an average of two crashes per stream. Usually about 40 minutes to an hour apart. It usually occurred during or just before a cutscene. I suspect it’s something to do with the loads. And it’s not just me encountering these problems either; the Steam forums are full of posts about it.

Putting aside the performance problems, how is the game?

Well, if you’re coming into this expecting more exploration and side quests, you’re going to be disappointed. There’s a very heavy combat focus the moment you get out of the opening sections, and breaks from it are somewhat rare. Not to say the combat is bad; it’s about the same as the first game. But it doesn’t do anything new, and enemy variety is lacking. At some point it just gets very repetitive and numbingly easy once you equip the Auto-9 with the PCBs that turn it into a full-auto monster. You practically turn into a walking A-10 Warthog.

There is at least one memorable combat segment. You get to control an ED-209. Although short, there are a few Easter eggs, and getting to be overpowered as hell is always enjoyable. I must say, it did remind me of the mech segment in Escape From Butcher Bay. Actually, this whole expansion gives me a similar vibe to the Riddick game.

There’s not much new in the way of weapons. The highlighted weapon they’ve added is a freeze gun. It turns pretty much any enemy into a popsicle. Unfortunately, the polygon count on the ice shards is absurdly high. So using it absolutely ruins the frame rate. It’s also not that fun to use, but it is effective.

There are some breaks from the combat. There are a couple of hub sections where you can pick up some side quests. These usually involve going from one place to another, getting items or searching for clues. There’s nothing that really stands out, unfortunately. Most of these side quests are usually finished in the same sentence that I start them in, or quickly thereafter. I can remember one where some dude wanted me to lift a gate, so I did, and then the side quest immediately completed about as quickly as it appeared on screen.

There are a couple of other sections, such as the part where you play as pre-RoboCop Alex Murphy and another section where you play as the scientist lady that communicates with you throughout the game. Murphy’s segment is too different from the main game, but the latter’s section starts off running away from thugs, and the best of it is a walking simulator with a choice at the end.

The story is a bit of a mess. The main villain’s goal is not particularly clear. He’s stolen the chair RoboCop uses, and I assume he’s trying to use it to hack OCP. But to what end I’m not sure. He also has history with Murphy, which is part of the flashback previously mentioned. There are a few recurring side characters, but beyond that, I struggled to care too much.

Overall, it’s still fine. It’s more RoboCop. But this expansion certainly has a lot of problems. I can only recommend it if you really want to turn more bad guys into paste. You can watch my playthrough of both the main game and the expansion here.

Metaphor: ReFantazio

As of the time of writing this, I have not finished Metaphor. I’m at the 2nd town; I’ve fought the boss there. I’m struggling to make my way through the game.

The fantasy racism aspect isn’t as appealing as it could be. Partly because they only depict the bare minimum of actual atrocities so far. But the thing that actually bugs me is the lack of reasoning, insults, and slurs that actual racism would actually bring. It’s really half-arsed, but they spend an ungodly amount of time on the subject.

Every single conversation in this game feels like an exposition dump. Constantly having to explain the intricacies of the world, as it isn’t ours and doesn’t operate like ours. But it bores the fuck out of me. I’d rather listen to the shipping forecast.

I don’t care about any of the characters whatsoever. They are miserable to talk to, they barely do anything outside of battle, and their personalities are uninteresting. I seriously could not care less.

The actual turn-based combat is OK. You get an amount of turns; you get more uses out of them if you exploit weaknesses. But there are no all-out attacks, and you can’t knock enemies down. You can’t swap to specific party members in battle like you can in Persona 5 and Persona 3 Reload via Baton Pass.

The class system is a bit complicated. There’s a bunch of them; they all have their own skill sets, and you can change the class of every character at any time out of battle. As you level up the classes, those skills can be used with other classes. What bugs me about the system is that the characters clearly have preferred classes, but the game is awful at explaining which ones those are.

As for what I actually like about the game, well, it’s pretty. There are some nice backgrounds and art. And you get to ride a giant mechanical lizard thing as your main method of transportation.

I’ll try my best to finish this, but I will have to force myself to do so.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

As if I could start this section in any other way.

This game blew up this year, and various people I know have raved about it, so I decided to give it a go.

And holy shit does it run like crap. It looks like crap too. The image quality is fuzzy and blurry. You have to use temporal reconstruction along with DLSS because you simply cannot run this game at native resolution at a reasonable framerate.

As for the gameplay, well, it’s a turn-based game similar to Persona or SMT, but with some real-time aspects. You can aim a gun at specific weak points to do additional damage, dodge and parry attacks, and your skills have a quick-time event associated with them that boosts the effectiveness of them.

No need to worry about mana levels either. Skills are gated by a battle-specific meter that recovers as you do damage and parry attacks. Which is nice. Worrying about mana use gets tiring after a while, so I appreciate not having to bother with it.

Levels are mostly corridors with hidden bits and other things to find. There’s no minimap for these levels, so it becomes easy to lose your sense of direction. There’s also an overworld map which you explore more or less the same way but with the camera further out.

Much like Metaphor, I’ve barely touched the surface of it. It’s more interesting than Metaphor, but I’m struggling to find the time or motivation to play it. I’m just not seeing what everyone else sees.

Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii

Majima is a pirate now.

This is an amazing premise let down by an incredibly slow introduction. They spend the first hour or so of the game introducing mechanics like growing plants and feeding animals.

Once the game does get going at least, it’s not too bad. The combat is fast-paced. Majima gets a dual-sword moveset that turns him into a human blender. But the combat isn’t anything beyond what the series has done before.

I’ve fought a dude named Keith about four times now, after about 6-8 hours of playing. Each time I wonder why he continues to bother trying to fight me. Once I can understand, twice also, but three fights and beyond – what has he got to prove at this point? Is he a masochist or something? Does he enjoy getting his arse kicked?

He’s not even a main character or anything. I genuinely do not understand why we keep fighting this dude.

I’m barely into chapter 2 as I’m writing this, so I still have plenty left to play. So I’ll give another update next year.

Other Stuff I Played:

Lumines Remastered

I hadn’t played Lumines before. My first experience with it was with the demo for Lumines Arise. If I were to describe it in layman’s terms, it’s a mix of Tetris, Puyo Puyo, and Puzzle Fighter. The goal is to connect 4 coloured blocks into a box shape. Then a line goes across the screen, clearing the blocks.

Off the bat, the music is incredible. The first song is “SHININ'” by Mondo Grosso, which is an awesome song. Other songs by them and songs by Nobuchika Eri are featured heavily in it. And they’re absolutely fantastic. Unfortunately, unlocking songs requires me to be significantly better at the game than I am.

My one actual complaint is that the game is FPS dependent. Playing above 60Hz causes it to run at much higher speeds than intended. Although 60Hz can also be quite difficult during the latter stages. I haven’t tested at 30Hz, perhaps that would solve the issue.

PowerWash Simulator 1 & 2

Another busybody game in a mountain of simulators of real-world work. I did not play much of the first game. It made me motion sick after a while, and hunting down the smallest of smudges became extremely tedious as the maps got larger.

The second game greatly improves the pixel hunting, highlighting the specific parts that require cleaning. Plus it’s more lenient as to when something is clean. Soap is free in the second game and is an extremely powerful tool. Using it means I no longer require the highest pressure nozzle for the toughest stains. Making my life much easier.

If I must complain, I’m not sure what the point of the hub area is. You can customise it, but it doesn’t serve much purpose. Also, the order of the levels does not really respect how much time you’re willing to put into it. You’ll start with a small job and then immediately receive multiple longer jobs after it. Some of which take over an hour to finish, if not more. There’s no time estimate on these jobs either. Thankfully you can save in the middle of one and pick up where you left off.

It would be nice if it gave you a time estimate for a job as well as organising it into small, medium, and large jobs. And then letting you pick which one you want to go to at the present time.

Either way, it’s a good time-wasting/podcast listening game.

Keeper

Double Fine released a game this year. Not that you would know, considering the complete lack of marketing for it. Anyway, it’s a pretty walking simulator where you play as a lighthouse making his way towards a mountain. Although you don’t stay in the lighthouse form. You get turned into a boat for a bit and a couple other things.

There’s no combat to speak of, but there are some puzzles. They’re not terribly difficult to figure out, but they use the mechanics they introduce to you fairly well.

It doesn’t run very well. I was struggling to maintain 60 FPS on near-low settings with DLSS Performance. I don’t know how the hell they managed to make a heavily scripted walking simulator run so badly, but they did. It’s an annoying blemish to an otherwise neat little game.

You can watch my playthrough here.

All In Abyss

I believe I mentioned this when I talked about Balatro. It’s another poker-focused game, but with a story told via a visual novel. I actually prefer it to Balatro because I play against another character instead of just the void. I prefer having the social aspects of poker, and seeing the other character react to your moves is fun.

That said, although the game does a good job at explaining the hierarchy of hands, cheating is part of the story and gameplay mechanics. So it doesn’t matter how good your hands are at times; the game can and will ruin it.

I haven’t finished the game; I’ve only made it up to the story part leading up to the next boss. But the first boss’ death scene was very disturbing. All I’ll say is that it involved food, and I’ll leave it at that. I hope I get some more time to play this soon.

DOOM 64

I feel like this game gets overlooked a lot. Probably because the N64 is probably the worst pile of crap to play shooters on, and partly because it was stuck on the N64 for the longest time. Either way, we can play it on PC now.

It feels like they took at the later levels in DOOM and made more of them. The maps are complicated with a lot of key hunting. A good amount of secrets too. Most of the weapons and enemies are the same, but with a different visual style.

I think the new art looks pretty good, albeit different. Certainly better looking than the PS1 port of the original.

The final boss is stupidly difficult, however. It requires you to obtain items from secret areas throughout the game to power up the Unmaker weapon. Otherwise, the final boss will obliterate you. Unless, of course, you save your BFG ammo and cheese it. In the additional levels they added for the remaster, these secret items are in the map with the final boss. Cutting out the need to hunt them down in prior levels.

You can watch my playthrough here.

Anime Corner:

Turkey!

I came into this expecting a bowling anime. I did not get a bowling anime.

Instead I got a stupidly contrived plot about time-travelling teenagers introducing bowling to some ancient Japanese family of girls while they deal with trying to figure out how to get back. Then they go back, realise that the girls they were friends with get slaughtered by the local warlord, and decide to go back again. With little to no consideration for how their actions could potentially change the course of history.

Frankly, it takes itself far too seriously, while also being probably one of the dumbest things I’ve ever watched.

New Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt

After God knows how long, there’s a new Panty and Stocking anime. And it’s the same as ever. Tonnes of pop culture references, sexual humour, and a crap load of uncensored nudity. The last of which is exclusive for Western audiences, as Japan censors that.

The parodies are generally more recent and very Western. Everything from Star Wars and Indiana Jones to Tomb Raider of all things. Inferno Cop even shows up at some point in some weird joke about American police brutality. I enjoyed it.

City The Animation

Remember Nichijou? City is from the same author. There are a lot more characters and more story threads than in Nichijou. There’s a group of three girls that often act as the main trio, but focus is certainly spread out beyond them.

The animation is incredible in places. Lots of characters on screen moving around, long shots with multiple gags as the camera moves past time, and so on. KyoAni still have some fantastic animators working for them.

That said, I don’t think the show is as funny as Nichijou was. The many characters do a lot for the world-building, but there are so many of them that it’s difficult to focus on some. Which means there’s a lack of driving force behind the overall plot. Nichijou mostly focused on Yuuko, her friends, the robot Nano, and her child professor. Other characters would only get a handful of gags. Here, characters get most of a whole episode. Sometimes multiple plotlines run in parallel. It gets hard to follow.

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My Top 10 Games Of The Year

Released Games That I Wanted To Play Or Play More Of

• Death Stranding 2
• Rune Factory: Guardians Of Azuma
• Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark
• Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound
• Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
• Baby Steps
• Tokyo Xtreme Racer
• Digimon Story: Time Stranger
• Lumines Arise

God I wish I had money.

Worst Game I Played

Sushi Ben

I really wish this game wasn’t as boring or buggy as it is, but here we are. I already talked about it above, so I’ll save you the reread.

Honourable Mentions:

Uma Musume: Pretty Derby

Not technically a 2025 game considering it’s been out in Japan for about 4 years. But I enjoy the lore of all the horses portrayed. Especially Gold Ship and Nice Nature. Unfortunately, the grinding and gacha elements were having a net negative effect on my life, so I had to drop the game.

Now here’s the Top 10:

1. Keeper
2. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
3. RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business
4. Ninja Gaiden 4
5. All In Abyss
6. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
7. Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O.
8. PowerWash Simulator 2
9. DOOM: The Dark Ages
10. Skate Story

I loved the style, the music, and the skateboarding was awesome despite being somewhat simple. It’s just a damn good game and stood out the most compared to everything else.

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My Top 10 Anime Of The Year

Special Mentions:

• Rock wa Lady no Tashinami deshite
• Ballpark de Tsukamaete!

Both fun shows, but lacking something that keeps it out of the top 10 of the year.

Worst Anime I Watched:

• Lazarus
• Turkey!

Lazarus doesn’t respect your intelligence and feels the need to spew self-righteous moral bullshit at you every chance it gets. The animation is good, but I couldn’t stand the plot or its characters. Topping it off is probably one of the stupidest endings ever written.

Turkey, on the other hand, could have been a normal “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” anime about bowling. But instead, the animators decided on time-travelling nonsense. I’ve already talked about it above, so I won’t repeat myself.

Right, here’s the Top 10:

1. City The Animation
2. Kowloon Generic Romance
3. Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Otona e no Kaidan
4. Okinawa de Suki ni Natta Ko ga Hougen Sugite Tsurasugiru
5. New Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt
6. Kusuriya no Hitorigoto 2nd Season
7. Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray & Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray Part 2
8. Mattaku Saikin no Tantei to Kitara
9. Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc
10. Ninja to Koroshiya no Futarigurashi

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Well, that’s another year in the can. It was pretty awful for a variety of reasons. Storms with power outages, a close family member died, several people in the games industry whose games I grew up with passed away, and prices of everything skyrocketed to fuel some idiotic fake demand for AI.

God, this year sucked. And next year is probably going to suck too. Let’s try and make the best of it.

ADMAN

Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005)

Despite my love for Need For Speed Underground 1 & 2, particularly 2, I never played the follow-up, Most Wanted. I know it’s beloved by much of the Need For Speed audience, but I never got around to it for one reason or another.

Unfortunately, to get it to run on modern machines, you have to mod it. Thankfully, the process of doing so isn’t too difficult, and if you know where to look, you can find versions of the game with all that stuff included. With those installed, the game runs pretty much perfectly. It looks extremely crisp and runs at my monitor’s full frame rate. I don’t know if there are any frame-rate-dependent aspects to it, but I haven’t found any problems.

The racing is solid. Plenty of events to do with different goals and challenges. The car selection isn’t huge, especially near the start of the game. But even halfway through the game, it’s still pretty minimal and mostly parrots the cars you receive for free by beating the racers on the “Blacklist”.

Dragging down the experience is the whole other half of the game: the police chase segments. These chases have their own challenges and goals, and the best part is that they’re mandatory. You cannot progress the game without dancing about with the rozzers. It bogs down the pacing of the game horrendously.

The serious issue with it is having to babysit the cops so you can get your heat level up just so you can even attempt to take on the challenges that you are required to complete just to continue racing. The whole thing is tedious.

It’s really killed my motivation to continue playing it. Which is a shame, because racing around the world is great. But the other half of the game is an annoyance.

Max Payne 1 & 2

These games have been in my backlog for a long, long time. I originally tried to play them back in 2010-ish but ended up putting them on the backlog. Thankfully, I finally came back to them.

Max Payne 1 is a bit of a rough game. The gunplay still mostly holds up, but the difficulty spikes can be frustrating. The checkpoints are basically non-existent, so you have to rely on quick saves. Levels are mixed in length and mostly take place in corridors or warehouses. Combat in general does get a bit repetitive by the end.

The first game’s surrealism and dream sequences are still as nutty as I remember them, and seeing the new stuff fills in more of the blanks about what Max is thinking about.

The first game overall holds up OK but is a bit rough. It also crashed on me several times.

The second game certainly expands upon the original in terms of design. The new physics system and improved gunplay add a lot to the firefights.

Levels are more varied too, with fewer apartment corridors. The first level is a hospital, with other levels taking place in environments including an amusement park, a construction site, and an elaborate mansion.

The surrealist elements do appear again, but they’re different from the original. There’s less 4th wall breaking stuff. It didn’t stand out as much this time around.

The difficulty is ramped up in 2; stronger enemies with bigger guns are the most prominent cause for the difficulty spike. But they’ve also added multiple escort sections. One of these is a sniping section where you play as Mona and have to cover Max. This section was miserable for me, as I could barely see the enemies with my bad eyesight. Thankfully, I didn’t take too many tries to get through it, but I imagine the harder difficulties would make that section infuriating.

The second noteworthy escort mission involves a Mafia boss wearing a “Captain Baseball Bat Boy” mascot outfit, which has been fitted with a bomb. This section isn’t difficult because of the escort part but rather due to the unrelenting amount of enemies with massive guns that it throws at you, often spawning them behind you, and getting turned into Swiss cheese thereafter.

Despite their faults, I’m glad to finally get these out of my backlog. You can watch my playthrough here & here.

RoboCop: Rogue City

Licensed games are usually terrible. But every once in a while you get an exception. Teyon created that exception with Terminator: Resistance. A game that came out of nowhere and was apparently pretty good. I never played it myself, but I will get to it eventually. But hot on the heels of that, they decided to make a RoboCop game. And I can attest that it is really good. Two licensed games in a row being good is a hell of a coincidence.

Let’s start with the vibes. It nails the aesthetic. The police station, the old steel mill, and OCP HQ all look spot on. The characters look pretty close to their original actors too, although several have been replaced or changed. Lewis spends most of the game in a hospital bed, so we get a rookie as a partner. His name is Ulysses Washington. He’s a bit of a prat and spends most of the game just “being there” and talking in your ear about stuff.

RoboCop is still voiced by Peter Weller and does a solid job. The voice acting is a bit stiff in places but does have a charm in the same way the movies did.

The game is best described as a Deus Ex-like. Specifically the newer ones. Open-ish hub worlds with side quests to do and characters to chat with. There are several points in the game where you can make choices about how you interact with a character, choose a side in an election, and so on. Although it doesn’t change the progression of the game much, it does make some minor changes here and there.

Gunplay is visceral. The main hand cannon (pistol would be an understatement) is pretty much the only weapon you’ll need. Although weapons like an M60 and the high-powered sniper rifle do serve a purpose. The sheer sound of the gun, combined with the bloody squelching when some poor sod gets righteously mowed down, provides a meaty ensemble of justice.

Adding to that, there’s an upgrade system where you place chips on a PCB. You have to use these to connect up wires for different abilities. But there are only so many chip designs, and each has its own percentage of how much it boosts the abilities. So you have to pick and choose carefully. And not everything on the PCB is a benefit. There are actually some debuffs that you might not be able to avoid unless you have the right chips to bypass them. The system is interesting but not really all that difficult to avoid getting the debuffs.

Although, my favourite updates were always the ones that made enemies explode and dismember more.

The main villain of the game is dumb. On paper, his motives seem solid, but the execution turns into a bit of a mess near the end. And that’s probably because the other story beats of the election, Delta City, and the OCP goon that runs the police force eat into the player’s attention.

But overall, I had a surprisingly enjoyable time with it, and I’m looking forward to playing the expansion as well as the Terminator game. And you can watch my full playthrough here.

Outrun 2006

This game is held in high regard by the small cult of arcade racing enthusiasts. I always wanted to give it a try but never got around to it. Eventually, I played the PS2 version of it, but issues with the emulator made me eventually switch to the PC version.

Man, this game is great. The drifting is fun as hell (Most of the time), and the music is probably the best stuff Sega has ever produced. Seriously, give this a listen:

I’m not including Splash Wave of course, because I have standards.

The selection of Ferraris is pretty good. I’m quite nostalgic for the Enzo, as I used to have a large poster of it on my wall back when I lived in London.

Girlfriend mode brings out the weirdness of the game. Challenges in that mode include running into ghosts, avoiding UFOs, and driving through a meteor shower with said space rocks pounding the road in front.

My one gripe with the game is the difficulty curve. It gets hard as you get into the later races in the game, unfair at times. The rubberbanding can get especially bullshit on the longer races, where you get ahead and stay ahead up until the final stretch, and then 3 or 4 cars suddenly pass you.

But I’m still enjoying it regardless.

Echo Point Nova

Holy shit, play this game. It’s incredible.

Imagine Titanfall, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Quake, Tribes, and Minecraft had an unholy baby; that is this game. A fast-paced FPS with environmental destruction, hoverboards, grappling hooks, and a ton of exploration.

The game takes place on a bunch of floating platforms. On these floating platforms are activators for spawning waves of enemies. Defeating these waves rewards you with either a gun, a perk, or a hat. Perks can change the game wildly. They include activating PvP, slowing down time when aiming, and even propelling you while you’re firing, leading to situations like this:

Hats, which make you look cool, also serve the purpose of increasing your allocation points for perks. So, more hats, more perks you can equip. An interesting concept, to say the least.

You also get others, like a springboarding wind power, a grenade, and a combustion power that melts through every material and even propels you when in mid-air.

The general gameplay loop is a ton of fun, and grappling around, multi-jumping, and riding around on the hoverboard just feel amazing. The gunplay is solid, although leading your shots gets quite difficult unless you toggle on some assists.

This blog post has taken so long to make that I actually played the free expansion to it. Unfortunately, it’s more of the same. The main difference being that it takes place on land instead of on floating platforms. It gives more use to the hoverboard.

Collectables are much easier to find in the expansion; they’re almost always within spitting distance of the checkpoints strewn across the map. Which kills the exploration a bit.

Regardless, if I had played this last year, this easily would have been in the top three, if not number one. And I’ve made a mental note to play Shattered Steel, the developer’s previous game.

Sonic Adventure DX

I played the crap out of this game as a child. But I only finished Knuckles’ campaign previously. I probably spent most of my time in the Chao garden back then.

But good God, does this game not hold up. The controls are terrible; everyone feels floaty and imprecise, except for the few times when they handle like mud. There’s also an oversensitivity to the controls. The camera has a fit in a bunch of situations. Bad game feel all around.

The levels sucked. Some of them were broken, so I would fall to my death unintentionally while trying to latch onto some mechanic that would transport me to another part of the level. Other sections might require you to do a spin dash; instead of maintaining speed, I graze a wall and come to a complete stop.

Amy’s levels are particularly awful, as you have to deal with the dogshit controls while also being pursued. Plus, Amy just sucks in general.

The only saving grace of the game is the exploration. You can find upgrades and additional Chao eggs. There’s something comforting about hub worlds in this era of video games. I felt the same way playing Shenmue and Mega Man Legends.

I eventually finished Adventure 1, but I can’t say I enjoyed it that much. But if you want to watch my playthrough, you can do so here.

Sonic Adventure 2

The one thing I liked about Adventure 1 was the open, explorable world. The 2nd Adventure game removes that and replaces it with linear levels and doubles down on everything I disliked about the first game. As you can imagine, I don’t like this game.

There are two story paths, Heroes and Villains. Heroes being made up of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles. You switch between them over the course of the game.

In terms of level structure, they’re all similar to how they were in Adventure 1, but with bigger levels. Sonic and Tails aren’t too bad, but the increased level size in Knuckles’ case means I have to spend even more time playing hide and seek with emerald fragments. To make it worse, their positions are more randomised this time, so I spend ages searching and have to rely on in-game hints to figure it out instead of the previously existing radar. Said radar’s radius has been drastically reduced.

The controls are still awful, and the level design hasn’t improved at all. There’s still plenty to get hung up on. And then to top it off, the boss fights are horrendous. They track your movement mid-attack, they have tight timing windows, and the mechanics around them are about as fun as stepping on broken glass.

I dropped the game; I have no interest in torturing myself further with it. Jeff Gerstmann is right; there are no good Sonic games.

Hogwarts Legacy

Oddly, I’m one of the few people that enjoyed the Harry Potter games more than the books and movies. The world-building in the series has always been well regarded, and the movies and games really added a lot to it. Hogwarts Legacy expands on it further by sending the player to the 1890s.

You get to explore Hogwarts in all its glory, plus the surrounding areas of Hogsmeade and beyond. It’s a big old area to explore, and there are craploads to do in it. There are puzzles and collectables spewing out of every nook and cranny. It’s an absolute collectathon nightmare. I found myself spending most of my time doing side quests and random puzzles in the world instead of the main quest.

Most of the rewards are cosmetic: hats, cloaks, etc. At some point I had so many items of clothing that I decided to stop bothering with all the side stuff. But also because it had gotten extremely tedious.

Exploring gets a lot easier with both fast travelling and unlocking brooms. You also get animal mounts, like a hippogriff. That said, your speed is limited for data streaming reasons, so you don’t really zip around all that much. It’s still decent enough.

As for the story, it mostly revolves around some “Ancient Magic” that never gets its full potential explained beyond a single instance of mind control. And in a typical “Main Protagonist Syndrome” way, we’re one of the only few characters that can even see the magic.

The character’s overly chatty and doesn’t really have anything interesting to say. Early on, I decided to start listening to podcasts while playing the game and didn’t stop. At no point did I feel the need to listen to what characters were saying to me, and I didn’t care. It really is that boring.

But how about the gameplay? Spellcasting and combat? In short, it’s underwhelming. Most of the spells are boring, and combat is a chore. You end up using the most effective spells over and over or avoid combat entirely by using stealth. You learn how to turn invisible fairly early on, so stealth becomes trivial, and you can even avoid combat entirely in some parts.

The most interesting thing about the spellcasting is that you get to learn the Unforgivable Curses. But you can only use them on enemies, and there are absolutely no consequences whatsoever to using them. Remember, you’re supposed to be thrown into Azkaban after even one use of them for any reason. And one character can be if you choose. It makes learning them uneventful, as the killing curse amounts to nothing more than a one-hit-kill spell with a cooldown timer.

I enjoyed aspects of the game, but the negatives and shortcomings started adding up, and by the end, I just found the whole experience to be mediocre.

Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault

Ever wondered what the Call Of Duty developers worked on before Call Of Duty? Well, that’s what this is. Taking you through various fronts in the Second World War, getting stuck into some of the most important campaigns from 1942 onwards. The American campaigns, that is.

The gunplay is dated; this is a 2002 game after all. No aim down sights, stiff movement, etc. Thankfully, shooting bad guys has been a solved problem in video games for years, so the jankiness doesn’t get in the way too much.

There are a couple of stealth sections in the game, where you wear an enemy uniform and try and infiltrate a base. But in my experience, I get past the first couple of groups of enemies, and then the whole place ends up on high alert. I can’t tell if I’m doing something wrong, but the game really doesn’t give me any feedback at all. It’s either I’m getting away with it, or I’m getting shot at, with no warning or explanation. Again, this was just how old games were.

The difficulty curve is all over the place. Most of the time it’s a non-issue. But then you get to D-Day, and you have to navigate a minefield to get into a trench. But it’s literally impossible to know where the mines are, plus you’re getting minced by an MG42 nest.

It gets worse as you progress. That infamous level with the snipers is no joke. I played the game on Easy, and they were still pushing my shit in. I suppose it’s somewhat realistic, going down a street at a snail’s pace, peeking around every corner, desperately trying to find and pick off snipers that you can barely see.

I didn’t bother with the expansions, the main campaign really took it out of me. You can watch my playthrough here.

Assault Spy

Imagine Devil May Cry, except you’re a Japanese salaryman (sort of). That’s pretty much the premise of Assault Spy. You play as one of two characters, one male, one female. I forget their names; it’s not really that important.

The story is silly. It starts with the male character who’s a corporate spy and has been laden with a rookie. They try to break into their target and find the place overrun with robots that are now attacking humans. Various office workers then become a collectable you can find throughout the game.

The story gets stranger from there, but I think I’ll withhold the details. By the way, the other character is a wacky blonde bimbo that works for the CIA.

Getting into the meat of the gameplay, the male character fights with a briefcase and an umbrella; the female character fights with her fists and a gun (she’s American, of course she does). You unlock combos using a currency you gain from playing the game; think of the red orbs from DMC.

The combat is mostly OK, but I felt that most of my inputs kept getting dropped, and the input timings seemed pretty tight. The explanations for the combos don’t seem to map to the actual inputs correctly; some are also under-explained entirely.

The game gets very repetitive after a while. Enemies are not that varied, nor are they particularly fun to fight. And that’s when you have to fight them. The game features a major stealth section 2/3rds of the way through the campaigns for both characters. And believe me, it’s terrible. Almost made me drop the game entirely.

The bosses are somewhat of a highlight in that they’re at least different, but also a low as some of these fights are more infuriating than anything. But that’s partly due to the shortcomings in the combat in general. I had to cheese the last few bosses, as it was so difficult to actually attack them without taking excessive damage. It made the ending of the game more of a downer than it should be.

There’s certainly an idea with this, and I did enjoy some of the absurdity of it, but the problems with the gameplay just dragged down the experience for me. You can watch my playthrough here.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game – Remastered

This game is the Ghostbusters Reunion Tour. The main four actors are back, and you go to all the environments you remember from the two movies, plus a few new places. And you fight the same ghosts too. Slimer and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man make appearances very early into the game.

You play as a silent protagonist that’s a newly joined rookie of the Ghostbusters crew. And that’s for the best, as the dialogue between the lads is more interesting to listen to than whatever some hack writer would likely come up with. Their interactions are entertaining and very fanservicey, often referencing events from the movies.

The Proton Pack is a very fun weapon. You get a variety of different blaster versions with their own uses, including one that acts as a shotgun, one that shoots goo, and another that freezes ghosts. The environments get absolutely ripped apart by the proton beams, burning holes in walls, destroying furniture, and sending debris flying. It’s extremely impressive considering it’s a PS3/360 game at its core.

My only problem with the game is the difficulty curve. A couple of boss fights and even a couple of arena fights are alarmingly more difficult than they need to be. The boss fight in the library stood out as being particularly troublesome. Adding to this, I have to babysit my teammates because they have a habit of running headfirst into danger. Keeping them alive is quite important too, because if they go down, you can’t rely on them to draw enemy aggro or have them revive you if you go down.

That said, it did not detract from my experience that much. Overall, I was surprised by how enjoyable the game was. It’s genuinely great. You can watch my playthrough here.

Quantum Break

This is also a Remedy game, although it doesn’t feel like it. The gameplay is so generic, it’s painful. It’s just a typical 3rd-person shooter with some extra powers slapped on top. The gunplay is lacklustre and gets mundane very quickly. The time powers are somewhat effective but are not exciting to use at all.

The story is very generic. For a game about time travel, it plays it remarkably safe, and major choices do not actually change the gameplay. They do change the live-action cutscenes, however.

Every chapter in the game is followed with a 40-minute live-action TV show episode. They’re not particularly high budget and mostly focus on characters that are not featured in the game at all. Aidan Gillen’s character is a bit of a mess. His explanation for falling from grace is never explained that well beyond trying to correct the timeline that he broke. The late Lance Reddick’s character is somewhat enjoyable, being a bit of a double-crosser.

There’s some enjoyment to be found in the visuals around the time travel stuff, but the game just does not utilise the idea well enough. Quantic Dream do a more interesting job with all of their games than what Remedy does here. It also lacks the Sam Lake weirdness that Max Payne and Alan Wake had. Anyway, if you want to watch my playthrough, you can find it here.

DOOM: The Dark Ages

Doomguy has put on a few pounds since Eternal (although this might be a prequel; honestly, I have no idea) and is now extra thick and heavy. The ground quakes beneath his feet. Lesser enemies shatter as he lands on the ground. And I wish I was making this up. Mobs literally explode into gibs when you land after a large fall.

The shotguns are still fantastic, although I do miss the grappling hook. However, I ended up using them 90% of the time. The other weapons, although conceptually interesting, weren’t really all that much fun to use. A couple has some weird mechanics attached to them that I rarely ever found a use case for.

They’ve added a destruction system for the props in the game, and it’s very impressive. In a time where a lot of games are very static in terms of interactivity, it’s nice to be able to blow some shit up.

Enemy AI is a bit dumber this time around; they tend to just stand there or have limited movement. Eternal and 2016’s AI seems more advanced. The trade-off is that there are a lot more enemies this time around. Dozens on screen, in fact. Not quite the hundreds that the original DOOM games could have, but still impressive.

Some folks have been concerned that the game would turn into “Parryslop”, and I can somewhat understand their apprehension. A lot of enemies and attacks now require you to parry them. Thankfully, the timing is so lenient I don’t even need to be anywhere near the attack to parry it. Seriously, it’s a joke. And you can make it even easier in the accessibility settings.

It’s still a lot of a collectathon. Figures, gold, and other stuff are all hidden around the levels. I swear I spent an alarming amount of time looking at the map screen. Annoyingly, there are points of no return in levels. So if you miss any collectables, you’ll have to replay the levels to get them. That said, they do mark out these points, so you are aware of when they happen. But in Eternal, you could fast travel around the maps, so you could collect almost everything your first time through. In this game, I still got 100% on most levels.

As for the story, it’s very Warhammer, but it never needed to be. They put a lot of effort into the cutscenes, but I genuinely couldn’t care less about anything that happens in them. It just feels like somebody’s fanfiction that they co-opted for this. It’s inoffensive, but it does make it hard to care about the main villain’s motives.

Overall, the game is pretty good, but I wouldn’t pay the £70-odd price for it. I’m glad I played it on Game Pass. You can watch the playthrough here.

Other Stuff I Played:

Balatro

Poker, but it’s about getting the highest number possible from your hands. It’s certainly helped me remember poker hands better, but the RNG screws me over a lot. I usually get bad hands or get a status effect that makes it impossible to win. Plus, I don’t really enjoy playing poker by myself; I would prefer to play against others. I’m interested in playing All In Abyss, as it has similar shenanigans but against characters.

Children Of The Sun

The best way to describe this game is to imagine SUPERHOT, but you’re a sniper. You have a single bullet, and hitting an enemy lets you aim at the next enemy with the same bullet. The goal is to kill everything with a single round. Throw in some clear inspirations from SUDA51’s games, particularly Killer7, and it creates a really neat puzzle game. My only complaint is that it’s a bit short. It’s only about three hours long. You can watch my playthrough here.

Anime Corner:

Okinawa de Suki ni Natta Ko ga Hougen Sugite Tsurasugiru

I ended up checking this out purely because anime set in Okinawa is a bit of a rarity. Plus, I don’t know much about the place. This anime is absolutely jam-packed with trivia, from dance moves to what people get up to during a typhoon. The characters are fun, if a little safe. There’s a bit of a love triangle going on, but it doesn’t really go anywhere in the anime. It’s good fun and makes me want to visit the place even more.

Kusuriya No Hitorigoto – Series 2

After greatly enjoying the first series, I was excited to see where the story was going to go. The second series adds several new characters, including a new servant girl that befriends Maomao. These characters are quite mysterious at first. The first half of the series is a bit boring, unfortunately; most of the episodes are one-off stories or build lore. They don’t raise the tension at all.

Once the second half kicks in, the story starts getting more interesting. Jinshi and Maomao get separated, making Jinshi extremely agitated. You get to see his more serious side and start to understand his secrets. At the end of the series, it’s all laid bare and opens up for a continuation of the story, where hopefully things get even more interesting. I do hope they adapt more of the story; there are quite a few novels to work with and plenty left of it to tell.

Kowloon Generic Romance

I’m not going to lie here; I only know of the manga because I absolutely love the design of the main character, Kujirai. But I never read the manga, and I had no idea what it was about. I went into the anime version completely blind.

The basic premise is that Kowloon exists again and is in a permanent state of summer. The main character, Kujirai, has no memories of her past but feels compelled to work at a real estate agency. There she meets Kudo, and they become a couple over the course of the show. But there’s more.

There’s a mysterious object hovering in the sky above Kowloon, and no-one knows what it is or what it’s doing.

Alongside the main couple, there’s also a gay couple that gets quite a lot of screentime. Unfortunately, their plotline is significantly less interesting than the main couple’s, but they get a lot more screen time than they probably should. A lot of Kudo and Kujirai’s slice-of-life chapters have seemingly been cut, which is undesirable.

As a result, the most enjoyable aspect of the show gets trampled on by additional, unnecessary plotlines. That being said, I still enjoyed the show. The art style is strong, and the overall atmosphere is engrossing. Kowloon was a crazy place, and it’s always fun to see it pop up in fiction.

Ninja to Koroshiya no Futarigurashi

I’m a fan of Shaft’s older work, but recently, the studio has been in a bit of a slump. Sangatsu no Lion was the last anime of theirs that I truly loved. Although the additional Monogatari adaptations are welcome. But it has been a while since they adapted a comedy manga.

“Ninkoro” is a hilarious anime. You expect fun ninja shenanigans and get hit in the face with pitch-black humour and suffering. They go out of their way to make you feel bad for the ninjas that the main character’s partner unremorsefully murders. The main character herself is a damn psychopath, showing no negative emotions whatsoever about turning the corpses of her former comrades into leaves. It’s not just bodies; she turns various objects into foliage, including a building.

It’s good form for Shaft and a good start for their new staff that worked on the show.

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Sorry this took so long to get all this written up. I know I keep saying this, but I’ll try harder to not rush these posts at the last minute.

ADMAN