Frog Detective - all three episodes (Xbox One)
10/10 lovely frog, but lobster cop is a prick
Mgs2 hd - ps5
10/10 my fav game prob
2 Likes
OlliOlli World
Only got a switch at the end of October and despite getting Mario Wonder with it, this has been my main game in that time. It’s basically just a 2D Tony Hawk with a much stronger emphasis on high scores but it’s hugely addictive and some days I had to stop playing because my thumbs had started to hurt.
An absolutely beautiful game to look at, each level is filled with so much detail and colour, it’s impossible to see it all as you whizz past, living on the edge of your reflexes. It introduces its mechanics very gradually so even a couple of levels before the end I was still learning new ways to maximize my score. Although I’d say I’d completed it as I’ve finished all the levels, there are still plenty of challenges that I missed along the way so it’ll still be a long time before I get near 100%
9/10
1 Like
1 - God of War Ragnorak - PS5
2 - Citizen Sleeper - Switch
3 - Cultist Simulator - Switch
4 - Tinykin - Switch
5 - Hogwarts Legacy - PS5
6 - Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty - PS5
7 - Resident Evil 4 Remake - PS5
8 - Tails of Iron - PS5
9 - Dark Souls - PS5
10 - Dredge - PS5
11 - Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - Switch
12 - Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - PS5
13 - Norco - PS5
14 - Sekiro - PS5
15 - Final Fantasy 16 - PS5
16 - Viewfinder - PS5
17 - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - Switch
18 - Blasphemous 2 - Switch
19 - It Takes Two - PS5
20 - Baldur’s Gate 3 - PS5
21 - Cocoon - PS5
22. - Robocop Rogue City - PS5
The game does nothing new and is graphically a little underwhelming but if you are a fan of the original movie then it’s an absolute blast to play. Whether it was being a stickler for the law and issuing tickets for parking violations or slowly walking through a room full of bad guys, grabbing one by the neck to launch into a second, then blowing the head off a third before punching the last guy through a wall the game is an absolute love letter to the original movie.
4 Likes
If you like this, give Lonely Mountains a go
1 Like
I need to get this robocop game
1 Like
Venba
Loved this 
1 Like
Yeah, was very good. Will make my list this year I reckon. Improved after it sat with me for a few weeks.
- Norco
- High on Life
- Hi-Fi Rush
- Wolfenstein: The New Order
- New Super Lucky’s Tale
- Maquette
- Pikuniku
- Superliminal
- Venba
- Toem
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
- Inside
- Cocoon
- Starfield
- Jusant
16. Frog Detective: The Haunted Island
17. Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard
18. Frog Detective 3: Corruption at Cowboy County
Well these were fun! Nice recommendation from @Ilovetoast. Simple first person detective game where there isn’t much to it really, fetch quests and logic wrapped up in a charm story with nice artwork.
Very funny too, lots of good jokes.
A fun time. Not a amazing game, but was a silly little game or trilogy of games. Highly recommended (and has a killer u lockable for completion as well!).
7/10
2 Likes
Jan 13th - Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4)
Feb 7th - Hi-fi Rush (Xbox Series S)
Feb 10th - Goldeneye (Xbox Series S / Switch)
Feb 20th - Halo: Combat Evolved / The Master Chief Collection (Xbox Series S)
Feb 25th - Bayonetta 3 (Switch)
Apr 10th - Metroid Prime Remastered (Switch)
Apr 30th - Dishonored + The Knife of Dunwall / The Brigmore Witches (Xbox Series S)
May 1st - Tron Identity (Switch)
May 10th - Elden Ring: NG+ (Xbox Series S)
Aug 5th - Streets of Rage 4 (Switch)
Aug 7th - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch)
Sep 11th - Astrobot’s Playroom (PS5)
Sep 22nd - Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye (PS5)
Sep 30th - Cocoon (Xbox Series S)
Oct 1st - Dordogne (Xbox Series S)
Oct 6th - Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (Xbox Series S)
Oct 16th - Pikmin 4 (Switch)
Nov 20th - Spiderman 2 (PS5)
Well I thoroughly enjoyed this. First experience on the PS5 that’s made me really seen what the console can do. Some impressive technical tricks and set pieces, gorgeous visuals, insane fast travel and lovely use of the controller. I don’t normally care about all that stuff, but on my new TV it really does shine.
Game wise, it’s nothing massively different to the first title, but it’s all just incrementally better; and those small gains do add up.
Combat is better. Side quest variety is better. Both main character arcs are better. Mary Jane sections are better. Traversal is better.
I’m not so into the villains in this game, but I thought where they allowed the story to go for the ‘good guys’ was really well handled.
I also fell in love with photo mode. I never normally engage with that feature but I spent dozens of hours with it here. I’m pretty pleased with some of the results too:
https://twitter.com/seansthomas/status/1716730641511788819?t=G3EC6UqPlHBwY8k17xVm8w&s=19
Insomniac are a very talented team. You could see their potential back on Sunset Overdrive and it’s being fully realised here. They’re the best at what they do around, on the big AAA stage, in my eyes. I’d far rather Platinum a breezy, fun, colourful game like this than slog through another dour 50 hour open world game.
Not quite feeling the perfect scores on some sites, but I think in general I’ve felt like 2023 has had tons of great games, if nothing overly revelatory from what I’ve experienced, bar perhaps some of the building systems in TOTK. But I’d say this has comfortably been the game I’ve most enjoyed just spending time with this year. It’s just a joy to pick up and play.
Excited to see where the next one goes story wise, though I do think the gameplay or setting will need a twist to stay fresh…
5 Likes
Also just finished Spider Man 2.
Nothing to add, just good big blockbuster AAA game. Very fun and enjoyable story, with some surprisingly brutal moments. Also, like how they reduced the number of side quests, felt like they were able to write fewer fun and interesting ones like the Grandad, Harold and with Hailey.
3 for 3 in enjoying these games, so excited for the next one to come!
5 Likes
Spiderman PS5.
The first one, PS5 upgrade from PS4 digital download. Spiderman was bundled with my original PS4 slim, played it for a bit, liked it but sold it as it’s value I deemed too high back in 2018 not to sell it physically.
Anyway, what a game. I made the mistake of not going into the DLC before ending the main game, literally just finished it. Need to get to certain point to go into all of the DLC’s which come with the PS5 upgrade seemingly. Will leave it on my system and get there again on a harder level than normal.
The game plays very well, looks ridiculous and is streets ahead of the Arkham Batman games as far as I’m concerned. Glad I upgraded this for £5 months back. Main game took 17 hours. Hated the puzzles and the stealth. Had heard others complain the game gets samey towards the end but for me it got better and better towards the end as by then the combat was all muscle memory.
Outrageous fun. 9/10.
Edit: Oh wait, went back to the completed game, not NG+ and I’m IN the DLC. Wahoo! Heist time…
2 Likes
1 - God of War Ragnorak - PS5
2 - Citizen Sleeper - Switch
3 - Cultist Simulator - Switch
4 - Tinykin - Switch
5 - Hogwarts Legacy - PS5
6 - Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty - PS5
7 - Resident Evil 4 Remake - PS5
8 - Tails of Iron - PS5
9 - Dark Souls - PS5
10 - Dredge - PS5
11 - Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - Switch
12 - Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - PS5
13 - Norco - PS5
14 - Sekiro - PS5
15 - Final Fantasy 16 - PS5
16 - Viewfinder - PS5
17 - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - Switch
18 - Blasphemous 2 - Switch
19 - It Takes Two - PS5
20 - Baldur’s Gate 3 - PS5
21 - Cocoon - PS5
22. - Robocop Rogue City - PS5
23 - Lies of P - PS5
Really good game. The game looks really nice and the world was fun to explore, It leans heavily into “borrowing” from Bloodborne to the point where it can sometimes feel like a pastiche but combat was enjoyable and, on the whole felt fair. I enjoyed the narrative and trying to follow the NPC quest lines (even if I didn’t complete a few of them). Early game bosses weren’t too memorable for me but the game saves it’s best bosses for the second half.
I liked the weapon system and the fact that if you could adjust weapons scaling properties so that if you found a new weapon you liked but it didn’t match your stats you could modify it to make it work.
I would definitely recommend giving it a go at some point if you are a fan of Souls-Like games.
2 Likes
Robocop Rogue City.
I love Robocop and this game nails the Robocop feel, the atmosphere, the movement, the side missions. Feels like a lesser Fallout 3 in ways. Some bosses are incredibly tough on just the normal setting. Feels like a PS3 game but I loved it even it felt a bit tired towards the ending. Probably worth waiting for a few more patches and a price drop for the non-Robo-enthusiasts out there. It’s a great game, but there will be… trouble. 8/10.
2 Likes
Black Ops III.
Been chipping away at this for over a year. Ending was really quite WTF, in a good way. Gunplay was a bit floaty for a COD game. Purchased solely for Zombie Chronicles in a sale way back and the multiplayer is actually fun and the amount of remastered zombies games included is cool. Campaign is probably a 7/10, fun and inventive but largely uhm okaaay.
The Talos Principle 2
It’s rare to play a game that looks you dead in the eye and says ‘so what is it that you believe in, really?’ It’s rarer still to play one that asks that and also has a relentlessly humanist and uncynical view of its own world. To make a piece of culture that way takes bravery because it’s so easy to come across as sophomoric and un-subtle, and just like the first game The Talos Principle has those moments, particularly near the beginning, which is slow. But again like the first game it’s so candid about it that it draws you in, until you’re fully invested in its cast of gently bickering robots and their attempts to solve the mystery of the island with its bizarre giant temples.
The puzzles are for the most part perfectly judged. I generally don’t like puzzle games because I find that there usually comes a moment a third of the way in where the difficulty curve skyrockets and
I’m made to feel like the fucking idiot I am. It doesn’t happen here - consistently I would walk away from a puzzle that flummoxed me, I’d turn it around in my head after lights out and go ‘oh, wait a minute!’ Part of this has to do with the fact the game is constantly introducing new concepts - teleportation, extra bodies, portals, anti-grav - such that it feels like the devs didn’t have time to stew on any one thing long enough to come up with some real stumpers.
With that said, there are a few bastards towards the end, particularly if you want to follow the golden path and get the optimum end, and I’m shaving a point off for what I’m going to refer to as ‘ticky tacky laser bullshit’, as well as a couple of annoying design decisions (the lack of fast travel once you’ve completed an area chief among them).
With that said, this is easily amongst my games of the year. It’s exactly the right sort of length, it looks great, it’s immensely satisfying. It occupied my thoughts for the past three weeks and I leave it feeling uplifted and stimulated. 9/10.
5 Likes
- Alan Wake II
In a way, this kind of highlights the problem that video games reviewers have with being part of the video game discourse. On one level, it’s a deeply flawed game in many mechanical ways - a lot of the survival horror combat elements mainly served to illustrate just how much better Resident Evil 4 had been at balancing action with tension, because this game sort of tries to have its cake and eat it a bit. It tries to be sparse with resources, but more often than not, that just means you have no choice but to run away from enemies… but said enemies can also do annoying super speed shit which means running isn’t really an option. I felt like there was a lot of stuff like that where it feels like they haven’t quite thought what they want the game to feel like and tbh I ended up slapping the game on easy for half the boss fights because there were too many times where it was just too fiddly having to dodge an attack thus interrupting reloading the weapon and then I need to swap items to a health pack and hold the button to use that all while I can’t fucking see because the screen is just completely swamped by an ugly red border… so on that level, it feels like points definitely deserve to be docked from those 9s and 10s ratings, right?
But then, in terms of how cursed gamer discourse tends to be like “anything below a 9 = mediocre at best”, that’s definitely not true of this game. I felt like it’s been a while since I played something that matches a sort of big blockbuster feel with this much character and personality. Someone put it pretty well saying that most of the flaws aren’t because it’s badly made, but because it’s actually trying to do something interesting and strange - which I can sort of agree with. Even though the ending sorta just sets up the inevitable DLC in the end, I found the story surprisingly compelling for how long the game was* and atmospherically it deserves every award going. The original Alan Wake is open about its influences to a fault, and this is so confident with weaving Twin Peaks: The Return, House of Leaves, True Detective, Fargo, what have you. I want to put my laptop down now but yeah man, Remedy even know how to do shared universe stuff in an age where that’s fatiguingly ubiquitous. Sam Lake ya good lad
*ya know, most survival horror games tend to be very slim
3 Likes
Yes this is exactly it. Alan Wake 2 often had me thinking, why aren’t games like this more often? Just a crumb of character work, please
2 Likes
Hello:
Might not super apply here mind you.
Spider Man 2 - PS5
I’m too tired for an essay. But this was very, very good.
Also bonkers that anybody cried about its legnth. It’s bloody long.
Not sure if I’ll get the platinum now. Tempted to sell it now and then get it again when the inevitable DLC drops.
Looks great, plays great, sounds great. Just top tier stuff.
Not a huge fan of some of the side stuff though. Like mysterio etc.
8.5/10
1 Like