Having now completed all boards and having seen the staff credits, this is probably about as close to completion as it gets short of buying everything from the shop and playing every minigame.

Amazing game, and I'm so glad to have experienced a great Mario Party game finally after having been turned off to the series by being introduced to it through so many awful entries/copycats. Only complaint is that this game is begging for more content. If we get DLC (and the good stuff at that) I'll bump this up to 5 stars. It's that good.

Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure is a game I should have nostalgia for, but the only part of it I look back positively on was the experience of collecting the toys rather than the game itself. I recall finding the experience boring and unfairly balanced in an effort to encourage purchasing additional toys, I could see through the blatant business strategy even as a child in the target audience.

I have brief memories of Giants and found it to be more enjoyable from the few levels I got to play in co-op, but my interest in actually playing the series and buying the games/toys declined from this point onwards, with me never purchasing Giants for myself and my interest in keeping up with news dropping off a cliff by Swap Force.

Revisiting the title then... it's a lot of fun! Nothing super special, but I enjoyed the brief time I spent with it. Co-op makes the experience a whole lot more enjoyable, as does turning the difficulty down to get around the still egregious "difficulty spikes" (enemies start doing absurd damage to make sure you have to buy more toys etc). The story and handholding is a little too infantile for me, but I was willing to put up with it for the fun gameplay. Looking forward to trying future games in the series, even if I know it's supposedly all downhill from here, but Giants is a great title to have peaked with for sure. You can do far worse in a brawler/exploration/platformer hybrid than this.

I really enjoyed my time with GT7. It's a fun game to switch off my brain to unwind after a long day while listening to my own playlist or choice of podcasts etc. As a decompressor, that's where it shines for me above all else. I could sit here and analyse how pretty the graphics are or how great the driving itself feels in its realism yet simplicity, but I'm no expert critic, so it'd be tough to stack that up against other contemporaries, so I'll just say it's a pretty example of what the PS5 is capable of going forward. (PS5 is the way to go here, PS4 is sufficient but the horrendously long loads do make it a big slog to sit through).

Couple of scummy aspects worth noting though which bump things down in my books though. Always online DRM, even for single player races... really? Also MTX and the absurd prices of cars in-game to doster FOMO marketed as realism... not great. Not tactics I fall for personally (although I don't mind buying a very cheap MTX if it'll make the experience better in my view) but worth noting for those who think they may be affected.

I'm not sure sims are close to being my first choice of racing genre, but GT7 fills a niche that I've wanted filled by a racer now for a good while, so that's a positive. Don't think it'll be replacing my love of the Forza Motorsport/Horizon series', but I'm certainly looking forward to dipping into previous entries when I can to see what else they have to offer.