Working my way through the Yakuza series and coming to this after Kiwami 1 and 2 was a bit jarring.

As the other two are full remakes, this being a remaster doesn't have the same quality of life improvements and it feels a bit dated.

The main story is fun but I would have liked to have spent more time in Okinawa as Kamurocho felt quite empty in this game. Splitting it across two cities and not having either live up to their full potential holds the game back. I didn't feel compelled to really dive into the side-quests in this one either.

I still had a great time with the game but I'm happy to move on to the next entry now.

I can understand why the series needed this hard pivot after RE6. It was really refreshing and I found it genuinely scary a fair few times.

There's not much you can say without spoiling things, but parts of the game felt a bit tacked on and unnecessary (as if often the case with RE games...) and it should have been a more tight, concise story solely in the house.

Definitely worth checking out if you have even a slight interest in horror and/or Resident Evil.

This feels and plays like a PS2 game that got released on PS3, then remastered for PS4 and I played it on a PS5. The only other God of War I've played is the "reboot" PS4 game and can see why they felt they needed to press the rest button after this title.

It's a very satisfying game to get through. The pace never drops and you don't feel overwhelmed by the enemies until later in the game. It makes you actually feel like a powerful god rather than struggling your way through. Combat could feel a bit "meatier" and less floaty.

It's nice to play a game that you can actually play and not have to learn countless crafting systems or worry about skill trees etc. Upgrading weapons is easy and straight forward leaving you to focus more on playing the game.

While it feels a bit dated, it's definitely a fun experience that doesn't outstay it's welcome.

A huge improvement over BotW!

It still has the things that annoyed me about that game (see that review) but as I was expecting them this time, the frustration was lessened.

The world feels a thousand times more alive. There's so much more to see and do. Plus the added levels of the Sky Islands and The Depths offer different types of exploration and almost changes the game entirely depending which one you are tackling.

I did find there was a lack of signposting making it difficult to locate where to trigger certain questline (such as how to navigate the depths) but once you realise you have to return to places you've already visited to find more missions it all clicks into place.

The story is a refreshing change of pace for Zelda games too. I often find them too similar and it's only the mechanics the differ from game to game. This however felt like a proper sequel to BotW without replaying the formula too much.

Despite a couple of flaws here and there, I had an absolute blast playing this game so it gets the full five.

After the opening segment the game kind of felt stale for a little while but once it picked back up again it was hard to stop playing. By the end of the game I'd had the best time.

The biggest flaw is that there's no fast travel. A lot of the game asks you to go from one end of a level to the other (multiple routes open up as you progress) and once you've achieved your objective there, you then have to retrace your steps all the way back to your ship. To make things worse, you have to sometimes revisit the planet you're on and do it all over again. As you gain new abilities and unlock skills, it makes traversal much more bearable and you get used to the lack of fast travel, but still, it would have been a nice feature.

The combat got a bit tricky for me on some of the harder boss fights and with certain enemies. I believe it's similar to the Soulsbourne type of games which are really not my thing at all but at least this was more forgiving. Plus unlocking some of the force powers was very satisfying.

I can't say much about the story without spoiling anything but what I will say is that if you're feeling Star Wars Fatigue like I am, then this is the cure.

I clocked in around 19 hours in total which just the right length to keep me interested and I'll definitely check out the sequel when I get a chance.

A not-too-distant-future, dystopian death sport heavily influenced by films like Rollerball and The Running Man.

Rollerdrome has an awesome 70s/80s future vibe to it complete with a synth-heavy soundtrack that oozes cool. I'm hesitant to use such a reductive statement, but in basic terms the game plays like Tony Hawk with guns. The way Kara (who you play as) moves around the arenas, up halfpipes and along rails is exactly like the Neversoft classics, but there are enough modifications and additions to the gameplay to give Rollerdrome its own identity.

Rollerdrome's core loop has you eliminating a set amount of enemies from an arena with your guns as you skate around performing tricks in order to reload. As you can imagine, there are several enemy types each with their own attacks you need to learn how to avoid and weaknesses to exploit. There are a handful of guns at your disposal (these unlock as you progress through the game) with different properties that work better/worse against the various enemies. Rollerdrome isn't exactly rewriting the rulebook, but it's certainly putting its own stamp on it.

There is a loose narrative you can choose to explore or ignore but doing so certainly adds weight to your actions in the game. Essentially, Rollerdrome is the world's most popular sport, you play as a rookie and work your way through the preliminaries to the grand finals while dystopian corruption happens around you. The game inserts first-person sections between levels every now and again allowing you to explore backstage of the arenas or in-transit to your next match that provide objects to interact with and absorb the lore.

I had a great time with Rollerdrome and now I've completed the main chunk of levels I fully intend to go back and complete the additional challenges I couldn't quite get on my first time through. It won't take you long to finish but these additional challenges plus an extra hard mode that unlocks on after the credits will keep completionists/masochists busy for a while.

I can't give it a rating yet as I've not finished it but the difficulty spike in this from the main game is astronomical! Exploring the island as Amy, Knuckles and Tails was great fun despite some technical issues (the camera when Knuckles is gliding is a bit of a nightmare).

As soon as I got to playing as Sonic and trying the cyberspace levels I hit a wall. They're so difficult they require a lot of time to trial and error them and find the best route, not to mention all the collectables in each level.

Then there's the towers you need to climb. I only managed one before I drifted off playing this. They're so fiddly and one mistake can mean starting from the very beginning again. As much as I loved Frontiers, the intricate platforming was not its strong suit, so to rely so heavily on it in this update is a really weird choice.

I want to come back to this at some point and finish it but I've got too many other games to play to stick with this and keep getting frustrated at this time.

The opening 30 minutes were enough to give this 5 stars.

The sequel takes everything the first game and the Miles Morales sub-sequel did and improves on it. As always, traversing the map as Spider-Man is one of the most fun things you can do in any game. The implementation of the web wings and the wind tunnels to help you pick up speed is very satisfying.

There are some pacing issues with the story which I won't go into too much for spoiler reasons, but I felt that I reached certain story beats quicker than I should have. Other than that, I had a great time with the story and it gave a refreshing take on some familiar, and dare I say 'overdone' characters.

Side quests! I'm a sucker for cleaning up icons on a map ala early Assassin's Creed. Gone are the somewhat tedious Doc Ock experiments from the first game. There are some scientific tasks to do (Peter's a big ol' nerd lest we forget) but they're simple to complete and there's so few of them you might even wish there were more. Each optional side quest makes you feel like you're doing something rather than just completing a to-do list to unlock skills or upgrade gadgets etc.

There are a couple of flaws here and there but this really is a top-tier game. Is it pushing the medium forward? No. Is it one of the most fun experiences you can have in a game? Absolutely.

What a fun game!

There were so many creepy parts but it was constantly a joy to play through. It was never too taxing so if I did have to redo a part it wasn't much of a slog to get back on track.

Some might find the game a bit short (I clocked in about 3 hours) but I think the duration and the extra hidden secrets to find make this so much more replayable.

I loved the ending too but no spoilers here. Really recommended, especially as it'll likely be quite cheap in a sale most of the time.

This was my first time playing this game since it came out on PS2 back in 2004. I'm quite nostalgic and usually when I revisit games from my past I have a great time and can overlook any flaws they may have. Unfortunately it wasn't the case here.

Firstly, it's just way too buggy. This whole Definitive Trilogy is infamous for their bugs and problems but having played through the other two, most of the issues seem to be resolved with them. I can deal with textures taking a while to load and similar graphical or performance issues, but for San Andreas I experienced cars spawning from the sky, random piles of bodies during missions and getting stuck in death loops where it was impossible to continue without manually loading an old save.

I won't touch on it too much but there's some content in the game that has aged really poorly too. That's also true of GTAIII and VC but it seemed way more gratuitous here.

Enough negatives though. The game still has fantastic parts and it was great exploring San Andreas. Now revisiting this game after GTA V you can really see how this was the blueprint for that game and the various locations and routes that survived the transition. I've also physically visited Las Vegas and San Francisco since playing this game originally and it's impressive how the game is able to semi-faithfully recreate these cities, albeit on a much smaller scale obviously.

If you can force your way past the bugs and flaws, you can still find a fun experience here but just make sure you wait until it's on sale, and at a hefty discount too!

Wow! Definitely the best of this remastered trilogy. This takes all the mechanics and style of Yakuza 4 and pushes it further. Once again you play as different characters throughout the game, but now each of them has a very specific side-story/job to do which really sucked me in. I don't want to spoil anything but as this is at the very start of the game, the taxi missions for Kiryu were a lot of fun!

There's a lot of game here to sink your teeth into if you so wish. Other than the specific side-stories, I only dabbled with the regular side-quests a little bit. The ones that I did were your standard Yakuza affair and fans of the series will know exactly what they're getting into but they are still fun nonetheless.

My main issues was that part 4, and to an extent part 3, felt tacked on and mostly irrelevant to the rest of the story. I had a good time with them, but it felt quite shoehorned into the overall plot.

If you've played a Yakuza game before, this will be right up your street. Familiar enough to get into but there's enough new things to keep you on your toes. Definitely not a series entry point but still a really strong episode in the Yakuza saga.

I love Persona 5 and Royal but this just didn't click with me properly.

It's not a bad game at all, it's just the style of game isn't for me personally. I love the characters and it's a great continuation from the regular version of P5, but the story can feel a bit convoluted at times.

I had more fun when I dropped the difficulty down to easy so the battles were quicker to get through and I could enjoy the story more. The gameplay mechanics felt like a lot to learn and master quickly which is fine, just not what I'm after right now.

I can see myself revisiting P5 Royal multiple times but I don't think I'll be doing the same with Strikers. I'd have much preferred this to be adapted to an anime and experience the story that way.

I loved playing as the four different characters. It was jarring at first having played three games pretty much just as Kiryu, but the fast pace of the story draws you in so you quickly adjust.

The fact that the game is effectively split into four parts with a different character for each section doesn't give you enough time to spend with each of them and as a result, I wasn't as invested in the side quests this time around (although I wasn't with Yakuza 3 either so maybe that's the nature of these remastered games). The different fighting styles and ways of navigating the city for each character stop things from getting stagnant too.

Sometimes the plot of a Yakuza game can feel like a slog in places (hence why side quests are often a great breather) but for better or worse, the story of Yakuza 4 rockets along and never feels like it has a lull or low point.

If it could have struck the balance of main story and giving you a reason to "live" in the world a bit more this would possibly be 5 stars.

Of the two new characters, Usagi is by far the better of the two. I found him such a joy to play as, especially as you can 'air-juggle' with him, truly making him feel like a worthy new addition. Conversely, I really struggled to click with Karai. I'm not sure what it was exactly but when going through the main story mode as her, I found it much harder and was dying multiple times, a position I've not been in since my first few playthroughs. That might just be me though and other players might find it the other way round with the new characters. Either way, they do both offer something fresh and new.

The survival mode is fun and adds a huge amount of replay value to the game. It does take a lot of trial and error to keep slogging as one character, dying and starting again so that you can level-up that character and use your new abilities to get a bit further along. Unfortunately I've not found it as addictive as the survival mode in similar games (Streets of Rage 4 which I've put so many hours into) but I'll definitely be picking this up and having a quick blast on survival when I want to scratch that itch.

For the relatively low price, this is absolutely worth picking up for fans of the main game even just for curiosity's sake.

EDIT: Ok, I've since played Survival mode online with a bunch of strangers and it was so much fun! Definitely the best way to play this mode and deserves an extra star because of it!

Played as part of Switch Online Collection.

I never owned an N64 back in the day as I was Sega through and through, but I did play this occasionally at friends houses where they would butcher me in multiplayer. So I'm really good at dying here.

It's not aged great and the controls take a lot of adjusting to after years dual analogue shooters, but if you persevere it's still a fun game, especially if you're a fan of the film.

I played on Secret Agent and there's a bit of a difficulty spike from around the 5th level onwards and games from back then didn't really hold your hand as much as they do now so a lot of trial and error of figuring out manoeuvres is the key to victory.

I haven't had chance to play multiplayer on this version yet but no doubt next time I see my friends they'll still put me in my place.