Tren levels that took me over 30 minutes to get Gold rank on:

Long Tren Runnin - Hauling 14 cars through a course filled with swinging cranes and obstacles. No other level in the game exemplifies the balance between speed and not losing cargo better than this one.

The Infinite Track - Procedurally generated survival level. There are two of these in the game, but the first was far more difficult. You're being chased by spikey cars that will kill you if they catch you. Boost too much and have to wait for it to recharge? Dead. Hesitate for a spilt-second with a track switch? Dead. Get an unfair batch of randomly-selected modules without enough breathing room to get ahead of the death train? Believe it or not, dead.

Magnetic Attraction - What if a train was Spider-Man and had to spiderclimb all over a bunch of crazy tracks but also there were spikes everywhere

All About the Bolts - Arguably the best track in the game. It's filled with teeter-totter tracks that you have to manipulate in order to use them as ramps, and when you finally nail it, it's euphoric. Never unfair, this track requires all the skill you've built up throughout the game. Phenomenal stuff.

What a fantastic physics-based puzzle game! It is absolutely worth downloading Dreams just for this. I can't recommend it enough.

Did you ever read Redwall books as a kid?

Tails of Iron absolutely RIPS. What an incredible little adventure! I didn't expect it to be what it was, and only tried it because it was a PS Plus monthly game. It's not a full-blown Metroidvania, but it borrows enough from the genre that, when combined with its solid combat-focused gameplay, it scratched the Silksong itch quite nicely.

I loved the setting and aesthetic, the art is perfectly grotty and messy, with rats, frogs, bugs, and moles cleaving heads and covering each other in viscera. The narration is also incredibly well-done, reminding me a lot of Bastion. Everything works together beautifully to create a compelling experience from start to finish, as you fight off invaders in your kingdom and rebuild what they've destroyed. The narration does a great job of describing everything from the rat protagonist's POV, and I couldn't have been more engrossed by the end.

Playing on PS5 was the right move as well, as the game makes great use of the Dualsense's adaptive triggers, and allows map navigation via the touch controls. I was a little annoyed by the rumble, however, as the intensity doesn't differentiate between getting struck by a massive boss or landing after a standing jump. But that was honestly my only negative of the entire experience, and at just under 5 hours to 100%, I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who enjoys challenging combat.

This is as simple as a 1v1 sports game could ever be, yet similarly to the NES title Ice Hockey (which would release a full decade later), there's delightful competition to be found in the simplicity. The ability to steal the ball from the other player is crucial, and creates a manic back-and-forth which is nearly as fun as realizing that you can make baskets from the top or bottom of the court despite not being remotely lined up with the basket. There is no depth of field, and there is no depth of mechanics, but that effectively means the game is what you make it.

My son and I got SO LOUD playing this. We'll be coming back to this one for a long time.

Football for the 2600 is... unknowable. The teams are seemingly comprised of cars with feet. After throwing the ball, it becomes the controlled playable character until it is caught. On defense, pressing the single Atari controller button seems to make your defenders flee from the opposing team. There is allegedly a way to plan your blocking formation before each play, but I couldn't for the life of me figure it out. And there's a clearly marked first down line, but I found no indication that the game counts downs at all.

EDIT: After more time playing, I discovered it does count downs, but it will flip possession seemingly at random well before a fourth down, leading to the initial confusion. It might be poor interception/fumble detection??

Truly a marvel, will play again with my kids. The game is broken. We had a blast.

I am VERY CONFLICTED about Rift Apart. It's an absolutely stunning showcase for the PS5 in every way, and it feels like a legitimate masterpiece most of the time. But then it just has to do something dumb every once in a while to bring the experience down.

First: The Good!

I've said it in multiple reviews before, but I really am in love with the DualSense. The haptic triggers, advanced rumble, and speaker (when used correctly) create a thoroughly engrossing experience that I will never not be a sucker for. The way that you half-pull a trigger for certain functions feels amazing, especially with the gentle little stop in the middle. The sounds and voices that come out of the controller throughout are just fun, and the rumble does a great job of making each weapon you use and each surface you walk on feel different. I love it!

Beyond the controller, the weapons feel great to use in and of themselves. I leveled each weapon up fully and spent all the Raritanium you can acquire in a single playthrough. In the end, there were very few weapons I didn't adore. I was a particularly big fan of the Negatron Collider. Big laser good.

I played this game right after finally getting a 4K OLED TV, and it's easily the most visually impressive game I've played to date. It's easy to take incredible graphics for granted, but I try to stop and say "wow" every once in a while, and Rift Apart probably got more wows out of me than anything I've played since Uncharted 4. And can you believe how good all that FUR looks?!?

Anyhow, missions are fun, characters are enjoyable, weapons great, visuals stunning, music solid, blah blah blah. Why didn't this end up clearing a 4/5 for me even though I was absolutely enamored with it most of the time?

The Bad!!

The Clank astral projection mini game is... fine. Just felt like puzzles for puzzles' sake, there was nothing particularly compelling there, I'm not sure if it's filler or a misguided attempt to break up the near-flawless Ratchet/Rivet gameplay, but I think the game as a whole would be better off without it.

The Glitch mini game is worse. A tiny cute spider robot shoots viruses? Okay that's kind of cool I guess, but... it's in a game that already has a lot of fantastic shooting. Why are we interrupting that for some bland laser-zapping? They try to give Glitch her own antagonist here, but it just ends up feeling pointless and hollow. Playing the Glitch levels felt like watching a bunch of 4-minute webisodes that spun off from your favorite TV show. The showrunners swear that these matter and are worth your time, but... are they??

Those are both downers, but they don't ruin the main third-person shooting and platforming. You might even argue that they make you appreciate the main gameplay even more by giving you something bland and tedious to compare it to! But, unfortunately, even the Ratchet/Rivet stuff ends up stumbling once you try to go for 100%. (And let's be real, if I'm enjoying a 3D platformer collectathon, I'm gonna collect every single thing) In the first Ratchet & Clank, levels are wide open areas which give you a variety of options for potential paths between any two points. Rift Apart mostly eschews this approach (with Savali being the main exception), instead focusing on segmented levels built around scripted set pieces. These make for some great and exciting scenes, but once you're trying to navigate a world like Sargasso or Cordelion without just following objective markers, you realize there's often one railroaded path that connects islands or rooms together, with deviation not often being possible. In a more open setting, exploration is a joy and wouldn't invoke the term "backtracking" at all, but completing most areas of Rift Apart feels a bit too much like repeating levels of an on-rails shooter, hoping you don't accidentally miss something because you'll have to begin the sequence of island-hopping again.

It really is a great game, and I'm glad I played it. But man, it's such a shame that it's not as consistent as it could've been.