Your Games Completed of 2026

New Year, New thread, New Me, New Games, New Lease on Life I hope!

Shinobi Art of Vengeance
This is an absolutely stunning looking game with fun combat but if I'm honest, I really started to dislike how damn long some levels were. If they were more compact, you'd still have the fun platforming and combat but they'd be closer together and not spaced by a bit of wondering about like a semi-metroidvania, something I'm not sure enhanced this game for me at all.

And as fun as combat is, it's pretty damn easy to the point of being pretty unengaging after a while, and why engage when the game design has you revisiting old maps with new powers and thus you can basically not fight them anyway? And the bosses were fun in the moment but they all blended into each other because of the low difficulty.

In short, the demo had me thinking this was a 10 but it's more like a 7 or 8, maybe Ragebound is the superior 2D Ninja sidescroller eh? AoV isn't bad, but I beat the PS2 Shinobi a few months ago and it was never boring the way this could be. I still have more stuff to do, it is a (sort of) Metroidvania after all but I'm not sure if I can bring myself to do it, the Goro Majima and Eggman DLC? Now that has me intrigued.

Starting off strong with, erm, Arkham Asylum (which I already played years ago on… PS3?). There was a ridiculous sale on this and the Arkham City remasters at the end of last year, which seemed rude to refuse. It was much shorter than I remembered, and the character designs have aged like milk, but getting that combo flow in combat is still chef's kiss.

Stupid amounts of stuff still left in it—the challenge maps, a little under half of the Riddler stuff—but I think I'll probably leave it there and give City a go next.

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance

Azure Striker Gunvolt
I wish I liked this more than I do, it's from the people who made the Mega Man Zero games and I really like the designs for this game so I bought the Trilogy pack on a sale a while ago and…not really sure I like it, the gameplay mechanic of tagging enemies so you can zap them boild down to you shooting things then holding a button to watch them die, I'm not sure how this is more fun than just shooting them like Mega Man or slicing them like Zero.

If the sequel isn't looking any better, I'm out.

A little too much bible/religion in it for me (just a few overtones, but I think it would've been better without it) but a small completion of "…and Roger" a 90 minute game that I'd recommend playing totally blind if you can.

Without giving too much away it has stuff that resonated a lot with me and there were bits I was genuinely quite teary. YMMV, of course, as it depends on whether you've faced issues like those in the game. I has a few similarities with other emotive games in whatever we're calling this genre now (point and click and FEEL THINGS?) but it's very much its own thing. Is it as good as Florence? (the game, not Rab) - I'd say not, but it's not far off.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

I thought this was superb. A really ambitious remake that expands on everything the original offered while still giving fans something new to think about. In particular the characters are much more effectively depicted here (especially Aerith - although Cloud is still a stroppy dullard) and the combat system does a good job of making them feel significantly different.

It does have a few pacing problems, but I guess that's not surprising given that it effectively expands a 5-hour intro sequence from the original into a full 40-hour game. The first half (up to and including Wall Market, I'd say) is mostly pretty great, but the back half suffers a bit with some very long "dungeon" sequences and a final section that just keeps going… and going… and going.

The ending is decidedly weird. Deliberately obtuse, even. It's never really clear where Sephiroth fits into things (I get that he's been retrofitted into this segment of the game from the original) and while he's clearly looking to manipulate timelines and mess about with stuff, I don't know why that suddenly makes him the party's enemy number one. There's a new guy called Zack who shows up with no explanation, right at the end. Jenova appears, gets smacked down and never properly explained. It's not clear where the party is going at the end of the game. But I'm sure this will all get further explained in the next game, or maybe in the new INTERmission segment that I've still got to play.

The last few hours of Remake are a pretty big diversion from where the PS1 game goes at that part, I really didn't like having the rug pulled from under me to be honest, which at the time put me in a minority opinion, but once that cat was out of the bag it made me a lot more fine with what it was doing, I still wish it didn't do that but it is what it is.

Rebirth is one of the best RPGs on the PS5 but it is VERY big, much bigger than Remake. People wondered if they were going to make the open world simplified or menu based or something and it turns out, they were just going to give us all of it (well, Disk 2 at least) and fill it with Yakuza levels of minigames. I think it's (mostly) GOOD content, more character development and stuff, but it definitely burned me out. I really hope Part 3 scales things back a bit.

I didn't gel with Rebirth at all the way I did with Remake. It's got some stuff in it that ranges from just kind of zany, to stuff that's borderline upsetting in a mostly-realistic art style (I wouldn't feel safe in a room with any real person who'd willingly stay in the Gold Saucer hotel). Wild tonal inconsistency seems to be part of the "charm" of a lot of JRPGs, but I found it distracting at best, and actively offputting at worst.

There's a bordering-on-Ubisoft amount of side crap, almost none of which is particularly compelling. I got fed up, dropped it onto Easy, and just mainlined it to the end of the plot from the middle of Spoiler - click to showCosmo Canyon. It's a shame, because some of the plot stuff it does is quite interesting, but it chickens out of the bravest decision it looked like it was going to make. It's still not quite clear by the end exactly what Sephiroth is doing, or why it must be STOPPED AT ALL COSTS.

I'll almost certainly play part 3 just to see the project through, but given how much goodwill I went into Rebirth with, I was ultimately pretty disappointed.

Yeah I really didn't get on with Rebirth. It could have been wonderful, but there's so much friction everywhere. I gave up on one of the awful chocobo stealth sections, after the fifth time of trying.

The chocobos are maybe the worst-implemented thing in it. Types are region-locked, there's no capture or breeding minigame, and the racing isn't even fun.

I thought the chocobo stealth sections in each region were super tedious, but I really enjoyed the racing game, drifting was fun af. Honestly I enjoy most of the minigames, I get why people might not like them, especially Queen's Blade but I loved that and the Fort Condor minigame a lot.

A big issue with Rebirth is how it sets itself up to be so formulaic, once you've done one region you know exactly what you're doing in the next one, so if you hated the Chocobos and the 'Investigate the Eikons' stuff you got that to look forward to every new Zone, even in the Zones themselves there's a pattern.

Ocarina of Time 3DS

I enjoyed this, but I'm not sure I actually recommend it these days. It's just so empty and despite it being an early pioneer of 3D open worlds, your path through the game is pretty set. Still, I did have fun with it and it was interesting comparing it to Breath of The Wild.

Final Fantasy Remake - INTERmission

Went back to this to play the extra Yuffie chapter you get on the newer versions of the game. It's fun enough, more substantial than I'd expected but that's mostly because it's padded out with minigames (including a fun Tower Defence thing that I spent far too much time on). Yuffie herself is annoying as shit and the guy she's paired with for this is a generic Final Fantasy plank that we'll never see again, but as an extra little bonus it's actually pretty good and you get some extra cutscenes at the end that follow the main party's path a bit further.

I wasn't planning to go straight into Rebirth but I'm actually quite keen to do so now - assuming that is that I can get it running well enough on the Steam Deck. Remake ran great but I'm not expecting the same from the sequel.

Yuffie is baffling because every character in the game has great work done in fleshing them out a bit more but aside from maybe a few scenes Yuffie still won't shut the fuck up about Materia

Her gameplay is fucking peak, though.

True, I didn't play Interlude but I hear she was somewhat of an outlier in how obviously more deep she was to the rest of the cast of Remake specifically and in Rebirth she has tons of heavy hitting tricks (I'm still a fan of Tank Red XIII spin2winning everyone into his limit break though)

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
Azure Striker Gunvolt

Trails beyond the Horizon - Such a massive bounce back from the last game, sadly this feels like the most bloated game in the series, some of the pacing issues are incredibly frustrating, but when it finally decides to do something it has the juiciest events in the series by far, it practically redefines the scale of everything to a pointwhere replaying the older games has a 'the whole time huh?' hanging over it, but in a good way. If they had cut the bloat the good moments of this game would be closer together and bridged by the best combat in the series to date, making the game probably Top 3 status for me.

As a game/RPG it isn't as good as Trails in the Sky 1st, as a Trails/Kiseki game this is still really good.

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
Azure Striker Gunvolt
Trails beyond the Horizon

We Love Katamari - as I said in the PWB thread, a 10/10 game that endlessly puts the concept of rolling a sticky ball over random shit alongside an absolutely wonderful OST through a fun and unique lens that changes your objective per level. Said this about a few games now but I really haven't got a bad word to say about this. I think I still have more content to do but I'll leave the rest to be played another day on Steam's version, I definitely rolled up the Sun though so it still counts as a win

Lost Records: Bloom and Rage

A narrative adventure game from Don't Nod, who did the first two Life is Strange games. It's very much in the same sort of mould, telling the story of what happened to four girls over the course of a summer they've largely forgotten, from the perspective of their reunion 27 years later.

I don't want to give too much away because the twists and turns are the entire point, but this is a beautiful game with some real emotional gut punches and a surprisingly mature storyline. If you like this sort of thing then this is a must play.

Oh, bloody hell, I hadn't posted in here yet? I'll have definitely forgotten something…

Picross S+

Given how long it will take me to finish all the DLC for this, I'm just going to put it in here for doing the base game, as that took long enough, and should be recorded. There's not much else to say though - it's Picross, and it's lovely. I got halfway through the first batch of puzzles, and then worked out how to turn all the assists off and started again. I will likely play this until all of the DLC is exhausted, and then buy another Picross game.

Holedown

One of my favourite iOS timewasters. It came off my phone for a bit, and then went back on, and with that I had to unlock everything again, because it would be rude not to. It's a block-breaker which evokes Peggle, Breakout and, well, snooker? It's fabulous though, and still worth playing even after you've unlocked everything, as just a high-score game.

Luck Be a Landlord

I'm sure I've mentioned this on here before, and someone picked it up but then didn't "get it" (Mart?). It's basically a roguelite which feels a bit like if Balatro was made for fruit machines rather than poker. Again, I'd (completely) finished it before, but it came off the phone, and once it was back on…

It suffers a little from being so dependent on RNG, but then it is a game based on fruit machines, so I suppose that is appropriate. It's another of my iOS all-timers though.

Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon

Finished three times, actually, to see all of the endings, as it has an interesting take on NG+ (and then NG++), whereby you retain everything you've unlocked, and can make the choices you didn't the first time through, but also new choices and paths become available. This is a somewhat surprising approach, introducing quite an interesting narrative device in a game where your character is not only mute, but also effectively hypothetical, given that almost everything story wise is just people talking at you while you look at your mech. In fact, I don't think you see a single human face throughout the game.

Interesting-but-slightly-underwhelming structure and story aside, this is a fabulous (mech) game though. The contrast between my muddling through the first playthrough and blasting through the third in a couple of hours, thanks to having grown confident with it all, and found "my" build, suggests that the usual FROM "git gud" magic is at play here too. The fact that the missions are generally bitesize (especially once you know your way around a little) meant they were eminently replayable, meaning that I did go hunting for secrets in my first playthrough. I was even more pleasantly surprised then when I found that the NG-specific missions often didn't have as many secrets, as if the developers were saying 'we know why you're still here, and we're here to make it smooth and enjoyable for you'.

I have a few little gripes, but they are few and far between, and are only things like 'I never really found a primary weapon I truly loved to single-wield', and the 'world feels a tiny bit lifeless'. The latter does make sense though, and is excused by the scale of everything - when you're boosting along, and street signs are being taken out by your mech's knees, you do feel like you're piloting a bloody enormous mech, which is sort of the point.

A classic? Not exactly? A cult classic? I certainly hope so.

Armored Core 6 is fucking awesome

Yeah. I need to start other stuff now, but sort of miss it already.

Roll on AC7.

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
Azure Striker Gunvolt
Trails beyond the Horizon
We Love Katamari

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City - Well I said this a while back but this is a big leap ahead of GTA3 in pretty much every way. I have to say though, it feels kinda rushed/unfinished exactly after you kill Diaz and take his mansion, partly because I didn't sandbox the shit out of it this time like I did when I was younger but also because the structure takes a slight turn for the worse….actually scratch that, if you don't play as intended and accrue cash whilst mooching around (what that entails in 2026 I have no idea, it's fun but it's not THAT deep) you're in for a pretty boring, grindy un GTA-like time as you scrounge cash for businesses to trigger the final mission, as in as soon as you do it the game is pretty much done. If I'm being honest it soured the final hours of the game for me and it's quite shocking how boring it was even if the Asset missions were all on par with the rest of the game's, that is to say: pretty damn fun.

Seems like unless I've also memory holed San Andreas having a stinker arc in there it's pretty much going to claim the 'Best PS2 GTA' title pretty easily, even better mission variance, more side activities like gang wars and I think as legendary as Vice City's OST is San Andreas' might have more for me personally?