[I played the Xbox 360 remaster via Series S backwards compatibility]

Still fun in its simplicity, and cheesy spy genre stylings, but too many of-the-era frustrations to finish the campaign. Objectives and navigation are just a little too obtuse, with insta-fails meaning you have to quit to the menu to start again -- not even a restart option in the pause menu! That feels like something that would have been sorted by the N64 era, but I guess such quality of life touches are more recent than we realize.

May boot this back up for some splitscreen multiplayer, in the event this plague eventual passes.

Too hard, man. TOO DAMN HARD!

It may seem salty to knock this game solely for its difficulty, but in the closing few hours I really found myself playing purely to satisfy the completionist in me and not just give up. There wasn't a drive to learn it's nuances and master them; I just hate being beaten.

It lacks the 'thats on me, not the game' quality that something like a Super Meat Boy or Hotline Miami has. While there are some genuinely great levels here that walk the line a bit better (boss battles in particular are all really good), so much of this feels like a chaotic Mario Maker level, where the user has just added one or two more enemies than needed -- just to be a dick. To that end, a lot of this game feels like trying to get jumps absolutely pixel-perfect (shades of the very first Crash game) and not very fluid or satisfying in a meaningful way, despite the bevy of cool tricks it has (time manipulation, gravity flipping etc).

Groussing aside, Crash 4 gets a lot right, and does feel like a more worthy sequel to the original Naughty Dog games than anything that came sinse. A great art style and fun writing channel the Saturday morning cartoon vibe that first made Crash one of my childhood favourites. There's a bevy of optional and replayable content if you're a sadist - although non-Crash playable characters are better on paper than in practice. Tawna boasts a wall jump and grappling hook, two of the sweetest traits a video game character can have, but both are stiff as all hell and not any more fun to use than the basic actions Crash can do. The same goes for the unique traits of other side characters I won't spoil here.

A great addition to this fledgling series, with a more tightly packed and better characterized story than the 2018 original. It's really interesting to see an open world game, which still has tonnes of optional content, keep its main story focused and to the point. The final few missions are fantastic.

On the gameplay side, it's very familiar. It's a welcome 'more of the same' with some tweaks and changes to the formula established in the last game. The real must-see aspect is the story, and the eye-melting fidelity of this game on PS5. As beautiful and bustling a representation of a big city like New York as we've seen so far.

While it may seem like a simple re-skin of Xcom, there's enough changes to make Gears Tactics a bit more approachable for the likes of me. By ditching the metagame (you simply assign gear to soldiers, no elaborate base building), and tweaking some of the game rules (move, shoot, reload in any order, so long as you have the action points to do it) - I found Tactics to be a well balanced, challenging but not discouraging turn based shooter. As an interesting balance, the game has a handful of story characters who can't die permanently, so rather than having to limp back to base without them, you simply have to restart at your last checkpoint if they die.

The campaign is a bit too long with too many repetitive side quests, but they at least give you plenty of opportunity to experiment with the various different units. To my surprise, the more glaring issue is the ugly, buggy presentation. I started playing on a low end PC and chalked it up to that, but moving over to an Xbox Series S it wasn't much better. Every level starts with about five seconds of textures popping in, and once in they are grimy and unappealing. When showing you mission critical events (enemies moving, characters arriving, bosses attacking etc) the camera often gets stuck in the environment and the screen is a mess. It's a really surprising showing from an Xbox first party game, especially one listed as 'optimised' on the new machines.

The biggest frustration was an hour deep into the final boss, a story character died, and when I selected 'load checkpoint' it restarted the whole mission from the beginning. Pretty frustrating, and capped off a surprisingly unpolished experience for a Microsoft game. Nonetheless, I'd check out a sequel for sure.

A fantastic game with the best of both worlds; fun VR interactions (combat, climbing, messing around with physics), as well as more traditional game trappings like exploration, upgrade trees, inventory management, and a quasi-open world element. The story isn't half bad either!

The only negative here is the performance, and the general visual fidelity. Playing this on a launch Oculus Quest, it feels like a miracle port -- which is a good and a bad thing. It's very well fleshed out and ambitious for a game on the little standalone headset, but some of the textures are downright hideous, and chugs in performance are far too common, and below what I'd say is a tolerable level in VR. Coupled with some other minor gripes (bad checkpointing, no manual saving) and this is just a hair below true perfection. But nonetheless, one of my favourite VR games to date, and a 2020 GOTYC.

A powerful, ambitious sequel. Tells a compelling story all its own, while also doing right by the ending of the first game -- which many would argue should have been left be. Its biggest failing is probably that same ambition that makes it feel so special; at times the pacing feels a bit drawn out and the lengthy run-time keeps you guessing.

Probably the best playing Naughty Dog game ever, as the marriage of their animation, AI systems, sound design, level design, and variety of play styles mesh beautifully.