Definitionally a 6/10 game, which is such a shame because it starts so fast. The opening is phenomenal, and the initial exploration through the first town gets you thinking: 'Has a Hollow Knight clone finally managed to reach the peaks of that?' The answer is no, but the combat does reach some string like sections where it becomes pure instinct and there's 3 people attacking you and you block, parry and jump and its beautiful. But so much backtracking! And there's 0 speed to how you run, so the majority of the game isn't exploring the interesting world, or marvelling at the art style, it's running through screens you've seen 19 times. Shame.

Mendoza is as good as Sapienza and Dartmoor is leaning dangerously close to Paris territory. Chongqing is straight atmosphere: I can take it or leave it, and Dubai has some of the most inventive kills in the entire franchise. Carpathian Mountains may as well be a stairway into the depths of hell, especially after such a harrowing dream sequence with Agent 47 drowning in the blood of the victims he's been programmed to exterminate. Hitman 3 is another in what should be an infinite map cycle by IO, who've made a far more narrative effort here than with their previous entries, making our bald headed anti-hero empathetic and somehow emotional behind his hollowed out eyes. This formula hasn't stopped working yet, and I don't think it ever will.

"But what about Berlin?"

You shut your goddamn mouth.

After playing this God forsaken game for upwards of 70 hours, or rather having the A.I. play the game for me, just to get a single Catwoman ability, I have truly lost sight of why I started to play in the first place. All combo strings become monotonous mesh after a while, and my fingers cramp at the thought of the amount of pain-staking hours these sweaty ass ranked players have played to take me to 0 without me being able to respond. I like DC but not this much. Maybe one day I will finally get Cat Call and life will be fine.

Brutally challenging, which is surprising given that the core mechanics of the game are simple and easy to understand: you jump, you bounce, you shoot. Failed to count the amount of times I tried to bounce onto a turtle's head before falling straight through it and dying, or forgetting about the breath system on level 3 and randomly losing hearts, and I had no idea why. Then the hard levels just up the ante to a million, and the final level before the boss reminds me of Celeste in that you enter a pseudo-flow state where you're all instinct and everything is flying past and your eyes zone out and it becomes one of those gaming moments that it's hard to move from.

One of a select few games where you'll find just as much fun ramming headfirst into the same rock 300 times as speed running a course first try. The core gameplay here really is just that strong, even with a very grindy progression system and little else to do besides jumping off every cliff the 4 maps have to offer (minus DLC). It's only a shame that it becomes dry within the first 5 hours and overstays its welcome if you're looking to go for 100%. For those first few hours though you'll be hard pressed to find a more addictive indie game out there.

You're probably here for the movement: the main draw to a 'Spider-Man' game will always be the ability to swing from rooftop to rooftop, and this really does make the most of that with how drawn out its missions are, how much they make you use it, and how much it overshadows pretty much everything else about the game. It's well and good you can soar through Manhattan seamlessly, but it sucks that the micro movements suffer because of it - at times you'll have issues doing something as simple as jumping up a ledge as Peter Parker is so obsessed with doing flips that he physically cannot stop himself. Other times you'll be busy fighting you're 90th horde of Saber officers, or escaped prisoners and realise that the gameplay is getting stale, but you're only halfway through the story mode. This is not a bad game, but at its best its a Spider-Man open game sim which shows what could be so much more in the future

Largely repetitive with little to no skill expression allowed due to the boss design. Hit, wait, wait, wait, hit. A lot of standing around looking at the admittedly beautiful artwork, which you'll have to do even outside of the boss fights with a limited movement system that makes Jotun feel clunky and 20 years out of its time. The Valhalla Mode endgame adds nothing to an already short runtime, and going for 100% is more of a slog than anything else. An earnest but misplaced effort from Thunder Lotus Games.

Fun for all of an hour, then it becomes excruciatingly annoying with your two options to either be: wait until the NPC's walk out of their dancing loops to seclude themselves which can take upwards of 20 seconds per character, or go in chainsaw roaring and slaughter as many people as possible. Either are fine in concept (Hitman balances both of these beautifully) but if you want to be a silent assassin it takes far too long, and it's exceedingly hard to be able to influence that with limited traps. If you choose the murder everyone approach you'll come to find not the police to be your enemies, but Mario, who locks up any window you may use while being chased by the law. It just becomes very annoying to go through each level, with very little variation between the lot, and repeat the same steps over and over. Still not a bad game, and the highs do let you feel like a rampaging maniac, but those lows are slightly too low to warrant it.

The charm of Spongebob is pretty great no matter where you spread it, though it's doing a lot of the heavy lifting for what would otherwise be something akin to New Super Lucky's Tale quality-wise. Bikini Bottom has never felt so empty, so lifeless, and this is with the amount of underpants, robots and random NPC's crammed into every nook and cranny of each level. Maybe it's the plague of 3D platformer collectathons that we've gotten recently, some good (Crash and Spyro remakes), some not so (Ratchet and Clank), that makes this feel even more average and boring than it likely is. Even still, it is boring, it is repetitive, and Spongebob just rehydrates an otherwise barren wasteland of a world.

Run, and keep running, because Need for Speed: Heat is the first since Hot Pursuit to feel like you're a god damn criminal - gunned down by cops, driving with two wheels missing and a Rhino on your tail. By day you can race legally, collect far too many collectibles and explore but once the sun goes down EA return to their roots and let you wreak havoc through Palm City. That's the shining jewel of this game, the HEAT system, which bolsters an already technically marvellous game that outguns any NFS game from this generation. Still has those NFS issues that will never make this as good as a Forza but for my money one of the best the series has ever managed.

What's your excuse? Triple-A game developers, with too much money and too much time on their hands aren't able to make a game with half the atmospheric depth, half the world-building, half the genuine love and affection that goes into Ghost of a Tale. I'm talking about a game where I had to recomplete it three times just to get the platinum as it glitched, a game where you'll often fall through the map or guards will see you from two buildings away, a game with such technical fault that it probably shouldn't have been released like this. Everything else is that good that it simply doesn't matter, and comes off as earnest more than anything. Ghost of a Tale wears its funding on its sleeve: it truly is the little mouse trying to survive in a rat eat rat world. There is no excuse.