It's the same game on PS4, but I managed to brute force it to 60fps+. The graphics really shine at higher resolutions and the controls fell really nice at higher framerates. Some glitches remain though; some minigames are harder to play at higher framerates and the ragdoll physics are even more comedic. It's like Titan Quest at times, flinging enemies all over the place. Penalising a game for having you launch enemies 10 feet into the air sometimes does feel like it goes against everything I like in games, so I won't do it.

Over 20 years since I last went through it and I'm a lot more impressed with it this time around. It really made me think about how far Sega could have pushed the Saturn if it had another year or two as technically it's super accomplished and things like the dragon morphing are still very cool today. The chip based soundtrack is excellent and the fully voiced dialogue is played by pretty much a who's-who of Japanese voice actors. It has three Otsukas in it!

In terms of the game, while short it perfectly translates the feeling of the rail shooter games, in that you're flying over smooth landscapes at a pretty much unbroken 30fps, interacting with objects using a unique but intuitive cursor. In battle you smoothly change positions around enemies and have a large array of attacks, which makes up for the lack of a traditional JRPG party.

The game is relatively short, but the variety in landscapes could have let them eke out double the length. The final dungeon in particular is an example; if you play it properly there's almost no combat in there at all. A very different approach and one which rewards smart play with smooth progress.

I picked this up for 15 quid in '98; I won't say that it deserves the price tags it commands for English versions but I do genuinely think that it still works extremely well as a game without changes in spite of its age and is worth bringing back, even in emulated form. In a genre which has simultaneously stretched out game length for the sake of 'value' and added complexity for false depth, Team Andromeda's effort provides everything I want from this kind of game in terms of exploration, interaction and combat with much almost no fat on it at all.

There’s a lot to like about this vampire-filled take on Max Payne. I thought it did a good job of nailing the self-important inner monologue of the main character, slow motion is always fun and the weapons, while few in number, generally have a decent punch. It doesn’t quite get there though; the biggest issue is probably the enemies themselves as most of them are melee types that just dumbly rush towards you. It’s also too long for the lack of level variety. It took me a little under 10 hours to get through all the levels but I think it could have stood to be more like 5-6.

As much a toy as a game - and a fun and interesting one at that. A somewhat anachronistic Web 1.0 simulator, infused with that typical vaporwave nostalgia for a past that never really existed but it's so dense with detail it's hard not to like it.

I'd have liked a few more chapters but I can see why they didn't do that - there's already a fair amount of flailing about at times trying to find the next bit of the game, and an extended scope would have increased the amount of content exponentially. Ultimately an interesting piece and I think you do get out what you put in, to an extent.

I think this is basically what Falcom would have ended up making by Ys 8 if they had carried on with the side scrolling games after 3.

The game is a bit rough and ready as you’d expect for something a guy put together in his spare time, especially graphically, but the fundamental combat is so much fun it carries you through. The story ended up getting me as well - especially in the extra chapter added for Revision which had me completely gripped in a situation where they could have had me drop completely off.

I can’t recommend this enough; there’s a good sized demo available which shows both low and high level combat and it runs on absolutely anything.

Steam Deck report: faultless, except for some slightly scratchy sound occasionally. Expect 4 hours on battery.

I'm still recovering from the end but I think that this might be my favourite in the series. Just full of passion on the part of everyone who made it, from the new game system through the ridiculous amount of fan service in side quests, story and assistants, all the way to the emotion of Kazuhiro Nakaya's performance as Kasuga.

Yokohama's a huge map with multiple sections and I didn't even reach the top edge of it once til I was about 30 hours in. It's wonderfully rendered, full of life but not too foreboding to cross because of the new fast travel system. That's the only thing I think can definitely be changed for the next one though as it takes a few too many button presses, both to activate taxi ranks and to get to the taxi app on your phone.

The battle system's been controversially received but for a first effort it's incredibly well put together, and full of RGG flavour. Characters grab and kick items to do more damage and the pace is actually pretty good. At first it seems a bit slow but when you realise you can set up your favourite moves to the dpad it speeds up a lot. By the end you're just constantly firing off brutal Heat moves and cleaning up late game mobs which would take a fair while in earlier games in seconds. Boss battles do miss the special QTE animations but the actual fights end up becoming a solid challenge, and you do have to prepare properly for fights by the end of the game.

Finally, the story and characters are as good as any of the previous games. It helps that Kasuga is a much more outgoing personality than Kiryu, and his weird self-delusion that he's the hero of a classic JRPG (which is remarked upon early on!) makes for some amazing speeches as you go through the game. His merry band of straight men (and women) are all great too, and all have their moments. The story builds up to as great climax and the ending's really terrific.

In the end, this is kind of what Persona would have been if all the characters were 20 years older. It swaps between reality and hyper-reality multiple times a minute while still being grounded in the story of a group of people just trying to do what they can in a bad situation. I definitely want some more of this, but first I'm ready for the return of Judge Eyes!

Much better than I expected. There's a heavy Tales influence which runs through the game, giving you a good 'party' to run through the game. The story's a bit plot-holey and it kind of forgets a lot of stuff when the main thread ramps up, but the interactions between the characters are often good. The combat's not totally amazing but there's plenty of satisfying actions, particularly involving smashing enemies with stuff scattered around the environment. My main issue is some really bad side quests which ended up stalling me for a while before I completely gave up.

2 is probably a bit harsh but man, all I can really think of in the end is negatives. The battle system is irritating button mashing, there is no sense of balance in the game, the arranged music is piss weak, the whole Private Actions system is one of those ideas that sounds good on paper but is actually a pain, and the game, while short, feels both like it skips over a load of stuff while making you backtrack more than it should. Encounter rate's too high too, and the final dungeon was terrible.

Also I didn't need the credits twice.

37 hours for the main story. Got sick of the instant kill bullshit in the end and just cheesed the final boss in Easy.

It's got a lot of good ideas for a dungeon crawler - the way that skills are learned in battle like Saga, the way that enemy hate is handled (it's one of the few RPGs I've seen which makes defending really matter) and the whole modern day occult setting is pretty good. There's a section in the middle which is really well done and properly brings the game together with El Shaddai that I really enjoyed. It just has too many niggling issues though; the Vita version runs so badly (and doesn't support Vita TV, infuriatingly), the game has separate trophy lists for each version which don't share, and the whole interface is about half a second too slow in every action. It takes about 30 seconds on the PS4 to revive and return a summon to your team from the menus because they're so slow and unresponsive. You have to quit and restart the entire game, which takes a full minute on Vita, if you want to upload a network shared save, because you can only do it from the title screen.

My biggest fault in the end ended up being something which happens in other games but is particularly egregious here - if the main character dies it's instantly game over. The worst part is that there doesn't seem to be any kind of defence against instant kills, and so you can just be told to do the fight again because the random number generator rolled a 1. The last few bosses just ended up with the two main characters just kind of cowering in defence, hoping not to die from a stray attack/group hit, while my summoned "astrals", 20+ levels above them, just pounded away on the enemy.

They clearly know it's an issue as well as there is a system where you can retry from just before the fight you died in for a fee, and that fee is tiny. All it does is waste your time and I can't help that that (plus the too-slow XP gain for the main characters compared to the Karma points you use to level up your astrals) is in service of getting that first clear time closer to 40 hours.

In the end, frustrating and ordinarily I'd say that they'll get it right next time but I don't think there will be one. If you're interested, definitely pick it up for PS4 and don't worry about turning down the difficulty at the end, or enjoy the grinding. It's fairly well set up for that.

I like being surprised by a game and this was a really nice surprise. The developers' affection for Robocop is completely obvious the whole time you’re playing. On the one hand, the script clearly wasn’t written by a native English speaker and most of the voice overs are the quality you’d normally get in a badly dubbed kitchen roll commercial, but on the other the actual plot itself is a much better follow-up to Robocop 2 than what they came out with in Robocop 3, Peter Weller puts in real effort as Robo himself and the game’s levels evoke Robocop incredibly well.

In fact, it’s that sense of place, whether you’re going around the wonderfully detailed recreation of the police station or realising you’re in the same steel mill from the first film where Murphy met his end, which makes the game work. Verhoeven-level gouts of blood spray forth from the creeps, walls explode in showers of plaster and documents scatter through the air as you trundle through the areas and power up your Auto-9, which eventually becomes a hand-held heavy machine gun full auto sniper rifle with unlimited ammo by the time you’re done with the game. As you would want from Robocop, the game does a great job of keeping you as a walking tank while still raising the stakes with new enemies.

In the end, this game’s got moxie and that’s what’s pushed it to a 5 for me. That and the ridiculous final boss. If you really like Robocop I think you'll get a lot from it.

What a confident, well-made sequel. I sort of struggled to the end of Remnant 1 but I could see that they were going for, and with the sequel they have largely fixed the problems that a solo player would have (especially with certain bosses) which leaves 20 hours or so of extremely fun shooting, once you pick up a good gun.

The thing that really got me, though, was the realisation that with the way the levels worked you were only intended to see about half of the game’s areas in one run through. At a time when it feels like there are so many games trying their absolute best to snow you under with objectives and quests, having a game actually keep stuff back to keep the game’s pace up took me by surprise. For a game that wasn’t even released at full price, it really punches above its weight.

Steam Deck report - you can convince it to get to 30 but I wouldn’t; I had the most fun playing with keyboard and mouse because fundamentally it’s a shooter.

It's Sen no Kiseki 5, for all that means both good and bad. I really liked the battle system as they just completely gave up on attempting to balance it; the ingame gacha showers you with extremely powerful spells and abilities, it's easy to keep the massive cast of characters level appropriate and you're just steaming through bosses by the end. Great fun and with the extra bonus characters in the 'hub' dungeon it's just fan service central.

I can't really go into any more as at that point we'd be in spoiler territory but I'm looking forward to a new start with the next series. The issues I had with Sen 4 are still very much here, and a reset of the scope is exactly what the writing team need. It didn't actively annoy me as much as the last couple of games but they also kind of forgot to write in a proper enemy. Weird stuff.