An interesting remake of an interesting game. You can feel the original game's scope limitations and it gets very repetitive if you try and do even half of the side missions but I'm glad I gave it a go. It was satisfying to just Falcon Punch the final boss to death, and I appreciated the lack of a stagger type mechanic which ended up ruining the FF7 Remake combat for me.

Steam Deck report: Not bad in the end - it's not too hard to get a reasonable 60fps output but there's some rendering weirdness which means that the quality of the picture even at max detail isn't great, and I found that the performance benefit for reducing settings wasn't worth the hit to image quality. Turning off AA in particular just turned it into a soup of badly scaled pixels.

Second run through, still enjoyed it as much if not more than first time around. The PC version started out OK but improved with patches; 60fps video cutscenes and DLSS being added were highlights. After being unsatisfied by the rendition of Shibuya in Ghostwire Tokyo, I'm even more impressed at the way that RGG Studio manage to compress the cities they use as settings: keeping the general topography, landmarks and nature of the streets while making it more compact.

Steam Deck report: A great game for the system. Medium detail or so plus FSR gave me a good 40fps, with a bit of a drop when moving through Yokohama in particular. If you're willing to lose some more detail 60 isn't out of the question, especially in Kamurocho, and I found myself swapping to it in longer cutscenes to benefit from those smoother prerendered scenes. I played about 15 hours of it across two intercontinental plane trips and it made the time pass extremely quickly.

Initially this is a really plain looking action RPG without too much going for it. Once you start playing the game properly though it is really good fun: you get the Ultimate Technique from Ninja Gaiden and it's got an extremely satisfying parry, but the whole thing feels like a first draft of a full game. The levels are spartan and repetitive, the story is extremely bare-bones, the character upgrades and progression feel more gated behind story progress than anything, the whole thing's badly organised (you have six spell 'elements' but only four shortcut buttons, for example), and you can't cancel moves very well which can be frustrating when surrounded, especially since the camera is appalling.

But again, that combat, while it starts out as pretty limited, really picks up towards the end. The final bosses end up being really fun because unlike other games of its ilk, if you anticipate even the biggest moves you can just ignore them and do a cool counterattack while gems and health pickups fly out of the boss. I'd love to see another iteration of this because with more time and better scoping it could be really fun.

Steam Deck report: Not a very well optimised game. There were area where even an RTX 3080 couldn't hold 60fps in spite of some unimpressive visuals (albeit improved by HDR with some super saturated spell effects) so the APU in the Deck really struggles. I locked it to 30fps with Medium visuals and Balanced FSR, as the Low settings removed fundamental parts of the rendering which made it look really unacceptably bad (no shadows at all, removed realtime lighting, that kind of thing). Even then, it wasn't able to hold 30 in some areas even at max TDP: there was an ice corridor in the third chapter in particular which would end up sending the frame rate to the low 20s in spite of nothing happening. Ultimately playable but far from optimal.

What a waste. A waste of a fantastic location in Shibuya, nonsensically rearranged and barely used at all except for the Scramble crossing and climbing Hikarie early on. A waste of a good setting with some initially interesting yokai related side quests ruined when you realise there's only maybe three of them and they just become another point on the map. Some of the worst control I've experienced in Unreal Engine, with mouse input being run through some input lag generator that had me drunkenly swinging the view around when the frame rate dropped below 100, which it often did with RT reflections on (the highlight of the game, since it's played mostly in rainy city streets illuminated by countless neon signs).

Such a shame.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy this as much as I did. The script and humour mostly missed the mark for me but at least the main antagonists were genuinely satisfying to ultimately defeat, and Claptrap is just the absolute worst. That aside though, the actual game feels great to play. Some really sharp aiming, a good selection of weapons and quite a few callbacks to classic guns in other shooters (the ASMD Shock Rifle ripoff I found was particularly fun to blow myself up with) among the sea of loot meant that I was always progressing from one fun gun to the next, and the feedback when shooting enemies is excellent. I played this over Christmas, mostly on the Steam Deck while watching films with the family and it was just really fun scratching that loot itch.

Steam Deck report: As I said, I played about half my time on this game on the Deck. I had some difficulty getting it working initially but once you realise the initial load takes ages on even a fast PC things made more sense. Proton GE and DX12 gave me the most stable experience and I played mostly between 40 and 60fps in a mix of medium and low detail at 75% rendering resolution. That sounds bad but it actually looked pretty decent on the small screen due to the large amount of stuff happening and the relatively high contrast of the graphics. Once I bound gyro control activation to the left trigger the game also handled extremely well; very responsive aiming and generally a pleasure to play.

This was kind of a reverse of the first game for me: I enjoyed the first half of Ragnarok a lot more than the second. The game starts off with lots of setpieces and variety as the story hums along, then about halfway through it just kind of starts meandering along with a bunch of stuff that I barely remember. And that's about it: a month or so later as I write this, I barely remember anything from the second half of the game except the neat new weapon you get and the constant wittering from whoever's hanging around with you.

More of a miss than a hit for me, unfortunately. Bayonetta remains a lot of fun to control but as a game it does feel like a step back; you spend a lot of time hitting massive enemies in their knees while the camera tries to keep up or retreating to do your Demon Slave attacks, and there's too much space inbetween the verses with the weak platforming from previous games becoming genuinely irritating at times. This comes to a head while you're controlling Viola, who is frustrating to play as because she's worse than Bayonetta in every way while also having her main defensive technique on a different button to Bayonetta's.

It does hit top gear for long enough to make you remember what you appreciate about the series, with some cool setpieces and often fun combat but there's too much friction inbetween, like the superfluous weapon skill trees or the weirdly empty hub level, which make the game feel like a hollowed out version of something bigger. A bit of a shame.

A really fun idea which outstays its welcome a bit. I would have loved a few more spray upgrades (or maybe more effective existing ones - I'm looking at you, soap attachment) as the last few levels are massive. I liked the way it used the environment to tell a weird little story in the middle of what is apparently just a relaxing game about cleaning dirt off things. My play time in the end was in the mid-40s hours and I think halving that would have been ideal. Looking forward to seeing what Futurlab come out with next as this was a nice little bit of inspiration.

Steam Deck report: Runs just great. Most of the time I played at 60fps in medium, 11W. Binding some of the controls (like toggling the spray) to the back buttons was a real winner in terms of ergonomics and it felt more comfortable to play than it did on either a standard controller or keyboard and mouse. The way it saves exactly what you've done when you quit also makes it an ideal game to just pick up and play - a good fit for the Deck.

Another run through on PC. Still not as good as 8 was, but with a lot of the technical flaws of the PS4 version alleviated the game works a lot better. I still think it's overall a bit muddled and the pacing's weird but uncovering the map remains fun and the combat's satisfying. The ending hits a little different after a couple of years not being able to travel anywhere, too.

Steam Deck report: I played almost entirely on Deck. A brilliant port by PH3 - obviously it was never going to drop a frame on my 3080-equipped desktop but being able to run at full resolution with equivalent settings and significantly better frame rate than on PS4 on a handheld helps the combat outside of dungeons and the loading's nice and quick even on SD card. Not a constant 60 in the overworld but there's plenty of room to reduce the load and I really liked how sharp it looked.

A funny little game that's more than the sum of its parts. That's a good thing, because the individual parts are often pretty lacking.

The premise of the game is extremely appealing: you are the college dropout child of a successful businessman who is given a grotty looking launderette to run as a way of learning business. You start off doing people's laundry but there are arcade machines in the back of the launderette which end up making more money and that ends up feeding back into itself and you end up with 30-odd arcade games, which you play in order to increase their earning potential.

It's a game of some pretty amazing ambition - 35-plus original games in one, for less than 20 quid? Unfortunately all of them have at least one major issue which seriously harms them. Universally, the big issues are poor controls and obnoxious CRT shaders but many games have other major issues, like the Arkanoid clone with shockingly poor physics, the DDR game with the arrows in the wrong order, the racing game which has corners that you can't take without crashing or the Super Hexagon game which seems to run in slow motion. It's not exactly Cassette 50 but I don't see myself coming back to any of them soon.

It still kept me going for 20-odd hours though; the voice of the character's father is well played and they absolutely nailed the progression. The games being fairly low quality doesn't matter so much when they're constantly coming in. With some more options and a bit of refactoring of things like the controls (especially in the games and on interacting with objects in the world) I think quite a few of the games could be genuinely a lot of fun, and since they're actively patching I think this might be worth revisiting in a few months.

Steam Deck report: After the first patch after a week or so, it just works. Pretty much solid 60 and I played 95% of the game on it. A good time waster.

I'm logging this as complete as I think I've broken the game by doing too many money runs.

I don't normally 'do' Early Access games but this one has been an amazing experience since I picked it up in January. A simple game which you can play while doing something else, but one with lots more depth than you'd think and had me looking around for guides on the best builds.

The best part is seeing all the 'new' stuff; it's almost like the old days when you'd hear about a ridiculous new secret in Mortal Kombat and then you'd see it. Stages going into other stages, moving too far in one direction and the screen turning black leading into a new boss fight, and all the unlockable characters. I'll still go back and keep up with the achievements but the last 7-8 months of patches are what I'll remember as a game already worth its piffling cost ended up getting built up into something many times its size.

Steam Deck report: This is a surprisingly heavy game (even my 12 core Ryzen 3900X often struggles when things get chaotic) and the Deck's CPU doesn't really stand a chance of getting to 30 minutes without a lot of skipped frames. It's hardly unplayable, though, as it ends up like an EDF game with the system struggling to display the sheer amount of destruction, and the form factor of the machine is absolutely perfect for this kind of game that's easy to pick up and hard to put down. The author's working on more efficient game code so hopefully this will improve but it's not compromised in any way.

A frustrating mess. An open world game where you have to play pretty much all the available side stuff to you as part of the main storyline. A game about being a biker with a bike that seems to be leaking fuel constantly. A game where you're playing as a complete psycho, muttering away to himself constantly about how he's going to kill every zombie he sees. A 'true' ending which is just a dumb sequel tease.

There are positives; it looks quite nice and once you get the final bike upgrades it feels a bit more freeing but the majority of the game is spent with the game systems actively pushing against you.

Steam Deck report: Ran perfectly happily at 40fps with mostly PS4 equivalent settings; tweaking the resolution down a little smoothed things out even more and the game's AA is so blurry I hardly noticed. The laggier controls due to the lower framerate are a pain at times but a bit of gyro aiming and tuning dead zones made it adequate enough. A good port, and doesn't feel compromised running on a handheld.

A decent Musou that starts well but really runs out of steam towards the end. It was three times as long as the previous FE Musou at 45 hours but I think it could have really benefitted from being closer to 30.

The battle system is good; it's not as fast and smooth as the previous game (which had a decent 60fps mode when playing docked!) and in terms of pure performance it's never smooth. It's no Age of Calamity but with long loading times and a frame rate which never goes above about 45 you're always feeling the strain on the Switch hardware. Kill counts are significantly lower and everything just has a few too many hit points for my liking in this genre.

The story is where it almost rescues the game but as I said it falls at the last hurdle. It starts fast, skipping through the time which was otherwise spent in FE Three Houses hanging around the Monastery but then you end up in a similar camp map running around too much, going through too many menus and talking to too many people. There's character development teased, but then the last bit of the game happens and it just kind of stops with a 'btw you won but we don't show you that' kind of text explanation.

Age of Calamity was an exceptional Musou game, full of variety in both characters and missions, held back by hardware that couldn't handle it. I look forward to playing it on an updated Switch, if that ever happens. I don't think I'd like this one any more if it ran at a constant 60.