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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge (PS5): COMPLETED!

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A PS5 game? How rare! But yes, this game was on my Switch wishlist for a while waiting for a decent sale, but then it recently appeared on PS++++++ as a free rental so I played it there instead. It felt wrong, somehow, even though it’s on the same TV the Switch version would have been played on.

Went through the game with my daughter. I was Mikey, she was Don, and it was great. It’s a proper sequel to the well-known arcade game from 1989, and although has loads more moves, much better graphics, animation and sound, and more characters, it really does feel like a sequel. The same humour and style, and even a remade cartoon intro sequence and, it would appear, the original voice cast.

There are a few additions which nod to more recent side-scrolling fighting games, like XP which eventually unlocks moves, more lives, more energy, and so on, and even some “missions” where you have to find hidden things in each level (you can return to levels too, and there’s an overworld map), so it’s a bit deeper than the original. Very enjoyable.

Sackboy: A Big Adventure (PS5): COMPLETED!

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I talked about this a lot more on the ugvm Podcast, but for those who don’t listen (who even are you?), here’s a written account instead.

Firstly, I want to point how how bad I thought the Little Big Planet games are. As toyboxes, as creation tools – they’re great. Clunky, but great. As actual platformers? Awful. Some really great ideas, totally ruined by stupid controls and physics and wonkiness. For this reason, I never even looked at Sackboy: A Big Adventure, which took away the good bit of the series (makin’ stuff) and left the bad bit (jumping about). PS+ thrust it upon me, however, so I thought I could at least have a peek.

And I’m so, so glad I did because it is glorious. By binning the construction, they’ve concentrated on the platforming and they absolutely nailed it. The physics feels right! The levels don’t feel bodged into existence! It’s fun, it’s cute, it’s inventive and it’s brilliant. Seems all they needed to do was completely remove the entire point of the series. Who knew?

I played through it in co-op with my daughter, which was another revelation. In LBP, “co-op” was misused. No matter how much you wanted and tried to work together, invariably you’d end up in each other’s way, grabbing them by mistake, causing death and being left behind and making the game unnecessarily harder. Here, it’s real proper co-op, where a second player is an asset not an obstacle. You can throw them to reach bonuses and secrets, take down baddies quicker, and zip through areas that need lots of button/switch/object manipulation. Two player improves the experience rather than causes frustration.

The levels themselves are varied and feel so much like Nintendo platformers it’s uncanny. You know the thing about Super Mario Galaxy where they bombard you with ideas that are often one-and-done and never used again, but there are so, so many of them? This feels like that. In fact, if you were to replace Sackboy with Kirby or Yoshi, this could very easily be a Nintendo platformer. Yes, that’s high praise – because Sony platformers are generally terrible. Between this and Astrobot on the PS5, my mind is being changed.

Oh, and it has Dawn French in it and you can slap each other. What more do you want?

Biomutant (PS5): COMPLETED!

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I do wonder sometimes what it is that makes me decide to play certain games. I’d cast a rough eye over reviews of Biomutant around the time it came out and it seemed to be an average open world adventure/explorey game, so ignored it. It’s now on PS+ (or possibly PS++ or PS+++: It’s hard to tell these days) and I downloaded it for reasons unknown, then started to play it.

After picking the fur colours for my… rat? Meerkat? I was set off in a world which immediately made me think of Fallout crossed with Stray – full of post-apocalyptic ruins and areas of poisoned air. Only with a narrator who won’t shut the hell up (I later discovered you can, thankfully) and keeps calling things by silly childish names. The plot is a mashup of three main stories – avenge the death of your parents by some big bad creature, unite all the tribes by joining one than either convincing them to join together (by fighting them) or helping them wipe the others out (by, uh, fighting them), and finally Save the World by stopping four huge Puffs (and no piano) from eating the roots of the World Tree or whatever it’s called. The latter seems to be the “main” quest.

Gameplay is like a cross between Zelda: Breath of the Wild and $random_ubisoft_title, with a large map and regions each with things to do. Tribes to take down, missions to complete, and loads of rubbish “knob twiddling” puzzles to solve. These puzzles are all virtually identical, whether they’re to activate washing machines, telephones, locked doors, record players, or other “old world relics”, and although there’s a side quest for each type, I really couldn’t be bothered tracking them all down.

Combat is a mix of smacking things with sword or club type weapons, or shooting with gun type weapons. It’s serviceable, but not really as fun or as fluid as other similar games You can build and modify your weapons and armour by swapping out parts and adding items to them for more damage or better healing or whatever, and this bit of the game is (I found, at least) pretty addictive – I was always trying to get the numbers up for, to be honest, little actual difference. I was always hilariously overpowered and near indestructible, and actually, the only time I died was when I jumped of a cliff into oblivion and the game reloaded an autosave which put me back just as I died. Helpful.

Graphically, Biomutant can look very, very pretty. Some incredible vistas, great sunsets, and amazing landscapes. Most of the characters are furry and the way the fur moves is wonderful. However, when it gets dark – especially in caves and underground – it looks dreadful. As in, you can’t see a bloody thing. If I fiddle with the gamma everything just goes grey instead of black, and looks worse. I don’t think it’s my TV, and I don’t think it’s HDR, as I don’t have this issue with other games. It’s like anything more than 30% black is 100% black. It affects the game too, as it makes these areas difficult to navigate and ugly on the eyes. You have a sort of torch, but it has a really narrow cone of effect so doesn’t help much.

To sum up, it’s a mix. There are some really nice bits, like the world and the characters and bits of the story. There are some rubbish bits, like the seemingly half-baked (and totally unnecessary, aside from needing to use that game title for something) power-up unlocking system and the puzzles. There are sections wholesale “borrowed” from other games, like Link’s glider, “horse”riding and Assassin’s Creed-like loot-chests. There’s a whole light/dark choice aspect which seems to get mostly ignored when you talk to people anyway. I went full “light” and kept being told that I might consider forgiving rather then destroy the guy who killed my family, but when it comes down to it, you’re not given that option. Too much of the fringes of the game feel under-done or incomplete. What is good, is really good, but it’s let down in so many ways.

Earth Defense Force: World Brothers (PS5): COMPLETED!

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I’m a fan of the EDF games, with their Massive Ants and Massive Wasps and Massive Robots and Massive Space Ships. I was intrigued by this, Minecraft-y looking entry into the series, but the problem with EDF games is they cost money and don’t often drop to Super Cheap, so I never got round to buying it. And I still haven’t, because it appeared on PS+!

I thought the only real difference between this and the others in the series was the graphics, but actually, there’s a bigger change. You see, you don’t control just one person, you control a squad of four, swapping between them with the d-pad. Instead of collecting billions of weapons, of which you used to be able to wield two, each of your team has just one weapon. But! Because you have four of them, you essentially have four weapons, albeit they’re a bit trickier to swap between and some of them may get “killed”.

As you play through the game, you find and rescue more “brothers” and “sisters”, each of whom is a terrible stereotype of the country they supposedly represent. You can then use these in your squad, and each type has different attributes (like speed and armour) and a special skill (like being able to fly for a bit, having a dash-dodge move, or grenades) so choosing a good combination of both characters and weapons for your team is essential. Well, actually it doesn’t make a lot of difference most of the time and I tended to stick with a couple with long range and a couple with short range weapons.

The rest of the game is, broadly, same as it ever was only in Super Bright Colour Vision and with stupid hyperactive chat instead of the usual morose “we’re all gonna die”/weirdly upbeat “we are the valiant infantry” of the grey-brown entries in the series. You still have ants and spiders, you still have Hectors and Erginus, you still have tanks and a huge cargo robot you can ride, it’s just a bit more jolly and blocky. Also, it was really smooth with no slowdown, which is unusual for EDF but probably because this was the “simpler” game, and on a PS5.

As before, I played through the game with my daughter in co-op, which actually meant we had two squads of four! It’s a lot of fun, but we found it a bit short compared to the “proper” games, and I also missed the “collect all the green weapons crates and red armour crates” which don’t exist here. Well, the red ones just heal your team now. Still, can’t complain when we enjoyed it so much anyway, and it didn’t cost us anything to play.

Toem (PS5): COMPLETED!

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This looked like a lovely wee game when I saw it appear on the Switch eShop, so because I’m morally against paying full price for anything these days I put it on my wish list in the hope of a sale. And then, it appeared on PS+, saving me even more money!

It’s a unique looking, black and white 2D characters in a 3D world game with a hand-drawn style, which is why it originally stood out to me. For the most part, it’s an adventure-y puzzle game, wrapped around the premise of taking photos of stuff. The aim is to complete enough photo challenges in one area to unlock travel to the next one, eventually reaching the Toem and taking a photo of it. I won’t explain what a Toem is (or even how to pronounce it), but the reason for the black and white graphics become clear when you get there.

None of the photo requests are particularly challenging, and some require you to return to visited areas with new clothes and/or abilities you unlocked later (like being able to see ghosts or break blocks of ice), but it isn’t really a Metroidvania as most are optional.

Each area has a great collection of characters to meet and interact with, from the old guy who has lost a sock (and somehow you find two for him), to the ghost of a horse’s head who wants a photo of what they looked like when they were still alive, to the group of thugs who won’t let you join their gang until you’ve found all their graffiti. There’s also some shady organisation watching you for Reasons, and a number of shy monsters to look out for and somehow get snaps of.

It’s very silly, and probably counts as one of those “cosy” genre games with no timers, deaths, failures, peril or danger, but is really quite lovely.