Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 (PS5): COMPLETED!

I’ve been eyeing this up for ages but it never really went cheap enough. Sure, I’m a fan of the series (although THPS3 is the best one), but I couldn’t bring myself to pay more than £20 for it. Then PS+ gave it away as a free rental, finally, so here we are. It’s a remake of the first two THPS games, mostly as I remember them, only in much higher resolution and with some of the music missing because …

Pile Up! Box by Box (PS5): COMPLETED!

No, I have no idea why I downloaded this, but then I discovered it was multiplayer co-op so played through it with my family. It’s a cute, relatively simple, platform puzzle game. Most of the puzzles relate to the height or distance you can jump, and manoeuvring or stacking objects (or your co-op partners) to reach buttons and switches and so on. There are springy things and floaty things, fans, fences you can burn, other characters you need to help, …

Moving Out (PS5): COMPLETED!

This is one of those intentionally obstructive co-op arcade games like Overcooked, and it has a similar art style and sense of humour to that game too. But, it’s a lot easier and I (well, we – daughter was on controller 2) had more fun with it. The aim is to clear a house of (mostly) furniture, by carrying it to the waiting lorry and packing it all in so it fits. Smaller items, like toasters and boxes, can be …

Stray (PS5): COMPLETED!

The first game to be “free” with the new higher tiers of PlayStation Plus on the day of release, Stray was a lovely surprise. I knew it existed, so I don’t mean like that, and it was announced to be coming to the service a while back. No, what I’m referring to is the gameplay, the setting, and just how good it is. Until downloading it, my interested was “ooh, a cat game? That might be fun”. But it’s so …

Minit (PS5): COMPLETED!

Another PS+ free rental, but a game I’ve nearly bought more than once elsewhere and actually own on PC (but I don’t have my Steam Deck yet to play it on!). Minit’s “thing” is that it’s a Zelda-ish game only you die every sixty seconds. Or sooner. And then you start again. However, some things are persistent and you do reach respawn points and open shortcuts so dying isn’t really an inconvenience. There’s a plot about having to go into …

I Am Dead (PS5): COMPLETED!

With PS+ Premium comes a huge number of games you can “borrow”. A few of those are titles I was eyeing up to buy on the Switch, so I suppose I’ve saved a bit of money now I’ve got them on my PlayStation “for free”. I Am Dead is one of those. It’s a hidden object game with a story and some quirks. Firstly, you’re dead (but then you surely guessed that from the title), and with the help of …

Sparkle Unleashed (PS5): COMPLETED!

A while back I played that Zuma clone Sparkle 2, and it was pretty good. Well, I recently got a free trial of PSNow to preview what the upcoming PS+ changes might be like, and the original Sparkle was on there and so I gave it a go. The only real difference between this and Sparkle 2 is that in that game you have the launcher in a fixed point but can rotate 360 degrees and shoot balls that way …

Spider-Man: Remastered: The City that Never Sleeps: Turf Wars (PS5): COMPLETED!

Although it is sort of its own story, this chapter continues on from the previous DLC. The Maggia are getting more dangerous what with Hammerhead nicking all the high tech Sable weaponry and outfitting himself with some impressive armour. There’s a new set of Screwball challenges too.

Spider-Man: Remastered: The City that Never Sleeps: The Heist (PS5): COMPLETED!

That’s more colons than a tin of cheap dog food. I won’t go into the mechanics of this DLC chapter as they’re the same as in the main game, but the story is much more low-key than what went before. It follows the return of Black Cat and how the Maggia (definitely not the Mafia) are resurging into Manhattan to fill the void left by Kingpin’s incarceration and how one of the Maggia family dons, Hammerhead, is trying to seize …

Spider-Man: Remastered (PS5): COMPLETED!

The most important thing in any Spider-Man game is the web swinging. What’s the point of being Spider-Man without it? Sure, he could swing in some of the 2D 8 and 16-bit platformers, but when the Gamecube-era Spider-Man 2 game came out the freedom of 3D traversal round New York was a massive wow. The rest of that game… not so much. Well, much time has passed since then and this, the PS5-improved version of the PS4 exclusive, is very …

Little Big Planet 3 (PS4): COMPLETED!

I don’t know where I got this. PS+, perhaps? I certainly would never have bought it what with not really liking the first game. Oh sure, it was clever and it looked pretty and you could make your own levels, but they forgot to make it controllable and fun and the physics are all over the place and the moving in and out of the screen is hit and miss. But they’ll have fixed that two sequels later, right? Right? …

Overcooked 2 (PS5): COMPLETED!

Although I enjoyed the original Overcooked, it was much too hard. Sure, I could get one star on each level, but that wasn’t enough to progress. With the “All You Can Eat” pack a free rental on PS+, my daughter and I gave the sequel a go and it’s much, much easier. To the point where we got 3 stars on most levels first time. The main change seems to be that you have much more time to complete dishes. …

Earth Defense Force 5 (PS5): COMPLETED!

I realised for the first time while playing EDF 5, having played all (I think) of the previous titles in the series, that I think the reason I enjoy them so much is that they’re basically musou games only with guns and aliens. Sure, there’s less base defence and area capture, but the gameplay is surprisingly similar. After I’d played a few levels, my daughter noticed it was two player and so asked to join in, which made it even …

One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 (PS5): COMPLETED!

Not that long ago I picked up One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 on the Switch because it was cheap and I was after a fun musou game. Turned out that, despite not knowing anything about One Piece, it was really rather good. So, when the sequel was cheap on PSN and I’d just bought a second PS5 controller, I thought I’d pick it up. It’s more of the same, really. There’s a few different story arcs, characters who were not …