Games Beaten 2026

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

09:
Wave Race 64

The tracks have a lot of personality, and the wave physics are marvelous! It's an otherwise basic racing game, but nevertheless unforgettable.
7/10

[REPO Man]

Beat Dead Island 2 for PS5 on New Game+ as Ryan.

[Markies]

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2026!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***

1. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (GBA)
2. Knights of the Round (SNES)
3. Fight'N Rage (NS)
4. Time Stalkers (SDC)
***5. Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster (PS3)***



I completed Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster on the Sony Playstation 3 this evening!

Final Fantasy X is my favorite game of all time.

Final Fantasy X/X-2 were the first games I ever beat for the Playstation 3. I beat them on my march to beating my Backlog. Well, I have been playing several PS3 games since then and I have not found one that I have marked as complete. I decided that my first PS3 Complete game that it had to be Final Fantasy X/X-2. So, with a bit of trepidation considering the length and what was needed to finish it, I decided to give it a try.

I succeeded in Final Fantasy X. I failed in Final Fantasy X-2.

Unfortunately, I missed some scenes in Final Fantasy X-2 and did not get an Episode Complete which locked me away from some content. My desire to continue to play the game was waning and I really did not want to go through the game a third time. So, I've already done everything in the PS2 version and the only new things are Dress Spheres, so I am going to mark it complete and move on.

Obviously, my opinion on these games will be a little skewed considering my history. Final Fantasy X is my favorite and most important game of my life. It is the reason I play games as much as I do today. It is one of the only things in this world that makes me fully happy and completely content. It is my home.

That is the PS2 version. Unfortunately, the Remastered versions did not add to that feeling. The remixed music feels so strange to me and it is hard to get over. Eventually, I will want to play the Switch versions because of tweaks including being able to play with the original music. I was really excited to try the Dark Aeons and fight Nemesis, but I was kind of disappointed in them all. The Dark Aeons don't try anything different except for maybe one while Nemesis is just annoying. Also, he adds so much extra time in the Monster Arena that would stretch out the end game even more. In X-2, it really is just some extra Dress Spheres. Much like the new sphere grid in the original, it's nice, but nothing too exciting.

Obviously, this is a different review because this is a different game to me. I will always want to try new Final Fantasy X content, but this just made me appreciate the original more. I will always enjoy playing through these games, but the PS2 versions will be the ones closest to my heart for all time!

[Markies]

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2026!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***

1. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (GBA)
2. Knights of the Round (SNES)
3. Fight'N Rage (NS)
4. Time Stalkers (SDC)
***5. Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster (PS3)***
6. OutRunners (GEN)



I completed OutRunners on the Sega Genesis this evening!

One of my childhood Genesis games was OutRun 2019. I absolutely adored that game and I loved just plopping that in for some fun driving action. Eventually, I finished everything in the game and after many years, I finally was able to pick up the original OutRun on the Genesis as well. While not as polished and more simpler, I still enjoyed the driving experience with some beautiful music. Since I was almost done with the trilogy, I decided to pick up OutRunners last year. Since last night was kind of sad night, I wanted something to pick up my spirits and I thought OutRunners would be it. Unfortunately, it was not and was rather annoying.

I will say, Outrunners still has that Outrun feel to it and I very much knew what I was getting into when I started up the game. It was still an enjoyable driving experience and had moments of enjoyment in the game. The music is nice too with some good melodies. The variety of cars was really nice and I think this had multiplayer mode for the very first time.

So, the multiplayer mode is a split screen. For it to work, the game is always running in split screen and you have a computer rival that you have to attend to. Obviously, being forced to play split screen in a single player game is rather annoying. It especially doesn't work in a driving game where it is hard to see what is coming in front of you. Also, that computer AI is absolutely relentless. They drive near perfectly, blocking you when they are in front and trying to ram you off the road. Besides the split screen, the game's presentation just feels like it was cheaply made. The melodies are good, but some of the music sounds like it comes from the Master System. The sound effects are what people greatly dislike about the Genesis sound chip. The voice samples are a garble mess. Finally, the graphics are very flat and they reissue the same assets over and over again. The game was ported by Data East and I think they did it on the cheap.

Overall, I did not enjoy much of my time with OutRunners. Since it is OutRun and a driving game, I did have some enjoyment with it. But, overall, I would recommend any other game in the series and I can see why this is the Black Sheep of the series. If you are a diehard racing fan or OutRun fan, I would recommend it, but for anybody else, this game is an easy skip.

[TheSSNintendo]

1. Deja Vu: MacVenture Series
2. Deja Vu II: MacVenture Series
3. Earthworm Jim 2 (SNES/Switch Online)
4. Crash Banidcoot: The Huge Adventure (Gameboy Advance)
5. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (Switch)
6. Lego Batman: The Video Game (Steam)
7. Ys III - Wanderers from Ys (SNES)

[TheSSNintendo]

1. Deja Vu: MacVenture Series
2. Deja Vu II: MacVenture Series
3. Earthworm Jim 2 (SNES/Switch Online)
4. Crash Banidcoot: The Huge Adventure (Gameboy Advance)
5. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (Switch)
6. Lego Batman: The Video Game (Steam)
7. Ys III - Wanderers from Ys (SNES)
8. Suikoden II HD Remaster (Switch)

[MrPopo]

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025

1. Dead Space (2023) - PC
2. Dead Space 2 - PC
3. Dead Space 3 - PC
4. The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon - PS5
5. Stellar Blade - PS5

Stellar Blade is an action game that takes a lot of cues from Nier: Automata. And by a lot of cues, I mean it's basically a Korean version of it, with a bit more emphasis on combat and a bit less emphasis on story. It does a solid job of being what it wants to be, but there just wasn't a lot of meat on these bones.

In the future, Earth has been overrun by monsters called Naytiba. The remnants of humanity have escaped to space, and every now and then a strike force is sent down to try and take out the lynchpin Naytiba. The game begins with the 7th Airborne Squad landing to try and find the Alpha Naytiba, and naturally, things go to hell and you are the only survivor.

The game is a mixture of open world zones and linear zones. The linear zones have you go through a variety of setpieces until you get to the final boss. The open world zones are where a bunch of sidequests are, and serve as a sandbox to play in until you move the story forward and enter another linear zone. Notably, the linear zone that leads from the open world zone is also a gameplay change; more on that in a bit.

The game has your standard array of moves for modern action games. Light attack, heavy attack, block, dodge, parry, and then special moves that require a resource gained from dodging and parrying. Parrying attacks will reduce the enemy stagger bar, and emptying that lets you do a special big damage move. Some enemy attacks must be dodged, and there's two kinds of enemy attacks that you have to do a specific counter dodge, which you must learn in the skill tree, but the benefit is you get extra benefits when they use those attacks and you dodge them properly.

The game additionally has a ranged attack option, but it sucks. It roots you in place and doesn't use the lock on system. Ammo is extremely limited, and the damage is anemic. There's really only two times you'll make use of it. The first is the aforementioned zones after the open world zones, where the game forces you to only use the ranged attack. Here the game has ammo drop prolifically, and enemies have exposed weakpoints that explode and drop their health fast, so the system is at least tolerable. The second is against two of the final three bosses, which have a special attack where they spawn targets in the air that you have to shoot down; if you don't do it in time they instant kill you.

The game's story has nothing novel in it; you can probably guess all of the major twists within the first third of the game. As a result, the game has to lean on its combat to keep you entertained, and unfortunately the combat is really only good against bosses. Against regular enemies you either steamroll single enemies (though sometimes they have way too much health, which makes them a slog), or you have to deal with packs that the combat system does not handle well. You'll take a lot of cheap shots because your attacks don't clear enough of an area to deal with multiple enemies. The bosses, at least, are quite enjoyable, but that's only a small amount of the content.

Overall, it's a solid enough game if you like those spectacle fighter action games. I'd recommend trying out the demo first (if it's still available; I'm not sure if it is); you'll figure out pretty quick if you enjoy the combat or not.

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

10: Returnal

Wait a sec, this is the 3D Metroid game I've been waiting for the whole time! Okay, the randomized layout isn't a perfect replacement for sequence breaking, and the velocity glitches aren't as exciting, but what you do get is a dark, atmospheric, lonely, and esoteric alien world to uncover, all the while enjoying great controls and constantly hunting for power-ups.
And if you can't seem to get past the first level, hang in there, the later ones take less attempts.
But the best part is the mind-fuck half way through the game. Fear of spoiling a game's story is wildly overestimated, but in this case, I genuinely think you should play the game before reading the rest.

After the third boss you finally get to return home. Due to the game's difficulty, it's well earned. And the ending is pleasant: you live your life to an old age in peace and contentness. But when you die of old age, guess what, you're back to the hellish planet. It's forty years later, but this time, there's no beacon to get you off. There's no more hope to push you forward, just your curiosity. But it turns out the original explanation of why you are stuck there is a red herring: the second half rewards you with a better explanation. Indulge!

9/10

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2026 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat

1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. We Were Here (Steam)
3. We Were Here Too (Steam)
4. Tales of Graces f (PS3) *
5. Retro Game Challenge (Switch) *
6. We Were Here Forever (Steam)
7. Tales of Hearts R (PSVita) *

8. Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered (PC)

I played the Wii version of this game many years ago around the time it came out. I remember having a lot of fun with it, but I never really knew much of anything about this version of the game because I didn’t have either console it was released on ^^;. Fast forward to a few weeks back, and my friends and I have watched both old Ghostbusters films and even some of the old cartoons at our weekly movie nights. With the movies so fresh in my head and having gotten this remaster for free on Epic last year, it seemed like the perfect time to finally sit down and play through this other version of the old “third Ghostbusters movie” video game. It took me around 8 hours and 45 minutes to beat the English version of the game on normal difficulty playing with my Xbox One controller.

With a decent amount of input from Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis (they didn’t write it, but this is based off of outlines for a potential third film), this game’s plot really does read like a proper third Ghostbusters film in a lot of ways. It’s 1991, two years after the end of Ghostbusters 2, and you play as a unnamed rookie who’s just joined the Ghostbusters team. You’re more of a mute observer in the story than a real character (though you do get to do a few sight gags at points), but the rest of the main cast are all here and voiced by their original actors. A huge psychic disturbance just blasted over the whole city due to some unknown occurrence at the museum’s new Gozer (the antagonist of the first film) exhibit. Work is about to get a LOT busier for the Ghostbusters, and you’re here to help them through it (and maybe even save the world together, if the previous two movies are any indication! X3).

The plot is really fun! It’s nothing deep or amazing, but it does a really solid job of feeling like a natural extension of where things leave off at the end of Ghostbusters 2. A friend of mine described it as a “nostalgia bomb” that still manages to build on old references rather than simply revel in them and do nothing new, and I agree with that wholeheartedly. The voice performances by the returning actors are a little awkward in the more video game-y bits, but for the most part, they work really well in crafting the atmosphere of a Ghostbusters adventure to go along with them on (save for Bill Murry who’s clearly barely trying, and his weak performance drags down nearly every scene he’s in, unfortunately). I’m not sure this would be quite as fun a romp for someone not interested in Ghostbusters in any way (at which point I’d ask, “why do you even want to play this game?” x3), but it’s still a pretty darn solidly written comedy even if you’re not a Ghostbusters fan. If you *are* a Ghostbusters fan, however, there’s a ton to love here. This was clearly put together by folks with a ton of care and love for the franchise, and it makes the whole experience just ooze fun out of every ectoplasmic slime pile X3

The gameplay is a third-person shooter, and having played a lot of first- and third-person shooters from this era over the past couple years, this is easily one of the strongest I’ve played. You go through largely linear stages fighting ghosts and apparitions to get from one end of the level to the other (no need to reinvent the wheel, especially when the movie-coded narrative is such a priority in the first place). Naturally, you have a proton pack rather than an assortment of guns, but they do give you a bit more firepower to work with than simply a normal stream of accelerated protons to whip around at ghosts. You eventually have a total of 4 different modes for the proton pack, and each mode has an alt fire mode to give you a total of 8 weapons to swap between whenever you like. The game doesn’t just have regenerating health, but you can also get revived by a fellow Ghostbuster if you’re downed (if there are any Ghostbusters up and around to revive you, that is). Their AI isn’t perfect, but they’re more than competent enough to be adequate partners most of the time.

You’ve also got various methods of dispatching different kinds of enemies. On the more minor end, you’ve got animated objects or simple undead creatures that can just be blasted until they stop moving (makes stuff like your slime launcher and shotgun mode on the proton pack come in really handy). Then you’ve got the proper ghosts. Anyone who’s seen the movies will know that it’s not enough to simply blast a ghost with a proton stream and hope they go away: You’ve gotta trap ‘em! Whittling down a ghost’s health, grabbing them with the wrangler and slamming them around, and then dragging them into a trap you’ve thrown takes some getting used to, but it does a great job at turning everything you’ve seen in the movies and shows into a video game experience. The wrangler, speaking of which, is effectively your ninth weapon. It’s a little more awkward to use manually than it probably should’ve been, but it thankfully kicks in automatically when a ghost is at low health, and it’s a great catharsis to give a ghost some grief after they’ve been bothering you for so long. Enemies in this game, particularly the captureable ghosts, have an awful lot of health, and it can make some combat encounters a bit frustrating at times with just how much you’ve gotta chase around a particularly annoying specter, but those are thankfully the minority of combats (and it would bustin’ really make you feel good if it were too easy? X3).

Between keeping your fellow Ghostbusters on their feet, capturing ghosts properly, and making sure you’re using the right weapon for the job, it can be kind of a lot to keep track of. However, most enemies are thankfully vulnerable to most weapons, and it’s just a matter of a particular weakness that particular enemy you’re fighting has (which can be found out by scanning them with your PKE meter!). Rather than ammo, your proton pack will simply overheat after using it for too long, so you’ve gotta tap a shoulder button between every few blasts to vent your heat unless you want to be without offense for much far longer than it’d take to blow off a little steam. All of your UI is diegetic, much like Dead Space, with your health and current proton pack heat level indicated on the side of your proton pack. They’re too hard to see clearly in the heat of combat, but other than that, the whole system works remarkably well. The game maintains a good, fast pace that lets you get from scene to scene fast enough that you’re never bored, and outside of some really mean combat encounters in the final stage, the game’s balancing is great too. They’ve managed to make a fun, novel shooter that really makes you feel like a Ghostbuster, and that’s an achievement worth celebrating in my book~.

The aesthetics are a mixed bag, particularly in this remaster. This game had a troubled development in the first place, with the publisher getting bought right before the game came out and the game hovering in limbo for another year before a new publisher picked it up and finally released it. While the voice acting has some spotty performances from one particular cast member (as mentioned earlier), the real casualty of sound design is the music. My only guess is that the game just never had the chance to get a bespoke soundtrack made for it, as damn near all the music in the game is just tracks reused directly from the original Ghostbusters movie soundtrack. They’re still good tunes, of course, but they can get quite repetitive over a game this long, and it makes some scenes feel a bit odd because they don’t have music purpose-built to serve them.

The graphics are also something hit and miss just because of their age. 3D graphics of all kinds have aged to varying degrees of severity, and PS3/360-era 3D has aged some of the hardest of the bunch with just how many of them go for a more realistic look to things. Unlike the cartoony, caricature style used in the Wii and PS2 counterpart games, this game goes for a more realistic style. While it works for the most part, it’s definitely got some uncanny valley feelings going on regarding the faces of the Ghostbusters with how not quite perfectly they capture the likenesses of their respective actors (and the upscaled resolution of the remaster doesn’t exactly help with that). This coupled with how the original version of this game already struggled with often terrible lip sync and very robotic, clunky animations in various cutscenes doesn’t exactly make for an experience as clean as a rough contemporary like Mass Effect 2 did, but the overall quality of the gameplay and writing helps make up for that more than enough.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. I hesitated at recommending this game quite this highly at first with the various meaningful imperfections it has, but it’s just such a great bundle of fun that I can’t help but recommend it. This is a VERY bare bones remaster, but it still makes for a great way to play the game on modern hardware (and didn’t crash on me once! XD). This is really great fun if you’re a fan of third-person shooters and want something novel, and if you’re a Ghostbusters fan (who somehow still hasn’t played this game), then this is a massive pile of fun to go through. As a Ghostbusters adventure where you get to pal along with the Ghostbusters as well as effectively the third Ghostbusters film, this passes with flying colors for me, and I’m willing to be that it very well may for you too if you’re not a huge stickler for graphics~ ^w^

9. Mega Man 11 (PC)

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Mega Man and similar such action platformers, so this game has been on my radar for years (especially after the Mega Man Mega Marathon Month a few years back when I played through damn near every single other one XD). However, the great price always held me back from taking the plunge on this one. As much as I like Mega Man, I don’t love it 40 USD-levels of much ^^;. However, it was recently on sale, and after mentioning how I’d like to play it some day, my lovely wife bought it for me as a gift ^w^. It’s taken a little while to get to playing it, but now I’ve finally gotten through Capcom’s most recent mainline Mega Man game (just in time for next year’s new one, I suppose X3). It overall took me a bit under 4 hours (3.5 hours on my save file) to beat the game on normal mode in Japanese using my Xbox One controller.

Mega Man 11 is, naturally, once again the tale of Mega Man fighting against his forever rival Dr. Wily. This time, an opening cutscene gives us a flashback to Dr. Wily and Dr. Light when they were younger, and how the scientific committee at their university discarded Wily’s double gear system invention in favor of Dr. Light’s idea to build robots with free will. Haunted by this nightmare, Wily nonetheless sees inspiration in his past failing, and sets to work at once. He kidnaps 8 more robot masters and imbues them with a new and improved double gear system (giving them greatly enhanced speed and power like never before!), and sets off to destroy the world that scorned him once again. Mega Man, naturally, sets off to stop him, but not before Dr. Light equips him with Wily’s old university-era double gear system prototype to allow him to fight with power and speed just like his new enemies can. It’s up to Mega Man, for the 11th-ish time, to kick Dr. Wily’s butt!

The story kinda plays at being more serious/thoughtful in some ways (not unlike Mega Man 9 did, in some respects) with Wily’s motivations being genuinely kinda sympathetic this time (but only kinda), but it’s still a Mega Man game at the end of the day. The story is pretty much just here as an excuse for the action, but I honestly wish it wasn’t? The bits of story and dialogue that *are* in the game, even down to the quips the robot masters have when you fight them, are so fun and full of personality that I really wished there’d been more of it. I don’t need the whole thing to have hundreds of pages of dialogue or anything, but with all the trouble they went to to give the whole game VA to this degree, I find it very weird they didn’t at least do little back and forths between Mega Man and the robot masters pre-fight like a good few of the Mega Man X games did. Either way, the story we’ve got is plenty silly and entertaining for a Mega Man adventure, and the Japanese VA is great too~.

The gameplay is Mega Man, for sure, but a bit different than it has been recently. In terms of just comparing this to the other numbered mainline Mega Man titles, this is far more mechanically a sequel to Mega Man 8 than it is to Mega Man 9 or 10. You’ve got 8 robot masters to fight and 4-ish Wily stages after that to play through, but you’ve also got the more expanded cast of Mega Man like Auto who runs your shop. You can buy more power ups as well as permanent passive upgrades to Mega Man much like you could in Mega Man 8, and Mega Man also has his dash back after losing it in Mega Man 9.

However, the big star gimmicks of this game are that double gear system. With it, you can toggle on and off a temporary big power up to your weapons or a huge increase in speed (a slow-mo mode) to help you defeat enemies and get through obstacles. In dire straits, you can even activate both at the same time, though the cooldown is longer if you let them overheat. They’re interesting gimmicks, but I didn’t particularly love them. I eventually got more and more used to using them, though I basically never used the power gear function even if it is cool that it buffs all of the robot masters’ weapons as well as the normal mega buster. I generally play these games with only the mega buster as much as I can (I only ever used special weapons to make the end-game boss rush easier), but what I did use of this game’s special weapons made them seem extremely powerful. That’s just a far less fun way to play these games to me, so I’m generally much happier to not worry about special ammo or weapons and just play around with the mega buster as much as I can.

Part of the reason I do that is because bosses become SO trivialized by using their weakness that even fighting them feels pointless and boring, but even with the new gear systems to get used to, the bosses in this game are balanced crazy hard quite frequently if you’re not using their weaknesses. While you’ve got incredible pushovers like Blast Man, you’ve also got real wrecking balls like Fuse Man and Block Man. The whole game is honestly remarkably difficult and over-tuned quite frequently. Even with stuff like your slow-mo powers to help you (and honestly likely directly due to their presence), this game easily has some of the hardest platforming I can remember in a Mega Man game. A lot of it seemed like it was barely easier, if at all, with the slow-mo powers in the first place, so I have a hard time chalking that up to just my inexperience using the new systems. I managed through the game alright, but that was due to a great familiarity with Mega Man as often as it was down to just blind luck, frankly ^^;. Bizarrely, while so many of the robot masters and stages were often so tough, this game also has, hands down, the easiest final Wily fight in the series. It’s nice to know that Capcom isn’t making Mega Man games super easy in an effort to appeal to mass markets or anything, but I feel like this game could’ve used a little bit more difficulty balancing with just how mean its platforming so often is (and just how long so many of the stages go on for, jfc).

The aesthetics of the game are just fine, too. The 2.5D aesthetics look very nice, and I like the looks of the new enemies and robot masters. The music is also quite good too, even if I didn’t come across any new all time favorite tracks during my time with this game. Ultimately, it’s more Mega Man, and that’s a hard thing to complain about when the standard of quality on these is still so relatively high.

Verdict: Recommended. If you’re a Mega Man fan, this is a pretty darn fun game. Sure, I found the gimmick of the double gear system underwhelming, and I also think the stages are often a bit too long and the difficulty tuning is outta whack, but those are overall small complaints. This is definitely not dethroning my favorite Mega Man games of the classic series any time soon, but it’s still a game I had a good bit of fun with, and I’m glad I finally played it. If you’re someone like me who held out on this game because of the price tag, that was absolutely a fair thing to do, but if you can get it for a few bucks like we managed to, then it’s still a good, fun way to spend an afternoon or two~.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2026 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat

1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. We Were Here (Steam)
3. We Were Here Too (Steam)
4. Tales of Graces f (PS3) *
5. Retro Game Challenge (Switch) *
6. We Were Here Forever (Steam)
7. Tales of Hearts R (PSVita) *
8. Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered (PC)
9. Mega Man 11 (PC)

10. Gravity Circuit (PC)

I nab just about every game that EGS gives away for free, but I don’t give most of them a second look. The trailer for this one, however, really got my attention. As a big Mega Man fan, my Mega Man senses were triggered immediately upon seeing everything about this game, and I added it to my “to play” list asap. Having just finished Mega Man 11 on PC, I was already completely set up to play this sorta thing on my desktop, so I figured I may as well give this a shot too. It overall took me about 5.5-ish hours (though my save file claims more like 3.5, somehow) to finish the English version of the game on normal difficulty.

Many years ago, a large structure simply called “the Arc” was unearthed, and it wasn’t long before countless Virus Army soldiers began pouring out of it. Everything looked like it was over until the Circuits came to the rescue! With all 9 of them working as a team, they were able to just barely hold off the attackers, but at great cost. Nearly all of them were lost in the conflict, with only Gravity Circuit (our titular character) surviving. Even all patched up, he never booted back up. Never, that is, until now! A new Virus Army has appeared out of nowhere and once again threatens the world, and it’s up to Gravity Circuit to save the day and set things right! (Not to mention find out just what the heck is going on in the first place!).

You don’t need to look at the gameplay very long to see that our dev team was VERY influenced by Mega Man Zero, and the same goes for the story too with our savior amnesiac robot here to save all the other robots. It definitely doesn’t *quite* hit the highs that the Zero series ultimately reaches for me, but it’s fun and has a sweet message in the end. If the concept of “It’s Mega Man Zero but with a decidedly Kamen Rider-y vibe to it a lot of the time” sounds appealing to you, then you’re probably gonna enjoy the heck out of this game’s story (or at least vibe with it well enough to see the game to its conclusion X3).

The gameplay is, as stated, *very* Mega Man Zero-inspired, and it controls really well, but with a few new twists and additions here and there to give Gravity Circuit a decidedly different feel than Zero does. While Gravity Circuit (who I’m gonna call by his other name of “Kai” for the sake of brevity) can dash boost and wall jump a lot like Zero, that’s where most similarities end. Unlike Zero, Kai never gets any other main weapons to mess around with. Kai doesn’t even have a blaster of any kind, with his main weapons of choice being melee brawling and grappling with the combo of his fists and hookshot. The hookshot can be used to pull in stunned enemies to then throw at more enemies (who can then, of course, be grabbed and thrown themselves), and it can also be used to platform around, too! The concept of an entirely melee-focused Mega Man-style game was incredibly intimidating at first, but thankfully the game is balanced really well around these things, so it’s nothing to worry about at all.

On top of the generally very approachable difficulty, the game also has a good few extra quirks in Kai’s favor for those willing to engage with it. First of all, you’ve got a maximum of 4 specials that you can unleash as long as you’ve got enough energy built up. You slowly unlock more of these for purchase as you progress through the game, and many of them are exceptionally powerful for taking down a particularly nasty foe (but I never really used them as the normal punching and grappling felt so good that I never felt particularly pressured to). The other thing you’ve got are booster chips. These are passive upgrades that can be purchased as long as you’ve saved enough civilians in each stage (though MMX6 veterans worry not, as the only danger to the civilians is you not being skilled enough to reach them in the first place). You can equip 3 of these passive abilities at a time, and they range from the ability to double jump to faster attack speed to even just more damage resistance, full stop. The default difficulty already felt so nice that I didn’t end up using these either until I got kinda stuck on the final boss (who was such a jerk that I didn’t feel like throwing myself into him that much XP), but they’re a really good way to both customize your playstyle as well as make the game as hard or easy as you’d like it to be.

The accessibility features in this game are all around really excellent, frankly. I deal with pain in my hands if I need to hold down the triggers for long lengths of time (something that all the running in this game was starting to really bother me with). Thankfully, though, not only can you rebind every button, but there’s also an accessibility option to turn the run from a hold to a toggle, so the game was suddenly super playable again after it seemed like I might need to shelve it for a while to let my hands recover. The game’s design is overall top notch, really. The gameplay and level design allows for some really sicko speedy play if you’re into that, because you can do a LOT between hookshooting across ceilings and throwing enemies around. The bosses are well balanced, and all feel very unique to one another, though likely owing to the lack of any Mega Man-esque weakness mechanic, they did feel a bit easier than I otherwise would’ve expected. Searching for secrets in levels was always a treat, and the various optional platforming challenges for power ups were always fun too. As a big fan of this genre, Gravity Circuit ended up scratching an itch I didn’t even realize I had for this kind of action game, and I’ve got basically nothing but praise for what’s on offer here~.

The aesthetics of the game are also really good. For general gameplay, the animations are really fluid, and the bright, discrete colors used for each character make it very easy to tell the differences between you, your foes, and their projectiles no matter how fast you’re going. In the story segments, the portraits of the characters are well detailed and have a lot of character to them. It’s great fun reading all of the weirdos that Kai needs to deal with along his adventure, and seeing him hold his forehead in frustration (among many other reaction poses that he and the folks he talks to have) never stopped being funny X3. The music is also excellent and provides a great background to each stage while living up very well to the mechanical inspirations for the game.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. As I’m sure you’ve already no doubt noticed, I enjoyed the heck outta this game. The dev team here are clearly huge fans of this sort of game, and they’ve done an awesome job making something worthy of any Mega Man Zero fan’s time (or any action platforming fan, in general). From the controls to the level design to the story, this game just nails the hell out of it in every single category, and any Mega Man fan would be doing themselves a grave disservice by overlooking this gem~