Games Beaten 2026

[MrPopo]

Or the middle ground of "the moment-to-moment gameplay is great, but the hub and spoke system feels closer to OoT than Metroid Prime, and if they made a sequel and just focused on level and world design then it would be amazing."

[PartridgeSenpai]

I've never been super huge into Metroid, and I've certainly never been huge into Prime (heck, only played the first one for the first time a few years back, and still haven't played any of the later ones), but it's been *so* interesting seeing the huge range of opinions about Prime 4 from people I know. There's clearly such a wide range of things people want/expect from the series, and it's been super neat to see that influence people's views of this latest entry ^w^

Great read! Makes me want to try out Uncharted 1 now, hah!

Thank you very much!
Uncharted 1 was a game I was shocked I had such a fun time with, and it was such a bummer that 2 did not come even remotely close to being that good. Thankfully, I can happily report that Uncharted 3 has been great fun so far, so that'll hopefully be a much more fun/happy review to write sometime in the next few days~

[marurun]

I rolled credits on Dragon Quest 11 this weekend, but there's apparently a lot of post-game material, and since RSI issues are making action gaming hard to do right now I guess I'll plow into them, despite wanting to play some different stuff.

[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)
11. Mario Party DS (DS)
12. Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)
13. Ghost of Tsushima: Iki Island (PS5)
14. Astro's Playroom (PS5)
15. Michael Jackson: The Experience (PSP)
16. Sackboy: A Big Adventure (PS5)
17. Control (PS4)
18. White Album (PS3)
19. Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World (GBA)
20. Kirby's Epic Yarn (Wii)
21. Breath of Fire III (PSP)
22. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (PS2) *
23. Sly 2: Band of Thieves (PS2)
24. Army of Two (Xbox 360)
25. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (PS2)
26. Jak II (PS2)
27. Jak 3 (PS2)
28. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3)
29. Pokemon Sapphire (GBA)
30. Watch_Dogs (PS4)
31. Watch_Dogs: Bad Blood (PS4)
32. Legend of Hero Tonma (TG16)
33. Alan Wake: American Nightmare (PC)
34. Banjo-Tooie (N64) *
35. Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters (PSP)
36. Super Robot Spirits (N64)
37. Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii)
38. Tales of Arise (PS4)
39. Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex (PS2)
40. Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (PS5)
41. Battlefield 1 (PS4)
42. Quantum Break (Xbone)
43. Battlefield V (PS4)
44. Balloon Fight GB (GBC)
45. Lemmings (PSP)
46. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS3)

47. Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (PS3)

I was so disappointed and bored by Uncharted 2 earlier in the week that I very nearly skipped playing this entirely. However, I like to give stuff the benefit of the doubt when I can, and even despite so many of my friends saying they found 3 about as good as 2 (a very worrying comparison), I still ended up working up the energy to give Uncharted 3 a chance. Thankfully, my good will didn’t go to waste! While this definitely isn’t my favorite in the series, it ended up being a far more satisfying and competent follow up to Uncharted 1, and a nice end point for the original trilogy. Collecting 82 treasures and playing on normal mode, it ended up taking me about 8.5 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game in English. As is so often the case with these more narrative heavy games, I will be getting into relatively spoiler-heavy talk in the story segment here, so reader discretion is once again advised.

In some ways both a prequel and a sequel to Uncharted 2, Uncharted 3 follows Drake’s latest journey as well as how much it ties to his past. Treasure hunter Nathan Drake and his partner in crime Victor Sullivan (Sully) are in a pub in London doing a deal to swap Drake’s prized ring, once owned by Sir Francis Drake himself, for a boatload of cash. However, the deal goes wrong fast, and the two barely make it out of the pub alive. That is, however, until they’re both shot as they’re trying to flee. As the two of them bleed out in the back alley, we get a flashback to Drake’s childhood, how he got the ring and met Sully in the first place, and how he first crossed paths with the mysterious Marlowe, the woman who’s powerful connections just seemingly killed him.

Uncharted 2 was a game I leveled a lot of criticism at for being little more than a poor man’s copy of the first game narratively. I cannot describe how relieved I was to see that Uncharted 3 manages to actually tell a new story about Nathan Drake for once! Granted, they’re taking a LOT of inspiration from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (a comical amount, frankly), but they’re doing it so knowingly that it just helps add to the bombastic, campy atmosphere of the whole adventure. Sully is actually a big presence in the narrative for a change, and between him, Chloe (From Uncharted 2), and our new character Charlie, Drake has a ton of fun moments to banter and bounce off of his fellow thieves/treasure hunters. We even manage to bring Elena back into the story (yet again!) without making it feel like a tired retread of the first game again! As we touch on all new aspects of Nathan Drake’s character, great pacing, a well-handled comedic adventurous tone, and great character banter help make Uncharted 3 a really entertaining playable action movie much like the first game succeeded so well at being.

However, even with all that praise in mind, the operative word in that previous sentence is “touch”. Uncharted 3 really reaches for the stars in trying to examine Nathan Drake as a character as well as his less than perfect attitudes towards the people around him, but the writers at Naughty Dog seem ultimately incapable of imagining any of the end points to all the threads they set up。We spend a ton of time in the first two thirds of the story having character after character badger Drake for pursuing this treasure so doggedly despite the great danger and impossible odds they face against Marlowe’s agency. The story pretty explicitly sets up not only that Drake’s pride/ambition in chasing this mystery, the greatest prize of his life, is going to get someone hurt, but that it’ll be Sully whom ends up being taken from him due to his own carelessness.

Despite that, the climax of the narrative can’t muster up anything greater than a fake out death for reasons entirely outside of his control. Drake is, as always, shown to be a person who is very willing to risk his own skin for the lives of people around him, and he never actually puts anyone in danger. Everyone who helps him is an enthusiastically willing participant as always, and Sully doesn’t go into the “Atlantis of the Sands” at the end of Drake’s metaphorical spear. He goes in, along with Drake, to stop Marlowe’s plan for world domination (or whatever), so even if he *had* died, it would’ve had no connection whatsoever to Drake’s alleged inability to be attentive to the safety of people close to him.

Similarly, as much as we get to spend a ton of time with Drake getting close to Elena (again) after yet another estrangement, the wider plot point that they weren’t just estranged but *married* off screen isn’t ever even explicitly mentioned. While they never do anything too incredible in building trust/chemistry between them that wasn’t already touched on in the first game, it’s completely inexplicable to me that such a major emotional plot point between them is only vaguely implied in the game’s ending cutscene rather than being some major twist or motivating factor for Drake in Act 3. While Uncharted 3 is a well-paced, fun adventure story, it really struggles to ever execute on any of the greater narrative themes it sets up in the first parts of the story. So many huge parts of the narrative are robbed of any meaningful conclusion (or like in the case of the marriage, any setup whatsoever) that it winds up feeling like a seriously unfinished story as a result.

The greatest culprits in this case, however, are the main antagonists, Marlowe and her right hand man Talbot. Uncharted 1 had Drake up against rival treasure hunters, the kinds of people not interested in the mystery, the history, or even the simple thrill of what they’re hunting for, but only the money. This is why the final battle in that game is against not the rival treasure hunter but one of his war profiteering mercenaries. Uncharted 2’s main antagonist is a power hungry warlord on the quest for immortality. It’s an uncomplicated motivation, but it at least makes it clear what his motivations are and why our heroes need to stop him. Uncharted 3, by contrast, seems to be at a total loss as to what its antagonists are actually interested in or, more importantly, *motivated* by outside of being plot device barriers to Nathan Drake’s quest.

In a pattern you’ll no doubt recognize from my earlier paragraphs here on the narrative, a lot of time is spent in the earlier part of the narrative setting up Marlowe as a cold, cunning, nigh all seeing criminal mastermind. Very little escapes her sight, and this is especially true due to the seemingly invincible physical prowess of her equally cunning sidekick Talbot. The two of them, along with their hordes of men in black-styled henchmen, are presented as an unstoppable force of nature that Nathan Drake’s ragtag band of thieves could never hope to either outwit or outmatch. Regardless, Marlowe is also given an increasing amount of scenes, as time goes on, where she inexplicably tries to appeal to Drake as if she has some kind of (almost maternal, at times) soft spot for him. It seems like we’ll be eventually going somewhere with this, as if some great reveal between her and Sully’s history will tie everything back together with Drake, but that moment never comes.

She never stops being the evil witch she starts as. The only difference by the end of the story is that, as she’s being pulled into the quicksand, we get a baffling scene of first her appealing to Drake’s sense of pride. He responds that he’s got “nothing to prove”, somewhat fulfilling the “You’re gonna let your pride kill you” ideas from earlier, but then he attempts to save her from the quicksand anyway as the building is falling apart around them. Sully tells him to let her die, Talbot pleads with him to save her, but in the end, he can’t save her, and she dies. This scene which seems only to exist to prove Drake can show mercy/care about others, something we’ve never before so much as hints at, nonetheless then leads into the final confrontation with Talbot, who still wants to kill Drake despite Drake earnestly trying to save Marlowe.

Why does Talbot try to kill him despite that? He’s the final boss enemy, so that’s apparently a justification in and of itself. We give as much explanation to that as we do to why Talbot is seemingly invulnerable to bullets, has super hallucination drugs he can fire into people to get them to do anything he wants, and how he can teleport at will whenever the plot deems it convenient. I kept expecting there to be SOME deeper elaboration at some point as to why Marlowe has these moments of seeming affection, this needless mercy for Drake, and why Talbot has all these weird powers, as they’re definitely the kinds of things the earlier Uncharted games would never leave unexplained, and yet they come and go without so much as a hint of explanation. The last thing we get in the story is the similarly inexplicable “they’ve been married the whole time” vagueposting scene before the credits.

So much of this story’s efforts towards setting up interesting, engaging angles around Drake as a character fail because it seems like they had absolutely no idea how to end the story they’d been writing, so they just shrugged and left in the coolest scenes as they were because the ideas were too favored to just throw away entirely at that point. The lack of any meaningful connective tissue didn’t matter, even if stuff like Talbot’s super drugs cast serious questions on the motivations of the main bad guys in the first place (if they already have these super drugs, why do they need the super ancient hallucinogen from the ancient city in the first place?). This is all to say that, as much as I really loved the campy tone and moment to moment comedy and banter, Uncharted 3’s narrative absolutely faceplants the landing. It’s definitely a story I think is a lot stronger than Uncharted 2’s overly self-derivative snore-fest, and I at least appreciate the ambition to tell a different, more ambitious story rather than just the same one again, but I can’t lie at just how ultimately underwhelming the final product actually is.

Thankfully, the narrative isn’t the only thing improved from Uncharted 2. Not only is the weapon variety better and adds to enhance the cool set pieces and fun level design, but the platforming has also finally been tuned to the point where you’re far, far less likely to plummet to your death for no good reason just because Drake decided that *this* press of the X button would be one that flung him into a pit. The set pieces all around are really fun and impressive in this game. While it’s a bit of a gratuitous detour from the main plot narratively, the cruise ship level is *so* freaking cool, especially for 2011, and stuff like the plane fight or the escape from the burning mansion were so fun and cool that it made it difficult to pick just one favorite set piece for me.

The coolest specific part of the combat, however, isn’t the gunplay or the set pieces, but the melee combat. I forgot to mention it in my Uncharted 2 review because it wasn’t terribly important, but the light/heavy combo stuff from Uncharted 1 were completely done away with in that game. Uncharted 2 simplified the melee combat into “light attack until you have to hit the counter button, then one more attack for a kill”, and that simplification was a pretty neutral change, in my eyes, because the danger factor from your enemies guns made any kind of melee combat a suicidal tool of last resort in the first place. Uncharted 3 has once again brought some meaningful technicality back to the combat, and it makes for some really fun and exciting brawling, especially in the brawling-focused set pieces. New grabbing, countering, and environmental attacking features almost make the game feel like it has the hyperreality of a Yakuza series game at times. The pub brawl is easily my favorite one of these, but there were tons of times that a sudden melee mid-firefight turned an already exciting battle that much cooler, and the revamp to the melee is definitely one of my favorite changes between this game and the previous one.

However, while it’s true that the gunplay and platforming are still as solid as ever on a micro level, the really big prize in Uncharted 3 is that those larger macro level design philosophy issues that Uncharted 2 struggled so badly with have finally been nailed down. The constant, never ending brutal enemy assaults from Uncharted 2 are gone, and in their place is a much better paced blend of story, platforming, and combat much like Uncharted 1 had managed to make for itself. Uncharted 3 still has some pretty tough encounters near the end of the game (especially with those flame demon jerks), but the overall encounter design has prioritized quality over quantity, and it pays serious dividends for the overall fun factor of the combat. As I’ve said in previous reviews of this series, Uncharted is very much a series that lives and dies on how well the dance between those main three aspects of its design (combat, story, and platforming) interplay, and Uncharted 3 does a fantastic job at righting what had gotten so wrong in Uncharted 2. As much as I might’ve had a lot of issues with the writing in Uncharted 3, the general vibe of “campy, fun, playable action movie” in the gameplay is back in a way I am so happy to see return to the series.

The presentation is still great, and it’s a nice step up from Uncharted 2 as well. It’s still the case that it’s not *quite* as wowing of a game for the time as Uncharted 1 was for 2007, but Uncharted 3 still looks very good, and the really impressive physics and execution of set pieces like the plane or sinking cruise ship go a long way to that effect. The music and audio are really good too as ever, even if there was a very odd, random bug where the audio would just cut out at times, and it’d only come back once I paused and unpaused the game. The voice acting and facial models on characters are also as stellar as ever, and it’s easy as ever to see why the industry at large started taking a lot of notes from how Uncharted produced its lavish, well-acted cutscenes.

Verdict: Recommended. While I’d still say that Uncharted 1 is easily the strongest “must play” out of this original Uncharted trilogy, Uncharted 3 was more than a fun enough time that I can recommend you check it out. The writing is certainly flawed, but the moment-to-moment pace of the story and action are strong enough that it never comes close to outright ruining the experience. The story is also even disconnected from the second game enough that you can safely skip Uncharted 2 and go right to 3 after playing 1, so anyone interested in playing 3 after enjoying 1 doesn’t need to slog through 2 like I did if they don’t want to X3. Even if Uncharted 3 isn’t the best out of the trilogy, it’s still a fun game worth playing, and it caps off the trilogy satisfyingly if not still more than a bit confusingly.

----

48. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank (PC)

I rather enjoyed Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion after playing it a while back, but it wasn’t my favorite game that year or anything. It was a solid and silly little Zelda-like, there was never any point where I was champing at the bit for a sequel. However, not only has their promised sequel come out, but it was even given away for free on the Epic Game Store, so I had more reason than ever to check it out. I never heard all that much about this game other than it played rather differently to the first, so I didn’t have any idea what to expect outside of that it’d probably be rather silly once again (which, indeed, it was X3). Much like the first game, this one knows how to give a good show but not outstay its welcome. Playing in English with my Xbox Series controller, nearly 100%-ing the game (just one hat it seems I could never find) on hard mode took me just about 3 hours only dying 4 times.

The start of this game spoils the end of Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion pretty hard if only because there’s really no way to avoid that given that game’s ending. After killing the god that was Mayor Onion, Food Folk society collapsed into a huge war the very next day. It’s been two days since the end of that first game, and Turnip Boy has been recruited by the Pickle Gang to pull the biggest job ever: Robbing the titular Botanical Bank! Turnip Boy hasn’t exactly had much time to rest since the previous game, but after killing a god, how hard could robbing one bank be? Turns out, pretty hard. With Stinky, the owner of the bank, locked away safely in his control room and the cops on their way, it’ll be no easy feat to take this motherload back to the hideout in one piece! Much like the first game, the story is full of wild lore about how the world of the Food Folk was created along with tons of silly side quest and wild side characters. I personally found this game funnier than the first one, but the comedy is still very much in the same vein. Anyone who enjoyed how the first one was written will no doubt really dig this game too (and it’s also pretty damn cool just how hard this game says Trans Rights, too~).

However, I can’t really say the same for the gameplay. That’s not because it’s bad, quite the opposite, but Turnip Boy has gone through quite a genre change since his quest for tax evasion. Where the first game is a pretty straightforward Zelda-like 2D action/adventure game, this game has gameplay much closer to something like Enter the Gungeon. That’s not to say that it’s some totally run-based rogue-lite thing, of course, but given the twin-stick shooter gameplay, that’s definitely what comes to mind faster than a Zelda game. The bank has an alarm that’s triggered whenever you enter it, and you’ve only got a few minutes to get out before the cops arrive and your task gets way harder (stay too long past the cops arriving, and Stinky just gasses the whole bank, so you’re on a hard time limit no matter how cavalier you wanna be with the cops).

Therefore, your mission upon each visit to the bank is to get as much cash as you can within the allotted time and then get back out in one piece. Once back at base, you can invest that cash into both items to allow plot progression as well as flat power upgrades to your abilities. While you have some standard bits of kit from the hideout, you can also find special guns and melee weapons while you’re in the bank. There’s a pretty wide variety of powerful and silly weapons to find, but most of them have limited ammo. Even still, ammo pickups from enemies are plentiful enough (even on hard mode) that you’re probably not going to need to worry about running out of ammo very often on most guns. If you take those special weapons back to HQ, however, you can trade them in to advance your weapons research and unlock more options for your standard loadout from the base, and weapons from home base always have unlimited ammo, too.

The actual way through the game has basically no procedural or random element to it. Outside of the required trips back to base to buy items to allow plot progression (like a special lamp to light up a dark room, for example), you can stay along one, unchanging path through the large main floor of the bank. The few randomized elements other than the guns you happen to find dropped from enemies are in the elevators scattered around each main area, as which elevators take you to which floor are randomized upon each reentry to the bank. The run-based approach also allows for ultimately unlimited loot to be collected as well, so you’re only ever as stuck monetarily as your willingness to grind, but the game (even on hard mode) is honestly never *that* hard to the point that anything outside of some slightly smarter playing can get you past whatever obstacle you’re stuck at. The bosses are tough, but they’re all very reasonable, and it’s overall a very fun challenge. Even someone who’s never even played a game like Enter the Gungeon like me was able to handle everything just fine, so I figure it can’t be *that* hard, in the grand scheme of things <w>.

Overall, the randomized elements aren’t particularly noteworthy, and I’d hesitate to call a lot of them “good” beyond their sheer practical value for things like refilling the bank with loot to steal. The only real “bad” part I can think of for them is that a lot of elevators lead to areas with sidequest-important NPCs behind them, so if you’re trying to do a specific quest, it can be very annoying at times just finding the right door to use to turn the darn thing in. Even still, I think all these annoyances are very well mitigated by just how short the game is. With even my not-quite-nearly-100% run barely clocking in at 3 hours on hard mode, I’d be hard pressed to say the game is particularly long. Even still, I would never call it “too short”. I think it stays for exactly as long as it can without overstaying its welcome, and it’s a very well crafted little action game as a result.

The aesthetics are very fun and charming just like the first game. They’ve taken a tiny bit of a graphical bump since the first game, with environments and enemies being a bit more detailed than they were in Tax Evasion, but nothing that’ll make it feel like you’re playing some amazing new reinvention of the series. The music was definitely the standout part of the presentation for me, though. So many awesomely fun and banging tracks to underscore the heck out of the action you’re doing. The team behind the Turnip Boy games know how to make some damn good bangers, and this game is packed full of ‘em.

Verdict: Recommended. While this game won’t blow your socks off or anything, it’s a short, fun adventure that’s very satisfying for the small package it fits in. Despite how often you go through the same areas, I never found myself getting bored due to just how satisfying the action is and how quickly you’re unlocking even more areas to adventure through (and shortcuts to access them by). Turnip Boy is certainly not the meatiest action/adventure indie game on the market, but it’s also a satisfying and fun game that shows that you don’t *need* a game that’s 40 hours long to still come out the other end with a great action/adventure experience~.

[ElkinFencer10]

Games Beaten in 2026 - 11
* denotes a replay

January (2 Games Beaten)

1. Metal Slug 2 - Neo Geo - January 20*
2. Metal Slug X - Neo Geo - January 25*

February (1 Game Beaten)

3. Metal Slug 3- Neo Geo - February 23*

March (3 Games Beaten)

4. Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown - Switch 2 - March 2
5. Resident Evil: Requiem - PlayStation 5 - March 5
6. Pokemon Pokopia - Switch 2 - March 19

April (2 Games Beaten)

7. Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen - Switch - April 6
8. Choo-Choo Charles - PlayStation 5 - April 16

May (2 Games Beaten)

9. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment - Switch 2 - May 25
10. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond - Switch 2 - May 30

June (1 Game Beaten)

11. Fallout: London - PC - June 6

11. Fallout: London - PC - June 6



Fallout fans have been waiting for over a decade for a new Fallout game. If you count Fallout 76, we've still been waiting for eight years (six years at the time of this mod's initial release). Unfortunately, Bethesda decided that they'd rather keep making content expansions for the Fallout game nobody likes instead of making a new blockbuster adventure. Fortunately for fans, a team of mostly (but not exclusively) British modders said, "Fine, we'll do it ourselves. Chip chip cheerio." Probably. Or something to that effect.



Fallout: London isn't "technically" a new Fallout game but rather a total conversion mod for Fallout 4. And when I say total conversion, I mean this feels as much like the vanilla Fallout 4 as New Vegas feels like Fallout 3; yeah, the gameplay is basically the same, but literally everything else is completely different. This is, hands down, the most impressive mod I've ever seen for any game. The sheer scale of Fallout: London is astounding especially when you consider that it was made by a twelve-person-team, and one of those twelve handled the website and PR, so eleven people actually made the mode. There are branching mission paths and multiple ending depending on which faction you side with, just like an official Fallout. There are dozens of side quests that you may or may not ever stumble upon, just like an official Fallout. There are hilarious Easter eggs, just like in an official Fallout. Most impressively to me, the game is FULLY voice acted, just like an official Fallout, and unlike most of the few voice acted mods I've played, the acting in Fallout: London is done by probably 85% genuinely talented voice actors. No late 90s/early 2000s craptastic voice acting here. Honest to God, the quality is so good, if I put this down in front of someone and said "This is the unannounced Fallout game that just leaked," and hid the Team FOLON logo and name, most people would believe it was a genuine Bethesda product. Bethesda ought to throw a boat load of pounds at them and release this as a standalone game for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch 2. It's that impressive. I spent nearly 120 hours with Fallout: London, and I've never spent that much time with any mod for any game ever.



The game starts off with a scenario that feels right at home with how other Fallout games by Bethesda have started; you wake up with no memory in a mysterious lab, and all you can find are mysterious masked guards and a voice over a loudspeaker that identifies itself only as "Mr. Smythe." From there, you break out of the lab and eventually find yourself in the streets of London. The first people you encounter are a few gangsters with a group called the Vagabonds. This is your first major faction of the game. They're embroiled in a bitter turf war with a rival gang, the Isle of Dogs Syndicate. The Vagabonds are typical plucky underdog heroes (well, as much as violent gangsters can be heroes), and the Isle of Dogs Syndicate is basically the literal mafia. You can choose to side with the mob, but I personally found it much more satisfying to stroll into their HQ with a .50 caliber revolver and start bursting heads like they're watermelons while my Vagabond sidekicks trail behind wading through an ankle-deep lake of blood. Those two factions, however, are not among the factions from whom you'll choose for your ending; their entire questlines are entirely self-contained and unrelated to the game's finale. The other five factions that don't have endings - and actually aren't even options to side with formally in any sense - are the Tommies, the closest thing there is to a successor the British army, and the Gentry, a bunch of rich douchebags who have barricaded themselves in Westminster to keep away from the commoner rabble and use their wealth to exploit the rest of the London wasteland. There are also the Pistols in Camden; they're basically a group of quasi-communist punks who keep to themselves and govern Camden via a democratically elected council with a limited-time term and only one term allowed. So basically, what I wish Congress was. You've got the Roundels in Hackney. They're weird; they're like a cross between a gang and a neighborhood watch. They'll engage in open street fights with Miller's Men, but they also kind of just want to be left alone to live in peace. They also devoutly follow a "prince" with a severe drug addiction. Lastly, you have Miller's Men in Islington. These are straight up raiders whose only rule is "Miller's' word is law."



The three factions between whom you'll have to choose for the game's finale are Angel, the 5th Column, and Camelot. Angel is Mr. Smythe's faction, so you could end up siding with the folks who had you imprisoned at the start of the game and were experimenting on you. The 5th Column are interesting because they're basically how a lot of people saw Donald Trump (not me; I always knew he was a fascist); they look like a beacon of hope and liberty aiming to restore freedom to London, and then you're shocked and horrified to discover that they're actual a fascist paramilitary militia with cult-like devotion to their leader. Did Team FOLON base them on MAGA? Probably not, but the parallels are hard to miss. Lastly, you have the faction I chose, Camelot. These guys are like if LARPers staged an armed coup. They live in a huge pre-war building they call Camelot, their leader calls himself Arthur, their chief tactician calls himself Merlin, and the lieutenants are referred to as "knights" and each adopt the name of one of the mythical King Arthur's knights. And yes, their strategy meetings are held sitting at a round table. Their goal, like the 5th Column, is to invade Westminster and overthrow the tyrannical rule of the Gentry, but unlike the fascist 5th Column and its desire for a dictatorship with their leader on top, Camelot aims to replace with Gentry with a representative democracy with universal suffrage. Put Jimmy Carter in plate mail and give him a longsword, and you've got Arthur. Oh, and Merlin builds a gigantic trebuchet that flings a car at the Westminster gate and blows a gigantic hole in their huge stone walls. The Rule of Cool dictates that they are the best faction.



What made Fallout: London so much fun for me wasn't just getting to explore London or having a new story in the Fallout universe to explore but all of the little silly fun things. There's a cult of "Cutethulhu," a stuffed knitted Cthulhu, and you find Cutethulhu dolls all over the place. Then you find out that the cult is actually a legit cult, and there's an entire side quest around it. There are new perks you can get upon level up, numerous companions that have their own companion quests and unique perks that you unlock when you get them to max affection. There are new monsters with a distinctly British feel like the radager, and the game has its own regional take on mirelurks and ghouls with mittenlurks (based on mitten crabs instead of blue crabs) and "commuters," respectively; I don't think the game ever makes clear how commuters are distinct from ghouls, but regular ghouls are in the game as well. Then you've got the weapons and armor. Most are your typical types of weapons, some from Fallout 4 and some unique to Fallout: London, but there are a lot of cool unique weapons, some of which are nods to elements of British history, like Joan of Arc's sword or the Crown Jewels. And yes, you can steal the Crown Jewels and walk around London looking like a hobo became the king or queen. So much love and attention and detail when into the creation of this mod that it really does boggle the mind. They teamed up with GOG, too, to make it super easy to install; as long as you own Fallout 4 through GOG, they have an installer that you can add to your library and launch like any other GOG game. It's not a problem if you have Fallout 4 through another launcher like Steam or Xbox, it's just a longer and more complicated manual installation.



Fallout: London is, in the context of fan-made mods, a masterpiece. That said, it's not perfect. Like I said, Team FOLON is only a dozen people, and they don't have the resources that Bethesda has. I ran into a lot of bugs. Most were minor - when I switched weapons, sometimes the gun would, for lack of a better phrase, lock up, and I'd have to switch weapons and then switch back in order to shoot or reload - but there were some that I could only get around with console commands. Quest-critical NCPs not spawning, a key to a door in a quest area that never dropped, NPCs spawning into walls so you can see their name when you're in front of them but not talk to them, etc. The kind of thing that Bethesda's QA team probably would have caught and either fixed before release or quickly patched. And that's not to say that dev team hasn't been catching and fixing bugs via updates; they absolutely have. There's just a limit to what fan modders can realistically do vs a team of paid corporate but testers. Then, of course, you have the typical Bethesda bugs where you kill a guy and his head drops to the ground like normal but his body rockets off into space like Team Rocket. That's not really something they could likely fix as it's universal in vanilla Fallout 4. It's a shame that PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch 2 players can't experience this mod, but if you have Fallout 4 on PC, this is definitely a mod that you need to play, even if it means buying Fallout 4 a second time.

[Ack]

1. Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil (FPS)(PC)
2. Doom 3 (FPS)(PC)
3. V Rising (Adventure)(PC)
4. Teardown (Action)(PC)
5. Control: Ultimate Edition (Action)(PC)
6. Peak (Adventure)(PC)
7. The Exit 8 (Horror)(PC)
8. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (RPG)(PC)
9. Killing Time: Resurrected (FPS)(PC)
10. Darkenstein 3D (FPS)(PC)
11. Metal Garden (FPS)(PC)
12. Caput Mortum (Horror)(PC)
13. Corridor 7: Alien Invasion (FPS)(PC)
14. Extraneum (FPS)(PC)
15. Dead Trash (FPS)(PC)
16. Dead Trash: Operation Yellow Snow (FPS)(PC)
17. Withering Rooms (Action)(PC)
18. Green Hell (Adventure)(PC)
19. Stray (Adventure)(PC)
20. Post Void (FPS)(PC)
21. Kiosk (Horror)(PC)
22. Gnomdom (Puzzle)(PC)
23. Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library (Puzzle)(PC)
24. Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion (FPS)(PC)
25. Vital Shell (Action)(PC)
26. Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior (FPS)(PC)
27. Slayers X (FPS)(PC)
28. PO'ed (FPS)(PC)

Nightdive has done some incredible work remastering a lot of forgotten or cast aside FPS games, and in the last few years, there have been some huge surprises. I was not expecting to see the likes of Killing Time get the royal treatment, but I wasn't upset by it at all. But then there is PO'ed, an oddball choice among oddballs.

Why is this weird? Well, for one, it wasn't a PC game...ever. It was a 3DO and then a PS1 release. And it was one I was curious about but doubted I'd ever get to play as a result of that console exclusivity. The other reason this is weird is because, well, PO'ed is a strange beast that I've seen described as a fever dream. It's not a "good" game. It's a weird game, from a bunch of folks with experience but who wanted to try and get away from the cramped feel of what was modern FPS design at the time.

The end result is a lot of experimentation, some of which showcases incredible creativity. And some of which falls utterly flat. You have a jetpack, an anger system that makes certain weapons do more damage the lower on health you get, levels that are wildly chaotic and lack general flow, a wide range of foes from invisible demons (awesome) to vampire bats (awful) to walking fanged butts (seriously). It is in many ways a glorious mess. And it also just as often plays like utter trash.

Character movement feels like ice skating, bad in most FPS but awful when you realize this one includes platforming in the early days of 3D. It has mandatory secrets that do not look any different from every other wall; no sign posting at all. It being a console FPS from the mid-90s, it has aim-assist, but flying enemies are tiny and usually move too fast to be hit. And then there are the vast array of bugs, like getting stuck in the ceiling or watching your rocket fly harmlessly through the sprite of the turret you want to blast.

The end result? PO'ed is not for me. The experiment simply didn't work, though I must admit there were some things I ended up really loving. My favorite weapon? The fly-by-wire rocket you control, so you can sit around a corner and wipe out the entire level. In a game where I get a frying pan and a meat cleaver, you made the rocket launcher cool. That's awesome.

But unless you're really into FPS oddities and history, I don't have much reason to recommend PO'ed. I'm glad I finally got to experience it, but I have no desire to ever do so again.