Games Beaten 2026

Post by **PartridgeSenpai** » Mon Jul 13, 2026 3:53 am

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

1~50

51. Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass (PC)
52. Blasphemous 2 (PC)
53. Max Payne 3 (PS3)
54. Lemmings (SFC)
55. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyu 3 (SFC)
56. Crash Twinsanity (PS2)
57. Coded Arms (PSP)
58. Poy Poy (PS1)
59. Tobal No.1 (PS1)
60. Game Center CX: Arino no Chousenjou 2 (Switch)
61. Game Center CX: Sanchoume no Arino (3DS)

62. GameCenter CX: Arino no Chousenjou 1 + 2 Replay (Switch)

This is a broader review of this remastered Switch collection of the first two DS Game Center CX games by indiesZero. I’ve already got (fairly lengthy) reviews of both games on their own, but I figured that I may as well have a brief review of the collection in general given that it does have a little new content all of its own on top of the general remasters themselves. Completing both games as well as the extra new game to this collection, Flame Fighting Salaryman Yattaro, took me a combined 39-ish hours.

Released for the 20th anniversary of the show’s airing (which still continues now!), this collection does a pretty heavy job at both remastering the original two DS games as well as making them work perfectly on only one widescreen rather than across two square-er DS screens. The fictional retro games themselves have been left largely graphically untouched (outside of being made to appear nicely on a larger screen properly), but everything outside of that has gotten a serious facelift. The collection opens with a loving (and remarkably accurate) recreation of the show’s set as it exists in 2023. From the Picadilly Circus coin dropper machine in the corner (which has been altered slightly to be non-Konami branded), to Arino’s snacks on the table, to even the very particular camera setups they use to film the show, it makes for a joyous yet lowkey intro to the collection for a big fan of the show like me. Then the other really noticeable upgrade is to each respective game’s non-retro game aspects. Kid Arino’s room as well as the Demon King Ariinoh himself have gotten major polygonal upgrades, and they feel perfectly at home on a big screen TV. The games themselves are perfectly feature complete, and they control very well too. You couldn’t really ask for much more in a console remaster of a DS game, frankly.

Then there are the bits of new content added for this release. On the more minor end, you’ve got online high score tables for certain games that allow you to compare yourself to friends and strangers for who can be the biggest sicko (affectionate) at these old retro score attack challenges X3. On a more tangible level, you’ve also got a few new multiplayer options that didn’t exist previously. GunDuel and Triotos, both games from the second of the two DS games, now have the option for cooperative and competitive two-player modes respectively.

Most impressive and interesting of all, however, is that they actually made an entirely new game for this collection: Flame Fighting Salaryman Yattaro. It’s a more linear homage to old Kunio-Kun games like River City Ransom, but with a very GCCX-spin to it. You play the titular Yattaro, and you’ve got to stop the evil plans of the MegaBit corporation from taking over the whole video game industry! You’ve got a fairly simple moveset at first, but beating up enemies gets you MegaBit’s illegal mod chips that you can turn in at the company for money. That money can be used for buying health, but if you spend it at the coffee shop in town, you can also learn new moves, too. Rather than fighting, though, you can also use good business etiquette to defeat your foes! By grappling a foe and pressing A, you can initiate a business card swap with them, and by inputting the correct D-pad inputs as they appear on screen, you’ll successfully do a swap. This won’t work on bosses, of course, and you can only do a swap with a particular enemy one time, but it’s definitely good practice to exchange with every enemy you see the first time you enter a room because exchanging more cards is how you get promotions! Promotions don’t just get Yattaro prestige, but they also get him extra max health, and you’re definitely going to want that for these tougher boss fights.

As far as beat’em ups go, this is definitely not Streets of Rage 4. The combos and combat are, true to their Kunio-Kun roots, fairly simple, and given that the business card exchange technically defeats enemies (and is a reliable and safe way to do so, as long as you can do the inputs correctly), it ends up being a far more dominant way to fight than actually, ya know, fighting enemies. Even still, with the several endings the game has and the pretty short playtime of roughly 2 hours, the simple mechanics and overpowered optional strategies never really have any time to meaningfully get in the way of gameplay. The business card exchange is a very clever way to make the game easier for non-beat’em up enthusiasts, and the fighting is more than solid enough to be fun for anyone who’d rather do business with their fists. It’s hardly enough to sell the whole collection to anyone who’s already sick of the two DS games after playing them to death, but for anyone who hasn’t thought about these games in years, it’s a really fun bonus on top of all the other retro goodness in store here.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. While it’s not UFO 50 in terms of overall content (this remaster collection comes in at a little less than 20 games even counting quite generously), that’s a hell of a bar to compare yourself to, and I don’t think it needs to be to still be worth the time and money. It’s a really well put together collection of two already awesome games. If you’re a fan of retro games and GCCX (especially if you can read Japanese), then this is a super easy recommendation, because these games are just as addictively fun as they ever were~.

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63. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (PS5)

I’ve been a fan of Ratchet & Clank for the past few years, and it’s been usually good fun going through the games. While there have been some digital-only games I haven’t been able to get my hands on, this was more or less the last one I hadn’t yet played as far as the mainline games go. I didn’t know if or how I’d ever be able to afford either this or the console, but lucky for me, it was among the games the person who sold me my PS5 digitally loaned to me, so that was two problems solved at once~. Admittedly, I haven’t been the biggest fan of the more recent R&C games I’ve played. While the gameplay has been fun, the narratives have been messy to the point of seriously compromising the final product ever since Crack in Time back in ’09, and I continue to hope that won’t be the case with every new one of these I’ve played. The same was unfortunately true for Rift Apart as well, and it does very little to threaten the status of my other favorite games in the series. Playing the UK version of the game in English, it took me about 10 or so hours to beat the game with 93% completion on normal mode. (As a disclaimer here at the start, I have a fair bit to complain about with the narrative of this game, so this is gonna be a pretty spoilery review).

Rift Apart is once again the story of Ratchet & Clank, and it’s effectively a direct sequel to Into the Nexus (a digital-only game from 2011 I have not played ^^; ). Our titular heroes are being honored with a huge hero parade despite them not having done any hero-ing for a good while now, but it all comes with a big present at the end from Clank to Ratchet. Clank has fixed the Dimensionator, the powerful device that allows travel between dimensions, so that Ratchet can go search for the other lombaxes. Ratchet doesn’t have much time to decide whether or not to actually do that, because the parade is immediately interrupted by Dr. Nefarious and his army of mercenaries. Despite our heroes’ best efforts, Nefarious successfully drags them into a dimension “where [Nefarious] always wins”, and manages to severely damage the integrity of the universe in the process. Now separated and stranded in this dangerous new universe ruled by its own Emperor Nefarious, our two heroes will need to team up with their dimensional counterparts if they ever want a chance of returning home, stopping the Nefariouses, or most importantly, preventing the total collapse of all universes due to the detonation of the damaged Dimensionator.

While it’s got some fun new characters and spins on classic (and some frankly not so classic) characters, this is yet another Ratchet & Clank game with very little actual substance to the story it’s trying to tell. There’s a lot of interesting set up via its premise, to be sure. This universe’s Ratchet & Clank, Rivet & Kit, never actually teamed up or even properly met until the events of this story. Rivet has been doing her best to assist the anti-Nefarious resistance movement, but they’re fighting a losing battle because Emperor Nefarious is just that powerful. While Ratchet & Clank’s initial story doesn’t really start out with much interesting to explore narratively (beyond the same old “what about the other Lombaxes?” that we’ve been retreading ever since we did it great back in Tools of Destruction in ’07), there’s still a ton of room here to explore all sorts of interesting themes via the similarities and differences between the usual universe and this new one. How capable is Rivet without a Clank-like counterpart to assist her, and how has she managed to stay strong despite all this hardship and loss? How does Kit leave her quiet life in the monastery to be comfortable becoming a hero? Just what is the key difference between our usual Doctor Nefarious and his seemingly victory-fated Emperor counterpart?

To spoil it all for you, we don’t get jack of an answer to any of these questions. Despite how much of its drama it tries to present as a meaningful, emotional story you’re meant to care about, a mixture of poor storytelling fundamentals and a seeming total incuriosity as to the deeper questions our story raises in the first place make Rift Apart an incredibly underwhelming narrative to follow. The setup and payoff of plot beat after plot beat is sloppily done to say the least. There were several moments I found, particularly in Rivet & Clank’s story, where not only is the payoff to that mission’s mini-story underwhelming because it’s so flimsy in construction, but the basic facts of the parallel the narrative is trying to draw just don’t make sense in the first place. While Ratchet & Kit actually have easily the most interesting and well fleshed out relationship in the game, it’s sadly the exception rather than the rule. Other than that she shares Ratchet’s boundless optimism and skill with machines, Rivet’s characterization is incredibly inconsistent, and it ends up making for a really weak thematic core as a result.

The most glaring example among any I can give is Rivet’s attitude towards robots. When she first meets Clank, Rivet is extremely suspicious of this robot she meets that alleges to know all this info about both Nefarious and the lombaxes. Clank wonders why at numerous points in the story why she’s so distrustful of both him and hostile towards robots, but the answer to the player seems clear as day. Rivet has lived for over a decade under the oppressive regime of the robo-supremacist Emperor Nefarious. Where Doctor Nefarious failed in Ratchet’s world to conquer Megalopolis and turn all its inhabitants into robots (like himself), Nefarious City in Rivet’s dimension clearly shows that her world’s Nefarious succeeded. She’s been running and fighting for most of her life against this robotic maniac trying to exterminate her as well as all other threats to his power, and she even at one point says “most people I meet work for Nefarious”. Her distrust of new people, especially robots, seems both obvious and reasonable from moment one, and the game’s treatment of it as this deeper mystery is nothing but confusing.

This is because the authors of this game apparently never even considered any of the above reasons I just gave as reasons that Rivet (or anyone) might like robots. It was, in fact, one *specific* robot, the giant one whose attack made Rivet lose her arm, who scared her both physically and mentally, and a grudge against this specific robot is something Rivet has carried with her to this very day (despite being shown earlier than this reveal blaming herself more than anything). Upon learning that Kit was that robot who attacked her, the ever optimistic, caring, and understanding Rivet completely turns heel on Kit, and the two’s (rather shallow and introductory) relationship is seriously fractured. There are these half-followed through themes about how one views oneself as “broken” or not (brokenness being in the eye of the beholder) as well as Kit weirdly blaming herself for being a “bad teammate”, but none of it ever ties together into anything that actually resembles sense. The authors clearly seemed at an utter loss as to how Rivet & Kit, two characters who actually barely interact, could have a meaningful conflict in their relationship when they spend nearly all of the first 50%+ of the narrative apart, and this ass-pull of a twist was the best they had to answer that need for a third act twist. This is the way which the entire narrative was seemingly approached, and it definitely makes for the R&C narrative I’ve had the worst time with since Crack in Time.

This story has a *terrible* case of “tell, don’t show” for its biggest plot beats, and the things we are “shown” all too often go directly against what we’re told, and it makes for a narrative that’s as often disappointing as it is outright confusing. Its authors seem chronically incurious about any of the questions their stories ask, and it makes the “adventure” part of these action/adventure games really frustrating to try and care about as a result. Heck, they barely seem curious enough to even try and tell new stories about Ratchet & Clank. For my money, we already very satisfyingly answers the question “what about the other lombaxes?” back in 2007 with Tools of Destruction, but it’s seemingly the eternal well of plot motivation for Insomniac with just how many R&C games since have focused on that being Ratchet’s motivating factor either in whole or in part. This is also the third mainline big-budget R&C game that’s brought back Dr. Nefarious as a protagonist (Crack in Time, the 2016 reboot, and now this) to incredibly weak effect. He was a great villain in R&C 3, and he’s felt like a shoehorned in nostalgia piece in every game since because they never have anything interesting for him to do.

As an extra disappointing knock-on effect of the cruddy writing, this game is pretty painfully unfunny too, most of the time. It’s not like, actively abhorrent or mean-spirited (thankfully), but it’s got *so* many jokes that just do not land at all for a series that, at one point, could boast quite safely about how solid its comedy writing was. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, you’ve got the generally shallow relationships between our principle characters. Being incurious about those deeper thematic character aspects means that they don’t have a good grasp on the shallower aspects of characterization either, so comedy through character dialogue tends to be a lot more misses than you have hits. The second source comes from how they rely a lot on one-liners by passing NPCs, and relying on quick snippets like that has a pretty high failure rate. It feels more like they’re trying to hit a “jokes per minute” quota than it feels like they’re trying to write genuinely solidly executed jokes. (If I had to point my finger at a third cause, it’d be the 2021 release date, as there’s a noticeable amount of smug neoliberal pot shots at the previous decade’s political events that come off as something between quaint and foolish from the perspective of 2026). That’s not to say the game never made me laugh, as there were a couple of gags that got me really good, but they were far rarer than I would’ve hoped they were. Most of this game’s comedy was me and my friends being in silent awe at just how annoying a repeated one-note joke was the umpteenth time it was told, and that just makes the poorly done dramatic aspects of the story that much more difficult to ignore.

To be clear, I don’t think that Rift Apart is the worst narrative in gaming by any means. The larger literal events of the narrative still make enough sense that you can at least follow the logical dominos of the plot beats from one to another. A story being literally intelligible is hardly high praise though. Even if these are issues that I seem to care about more than most other R&C players, that doesn’t change just how much the poorly written story impacted my experience with this game, and this is hardly the first time Insomniac has let me down like this. This is yet another Ratchet & Clank game I’m writing this type of essay about, where the narrative seems like a total afterthought in the same way an 8-bit game’s narrative would be, and for a series I generally enjoy and *has* had some really solidly executed narratives, that’s a real disappointment for me to have to write here.

The gameplay, at least, is a nice improvement from R&C’s last significant outing five years earlier. The fundamental building blocks are largely the same. You go to various planets, fight monsters, look for secrets, complete mission objectives both mandatory and optional, the works. If you’ve played any recent or old (but not the stuff in the middle <w>) Ratchet & Clank game, you’ll be right at home here. It’s a really solid third-person shooter action game with some serviceable platforming in it too. The platforming feels fairly perfunctory, and it’ll do nothing to challenge a seasoned platforming veteran, but it does a nice job breaking up the pace between firefights. My only real criticism of it is that the jet boots sections sometimes get you stuck on the scenery, but the penalty for failure is so scant that it’s hard to get meaningfully upset about. The guns are a nice mix of old favorites and new stuff, and they’ve got both good power and sound design to really make it feel like you’re blowin’ up the baddies good. Enemy and boss variety (you fight the same mini-bosses *so* many times) isn’t great, but it honestly barely matters. This game is a great example of how good encounter and level design often matters a heck of a lot more than sheer enemy variety, as despite the relatively small enemy list, fights never really get boring or tedious because of the nice pace of the action. If you’re primarily a fan of the big set pieces and big silly guns in Ratchet & Clank, Rift Apart will definitely not leave you disappointed.

Aesthetically, the game looks and sounds great. The music isn’t anything I’d put on my MP3 player anytime soon, but it fits the tone of its various scenes very well. The voice acting and such are great, and the character designs and animations are really well done too. As much as I feel that Rivet & Kit are rather shoddily written characters, their designs are really fun, and I’d love to see them star in a better executed final product. My only real complaint for aesthetics is with Ratchet & Rivet’s designs, or rather how the game won’t let me see them XD. Both characters have armor pieces you can find throughout the game, and wearing a full set gives a pretty meaningful passive bonus. That’s all well and good, of course. Hard to complain about a collectible that’s really worth your time to grab (even if the toggleable bonuses from the golden bolts are fun as ever), but these mid-tier designed armors cover up the great, fun designs of our main characters! They thankfully have the good sense to automatically remove their helmets for cutscenes so all of that lovingly done, next-gen 3D animation doesn’t go to waste behind some armor you didn’t have the foresight to remove, but it’s still annoying that you get to actually see so little of the rest of our characters because there’s no “make armor invisible” toggle option.

Speaking of toggleable options, that is one thing I absolutely cannot complain about here. I was somewhat looking forward to trying out my new PS5 accessibility controller with this game, but it turned out that I never needed it at all because the in-game accessibility features are just so good. There are so many specific options to turn various presses and holds into toggles and vice versa that my achy hands had no issues playing through this shoulder-button intensive game (other than the usual problem of what a heavy bugger the DualSense is in the first place). As much as I don’t exactly hold their writing ability in high regard, Insomniac continues to be absolutely excellent at making sure as many people as possible can enjoy their games, and that’s very much something worthy of praise in my book~.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As much as I ultimately enjoyed this game a fair bit more than the 2016 Ratchet & Clank, a game I played last year and also hesitantly recommended, I ultimately just can’t bring myself to earnestly recommend it any more than this. This game is certainly *better* than that one, but it fails so much harder in so many ways that I care about that endorsing it any more highly than this would feel disingenuous on my part. Sure, it’s a fun action game, but Insomniac have *always* made R&C games that are good action games. Plenty of older ones also managed to have compelling (or at least funny) stories too, so I don’t see why any newer entry should be held to a lower standard than what the PS2 and PS3 entries managed to do perfectly fine back then. I think if you want a solid action/adventure title, then Rift Apart is a very safe bet, but if you’re someone like me who has been waiting since Tools of Destruction for a Ratchet & Clank game that feels like it actually gives a damn about the adventure our characters are on, then you are going to be left sorely wanting with this.

Post by **PartridgeSenpai** » Fri Jul 17, 2026 6:48 am

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

1~50

51. Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass (PC)
52. Blasphemous 2 (PC)
53. Max Payne 3 (PS3)
54. Lemmings (SFC)
55. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyu 3 (SFC)
56. Crash Twinsanity (PS2)
57. Coded Arms (PSP)
58. Poy Poy (PS1)
59. Tobal No.1 (PS1)
60. Game Center CX: Arino no Chousenjou 2 (Switch)
61. Game Center CX: Sanchoume no Arino (3DS)
62. GameCenter CX: Arino no Chousenjou 1 + 2 Replay (Switch)
63. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (PS5)

64. Godzilla Voxel Wars (PC)

Much like Ghostbusters, Godzilla has been a quiet love of mine for a very long time. Ever since I played some of the silly 4-player brawlers on GameCube as a kid, I’ve loved the monster designs, and favorites like Gigan and Megalon (neither of whom are in this game, as it so happens XD) have always had a warm place in my heart. Even still, I’d never even heard of this game until it was free on the Epic Game Store some months back. Even then, I never even gave it a second look until I saw a friend playing it. “Voxels” as a concept to me scream “Minecraft”, and yet another Minecraft clone was really not what I was up for, Godzilla-themed or no. Still, a Godzilla-Minecraft adventure thing frankly would’ve been a more sensical game to exist than this thing XD. I don’t know how in the world a single-player discrete puzzle solver, the kind you used to get in the 8- and 16-bit days, got made and got made *this well* in the 2020’s, but I’m certainly not complaining! This game went from a temporary time filling distraction before I moved on to bigger RPGs into something that consumed basically all of my free time for well over a week X3. I played through all 120 levels of both the normal story and the 120 underlevels for the true ending. I got the perfect solution rank on all 240 levels using only 16 hints in total, and it tall took me about 28.5 hours to do playing the English version of the game on PC via my Xbox Series controller.

In Godzilla Voxel Wars, you play a kid who grew up with a fairly absent father. Living mostly with your mom, moving all around the country and then the world, you never had many friends. What little contact you did have with your father, who disappeared mysteriously during his research years ago, are in these little Godzilla-themed board game toys he sends you. These toys and the puzzles within are a constant hobby of yours as you grow up and eventually become a specialist researcher yourself, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Between the little text-based cutscenes between each world and the optional investigation documents you can acquire between stages, this game has a story that’s both relatively light and also *very* weird. I’d go as far as to call it “delightfully contrived”, personally XD. It definitely isn’t some awe-inspiring narrative, by any means, but it combined with the presentation go above and beyond the call of duty in providing an excuse for our puzzling action.

Though I guess there really isn’t “action” as such, since this is what I call a “hard” puzzle game. That doesn’t refer to the difficulty, mind you. Rather, it refers to the degree of plasticity the puzzles’ solutions have. A “soft” puzzle game has, in theory, an assortment of action and/or real-time elements that can be optimized and practiced at for more optimal solutions. Games like Adventures of Lolo or Lemmings are examples of what I call soft puzzle games. Hard puzzle games, by contrast, are more like chess puzzles. While there may be more than one solution, there is no degree of action to excel at or optimize. At the end of the day, it’s just figuring out how to move the pieces in just the right way to achieve your objective. While Godzilla Voxel Wars is hardly Baba Is You in terms of how sicko-mode its puzzles get, it’s much more along that line of puzzle game, with the perspective being a lot like Into the Breach but with only pre-made levels instead of procedurally generated ones.

The conceit of these puzzles is that Earth under attack by some kind of mushroom monsters, and it’s up to Godzilla and his giant monster pals to both protect Earth’s cities and take these fungi down! You start with just Godzilla, but you slowly accumulate quite the variety of monsters who can appear as your allies in maps as you play through the game. The same goes for the mushroom invaders. There are many types of them, and each one will have different methods of attacking that you’ll need to contend with properly to win. On its face, the method of play is very simple. Each monster has their own unique method of attacking as well as a specific amount of squares they can move per turn. You don’t *have* to move, but movement *does* need to end in some kind of attack. Before the allotted number of turns runs out, you’ve got to both destroy all the mushroom monsters on screen as well as their nests in infected buildings.

That all sounds simple, but these puzzles are designed with some rather devious efficiency in mind. If you’re just trying to see the end of the game, then you’ve got tons of turns to complete each puzzle. As long as less than three building chunks get damaged and Godzilla doesn’t die, running out of turns actually isn’t a meaningful concern at all in the vast majority of levels. However, each level has a star rating between one and three. Preventing a single building from getting destroyed, not using your acquired G-points to summon more helpers, collecting the occasional optional investigation document in-level, and beating the level in the indicated minimum number of turns will all get you points that your performance is scored with. The better you do, the more points you’ll get, and the more points you get, the more stars you’ll get at the end.

If you play well enough to get the maximum possible number of points, you’ll be rewarded with a special G-ticket, and G-tickets can be spent on extremely valuable hints. These are some of the best hints I’ve seen in a puzzle game, too. Activating a hint actually starts the game playing the level for you, and one G-ticket used will play one turn towards the perfect solution for you. It’s entirely up to you on whether or not to use them, and they’re hardly an unlimited resource, but they’re a godsend of puzzle design for this kind of game, and this is definitely a type of hint system that I hope more games adopt for themselves in the future. Stars are worth more than just bragging rights, too. While they don’t matter for the main game, which are composed of six worlds of 20 levels each, each world has an “underside” as well that contains another 20 whole levels. Your total number of collected stars is what unlocks more and more of those underside levels, so it’s a nice incentive for players really feeling the groove of the puzzle solving to solve more puzzles more better to get even more puzzles to solve!

I even love how the difficulty curve of the game works, because it’s actually a lot of hills and valleys rather than one giant upwards slope. This means that you get a really nicely paced mix of easy and difficult levels from the very start of the game to the very end, so the early game doesn’t feel like a boring breeze, and the late game isn’t just an endless succession of frustrating head-scratchers. It’s even true for the underside levels! Though I’ll admit that, while the underside levels *do* have a vibe of “extras largely harder than the normal game’s levels” most of the time, they also sometimes have vibes of “levels rejected from use in the main game because they’re a bit too easy” ^^;. The underlevel boss refights are *nuts* hard, though, and you’ll definitely get that vibe of extra hard from those, I promise you XD. The best part of this approach to difficulty is that the generous time limit for standard completion also means that there’s very little burden placed on a player having a hard time coming up with the perfect solution for a particularly difficult early level. You can just flex how many more than absolutely necessary turns you have to effectively skip the hard stuff and come back to it later with no penalty. It’s a really elegantly designed and well executed bit of accessibility that makes the game just that much more addicting to keep playing and playing X3

This is honestly a phenomenal puzzle game, and the complaints I have are extremely few and relatively small. First of all is a quality of life feature I wish the game had. It already has the extremely convenient feature of being able to press a button to rewind back a move, and you can do that as many turns back as you want. However, as great as the game is about showing you the information of what the pending attacks will do upon the end of your turn, sometimes you’ll still make mistakes and lose (or even win) by accident. Once the level hits this end state, there is no way to rewind anymore, and you’ll have to just replay the whole level over again from the start if you want to get back to where you were just before you died. Being able to rewind even upon an end state (especially if you lose the level) would’ve been a very appreciated feature.

My next complaint is also fairly small, but it’s about enemy behavior. Enemies seem to act randomly when it comes to what they’re targeting and where. They’ll stay put if they’ve got an attack lined up towards one of your units or an uninfested building, but otherwise their priorities are fairly impenetrable, and it’s nothing but a matter of guesswork on exactly how enemies will move upon their next turn. In fairness to the game, the operative word there is “seems” for how randomly they move. Enemies actually *do* have a discrete target-seeking priority pattern of east -> west -> north -> south that radiates outward from them when they’re looking for what to do next (there’s a little compass next to the board that shows you cardinal directions discreetly). The only thing is that this is never communicated through the tutorials to the player. While it’s probably more detail than most players need, having it contained *only* within a findable investigation report in the underlevels is too hidden for my money, and it probably should’ve been put elsewhere (like an investigation report in an earlier level). However, pain in the booty as that info is to find in the game as things are, the incredible ease and utility of the undo button makes the rather hidden nature of this information about as painless as it could possibly be. Especially given that enemies only move *after* attacking, you’ll never get a surprise game over preventing you from undoing back to the previous turn just because you couldn’t accurately predict where an enemy was going to move on their next turn. Not only that, but the far more valuable information, enemy *attack* order, is available to you from the very start of the game by simply pressing a button in the upper left of the screen (or holding R2).

The third and last complaint I have just regards how the game communicates a specific mechanic to you. Those investigation documents have to be picked up by a friendly monster to count for points (and to read the little lore entry on them after the map), at least that’s what the game *tells* you. Something the game never actually tells you, so far as I can tell, is that pushing one of the moveable, indestructible boxes present in some stages into a document will *also* count as collecting it. There were a few stages I was banging my head against for ages thinking they were just impossible when all I actually had to do was shove a box into them. The only reason I ever even found out this was possible in the first place was one of the game’s hint auto-turn things showing me it was doable, and I never would’ve guessed it could be done had I not seen it there. This is hardly all that meaningful of a fault, but it’s both such an easily avoided thing as well as such a pain in the butt for a dedicated player such as myself that I just had to mention it here so that some reader/prospective player may avoid my mistake and have things just that much easier when they play the game X3

The presentation is rather simple, but it’s very effective for what it is. The little voxel recreations of all of the classic Godzilla monsters is really well done, and it makes them adorably cube-ful while still being very recognizable as themselves. They have a look almost like someone made a bunch of Godzilla monsters for their 3D Dot Game Heroes player character, even X3. The mushrooms and cities are also nicely put together, and information about the map’s state as well as refreshers on the particular powers of each monster type are very well communicated too. The music is probably the presentation’s sticking point, as there aren’t terribly many songs, but the ones that are present are very nice for puzzling along to (and one is even a fun rendition of the Godzilla theme itself~). Probably my favorite aspect of the aesthetics are the smaller touches, though. The way monsters so satisfyingly pop to little pieces when they die, the way the whole screen shakes when they trundle past the house, and the ways the game board’s surroundings change depending on what world you’re in add a lot to the charm and fun factor as you play. My favorite of all those little touches has to be all of the classic sound effects for all of the iconic moves each monster has (whether it’s Godzilla’s atomic breath or Desotroyah’s beam cannon), because it just makes this game ooze love for the license even more (despite how odd a choice this license was for this game in the first place X3).

Verdict: Highly Recommended. As I said before, this is a five-star puzzle game. I have no idea how this little indie studio ran by a former Nintendo dev got this license or why they made *this* sort of game with it, but frankly none of that matters. What *does* matter is that this is a damn fun puzzle game, and it’s one of my favorite puzzle games I’ve played all year. They don’t really make puzzle games like this that much anymore, and it’s so fun to see one like this not just getting made but being so damn good on top of that. It’s even got an online level creator too for making and sharing your own maps so the Godzilla puzzle fun/madness never needs to stop! X3. If you’re a fan of puzzle solving gameplay at all, then this is absolutely a game you shouldn’t pass up on. It’s certainly the last thing I’d expect a Godzilla game to be, and I wouldn’t blame someone for wanting something a bit more action-focused with this sort of license, but Godzilla Voxel Wars manages to thoroughly dismiss all doubts the best way any game can: by being a damn good video game~.

Post by **REPO Man** » Fri Jul 17, 2026 12:58 pm

Looks like a definite buy.

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