Beat a run of Balatro for PS5, the second one I've ever beaten (the first was on Android, though I forgot to mention it here).
And I just beat a playthrough of The Picky Horror Show, a fanmade Pico-8 remake of the 1985 Rocky Horror Show computer game. Unlike the original, you can play not just as Brad and Janet, but also as Magenta, Columbia and Rocky. Rocky's the easiest, probably because running into other characters don't end with the player losing their clothes when the cross another character.
Games Beaten 2026
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RobertAugustdeMeijer
- 64-bit
- Posts: 328
- Joined: Fri Sep 02, 2022 10:15 am
Re: Games Beaten 2026
Neat! Thanks for sharing!REPO Man wrote: ↑Fri Apr 17, 2026 5:32 am Beat a run of Balatro for PS5, the second one I've ever beaten (the first was on Android, though I forgot to mention it here).
And I just beat a playthrough of The Picky Horror Show, a fanmade Pico-8 remake of the 1985 Rocky Horror Show computer game. Unlike the original, you can play not just as Brad and Janet, but also as Magenta, Columbia and Rocky. Rocky's the easiest, probably because running into other characters don't end with the player losing their clothes when the cross another character.
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ElkinFencer10
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 8984
- Joined: Fri Aug 13, 2010 8:34 pm
- Location: Elkin, North Carolina
- Contact:
Re: Games Beaten 2026
Games Beaten in 2026 - 8
* denotes a replay
January (2 Games Beaten)
February (1 Game Beaten)
March (3 Games Beaten)
April (2 Games Beaten)
8. Choo-Choo Charles - PlayStation 5 - April 16
Choo-Choo Charles is an acid trip of a horror game. I feel like a lot of millennials will resonate with this game, clearly low budget though it is, as the main antagonist, a demonic spider-train hybrid named Charles, is basically what a sleep paralysis version of Thomas the Tank Engine would look like. That makes sense, too; it’s directly inspired by the animation of Tom Coben’s in his video “Thomas Feeds” which literally involves a demonic spider-like Thomas. Charles’s face, as will be obvious to anyone who’s read the book or see either film adaptation, was inspired by Stephen King’s masterpiece novel, IT. It also, I am confident, is inspired by Stephen King’s ostensibly children’s book, Charlie the Choo-Choo, which was written as an element of the Dark Tower series. It’s not a visually appealing game, the voice acting is terrible, and the gameplay can feel repetitive, but I still found something mesmerizing about the whole experience.
The game’s presentation doesn’t make the best first impression. The title screen menu is basic and feels uninspired. When you actually start the game, you immediately notice how bad (by modern standards) the game’s models and textures are. Charles and your train both look great, but the NPCs look like upscaled PS2 models. You’ll also notice that no one’s mouth moves when they speak, and their eyes all look milky as if everyone on the island has cataracts. Honestly, the character models’ unmoving lips probably bother me a lot more than they should, but for whatever reason, that just sticks with me. Inside your train, if you look at the walls, the bolts and edges of the sheet metal literally look like they’re drawn on with a pencil. I’m not sure if that was an intentional stylistic choice, but it gave me the impression of quick and sloppy texture work.
The gameplay involves riding your train around the island as you complete side missions to get scrap, the resource used to upgrade and repair your train, complete weapon missions to unlock the three additional weapons for your train (you start with a machine gun and unlock a flamethrower, an artillery looking cannon, and a rocket launcher), and complete main missions to progress the story along to the final battle. Along the way, you will randomly be accosted by Charles. As a spider train, he has eight legs that allow him to move independently of the train tracks, and also like a spider, he is virtually silent. There is a change in music when he’s nearby, so you know when you need to be on guard, but he is silent, so you don’t have any idea from which direction he’s coming. This leads inevitably to a jump scare that consistently had me screaming and in need of new underwear. If you’re in your train, though, you might be able to damage him enough to get him to flee which requires taking him down to about half health. The missions themselves involve getting out of your train and running across the open terrain, something that is super nerve-wracking since you never know when a demon train with a Pennywise face is going to sprint over the nearest hill and eat you before you know he’s there. Some of these missions will also have you contest with cultists who wear masks of Charles’s face and carry shotguns and American law enforcement’s default attitude of “shoot first, ask questions later.” You can kill them if you lure them back to your train and shoot rockets or bullets at them, but on foot, you’re unarmed and either have to sneak around quietly or sprint like Usain Bolt and try to complete your objective and get back to your train before they put too many holes in you. When all of the other main missions are done and you think you’re adequately upgraded (read: fully), you summon Charles for a final battle. If you’re fully upgraded and just continuously chuck rockets at his face, this is actually the easiest encounter of the game.
All in all, Choo-Choo Charles is extraordinarily okay. It looks like it was made 15 years ago, it sounds like the voice acting was pulled from 2001, and it’s short. It’s super short. Like, I completed every mission and fully upgraded everything and still beat it in less than three hours. That said, you’ll never have to worry about the game dragging on or wearing out its welcome. You just might not want to buy it unless it’s on sale. Normally, the game can be downloaded on Xbox One, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch, or PC for $20; or you could buy the physical release like I did on PlayStation 5 for $30. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend paying more than $10 given that the game is shorter than my once-weekly university class on comparative labor history was. It is, however, a worthwhile game for a single-sitting horror game night in October, so throw it on a wishlist, but don’t pay full price unless you’re obsessed with trains, the novel IT, or any and every horror game out there.
* denotes a replay
January (2 Games Beaten)
Choo-Choo Charles is an acid trip of a horror game. I feel like a lot of millennials will resonate with this game, clearly low budget though it is, as the main antagonist, a demonic spider-train hybrid named Charles, is basically what a sleep paralysis version of Thomas the Tank Engine would look like. That makes sense, too; it’s directly inspired by the animation of Tom Coben’s in his video “Thomas Feeds” which literally involves a demonic spider-like Thomas. Charles’s face, as will be obvious to anyone who’s read the book or see either film adaptation, was inspired by Stephen King’s masterpiece novel, IT. It also, I am confident, is inspired by Stephen King’s ostensibly children’s book, Charlie the Choo-Choo, which was written as an element of the Dark Tower series. It’s not a visually appealing game, the voice acting is terrible, and the gameplay can feel repetitive, but I still found something mesmerizing about the whole experience.
The game’s presentation doesn’t make the best first impression. The title screen menu is basic and feels uninspired. When you actually start the game, you immediately notice how bad (by modern standards) the game’s models and textures are. Charles and your train both look great, but the NPCs look like upscaled PS2 models. You’ll also notice that no one’s mouth moves when they speak, and their eyes all look milky as if everyone on the island has cataracts. Honestly, the character models’ unmoving lips probably bother me a lot more than they should, but for whatever reason, that just sticks with me. Inside your train, if you look at the walls, the bolts and edges of the sheet metal literally look like they’re drawn on with a pencil. I’m not sure if that was an intentional stylistic choice, but it gave me the impression of quick and sloppy texture work.
The gameplay involves riding your train around the island as you complete side missions to get scrap, the resource used to upgrade and repair your train, complete weapon missions to unlock the three additional weapons for your train (you start with a machine gun and unlock a flamethrower, an artillery looking cannon, and a rocket launcher), and complete main missions to progress the story along to the final battle. Along the way, you will randomly be accosted by Charles. As a spider train, he has eight legs that allow him to move independently of the train tracks, and also like a spider, he is virtually silent. There is a change in music when he’s nearby, so you know when you need to be on guard, but he is silent, so you don’t have any idea from which direction he’s coming. This leads inevitably to a jump scare that consistently had me screaming and in need of new underwear. If you’re in your train, though, you might be able to damage him enough to get him to flee which requires taking him down to about half health. The missions themselves involve getting out of your train and running across the open terrain, something that is super nerve-wracking since you never know when a demon train with a Pennywise face is going to sprint over the nearest hill and eat you before you know he’s there. Some of these missions will also have you contest with cultists who wear masks of Charles’s face and carry shotguns and American law enforcement’s default attitude of “shoot first, ask questions later.” You can kill them if you lure them back to your train and shoot rockets or bullets at them, but on foot, you’re unarmed and either have to sneak around quietly or sprint like Usain Bolt and try to complete your objective and get back to your train before they put too many holes in you. When all of the other main missions are done and you think you’re adequately upgraded (read: fully), you summon Charles for a final battle. If you’re fully upgraded and just continuously chuck rockets at his face, this is actually the easiest encounter of the game.
All in all, Choo-Choo Charles is extraordinarily okay. It looks like it was made 15 years ago, it sounds like the voice acting was pulled from 2001, and it’s short. It’s super short. Like, I completed every mission and fully upgraded everything and still beat it in less than three hours. That said, you’ll never have to worry about the game dragging on or wearing out its welcome. You just might not want to buy it unless it’s on sale. Normally, the game can be downloaded on Xbox One, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch, or PC for $20; or you could buy the physical release like I did on PlayStation 5 for $30. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend paying more than $10 given that the game is shorter than my once-weekly university class on comparative labor history was. It is, however, a worthwhile game for a single-sitting horror game night in October, so throw it on a wishlist, but don’t pay full price unless you’re obsessed with trains, the novel IT, or any and every horror game out there.
Patron Saint of Bitch Mode
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PartridgeSenpai
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 3187
- Joined: Mon Dec 14, 2015 9:27 am
- Location: Northern Japan
Re: Games Beaten 2026
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)
I’ve had a very interesting time over the past year and change delving into all sorts of “guy in a city”-type open world games (my more catch-all term for a GTA-clone). This has been a game kinda sorta on my radar for a while, but I’ve just never really had the impetus to give it a try. As much as I’m far from a Ubisoft game fan, I really loved my time with Watch_Dogs 2 when I played it years ago, but nothing I’d ever heard about this game made it compelling to look into. Watch_Dogs 2 was framed as “the one where they got it right”, with everything from the hacking-focused gameplay to the basic tone of the story just being an underdeveloped mess in the first game. After finding this game for super cheap locally, however, I decided that it was finally time to see what all the anti-hype was about with this infamously underwhelming early PS4-era title. Doing a fair bit (though far from all) of the side content, it took me around 33 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game in English, playing the PS4 version of the game on my PS5 with my DualSense controller. (Quick warning that this review does get into fairly meaningful spoiler territory, so reader discretion is advised for those who care about that sort of thing).
Watch_Dogs is the story of Aiden Pearce. In the near future, the Blume Corporation and it’s “ctOS” (Central Operating System) have turned Chicago into a city of the future, with the whole place (from ATMs to traffic lights to even people’s phones) being connected to this central system. Pearce is a hacker, and he and his even more tech savvy buddy Damien have set up this huge heist where they’ll raid white collar bank accounts without them even knowing it. But something goes wrong. Some weird glitch in the system that Damien can’t help but chase turns the whole job into a disaster, and Pearce barely makes it away. The only thing is, they’ve ticked off the *wrong* people. A hit is put out on Aiden, and in the botch job of a hit, his niece ends up dying instead. We flash forward a year, and blaming himself for his niece’s death, Pearce has turned his already prickly exterior into a total shell. Turning himself into “The Fox”, a persona dubbed “The Vigilante” by the press and people of Chicago, he’s refocused his entire life on getting revenge on the people who killed his niece, no matter the cost.
Given the whole ‘big brother is watching you/death of privacy’ nature of the setting, the actual form our story ends up taking being a more typical gangster revenge story is a weird one at first, second, and even third glance. Watch_Dogs has received no shortage of flak over the years for its melodramatic, ludonarratively dissonant story, and I can frankly hardly blame people for feeling that way, because that was the way I felt for a most of my time with Watch_Dogs. That all said, I was frankly shocked at just what a turnaround I’d felt by the end of my time with this game. It’s definitely far from perfect, but I’d argue that Watch_Dogs has a much stronger narrative than its reputation would lead you to believe.
That reputation is hardly unfairly earned, mind you. This game was in development for five long years, and the scars of that process are not lost on the final product. A fair few rather important side characters seem to come and go at the convenience of the larger revenge story, Aiden and his sister Nicky (another major character) at some points really seem like they were estranged exes rather than siblings in earlier drafts, and how all the gang war violence seems to relate to the larger systemic violence of the surveillance state is an ongoing question for nearly the entire game. However, as baffling and frustrating as these individual aspects can seem in the moment, they actually do come together quite well by the end.
At the end of the day, Watch_Dogs is a story about guilt, what it does to people, and the people it does (or indeed doesn’t) turn them into. While Aiden Pearce is a very “sad uncle” archetype who isn’t very compelling on his own, we populate the story around him with a treasure trove of foils to compare and contrast him against. This can give the story an air of “Wait, what about [character]?” at times, but looking at the collection of different stories our narrative is composed of, we do all tie things back together in a neat, thematic bow by the end.
His sister Nicky, for example, is someone who’s always idolized her big brother, and it’s tearing her up inside watching what this guilt has turned him into. He similarly hates having involved them, but also knows that protecting them is the right thing to do, and prioritizes their safety beyond his ability to easily see them. This whole dynamic is so much better done with them as siblings than as ex-spouses (or what have you), because making Nicky some potential romantic trophy to be re-won by Aiden’s actions would badly damage the real, complicated tragedy of their separation due to Aiden’s actions. The story is honestly far better for eschewing any major romantic subplots, because that would do nothing but serve to distract from Aiden’s real personal motivation: Guilt. Guilt has turned Aiden into an avenger driven to pass judgment on those who’ve hurt his family, but this isn’t the only path he could’ve followed. We’re shown the failed hitman who ended up killing his niece (the guilt from which turned his already dire gang situation into something that completely destroyed his life), and the informant who helped the hit happen in the first place (who ends up giving so much of herself to help Aiden get his revenge that she ends up becoming a victim herself in the process).
These serve as narrative demonstrations to validate the path Aiden has ultimately taken: He’s under no delusions that this is anything but a self-serving mission of revenge, but he’s turning this pain and guilt into a bigger weapon. By the end of the narrative, he's refined it into a motivation to help him make a difference, to keep more tragedies like this from happening again. It’s this ability to self-reflect as well as feel guilt in the first place that separates Aiden, a guy who kills a *lot* of people, from the similarly mass murdering antagonists of our piece. Nearly every major character in the story is grappling with what being close to (or explicitly in) a life of crime has brought them, but none of the gang leaders or wannabee criminal masterminds that Aiden faces off against feel any remorse for what they’ve done. Their grand schemes and abuse of the ctOS system only serve to elevate their own power, and they care very little whom they need to hurt, threaten, and destroy to make that happen.
Aiden is a rather unconventional protagonist in a lot of ways, particularly in that the story feels rather unsure on how much of an anti-hero they want to portray him as. He's not a clear cut "bad guy doing good things" or vice versa, but he's also hardly someone you'd want to emulate yourself (and I don't just mean all the killing and crimes). Aiden is a pretty damn antisocial guy. He distrusts everyone by default, he actively manipulates people in basically every interaction with people who aren't his family, and the craziest thing is that the story actually validates his behavior quite a few times. That's not to say it's an invalid approach to a story like this so much as it is to say that a more conventional story with a main character like this would have him learn to soften his approach over the course of the story. It'd end with him facing his trauma and the climax would revolve around him using the rediscovered ability to trust in people close to him to conquer the ultimate threat, but that is not the story we're telling here at all.
Aiden is the "hero" of our story in that he takes down the bad guy at the end, but he doesn't really "win" so much as he keeps himself from ever really losing *everything*. He saves his family, sure, but he also ensures he'll never get to see or contact them again in the process. He manages to beat Damien, sure, but he's hardly done anything to stop Blume, ctOS, or the corruption rampant in the city that allowed those former two to take control in the first place. Aiden ends our story our story a lone wolf as he began it, but he just has a couple more contacts, a safe family, and a newfound confidence in his actions and a willingness to use them now for the greater good instead of primarily his own revenge. Ubisoft have made a very odd choice for the main protagonist of a AAA flagship video game, so I can't really blame people for not vibing with him or understanding what they were going for (I'd even go as far as to say that Aiden was damn near set up to be misunderstood with the kind of character he is), but I still gotta say that I do kinda love just how well they've pulled off what they're going for here, even if it's a bit of a messy process getting there.
The reason we ultimately don’t focus on groups like the police, the city government, Blume, or even the anonymous hacker group DedSec (who some readers may know are in part the protagonists of the sequel) is because we’re actually all slowly painting them with the same brush as wannabee masterminds of the tool of mass destruction known as ctOS. Aiden refuses to band with any of these groups because he’s far too skeptical of their ultimate motives, and he views ctOS as a tool *no* group should have access to (there can be no effective “watch dogs” of a tool this easily abused). All of this takes quite a while to lay out the pieces for, but by the time we’re reaching the end of our story, Ubisoft’s team have actually managed to turn this melodrama into something genuinely compelling as both character piece and societal critique. It’s hardly the best paced or executed story of this type to exist, sure, but given the expectations I went into this game with, I was amazed at just how well done this story is.
All of that defense and praise out of the way, the elephant in the room yet remains that ludonarrative dissonance (the process of how you’re made to play the game being at odds with the narrative the game is trying to tell you), and I will very readily state that it is the key failing of the game’s story. Aiden Pearce is someone who kills a *lot* of people in his attempts to get justice for his dead niece, but as much as he is cognizant of how he’s no hero, how he really has no right to choose who lives or dies, the gameplay having no nonlethal combat options outside of melee takedowns makes it feel rather hollow that he’s actually all that torn up about taking lives.
However, the other side of that coin also doesn’t work. If you play as I did, where you take the greatest pains you can to never kill anyone (if and whenever possible), the game still acts like you’ve killed your targets anyway. Heck, there are several missions that explicitly make no sense if you leave your target alive, but it still counts as complete (and them as dead) if you do the non-lethal takedown attack on them. Aiden is always portrayed as a ready taker of lives of his enemies no matter how you play the game, and it clashes very badly with how the game expressly gives you options for non-lethal combat. While the game *does* have a simple morality system, it’s largely centered around you killing innocent civilians for “bad guy points” and stopping street crimes for “good guy points”. The only mechanic it actually affects is how often civilians call the police on you if they see you in public, and it has no ramifications on the narrative at all. While morality systems like this were definitely falling out of fashion at the time, I nonetheless think that Watch_Dogs would’ve benefited greatly from leaning harder into this aspect of the gameplay, or at least better wedding the gameplay systems to the story they were trying to tell. This dissonance doesn’t ruin the whole narrative by any means, but it’s a dark cloud hanging over the whole thing regardless, and it reeks quite strongly of a game that had a very troubled development cycle.
A similar kind of dissonance (not being ludonarrative in nature but simply feeling born out of a messy development cycle) haunts a lot of the gameplay overall. At the time of its release, Watch_Dogs was definitely not out there to reinvent the wheel on how to make a game in this decade-old genre. However, the fundamentals of how it puts together this GTA-clone are actually really remarkably solid. The stealth system works great, the cover shooter gunplay is very solid, and the driving feels really good to do as well. Their reimagining of Chicago pays homage to the real place while also making it a good video game location to play around in with a good amount of variety. While there are some issues with putting too much responsibility on one button for circumstantial actions (I had a fair few stealthy attempts foiled by Aiden vaulting over an obstacle when I pressed O rather than taking out a guy stealthily like I’d wanted him too), the basic building blocks of an open world game are pulled off very well and feel great to play.
The big bugbear in the whole process is just the underwhelming nature of the hacking. It very well may be down to me having played Watch_Dogs 2 before this first one, but for my money, the front of the box gimmick just does not feel like where it should be in a lot of cases. There are definitely some places where it succeeds well. As a sort of minor superpower in a stealth section or firefight, the hacking is really well executed. Hacking cameras to tag enemies and track their movements better (like a good few other Ubisoft games do) makes for a fantastic stealth tool, and the same goes for being able to distract enemies and set off their grenades with hacking powers too. In both stealth and a firefight, being able to blow up mechanical equipment nearby enemies to either distract or disable them is also really cool, and it lends a lot to the vibe of feeling like a one-man army against all of these hired goons and gangsters out to get you.
But if you’re not in a gunfight or stealthing around, then this is basically just another GTA-style game. While there are some *very* light environmental puzzles here and there, they’re really just scavenger hunts for a camera that’ll allow you to see the switch to flick to open the door you’re stuck on. Watch_Dogs 1 lacks any of the fancy toys of its sequel (like the RC car or the drone) to help explore the world with, and you actually can’t influence cars at *all* with your hacking. You actually can’t even fire your gun while you drive. As much as I hate car combat in games like this, so that’s hardly a disappointment to me, this ultimately means that the only thing you can do to help bring down a car (in the many such missions where that’s required of you) is either bang their car with yours for ages until they’re disabled, or just follow them/let them tail you until they drive over an obstacle that you can press the flashing button prompt to disable them with. It makes for very tedious and lackluster driving sections in a game packed with them, and it makes it very hard to escape that feeling of “Is *this* it?”.
Watch_Dogs 1 is a pretty well put together game, otherwise. In the grand scheme of things, its flaws are ultimately fairly minor (day/night cycle but no clock, summoned vehicles spawning too far away from you, Lake Michigan as too reliable a sure-fire way to escape pursuers because none of them have boats), but the flaws it has are unfortunately so wrapped up in its biggest gimmicks that it isn’t left with much to stand out after the fact. It lacks the zany bombast of Saints Row, and while it controls better than something like GTA (unless you’re a huge fan of the over-animated human controls in RockStar games), it doesn’t have nearly the sim elements that a game like GTA V did (or the investigation/deduction gimmicks of a game like L.A. Noire, to bring up another rough contemporary). The play experience of Watch_Dogs 1 ends up mostly being a very competent GTA-clone, which isn’t a bad thing, but I also don’t really blame people for not being terribly blown away by it back then, and it also makes it a relatively difficult game to recommend people go back to compared to the many other games in this genre from the past two decades that have more interesting points of design friction to go back and experience.
Before I conclude talking about the mechanics, I want to give a quick disclaimer about how I actually played this game. While I did indeed play it via a DualSense on a PS5, I did not play with any standard controls. This game uses R2 a *lot* because you have to hold it down to both run as well as accelerate in your car. Holding down analog triggers for long periods like that really hurts my hands and arms, so I actually nearly had to abandon this game in the first hour or so. However, I remembered that the PS5 has console-level button rebinding, and that solved all my problems (mostly). By swapping the functions of the R2 and X buttons, I was able to just hold X to drive and run, and all I really had to do to compensate was press R2 to select stuff in menus. It *did*, however, make gunplay far more awkward, because you’ve gotta hold L2 to pull out your gun, use the right stick to aim, and press X to fire, but even with my weird, rebound controls, I still managed to both have a great time and think both the driving and gunplay were good fun. Not an ideal way to play this sort of game, and it’s a real shame the game is *just* too old to really have meaningful accessibility options in-game, but it’s good to have this option on a console level at the very least.
Aesthetically, the game is perfectly fine and not particularly remarkable. The soundtrack has a few original songs, but they’re fairly subdued and largely just for setting tone during some dangerous sections when a vocal track wouldn’t be appropriate. The vocal tracks that the game does have are just fine, but they’re not particularly my cup of tea. They might be more your kind of music than they were mine, but I found myself just turning off the radio whenever I got in a car far more than I ever usually do in this sort of game. The voice acting is really good, though, and the Japanese dub (for the mission or two that I tested it with) is great too. The humor and such are translated really well, and they even went out of their way to redo the lip sync for cutscenes and such. It’s pretty weird that the NPC enemies aren’t redubbed and still speak English at you, but at least all of the story important stuff was handled with a good amount of care and attention for Japanese players XD
The graphics are also perfectly fine. I know there was quite the scandal over them when the game first released, but over ten years out from that, the game we have is the game we have, and that game looks perfectly fine. It looks like what it is, which is a cross-generation open world game. Not particularly great for a PS4 game, but the framerate is perfectly good (on the PS5, at least), and people generally avoid looking uncanny (outside when glitches happen like Aiden suddenly holding two guns or phones in his hand at the same time like I had happen here and there XD).
My biggest (albeit still minor) issue with the visuals is really just character design. A lot of our main characters (particularly Aiden, Clara, and Damien) are dressed *so* conspicuously that it’s hilarious. Aiden is meant to be this undercover vigilante, but his coat is *so* particular and stand out that anyone would recognize him from a mile away if they had seen even one photo of him. While you can technically buy new clothes for Aiden, it’s only different colored versions of his default outfit, so if you feel like standing out even more and looking even more silly, that option is always there for you XD. Clara and Damien come off as really over designed for what they are. They look like they escaped from Watch_Dogs 2 with how they dress, and it just gives scenes that they’re in a weird vibe that other major characters like Nicky, Iraq, and even T-Bone just never do.
Verdict: Recommended. I actually enjoyed my time with this game a fair bit. Now that I’ve finished it, I definitely think that this game gets hated on way more than it deserves for how genuinely decent it is. I don’t think it’s amazing, of course, and there are no shortage of games in this genre, both older and newer, that will be a more memorable time for you, but just how solidly this game put together and the strengths it *does* have do a more than good enough job to make up for its weaker and more forgettable aspects. If you’re after a quality GTA-style game but have been scared away by all the harsh talk about Watch_Dogs 1 as I had, I really do think it’s worth giving this game a look anyhow if you can pick it up cheap like I did, because you just might come away from it just as happy with your purchase as I did~.
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)
I’ve had a very interesting time over the past year and change delving into all sorts of “guy in a city”-type open world games (my more catch-all term for a GTA-clone). This has been a game kinda sorta on my radar for a while, but I’ve just never really had the impetus to give it a try. As much as I’m far from a Ubisoft game fan, I really loved my time with Watch_Dogs 2 when I played it years ago, but nothing I’d ever heard about this game made it compelling to look into. Watch_Dogs 2 was framed as “the one where they got it right”, with everything from the hacking-focused gameplay to the basic tone of the story just being an underdeveloped mess in the first game. After finding this game for super cheap locally, however, I decided that it was finally time to see what all the anti-hype was about with this infamously underwhelming early PS4-era title. Doing a fair bit (though far from all) of the side content, it took me around 33 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game in English, playing the PS4 version of the game on my PS5 with my DualSense controller. (Quick warning that this review does get into fairly meaningful spoiler territory, so reader discretion is advised for those who care about that sort of thing).
Watch_Dogs is the story of Aiden Pearce. In the near future, the Blume Corporation and it’s “ctOS” (Central Operating System) have turned Chicago into a city of the future, with the whole place (from ATMs to traffic lights to even people’s phones) being connected to this central system. Pearce is a hacker, and he and his even more tech savvy buddy Damien have set up this huge heist where they’ll raid white collar bank accounts without them even knowing it. But something goes wrong. Some weird glitch in the system that Damien can’t help but chase turns the whole job into a disaster, and Pearce barely makes it away. The only thing is, they’ve ticked off the *wrong* people. A hit is put out on Aiden, and in the botch job of a hit, his niece ends up dying instead. We flash forward a year, and blaming himself for his niece’s death, Pearce has turned his already prickly exterior into a total shell. Turning himself into “The Fox”, a persona dubbed “The Vigilante” by the press and people of Chicago, he’s refocused his entire life on getting revenge on the people who killed his niece, no matter the cost.
Given the whole ‘big brother is watching you/death of privacy’ nature of the setting, the actual form our story ends up taking being a more typical gangster revenge story is a weird one at first, second, and even third glance. Watch_Dogs has received no shortage of flak over the years for its melodramatic, ludonarratively dissonant story, and I can frankly hardly blame people for feeling that way, because that was the way I felt for a most of my time with Watch_Dogs. That all said, I was frankly shocked at just what a turnaround I’d felt by the end of my time with this game. It’s definitely far from perfect, but I’d argue that Watch_Dogs has a much stronger narrative than its reputation would lead you to believe.
That reputation is hardly unfairly earned, mind you. This game was in development for five long years, and the scars of that process are not lost on the final product. A fair few rather important side characters seem to come and go at the convenience of the larger revenge story, Aiden and his sister Nicky (another major character) at some points really seem like they were estranged exes rather than siblings in earlier drafts, and how all the gang war violence seems to relate to the larger systemic violence of the surveillance state is an ongoing question for nearly the entire game. However, as baffling and frustrating as these individual aspects can seem in the moment, they actually do come together quite well by the end.
At the end of the day, Watch_Dogs is a story about guilt, what it does to people, and the people it does (or indeed doesn’t) turn them into. While Aiden Pearce is a very “sad uncle” archetype who isn’t very compelling on his own, we populate the story around him with a treasure trove of foils to compare and contrast him against. This can give the story an air of “Wait, what about [character]?” at times, but looking at the collection of different stories our narrative is composed of, we do all tie things back together in a neat, thematic bow by the end.
His sister Nicky, for example, is someone who’s always idolized her big brother, and it’s tearing her up inside watching what this guilt has turned him into. He similarly hates having involved them, but also knows that protecting them is the right thing to do, and prioritizes their safety beyond his ability to easily see them. This whole dynamic is so much better done with them as siblings than as ex-spouses (or what have you), because making Nicky some potential romantic trophy to be re-won by Aiden’s actions would badly damage the real, complicated tragedy of their separation due to Aiden’s actions. The story is honestly far better for eschewing any major romantic subplots, because that would do nothing but serve to distract from Aiden’s real personal motivation: Guilt. Guilt has turned Aiden into an avenger driven to pass judgment on those who’ve hurt his family, but this isn’t the only path he could’ve followed. We’re shown the failed hitman who ended up killing his niece (the guilt from which turned his already dire gang situation into something that completely destroyed his life), and the informant who helped the hit happen in the first place (who ends up giving so much of herself to help Aiden get his revenge that she ends up becoming a victim herself in the process).
These serve as narrative demonstrations to validate the path Aiden has ultimately taken: He’s under no delusions that this is anything but a self-serving mission of revenge, but he’s turning this pain and guilt into a bigger weapon. By the end of the narrative, he's refined it into a motivation to help him make a difference, to keep more tragedies like this from happening again. It’s this ability to self-reflect as well as feel guilt in the first place that separates Aiden, a guy who kills a *lot* of people, from the similarly mass murdering antagonists of our piece. Nearly every major character in the story is grappling with what being close to (or explicitly in) a life of crime has brought them, but none of the gang leaders or wannabee criminal masterminds that Aiden faces off against feel any remorse for what they’ve done. Their grand schemes and abuse of the ctOS system only serve to elevate their own power, and they care very little whom they need to hurt, threaten, and destroy to make that happen.
Aiden is a rather unconventional protagonist in a lot of ways, particularly in that the story feels rather unsure on how much of an anti-hero they want to portray him as. He's not a clear cut "bad guy doing good things" or vice versa, but he's also hardly someone you'd want to emulate yourself (and I don't just mean all the killing and crimes). Aiden is a pretty damn antisocial guy. He distrusts everyone by default, he actively manipulates people in basically every interaction with people who aren't his family, and the craziest thing is that the story actually validates his behavior quite a few times. That's not to say it's an invalid approach to a story like this so much as it is to say that a more conventional story with a main character like this would have him learn to soften his approach over the course of the story. It'd end with him facing his trauma and the climax would revolve around him using the rediscovered ability to trust in people close to him to conquer the ultimate threat, but that is not the story we're telling here at all.
Aiden is the "hero" of our story in that he takes down the bad guy at the end, but he doesn't really "win" so much as he keeps himself from ever really losing *everything*. He saves his family, sure, but he also ensures he'll never get to see or contact them again in the process. He manages to beat Damien, sure, but he's hardly done anything to stop Blume, ctOS, or the corruption rampant in the city that allowed those former two to take control in the first place. Aiden ends our story our story a lone wolf as he began it, but he just has a couple more contacts, a safe family, and a newfound confidence in his actions and a willingness to use them now for the greater good instead of primarily his own revenge. Ubisoft have made a very odd choice for the main protagonist of a AAA flagship video game, so I can't really blame people for not vibing with him or understanding what they were going for (I'd even go as far as to say that Aiden was damn near set up to be misunderstood with the kind of character he is), but I still gotta say that I do kinda love just how well they've pulled off what they're going for here, even if it's a bit of a messy process getting there.
The reason we ultimately don’t focus on groups like the police, the city government, Blume, or even the anonymous hacker group DedSec (who some readers may know are in part the protagonists of the sequel) is because we’re actually all slowly painting them with the same brush as wannabee masterminds of the tool of mass destruction known as ctOS. Aiden refuses to band with any of these groups because he’s far too skeptical of their ultimate motives, and he views ctOS as a tool *no* group should have access to (there can be no effective “watch dogs” of a tool this easily abused). All of this takes quite a while to lay out the pieces for, but by the time we’re reaching the end of our story, Ubisoft’s team have actually managed to turn this melodrama into something genuinely compelling as both character piece and societal critique. It’s hardly the best paced or executed story of this type to exist, sure, but given the expectations I went into this game with, I was amazed at just how well done this story is.
All of that defense and praise out of the way, the elephant in the room yet remains that ludonarrative dissonance (the process of how you’re made to play the game being at odds with the narrative the game is trying to tell you), and I will very readily state that it is the key failing of the game’s story. Aiden Pearce is someone who kills a *lot* of people in his attempts to get justice for his dead niece, but as much as he is cognizant of how he’s no hero, how he really has no right to choose who lives or dies, the gameplay having no nonlethal combat options outside of melee takedowns makes it feel rather hollow that he’s actually all that torn up about taking lives.
However, the other side of that coin also doesn’t work. If you play as I did, where you take the greatest pains you can to never kill anyone (if and whenever possible), the game still acts like you’ve killed your targets anyway. Heck, there are several missions that explicitly make no sense if you leave your target alive, but it still counts as complete (and them as dead) if you do the non-lethal takedown attack on them. Aiden is always portrayed as a ready taker of lives of his enemies no matter how you play the game, and it clashes very badly with how the game expressly gives you options for non-lethal combat. While the game *does* have a simple morality system, it’s largely centered around you killing innocent civilians for “bad guy points” and stopping street crimes for “good guy points”. The only mechanic it actually affects is how often civilians call the police on you if they see you in public, and it has no ramifications on the narrative at all. While morality systems like this were definitely falling out of fashion at the time, I nonetheless think that Watch_Dogs would’ve benefited greatly from leaning harder into this aspect of the gameplay, or at least better wedding the gameplay systems to the story they were trying to tell. This dissonance doesn’t ruin the whole narrative by any means, but it’s a dark cloud hanging over the whole thing regardless, and it reeks quite strongly of a game that had a very troubled development cycle.
A similar kind of dissonance (not being ludonarrative in nature but simply feeling born out of a messy development cycle) haunts a lot of the gameplay overall. At the time of its release, Watch_Dogs was definitely not out there to reinvent the wheel on how to make a game in this decade-old genre. However, the fundamentals of how it puts together this GTA-clone are actually really remarkably solid. The stealth system works great, the cover shooter gunplay is very solid, and the driving feels really good to do as well. Their reimagining of Chicago pays homage to the real place while also making it a good video game location to play around in with a good amount of variety. While there are some issues with putting too much responsibility on one button for circumstantial actions (I had a fair few stealthy attempts foiled by Aiden vaulting over an obstacle when I pressed O rather than taking out a guy stealthily like I’d wanted him too), the basic building blocks of an open world game are pulled off very well and feel great to play.
The big bugbear in the whole process is just the underwhelming nature of the hacking. It very well may be down to me having played Watch_Dogs 2 before this first one, but for my money, the front of the box gimmick just does not feel like where it should be in a lot of cases. There are definitely some places where it succeeds well. As a sort of minor superpower in a stealth section or firefight, the hacking is really well executed. Hacking cameras to tag enemies and track their movements better (like a good few other Ubisoft games do) makes for a fantastic stealth tool, and the same goes for being able to distract enemies and set off their grenades with hacking powers too. In both stealth and a firefight, being able to blow up mechanical equipment nearby enemies to either distract or disable them is also really cool, and it lends a lot to the vibe of feeling like a one-man army against all of these hired goons and gangsters out to get you.
But if you’re not in a gunfight or stealthing around, then this is basically just another GTA-style game. While there are some *very* light environmental puzzles here and there, they’re really just scavenger hunts for a camera that’ll allow you to see the switch to flick to open the door you’re stuck on. Watch_Dogs 1 lacks any of the fancy toys of its sequel (like the RC car or the drone) to help explore the world with, and you actually can’t influence cars at *all* with your hacking. You actually can’t even fire your gun while you drive. As much as I hate car combat in games like this, so that’s hardly a disappointment to me, this ultimately means that the only thing you can do to help bring down a car (in the many such missions where that’s required of you) is either bang their car with yours for ages until they’re disabled, or just follow them/let them tail you until they drive over an obstacle that you can press the flashing button prompt to disable them with. It makes for very tedious and lackluster driving sections in a game packed with them, and it makes it very hard to escape that feeling of “Is *this* it?”.
Watch_Dogs 1 is a pretty well put together game, otherwise. In the grand scheme of things, its flaws are ultimately fairly minor (day/night cycle but no clock, summoned vehicles spawning too far away from you, Lake Michigan as too reliable a sure-fire way to escape pursuers because none of them have boats), but the flaws it has are unfortunately so wrapped up in its biggest gimmicks that it isn’t left with much to stand out after the fact. It lacks the zany bombast of Saints Row, and while it controls better than something like GTA (unless you’re a huge fan of the over-animated human controls in RockStar games), it doesn’t have nearly the sim elements that a game like GTA V did (or the investigation/deduction gimmicks of a game like L.A. Noire, to bring up another rough contemporary). The play experience of Watch_Dogs 1 ends up mostly being a very competent GTA-clone, which isn’t a bad thing, but I also don’t really blame people for not being terribly blown away by it back then, and it also makes it a relatively difficult game to recommend people go back to compared to the many other games in this genre from the past two decades that have more interesting points of design friction to go back and experience.
Before I conclude talking about the mechanics, I want to give a quick disclaimer about how I actually played this game. While I did indeed play it via a DualSense on a PS5, I did not play with any standard controls. This game uses R2 a *lot* because you have to hold it down to both run as well as accelerate in your car. Holding down analog triggers for long periods like that really hurts my hands and arms, so I actually nearly had to abandon this game in the first hour or so. However, I remembered that the PS5 has console-level button rebinding, and that solved all my problems (mostly). By swapping the functions of the R2 and X buttons, I was able to just hold X to drive and run, and all I really had to do to compensate was press R2 to select stuff in menus. It *did*, however, make gunplay far more awkward, because you’ve gotta hold L2 to pull out your gun, use the right stick to aim, and press X to fire, but even with my weird, rebound controls, I still managed to both have a great time and think both the driving and gunplay were good fun. Not an ideal way to play this sort of game, and it’s a real shame the game is *just* too old to really have meaningful accessibility options in-game, but it’s good to have this option on a console level at the very least.
Aesthetically, the game is perfectly fine and not particularly remarkable. The soundtrack has a few original songs, but they’re fairly subdued and largely just for setting tone during some dangerous sections when a vocal track wouldn’t be appropriate. The vocal tracks that the game does have are just fine, but they’re not particularly my cup of tea. They might be more your kind of music than they were mine, but I found myself just turning off the radio whenever I got in a car far more than I ever usually do in this sort of game. The voice acting is really good, though, and the Japanese dub (for the mission or two that I tested it with) is great too. The humor and such are translated really well, and they even went out of their way to redo the lip sync for cutscenes and such. It’s pretty weird that the NPC enemies aren’t redubbed and still speak English at you, but at least all of the story important stuff was handled with a good amount of care and attention for Japanese players XD
The graphics are also perfectly fine. I know there was quite the scandal over them when the game first released, but over ten years out from that, the game we have is the game we have, and that game looks perfectly fine. It looks like what it is, which is a cross-generation open world game. Not particularly great for a PS4 game, but the framerate is perfectly good (on the PS5, at least), and people generally avoid looking uncanny (outside when glitches happen like Aiden suddenly holding two guns or phones in his hand at the same time like I had happen here and there XD).
My biggest (albeit still minor) issue with the visuals is really just character design. A lot of our main characters (particularly Aiden, Clara, and Damien) are dressed *so* conspicuously that it’s hilarious. Aiden is meant to be this undercover vigilante, but his coat is *so* particular and stand out that anyone would recognize him from a mile away if they had seen even one photo of him. While you can technically buy new clothes for Aiden, it’s only different colored versions of his default outfit, so if you feel like standing out even more and looking even more silly, that option is always there for you XD. Clara and Damien come off as really over designed for what they are. They look like they escaped from Watch_Dogs 2 with how they dress, and it just gives scenes that they’re in a weird vibe that other major characters like Nicky, Iraq, and even T-Bone just never do.
Verdict: Recommended. I actually enjoyed my time with this game a fair bit. Now that I’ve finished it, I definitely think that this game gets hated on way more than it deserves for how genuinely decent it is. I don’t think it’s amazing, of course, and there are no shortage of games in this genre, both older and newer, that will be a more memorable time for you, but just how solidly this game put together and the strengths it *does* have do a more than good enough job to make up for its weaker and more forgettable aspects. If you’re after a quality GTA-style game but have been scared away by all the harsh talk about Watch_Dogs 1 as I had, I really do think it’s worth giving this game a look anyhow if you can pick it up cheap like I did, because you just might come away from it just as happy with your purchase as I did~.
Last edited by PartridgeSenpai on Mon Apr 20, 2026 6:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
Re: Games Beaten 2026
I really wish Ubisoft would port the entire Watch_Dogs trilogy to Switch 2. I already bought the first two on PS4 and beat the second one, but I'd love to play these games on the go. Same with the Far Cry games, of which I've beaten all of them except for Far Cry 4, Far Cry Primal and all the games before the third one.
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PartridgeSenpai
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- Posts: 3187
- Joined: Mon Dec 14, 2015 9:27 am
- Location: Northern Japan
Re: Games Beaten 2026
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)
After finishing the base game for Watch_Dogs, I originally had no real intentions of playing this. Being someone who almost exclusively plays games way after they come out (so I get them used for super cheap), I’m very used to the DLC for a game being far out of my price range. However, the season pass for this game just so happened to be 80% off just as I finished the base game, so I could get this DLC expansion for only like 2 bucks! The base game had cost me 3 bucks, and while I knew this wouldn’t be proportionally as much content, this was so cheap that I figured as I might as well just take the plunge, especially with how much my friend had talked up how good Bad Blood was. It overall took me a little under 8 hours to do a bit of the side content and beat the game playing the PS4 version on my PS5, just as I did with the base game. I want to give a quick disclaimer here that this review does get into some spoiler territory, so please use the proper discretion when reading further, but this is also going to serve as an addendum to my main review in regards to a lot of the mechanics of the game because they’re so similar, so for anyone feeling that I skim too fast over that stuff, this is why.
Bad Blood takes place some time after the base game of Watch_Dogs and follows Aiden’s friend(?)/ally, T-Bone, aka Kenny. Kenny was the original creator of the super surveillance tool ctOS, and he and the Blume Corporation that run it have been at odds ever since. He’s finally managed to break into Blume HQ, though, and he’s just finished completely wiping his data from their servers. It’s a messy getaway, but he’s finally free to leave Chicago and start again somewhere else free from the long arm of Blume’s tracking software. However, a friend in need pulls him back in. Another ally of Aiden’s from the base game and also a former Blume employee, Tobias Frewer, calls Kenny from a panic as some thugs are in the middle of kidnapping him. Kenny chooses to abandon fleeing the city for now and save his estranged friend instead, even if it means he’ll be pulled into a whole new sordid web of baddies out trying to ice the two of them.
I was remarkably surprised at the quality of the story of the main game, so hearing my friend say that this was even *better* had me pretty excited to check this little expansion DLC out. However, I was left pretty disappointed, as this narrative came off as pretty half-baked. It’s not awful, but it definitely feels more thrown together and less polished than the main game was (which I’m sure for some people will be an incredibly damning statement XD). Kenny is definitely a fun character, someone a lot more obviously countercultural and much closer to the kind of protagonists we’d be getting in Watch_Dogs 2. He’s also less straightforwardly an anti-hero than Aiden Pearce is, though that’s as much down to the type of story he’s in as it is down to the kind of person he is. The thing that makes him a weak protagonist, however, isn’t really this stuff so much as it is that the larger plot conceit of this DLC just isn’t very well developed.
Kenny was already a pretty well rounded character, so there’s not really much space for him to grow or change as a person as a result of the events of this DLC. The final conflict we’re faced with is, indeed, still connected to that larger theme of guilt that the main game concerns itself with so much, but Kenny already processed his guilt a long time ago. It’s definitely interesting that the main antagonist here comes from the lens of “Kenny can never feel enough guilt for what he’s done to me. He has to die”, but he’s such a shallow guy that we never really go anywhere meaningfully with that. You could certainly argue (as I would) that this isn’t so much a story of Kenny vs. the antagonist so much as it is a story of Kenny and Tobias becoming friends again, but even that is more in the realm of shallow buddy comedy than anything else. I reiterate that this isn’t a badly told story, but compared to the main game, I found it a lot more meandering and searching for a larger purpose. It’s not a bad story on its own, and the dialogue writing (particularly the banter between Kenny and Tobias) is some of the funniest it’s been for Watch_Dogs 1, but it’s definitely not a terribly compelling epilogue by any means.
Beyond that, we also unfortunately get into significantly more crappy politics that feel far more of both Ubisoft’s writing tendencies as well as just the general political mood of when the game was made. In a word, it’s copaganda. The main game skirts the edges of more directed societal critique in what it’s doing with its personal story, but it ultimately avoids it and pulls it off with a more general critique of ctOS’s existence as a whole being immoral and a tool no one should have (there cannot possibly be a trusted “watch dogs” for a weapon this powerful). This game’s side activities has Kenny working directly (albeit anonymously) for a detective in the Chicago Police Department, and she is very much framed as a “good cop, and the kind the city needs more of”.
The plausible deniability that one can afford the main game’s treatment of cops and city politics is completely out the window with this, because the institution of the police as they exist in near-future dystopia are now explicitly framed as part of the solution. It’s no condemnation of society at large that its politicians and instruments of law enforcement have been so thoroughly corrupted by Blume, ctOS, and these private institutions around them. It’s just those private institutions faults for being so evil that they would corrupt these otherwise inherently moral aspects of a capitalist democracy. While this certainly isn’t a major central point of the main story, put alongside the rug pull of Blume once again not actually being the main antagonists of the story (despite them being set up to be at the start), I had a much harder time forgiving this story’s utter refusal to answer the larger questions raised by the nature of its setting. It’s nice that Watch_Dogs 2 does ultimately get to that point (or at least a hell of a lot closer), but Bad Blood’s relatively weak personal story combined with the bigger highlight on just how explicitly cowardly/misguided the politics are makes this that much harder a pill to swallow for anyone who wasn’t champing at the bit for more Kenny in their lives.
Mechanically, this is really just more Watch_Dogs 1. A lot of the miscellaneous side activities are gone (so for all y’all addicted to playing chess in Watch_Dogs, you’re gonna have to go back to the base game for that ;b), but everything else from the gunplay to the driving is just as solid as it ever was. Graphics are still the same, included vehicles are still the same, and not only are the songs still the same, but the same handful of them are unlockable by hacking the phones of random passersby. That said, it’s not *entirely* identical to the base game, and the few new touches they add are things that get us that much closer to Watch_Dogs 2 even if the overall design of the game world still doesn’t compliment their inclusion terribly heavily.
On the more minor side, we’ve got the new side activities: street sweeping. This is the name of the collective activities of Kenny taking on the city’s new 3 biggest gangs for the CPD lady. These aren’t anything entirely new, per se, but they do a good job of recontextualizing and reimagining the gang hideout mission types from the main game and giving them both more depth and tighter design. It feels pretty crazy overkill that there are there are 60 of them (not counting the new fixer contracts (aka driving missions)), but they’re well constructed enough that it was fun to kill time with them and indulge in the good Watch_Dogs shooting and stealth mechanics.
The new big mechanic is the RC car! While it’s definitely not as slick to use as it will be in Watch_Dogs 2 (it’s quite slow and unlocking more features for it takes quite a while), it’s a really good step in the right direction. The main issue I had with it is that I just never felt all that pressured to use it because it’s *only* a stealth tool, and the normal stealth mechanics of the game are so strong that I never really felt compelled to use the RC car outside of the mandatory points for the main story missions. The RC car is a really effective way to take down enemies non-lethally, quietly, and efficiently, but it’s also so slow that it’s not terribly exciting to use. The scale of the combats you’re doing are still on the same scale as the base game’s were, for the most part, so for anyone who already really enjoyed the stealth of the base game like I did, the RC car will likely end up being a novel but ultimately uncompelling gimmick even if you do end up doing all 60 of those street sweep missions.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you liked the base game and can get Bad Blood for cheap enough like I did, then I think it’s short enough that it’s still worth a play. Just be aware that it really is just more Watch_Dogs, and it’s not a particularly compelling evolution on the formula. Even for someone like me who really liked the base game, Bad Blood ended up feeling rather tossed together and unnecessary in a lot of places, and if you already weren’t in love with base Watch_Dogs 1, you’re probably better off just skipping straight on to Watch_Dogs 2 unless a buddy comedy with Kenny & Tobias is just that appealing a sales pitch X3
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)
After finishing the base game for Watch_Dogs, I originally had no real intentions of playing this. Being someone who almost exclusively plays games way after they come out (so I get them used for super cheap), I’m very used to the DLC for a game being far out of my price range. However, the season pass for this game just so happened to be 80% off just as I finished the base game, so I could get this DLC expansion for only like 2 bucks! The base game had cost me 3 bucks, and while I knew this wouldn’t be proportionally as much content, this was so cheap that I figured as I might as well just take the plunge, especially with how much my friend had talked up how good Bad Blood was. It overall took me a little under 8 hours to do a bit of the side content and beat the game playing the PS4 version on my PS5, just as I did with the base game. I want to give a quick disclaimer here that this review does get into some spoiler territory, so please use the proper discretion when reading further, but this is also going to serve as an addendum to my main review in regards to a lot of the mechanics of the game because they’re so similar, so for anyone feeling that I skim too fast over that stuff, this is why.
Bad Blood takes place some time after the base game of Watch_Dogs and follows Aiden’s friend(?)/ally, T-Bone, aka Kenny. Kenny was the original creator of the super surveillance tool ctOS, and he and the Blume Corporation that run it have been at odds ever since. He’s finally managed to break into Blume HQ, though, and he’s just finished completely wiping his data from their servers. It’s a messy getaway, but he’s finally free to leave Chicago and start again somewhere else free from the long arm of Blume’s tracking software. However, a friend in need pulls him back in. Another ally of Aiden’s from the base game and also a former Blume employee, Tobias Frewer, calls Kenny from a panic as some thugs are in the middle of kidnapping him. Kenny chooses to abandon fleeing the city for now and save his estranged friend instead, even if it means he’ll be pulled into a whole new sordid web of baddies out trying to ice the two of them.
I was remarkably surprised at the quality of the story of the main game, so hearing my friend say that this was even *better* had me pretty excited to check this little expansion DLC out. However, I was left pretty disappointed, as this narrative came off as pretty half-baked. It’s not awful, but it definitely feels more thrown together and less polished than the main game was (which I’m sure for some people will be an incredibly damning statement XD). Kenny is definitely a fun character, someone a lot more obviously countercultural and much closer to the kind of protagonists we’d be getting in Watch_Dogs 2. He’s also less straightforwardly an anti-hero than Aiden Pearce is, though that’s as much down to the type of story he’s in as it is down to the kind of person he is. The thing that makes him a weak protagonist, however, isn’t really this stuff so much as it is that the larger plot conceit of this DLC just isn’t very well developed.
Kenny was already a pretty well rounded character, so there’s not really much space for him to grow or change as a person as a result of the events of this DLC. The final conflict we’re faced with is, indeed, still connected to that larger theme of guilt that the main game concerns itself with so much, but Kenny already processed his guilt a long time ago. It’s definitely interesting that the main antagonist here comes from the lens of “Kenny can never feel enough guilt for what he’s done to me. He has to die”, but he’s such a shallow guy that we never really go anywhere meaningfully with that. You could certainly argue (as I would) that this isn’t so much a story of Kenny vs. the antagonist so much as it is a story of Kenny and Tobias becoming friends again, but even that is more in the realm of shallow buddy comedy than anything else. I reiterate that this isn’t a badly told story, but compared to the main game, I found it a lot more meandering and searching for a larger purpose. It’s not a bad story on its own, and the dialogue writing (particularly the banter between Kenny and Tobias) is some of the funniest it’s been for Watch_Dogs 1, but it’s definitely not a terribly compelling epilogue by any means.
Beyond that, we also unfortunately get into significantly more crappy politics that feel far more of both Ubisoft’s writing tendencies as well as just the general political mood of when the game was made. In a word, it’s copaganda. The main game skirts the edges of more directed societal critique in what it’s doing with its personal story, but it ultimately avoids it and pulls it off with a more general critique of ctOS’s existence as a whole being immoral and a tool no one should have (there cannot possibly be a trusted “watch dogs” for a weapon this powerful). This game’s side activities has Kenny working directly (albeit anonymously) for a detective in the Chicago Police Department, and she is very much framed as a “good cop, and the kind the city needs more of”.
The plausible deniability that one can afford the main game’s treatment of cops and city politics is completely out the window with this, because the institution of the police as they exist in near-future dystopia are now explicitly framed as part of the solution. It’s no condemnation of society at large that its politicians and instruments of law enforcement have been so thoroughly corrupted by Blume, ctOS, and these private institutions around them. It’s just those private institutions faults for being so evil that they would corrupt these otherwise inherently moral aspects of a capitalist democracy. While this certainly isn’t a major central point of the main story, put alongside the rug pull of Blume once again not actually being the main antagonists of the story (despite them being set up to be at the start), I had a much harder time forgiving this story’s utter refusal to answer the larger questions raised by the nature of its setting. It’s nice that Watch_Dogs 2 does ultimately get to that point (or at least a hell of a lot closer), but Bad Blood’s relatively weak personal story combined with the bigger highlight on just how explicitly cowardly/misguided the politics are makes this that much harder a pill to swallow for anyone who wasn’t champing at the bit for more Kenny in their lives.
Mechanically, this is really just more Watch_Dogs 1. A lot of the miscellaneous side activities are gone (so for all y’all addicted to playing chess in Watch_Dogs, you’re gonna have to go back to the base game for that ;b), but everything else from the gunplay to the driving is just as solid as it ever was. Graphics are still the same, included vehicles are still the same, and not only are the songs still the same, but the same handful of them are unlockable by hacking the phones of random passersby. That said, it’s not *entirely* identical to the base game, and the few new touches they add are things that get us that much closer to Watch_Dogs 2 even if the overall design of the game world still doesn’t compliment their inclusion terribly heavily.
On the more minor side, we’ve got the new side activities: street sweeping. This is the name of the collective activities of Kenny taking on the city’s new 3 biggest gangs for the CPD lady. These aren’t anything entirely new, per se, but they do a good job of recontextualizing and reimagining the gang hideout mission types from the main game and giving them both more depth and tighter design. It feels pretty crazy overkill that there are there are 60 of them (not counting the new fixer contracts (aka driving missions)), but they’re well constructed enough that it was fun to kill time with them and indulge in the good Watch_Dogs shooting and stealth mechanics.
The new big mechanic is the RC car! While it’s definitely not as slick to use as it will be in Watch_Dogs 2 (it’s quite slow and unlocking more features for it takes quite a while), it’s a really good step in the right direction. The main issue I had with it is that I just never felt all that pressured to use it because it’s *only* a stealth tool, and the normal stealth mechanics of the game are so strong that I never really felt compelled to use the RC car outside of the mandatory points for the main story missions. The RC car is a really effective way to take down enemies non-lethally, quietly, and efficiently, but it’s also so slow that it’s not terribly exciting to use. The scale of the combats you’re doing are still on the same scale as the base game’s were, for the most part, so for anyone who already really enjoyed the stealth of the base game like I did, the RC car will likely end up being a novel but ultimately uncompelling gimmick even if you do end up doing all 60 of those street sweep missions.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you liked the base game and can get Bad Blood for cheap enough like I did, then I think it’s short enough that it’s still worth a play. Just be aware that it really is just more Watch_Dogs, and it’s not a particularly compelling evolution on the formula. Even for someone like me who really liked the base game, Bad Blood ended up feeling rather tossed together and unnecessary in a lot of places, and if you already weren’t in love with base Watch_Dogs 1, you’re probably better off just skipping straight on to Watch_Dogs 2 unless a buddy comedy with Kenny & Tobias is just that appealing a sales pitch X3
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
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RobertAugustdeMeijer
- 64-bit
- Posts: 328
- Joined: Fri Sep 02, 2022 10:15 am
Re: Games Beaten 2026
22: Eternal Darkness
The brisk pace and its references to Lovecraftian horror already make this an above average survival horror game. What makes it a classic is its insanity meter, where lowering it brings the game goes into bizarre territory. Sometimes enough to make you wonder if you can actually continue playing the game at all. If only Silicon Knights had the guts to, instead of keeping them to mere illusions, truly commit to some of these outcomes. Imagine playing a horror game that would permanently lower the volume of your television set. Now that would have made the game truly frightening to play! Still, a good time from start to finish.
7/10
The brisk pace and its references to Lovecraftian horror already make this an above average survival horror game. What makes it a classic is its insanity meter, where lowering it brings the game goes into bizarre territory. Sometimes enough to make you wonder if you can actually continue playing the game at all. If only Silicon Knights had the guts to, instead of keeping them to mere illusions, truly commit to some of these outcomes. Imagine playing a horror game that would permanently lower the volume of your television set. Now that would have made the game truly frightening to play! Still, a good time from start to finish.
7/10
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PartridgeSenpai
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 3187
- Joined: Mon Dec 14, 2015 9:27 am
- Location: Northern Japan
Re: Games Beaten 2026
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)
I’ve owned this game on Wii Virtual Console for close to 20 years now. I remember buying it wayyy back when I’d just grab stuff because it looked cool, and the new family Wii and the VC were all so novel and exciting. Compared to the other stuff I grabbed back then, things like Mega Man or Bonk, this was never something I liked all that much. It was way too hard, and I resigned myself to just never beating it. I was content to just leave it that way, frankly, but then a few days back, something in me just decided to give it another try now that I’m so much older. I’m so very much older, in fact, that I actually can’t play this game for more than 5 or 10 minutes at a time without my right arm cramping terribly (for the rest of the day) from mashing the fire button so much XD. Despite that, the progress was good enough on my first day playing that I was confident that I could do it! It took a few days, but I eventually beat it! Over 45 total minutes, I beat the English version of the game via my Wii’s Virtual Console service using a sideways Wiimote to play.
This is an arcade game from ’89 ported to the PCE in ’91 and then to English in ’93. Needless to say, it’s got a pretty light story. The princess has been kidnapped by some evil thing, and you, the (soon to be legendary) hero Tonma (or “Tommy” as the end text inexplicably calls him) have set out to save her! While I doubt this would’ve been a very thrilling setup for an adventure in ’93, it’s a fine setup for our adventure, especially given that this is an arcade conversion.
Speaking of underwhelming for ’93, the gameplay XD. The gameplay absolutely isn’t bad, and it actually controls quite well, but 7 short stages (with the last stage just being the final boss) is hardly a terribly compelling software offering when your friends have had stuff like Mario World on their SNES and Sonic games on their Genesis for years now. However, looking at what the game is rather than what it isn’t, I think it holds up just fine. You’ve got a standard fire button and jump ability. While it’s annoying to have to mash the button like crazy to fire, the game would’ve at least had native turbo via the TG16 back when it came out. You can jump quite high, and you’ve even got a Might Bomb Jack-style slow descent if you hold up while you’re in mid-air. There are several upgrades you can get, but you lose them all upon death. Not only that, but you die in one whole hit. One misplay is all that lies between you and being sent back because this game lack Contra-style instant respawns.
However, as brutal as that sounds, it’s actually a lot more forgiving than you’d think. Even though vertically-focused stages like level 2 or 4 lack any checkpoints at all, the more horizontally designed stages have a key you’ll need to find before you can progress through the door to the next section of the stage. These key doors function as your respawn points, and incredibly for a game of this age, that respawn point even persists between continues. Whether you lost a life or even game over, you respawn at the same point, which is unbelievably forgiving for a game this old. The power up design also makes this a lot more reasonable, too. Your movement is quick and nimble enough, and your enemies are relatively slow and limited enough, that even with no powerups you’re still quite capable of defending yourself and navigating through stages. Each respawn point has readily available new powerups to go grab, too, so you’ll never hit a case like Castlevania or Ninja Gaiden so often throw you into where you’re just screwed because you died once and lost your mandatory powerups for that stage/boss/etc. While the gameplay is quite simple and the game length is quite short, this is actually a remarkably tough but fair game for the time, and it was a very welcome and stand out feature setting apart from contemporary action platformers (especially given that this is an irem game).
Visually, the game is fine, but it’s really unimpressive. Frankly, I don’t think it would’ve been that incredible in the arcades even when it was new, and it certainly would not have been much of a standout home console game in ’91, let alone in ’93. Colors are bright, and it’s always easy to tell where everything is, but enemies trade their relatively detailed designs for very few actual animation frames. It’s got a good retro charm to it, but this is hardly the most visually impressive game on the TG16. The music is also fine and a fun addition to the stages, but it’s not exactly anything to write home about. The aesthetics are all completely serviceable and hard to really complain about, but it’s also nothing that’ll stick with you afterwards.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As much as this game has lived in my head as a “too hard to be fun” junky game for so much of my life, now that I’ve actually sat down and played it, it’s really not that bad. More than that, it’s genuinely pretty fun! If you’re a fan of action platformers from the 16-bit and especially 8-bit eras and you want something unfamiliar to challenge yourself with (and ideally also have either good joints or a turbo controller available), then Legend of Hero Tonma is a pretty darn good and satisfying time to play through even if it’ll never find itself on any Top 10 Greatest Games lists.
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)
I’ve owned this game on Wii Virtual Console for close to 20 years now. I remember buying it wayyy back when I’d just grab stuff because it looked cool, and the new family Wii and the VC were all so novel and exciting. Compared to the other stuff I grabbed back then, things like Mega Man or Bonk, this was never something I liked all that much. It was way too hard, and I resigned myself to just never beating it. I was content to just leave it that way, frankly, but then a few days back, something in me just decided to give it another try now that I’m so much older. I’m so very much older, in fact, that I actually can’t play this game for more than 5 or 10 minutes at a time without my right arm cramping terribly (for the rest of the day) from mashing the fire button so much XD. Despite that, the progress was good enough on my first day playing that I was confident that I could do it! It took a few days, but I eventually beat it! Over 45 total minutes, I beat the English version of the game via my Wii’s Virtual Console service using a sideways Wiimote to play.
This is an arcade game from ’89 ported to the PCE in ’91 and then to English in ’93. Needless to say, it’s got a pretty light story. The princess has been kidnapped by some evil thing, and you, the (soon to be legendary) hero Tonma (or “Tommy” as the end text inexplicably calls him) have set out to save her! While I doubt this would’ve been a very thrilling setup for an adventure in ’93, it’s a fine setup for our adventure, especially given that this is an arcade conversion.
Speaking of underwhelming for ’93, the gameplay XD. The gameplay absolutely isn’t bad, and it actually controls quite well, but 7 short stages (with the last stage just being the final boss) is hardly a terribly compelling software offering when your friends have had stuff like Mario World on their SNES and Sonic games on their Genesis for years now. However, looking at what the game is rather than what it isn’t, I think it holds up just fine. You’ve got a standard fire button and jump ability. While it’s annoying to have to mash the button like crazy to fire, the game would’ve at least had native turbo via the TG16 back when it came out. You can jump quite high, and you’ve even got a Might Bomb Jack-style slow descent if you hold up while you’re in mid-air. There are several upgrades you can get, but you lose them all upon death. Not only that, but you die in one whole hit. One misplay is all that lies between you and being sent back because this game lack Contra-style instant respawns.
However, as brutal as that sounds, it’s actually a lot more forgiving than you’d think. Even though vertically-focused stages like level 2 or 4 lack any checkpoints at all, the more horizontally designed stages have a key you’ll need to find before you can progress through the door to the next section of the stage. These key doors function as your respawn points, and incredibly for a game of this age, that respawn point even persists between continues. Whether you lost a life or even game over, you respawn at the same point, which is unbelievably forgiving for a game this old. The power up design also makes this a lot more reasonable, too. Your movement is quick and nimble enough, and your enemies are relatively slow and limited enough, that even with no powerups you’re still quite capable of defending yourself and navigating through stages. Each respawn point has readily available new powerups to go grab, too, so you’ll never hit a case like Castlevania or Ninja Gaiden so often throw you into where you’re just screwed because you died once and lost your mandatory powerups for that stage/boss/etc. While the gameplay is quite simple and the game length is quite short, this is actually a remarkably tough but fair game for the time, and it was a very welcome and stand out feature setting apart from contemporary action platformers (especially given that this is an irem game).
Visually, the game is fine, but it’s really unimpressive. Frankly, I don’t think it would’ve been that incredible in the arcades even when it was new, and it certainly would not have been much of a standout home console game in ’91, let alone in ’93. Colors are bright, and it’s always easy to tell where everything is, but enemies trade their relatively detailed designs for very few actual animation frames. It’s got a good retro charm to it, but this is hardly the most visually impressive game on the TG16. The music is also fine and a fun addition to the stages, but it’s not exactly anything to write home about. The aesthetics are all completely serviceable and hard to really complain about, but it’s also nothing that’ll stick with you afterwards.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As much as this game has lived in my head as a “too hard to be fun” junky game for so much of my life, now that I’ve actually sat down and played it, it’s really not that bad. More than that, it’s genuinely pretty fun! If you’re a fan of action platformers from the 16-bit and especially 8-bit eras and you want something unfamiliar to challenge yourself with (and ideally also have either good joints or a turbo controller available), then Legend of Hero Tonma is a pretty darn good and satisfying time to play through even if it’ll never find itself on any Top 10 Greatest Games lists.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
Re: Games Beaten 2026
rndstranger posted a video on Legend of Hero Tonma recently, and he noted that the dev team was largely women and the game was designed to be just a hair more forgiving. So it was an arcade title first that was designed to be just a tad more welcoming to women and a little more accessible, and it sounds like some of that translated over to the home release.
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TheSSNintendo
- 128-bit
- Posts: 669
- Joined: Mon Jul 11, 2011 10:27 pm
Re: Games Beaten 2026
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)
9. Technobabylon (GOG)
10. Crystalis (NES/Switch Online)
11. Mega Man II (Game Boy/Switch Online)
12. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back from the Sewers (Game Boy/Cowabunga Collection)
13. Prison City (Steam)
14. Mega Man X2 (SNES/Mega Man X Legacy Collection)
15. Tunic (XBox One)
16. Ducktales 2 (NES/Steam - Disney Afternoon Collection)
17. Talespin (NES/Steam - Disney Afternoon Collection)
18. Freddy Pharkas - Frontier Pharmacist (GOG)
19. Sam & Max Hit the Road (GOG)
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)
9. Technobabylon (GOG)
10. Crystalis (NES/Switch Online)
11. Mega Man II (Game Boy/Switch Online)
12. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back from the Sewers (Game Boy/Cowabunga Collection)
13. Prison City (Steam)
14. Mega Man X2 (SNES/Mega Man X Legacy Collection)
15. Tunic (XBox One)
16. Ducktales 2 (NES/Steam - Disney Afternoon Collection)
17. Talespin (NES/Steam - Disney Afternoon Collection)
18. Freddy Pharkas - Frontier Pharmacist (GOG)
19. Sam & Max Hit the Road (GOG)