It’s a new year, and with it comes the first Gaming Respawn Plays of 2025! As we begin the new year and adjust ourselves after the holiday seasons, some of us have not entirely neglected our gaming and continue to make time for one of the few things that makes life worth living in this miserable world…whoa, where’d that come from? Anyway, join us in our first of many Gaming Respawn Plays to come in the year 2025. Enjoy!
Peter Keen
Hitman Series, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II, God of War, and More
I’ve looked at upcoming games, and frankly, there isn’t too much on the horizon to catch my interest. This fits nicely with my gaming New Year’s resolution of playing more of what I’ve already bought. The backlog battle is real!
With this in mind, and in an effort to spend less cash buying new games to play those games I’ve meant to go back to, I immediately spent £20 upgrading Hitman: World of Assassination to get all of the side mission content!!! DLC doesn’t count as a new game, right? I’ve also been meaning to try and platinum more of the games I really enjoy, so this month has been a rather eclectic mix.
First of all, I have spent the early part of January hoovering up all the trophies for Space Marine II. I have all but one that requires me to kill 41,000 enemies over all game modes. Considering I’ve put 65 hours into the game already and have only just reached over 21,000 kills, that should give you an idea of how much longer it will take me to get that trophy. Hopefully, the Horde Mode coming later in the year will sort this out quickly.
Then, I felt bad that as a HUGE God of War fan, I did not get the platinum trophy for the 2018 God of War game. I have the plat for most of the others, including Ragnarok. So, I’ve started replaying that game and am enjoying it all over again. In doing so, I’m finding a lot more to the game in the side content than I originally thought was there!
Speaking of side content, I also really enjoy the Hitman series, and I played through the Hitman 1, 2, and 3 campaigns through the World of Assassination collection and then dropped it like a stone. However, I have noticed and have been impressed with how IO Interactive has supported the game post-release with a lot of content. So, seeing how one of the bundles for some of these side missions (that can last almost as long as the main game, anyway) was on offer at the PlayStation Store, I got it and then realized/remembered that the game still has weekly in-game challenges and other content I’ve not even tried (like Escalation Mode and Arcade Mode). It’s time for Baldy to get back into action on my TV screen!
On top of all this, I’ve dropped the Space Marine II multiplayer side of things for a break, so I now am getting my multiplayer fix back on with Helldivers II. That’s another game that deserves more time than I have given it. I’ve already collected a wonderful gameplay montage of fun in a short space of time. However, Helldivers II is one of those games that is a huge amount of fun for a short time. I mean, even if you like steak, you would get bored of it after a while if you had it every day. That’s how I feel about Helldivers II. I’m enjoying it for now, but I’ll drop it for something else or go back onto Space Marine II again soon.
Sprinkle in a lot of Dynasty Warriors: Origins, Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Future Tone, and Pure Chess, and you can see it’s a right mix of a lot of things this month.
Daniel Garcia-Montes
Red Dead Redemption II
Finally. At long last. I’ve begun playing Red Dead Redemption II. I very much enjoyed the first Red Dead Redemption when I originally played it back in 2013 or so (over a decade ago). I fully intended to play RDR2 at some point soon after it released, but I got distracted by many other games that had me even more hyped, like Spider-Man, God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, and others. Before I knew it, SEVEN YEARS had gone by without me playing RDR2 (since it released in 2018). Something had to be done about that. As mentioned in a previous article, I replayed RDR1 and enjoyed myself quite a bit, and now to continue to make the experience “complete”, I started playing RDR2 at long friggin’ last about two weeks ago.
I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I just recently finished the prologue, so I haven’t played much of the game. I, again, got distracted by the demo for another upcoming game I’m very interested in, The First Berserker: Khazan. Now, it’s basically a race against time to play as much of RDR2 as I can before The First Berserker releases in two months. Can I finish RDR2 in time? Very likely not. But I will finish it, even if it’s after I finish The First Berserker. It certainly has my attention now that I’ve reached the point where the world opens up and I can start free-roaming and doing my thing. While it’s still very early in my playthrough, I can tell this game is quite different from its predecessor due to features such as keeping track of your health and stamina as it lowers depending on cold or hot weather conditions, and the overall movement controls are certainly slower and more deliberate than the first game’s, lending a stronger sense of realism to the experience. Combat is still pretty fun, but I need to play more to form a better opinion on it and see if I enjoy it more than the first game’s.
Looking forward to continuing the saga of Arthur Morgan and the ole’ Van der Linde gang and seeing how it is that they go from being a relatively loving family of outlaws to eventually “disbanding” and basically falling apart at the seams.
Will Worrall
Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper
January is a bit of a weird month, both generally and for gamers. You’re most likely loaded down with games to play after the holiday season, and yet, with everything being so gloomy, there’s also a solid chance you’ve not gotten around to playing them and instead have focused on comfort games. Well, at least you have if you’re anything like me.
This is a long-winded way of saying that the GOG sale hit, and I’ve spent my time in January mostly playing Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper. If you don’t know, they’re both management sims from Bullfrog that were released in the 90s. In one, you run a hospital and try not to kill anyone, in the other, you run the dungeon of an evil overlord and try to kill everyone who isn’t on your side. See if you can guess which is which from the titles.
It’s a bit strange to say this about two games that technically have very different goals to accomplish, but they’re surprisingly similar in both gameplay and style. You start out with a blank slate (in most cases) and have to construct all of your fundamental rooms to provide the basic needs for your facility. Then, you have to make sure you’ve got your research taken care of to unlock new rooms, then it’s pretty much a non-stop marathon of earning money to keep yourself above water until the game tells you that you’ve won.
Sure, one of the games requires you to dump a bunch of demons in a tunnel filled with heroes, while the other is mostly about putting down benches and vending machines, but overall, they don’t have dissimilar vibes. They both require you to manage a workforce and plan out a building, just very different workforces and buildings.
Either way, these games are both amazing and still shockingly playable on modern hardware thanks to the folks over at GOG and Dosbox who put loads of work into making these games available for us on Windows 10/11 and beyond. If you want to pick up either game, check out the links below while they’re still on offer (quick).
Dungeon Keeper (GOG) – THIS IS AN AFFILIATE LINK
Theme Hospital (GOG) – THIS IS AN AFFILIATE LINK