We’re back with the next Gaming Respawn Plays for the month of April. More of us have been partaking in a smorgasbord of gaming goodness lately, with most of revisiting hit titles from yesteryear to recapture the magic of gaming past. Check out what we’ve been playing in Gaming Respawn Plays (April 2025).
Tasha Quinn
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition
It’s not the first time I’ve found myself engrossed in the world of Mass Effect, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. There’s something truly special about these games – something that allows them to remain firm favourites of mine, no matter how many new titles I add to my list of completed games.
I’m playing the Legendary Edition again, specifically the first game. It might not be the best in the series, but it’s the game that started it all – the one that introduced us to fan favourites like Tali, Wrex, and of course, everyone’s space BFF, Garrus Vakarian. That’s something Mass Effect has always done very well – create compelling party members that aren’t limited to just one game.
Then there’s the moral complexity. I’m not just talking about the Renegade and Paragon system – I will always take the Renegade point penalty for punching the reporter – I’m talking about those big, game-changing decisions. Do I save Ashley or Kaiden? Do I cure the Genophage? Do I choose the Geth or the Quarians?
What makes these decisions even more difficult is the fact that many of them have an impact on all three games, so your choices may well come back to haunt you. Still, that’s something I really like about the series. The decisions actually matter. There are far too many games out there that create the illusion of choice when, in reality, nothing in the narrative really changes.
I’ll admit that I was really happy when the Legendary Edition was released. It was something I’d been waiting on for a long time, so it was a day-one purchase for me. That said, I got partway through the second game on the release of Legendary before NEO: The World Ends with You was released, so I never finished my replay of the series.
This time, I plan on replaying the series in full. Except for Mass Effect: Andromeda. I could never get into Andromeda.
Daniel Garcia-Montes
The First Berserker: Khazan
I’m currently halfway through the first game of 2025 that I had been waiting on since I first saw trailers for it last year. The game in question is The First Berserker: Khazan, the latest Souls-like title to hit the gaming scene. Much of what I saw on this game reminded me of the Nioh series, arguably the best Souls-like games out there that, in my opinion, refined the Dark Souls formula and made it far more engaging than FromSoftware’s actual Souls games. At the very least, it was more fast-paced, hectic, and most importantly, fun. And as it turns out, First Berserker actually does have a lot in common with the Nioh games in terms of fast-paced combat, level layouts, mission structure, and even similar collectibles. The combat is deep but intuitive, so you shouldn’t be too overwhelmed with memorizing combos and such.
Then there are the enemies and bosses. Enemy variety in First Berserker is plentiful, and repeat enemies are even less common in this game than in Nioh. The enemies are challenging yet fun to fight. However…I can’t quite say the same for the bosses. The earlier bosses were quite tough, requiring me anywhere between 7 to 10 attempts to beat, sometimes a bit more. That’s all well and good, but when I start running into bosses that take me north of 25 to 30 tries to beat on only the fifth or so mission, that’s when I start to question if these bosses are properly balanced. The bosses in Nioh and especially the absolutely brutal bosses in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice kicked my ass plenty of times, but not even the majority of bosses in Sekiro had me spending so much damn time emptying out their health (or poise) meters like the more recent ones I’ve dealt with in First Berserker. They have the absolute worst combination of qualities that make bosses annoying, namely extremely high health pools, ridiculously hard to read/counter attacks and abilities, and the ability to outright kill you in as few as three hits, which is especially disheartening when it happens just as you managed to bring the boss’s health down to 15%.
Again, I’m only halfway through the game but am already feeling immense frustration with many bosses, and I fear it’s only going to get worse from here. I definitely feel things are rather unbalanced with regards to many of these bosses, but the rest of the game is quite enjoyable, and it does feel good eventually defeating these pain-in-the-ass bosses. I will continue going through the game, and hopefully, I’ll “git gud” enough so that fighting the bosses will become a bit more fun.
Will Worrall
Tombi!/Tomba! and The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
If you’re a big reader of the site, you’ll probably know that the game I was mostly playing this past month was The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (plug, plug), but as I have now spent well over 100 hours playing and writing about that game, I’m going to talk about the other game I was playing this month as a palette cleanser: Tombi!
If you’re in the U.S, you probably know the game as Tomba!, but here in the UK, Tombi! was the release name, and both games are functionally the same, as far as I know. It’s basically a 2.5D platform adventure game where you control a pink-haired wild-boy anime character who has to do battle with a horde of evil pigs to save his homeland. To accomplish this, you have a weapon and your ability to grab enemies by the head and throw them for all they’re worth.
While it’s easy to dismiss the game as ‘another cutesy platformer’, there is so much more going on beneath the surface. Rather than being a simple platformer, this is an adventure game where you have to platform around the world solving puzzles to advance the story and defeat the evil pigs who control the land. This could be simple, such as finding several characters or animals, or as complex as figuring out how you can teach your character a language.
It’s a game stacked full of charm and challenge in equal measure, and it’s been a hell of a good time. Even reaching the first boss feels like an accomplishment, and it’s been great to have a break from watching teenagers stab themselves through the chest over and over again. Oh, final side note: Tombi! was directed by the guy who directed Capcom classics like Bionic Commando, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, and Sweet Home.
Peter Keen
Yakuza 6: The Song of Life and Gran Turismo 7
After I FINALLY got the platinum for God of War 2018, I thought I needed a complete change of pace, so I got back into Gran Turismo 7. I am part of an online racing group called MRC (Mature Racing Club), and not only do I race in some of the series they have going, but like the mad fools they are, they also like it when I do voice-over race comms for them too. Below is a sample video of yours truly. Think Jeremy Clarkson meets Murray Walker, and you’ll get where I come from when I do them!
Apart from that, while I have played all of the games in the Yakuza series, there was one I haven’t played, and that was Yakuza 6: The Song of Life. It’s been a glaring omission of mine not to have played this game as I’ve played the game after, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name (and platinumed it too), and Yakuza 5, the game before. The reason I held off playing it, though, was for a reason you may not think of.
Yakuza 6 was made for the PS4. All the previous games have had HD remasters or have been made to play on much better hardware later (PS5). So, I have been waiting patiently for Yakuza 6 to either get a current-gen PS5 patch or a complete remaster. I’ve waited and waited…and nothing has happened. I’ve done a bit of digging, and it looks like they never will remaster the game. It’s a shame as the setting of Kamurocho looks spectacular in this version of a Yakuza game, it’s just that at a normal 30fps on a PS4, it doesn’t look as spectacular or play as smoothly as its 60fps remastered brothers do.
So, as it doesn’t play as smoothly as I hoped, or that I intend to spend much time doing all the goofy side missions and activities, I’ve dropped the difficulty down to easy and am just ploughing through the story-only missions as quickly as possible.
Finally, there are levels in games that are infamous for being awful. One of the most common is the level in Heavy Rain where you are looking for your son, and for ages you walk around just shouting “Jason!”. Well, Yakuza 6 has an awful level like that, Chapter 3. You are a criminal underworld legend Yakuza, yet you spend this entire chapter holding a baby and having to suffer around 30 minutes of hearing baby crying as background noise. I get what they were trying to do, but goodness me, it goes on far too long! Thankfully, now I’m at Chapter 9, and the story is really kicking in, and I’m remembering why I love this series of games and Kiryu so much. This game’s storytelling and world are absolutely FANTASTIC!
