Back again for our regular Sunday roundup of quick-fire reviews and impressions of everything under the spotlight at Retro Arcadia this week, old and new and a bit of both…

I had my suspicions, but all the same, I was still disappointed when The Lamplighter’s League turned out to be not to for me after all. Too much stealth on top of all that turn-based combat is too much for my taste but I gave it a few missions all the same because I’ve liked how it looks and been intrigued by its pulp-inspired story since it first appeared for pre-install on on Xbox Game Pass a while back, and where it finally arrived last week. It’s a campy occult-noir adventure set in an alternate 1930s where you assemble an increasingly large group of misfits, each with different traits and unique skills, in an attempt to put an end to an ancient cult, The Banished Court, and their plans for global domination. Each mission mixes up real-time “infiltration” where you skulk around, either as a group or individually, progressing towards objectives, setting traps and generally trying to gain strategic advantage before things inevitably switch to pretty deep turn-based combat. There was a bit of jank in both modes though, with things like disappearing guards as their patrol route took them behind something, never to re-emerge on the other side, or the graphical glitches when combat turns play out in what weren’t exactly impressive 3D cutscenes to begin with. All the same, the gameplay seems solid enough if that’s your bag, and while it’s not really mine, I think the narrative and characterisation probably still are, so I’ll still see if I can get at them some other way. Shame though.

Mario’s Picross has been one of my favourites on the Game Boy for a long time but I’ve never actually owned a copy until now! After a bit of patience on eBay, I finally got a pristine cartridge and manual, albeit for a bit more than I’d usually spend on one of these. It’s a number-logic puzzler from 1995 with Mario chipping away at increasingly complex grids, guided by the numerical clues at the side of each row and column, to reveal a picture of something. It’s like Sudoku meets a crossword puzzle, with each part of the picture located correctly then potentially revealing clues about other squares, which start out 5×5 and end up at 15×15 across 256 separate puzzles. It’s all against the clock too, with the initially generous thirty minutes for each one soon being whittled down by a big penalty every time you chisel away the wrong bit! I’ve adored this from afar for years and there’s no doubt I’ll more than rinse out what I paid for it now I’ve got it for real!

I’ve certainly been getting my money’s worth out of Game Pass of late too, and although the arrival of Gotham Knights last week wasn’t exactly its most high profile, it’s great getting to play stuff like this you fancied trying when it first came out but for whatever reason never got to. As a big fan of the Batman Arkham games, I definitely fancied this successor to those of sorts in the run up to its original 2022 release, then it didn’t review great, quickly disappeared and here we are! You get to play as either Robin, Batgirl, Nightwing or Red Hood, trying to restore justice to Gotham City in the wake of Batman’s death. It’s a very linear-feeling open-world action adventure with some RPG elements that allow for various upgrades, new skills and customisation on top of each character’s unique play style, with a standalone story featuring familiar faces but unrelated to any of the previous games. Which unfortunately isn’t the only thing that feels unrelated… Those games were built around an organic fluidity to everything – but in particular the combat – that’s just not present here. In the three or so hours I gave it, the storyline was pretty good though, and the four knights were just the right side of annoying, and it seemed like there was plenty to keep you busy, even if that did also include a lot of faff and non-stop interruptions to the action. Glad I got to play it in the end but unfortunately it’s just not Batman!

After getting totally sidetracked by Wipeout 2048 on the PlayStation 4 last week, I finally got to the reason I was on there again in the first place and fired up Dragon’s Crown Pro, which I bought in a sale for next to nothing after liking the sound of what I heard when the Cane and Rinse podcast delved into it earlier this year. It’s a 2018 remaster of a 2013 PlayStation 3 side-scrolling beat ‘em up meets loot-heavy, high-fantasy RPG, with a very stylish, possibly hand-painted art-style. And the most ridiculously top-heavy sorceress as a character choice you could ever imagine… Who was obviously also my instant selection! She is marginally less scantily-clad than similarly impressively-endowed characters you’ll also encounter (within minutes!) though, so I’m not going to feel too dirty about it, although there are (some) less pervy options if you wish. And with all that established, I’m not ready to throw in the towel quite yet, but I don’t know how much I like this. Sexualisation aside, there’s really not much to any of its constituent parts, with lacklustre Golden Axe-play that can be overly challenging as a single player, and not enough to the levelling-up and looting – or any of the story, for that matter – to keep me especially otherwise engaged. It is a stunner though, in more ways than one, with the orchestral soundtrack in particular benefitting from the Pro version treatment on PS4. I’ll let you know if I’m still playing next time though!

Forza Motorsport is superb! And that’s likely going to be the case whether you’re playing it solo or multiplayer, as a car-nerd RPG or just pressing auto-upgrade when you remember it’s there, or as a full-on racing simulation or with whatever combination of stablisers make driving feel great for you… Or a bit of all of the above because absolutely everything has its own setting and you can change it all to your heart’s content whenever you want until it’s just right! Which includes opting for thirty frames per second with ray-tracing and all the other fancy graphical bells and whistles turned up to eleven because (despite the last game) I’m not a pervert and want to enjoy all that glorious dynamic light and weather and dust to the max! It really looks and sounds stunning, and that’s just how it handles too – weighty but right on the edge of control, especially as your tyres start to go off but you need to stay aggressive because you’ve gone high risk on your pre-race targets and there’s only two laps left to recover that trip into a deep bit of gravel on the last one! While I’ve no interest in collecting and tweaking five hundred cars, I do think it’s worth spending time in the insane number of realism settings getting that just right for how you want to play, one or two at the time over your first few multi-race events. I went from turning off the stupid racing-line guide and steering assists but still winning everything, to so realistic it was just miserable, to somewhere in-between that kept things enjoyable but unpredictable, then as you play you gradually keep refining it. Just like you’re probably supposed to with your car! I’ve had a couple of freezes between races and the same for a bug where I’m slipstreaming someone but have then been unable to pull out and overtake, like the steering has been disabled, which I hope gets patched, but otherwise performance is great, even if you don’t care about 60fps! There’s loads here to keep you going too, and I believe there’s more to come, and I’ll definitely be sticking with it for a very long ride.

More new stuff than the usual retro this time, but hopefully no complaints. And if you want really retro, be sure to check out last Wednesday’s new flavour of deep-dive, when we went back exactly 40 years with 3D glasses in hand to check out the latest in all things gaming in the first episode proper of what will become an increasingly regular new feature, Retro Rewind: October 1983 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the original magazine! Then next Wednesday, we’re heading back even further, all the way to 1982, to discover Grandstand’s Scramble electronic tabletop game, as well as talking VIC-20 versions and other kings of clones too! See you then!