45 - Demon's Souls (PS5 2020) - BEAT - While Astro's Playroom was a nice little warmup to the PS5 hardware, Demon's Souls is the proper PS5 experience and I think it shows. Very good looking game, super smooth gameplay, pretty quick loading between all the areas, it's just all around quality It's not gonna visually blow people away like some other games would like a Ghost of Tsushima or Spider-Man: Miles Morales, games that really pop visually, but it's a real nice looking game. This is a remake, so I will say that if you haven't played the original Demon's Souls, but played anything from Dark Souls and on, I feel like this game is gonna come off a tad clunky in places, because it is meant to recreate an 11 year old game, so they didn't change a whole lot. I think they updated and cleaned up a few small things, but some aspects don't take into account what has improved over the Soulsborne lifespan.
Boss fights I think stand out as generally not being good compared to the other games, as most are very one note. They have a gimmick, you exploit the gimmick, and you are done. Only a few fights come off as particularly hard, and I only felt like one of the fights felt like a real solid fight. Some are visually very cool and cinematic and that what makes them standout, but I'd never say they are as good as what the games will go on to do.
Otherwise it's what you expect out of a Souls game and I enjoyed my time with it and is a solid start for the PS5.
46 - Spider-Man: Miles Morales (PS5 2020) - BEAT - As expected with this game, it was a fun time. From the outset, it seemed to be basically "Spider-Man 1.5" and that's what it was, so if you played the first game, you've played this one. I think where it does set itself apart, aside from the PS5 just make everything play and look better, is stuff with the story and the additions to gameplay. The story is a good time, basically a way to do somewhat of a Spider-Man origin thing, without rehashing Peter Parker's experience that has been explored to death in other media and games at this point. It's all pretty good stuff. Gameplay is extra impactful with the inclusion of the venom powers, which are generally DoT/High Power strikes and make for some really cool visuals.
The negatives for me probably come down to the lack of villains or hero's showing up much in the game. Like there's Rhino, and Tinkerer is basically an original character at this point, and other than the Prowler who is a notable character for Miles, that's it, other than a very tiny appearance of a villain through a computer screen and barely worth mentioning. I know they probably wanted to focus on Miles more, him becoming a proper Spider-Man, and this is a shorter game, but I feel like they needed some other characters to show up, even for a one-off, like there's not even anyone on the level of like Screwball for the game compared to the first one and it sorta sags the middle of the game just a tad.
Minor complaint aside, it's still a fun game, swinging through New York is never not a good time and Miles is a fun character. The tease for what I assume is Spider-Man 2 is pretty exciting.