Duloth

Oddly enough, despite giving it a mixed review, its mostly a matter of context. If you have never played any of the mass effect games or bought them before, and are a fan of RPGs/shooters, then this is 100% a good purchase. To put that in perspective, however, it is also an inferior purchase to buying the older trilogy edition and applying the most popular user-created mods to it. In addition to not quite managing to match up to the quality and options added with mods to previous editions, it adds new bugs and re-cuts scenes and removes pieces. The only reason I could imagine for releasing this version would be is if they changed the highly controversial and disliked ending to the trilogy; which they didn't. Buy the trilogy edition instead, mod the hell out of it to get better graphics, more options, and more gameplay than the legendary offers, and enjoy.

What would you get if you built a total conversion mod for X-com 2, wherein you were dealing with a Zerg invasion of earth, with a slowly expanding creep from which colonies of the organic invaders would swarm out to attack nearby cities, and then tacked on a faction system where mid-tier equipment was gated based on allying yourself with one of three groups of survivors? Phoenix Point. Its clearly an unfinished game, where some aspects that may have been considered early on were changed and removed with their legacy remaining in the game, never quite balanced out properly, and with a fair number of bugs still held over well after release. And when Is say Zerg, I mean Zerg; one of the alien units looks like a more detailed version of a Hydralisk, and the entire faction follows an alien/insect/crustacean aesthetic that means every creature you run into would fit in well with the swarm, including infested terrans. Couple this with an aesthetic on one of the factions that resembles blue-armored starcraft space marines, and this seems like a Starcraft total conversion for X-com. That being said... while it wasn't well-designed or balanced, they certainly weren't lazy about it either. A truly ridiculous number of options for equipping and customizing your soldiers by the end, some of which are more useful for fighting specific enemy types, and some vehicles which are incredibly overpowered early on, and later only useful for gimmick tactics.

This game is essentially a mid-grade platformer combined with a mid-grade 3rd-person action game. Not bad, not exceptional, just somewhat above average, mostly due to very polished character design. You are not the hero of the galaxy, you are not vader's asssassin gone rogue, you are an everyday padawan with an amusing gimmick who would do well as a detective but fares poorly as a jedi hero. The level design is the biggest failure here. These levels look pretty, and are well drawn, but are convoluted and poorly thought-out messes, very easy to get lost in, and often without any clear objective to deal with, going for a very cramped, tiny aesthetic with lots of sliding-down-ramps and tomb raider-esque shenanigans. You still have a lightsaber, this magic sword that can cut through anything; but the only things it can cut in these levels are nonhuman opponents and ropes. If you're a huge fan of tomb raider and thought the Force Unleashed was too over the top and needed a weaker cast of characters, this would be the game for you.

In many ways this game heavily resembles a slightly dumbed-down version of Freelancer, with improved graphics. The gameplay works out very similarly, with preset jump-points to go between systems, afterburners, 'warp' drive instead of cruise; essentially, a modern-day rehash of an old but good game. Not really much in the way of improvements, and some serious drawbacks coming in the form of the player being the only in-game thing operating on a 2D plane. Still; if it were just a HD retexture of Freelancer with the music produced for this game... I'd still say its at least a 7/10. The only complaint I have about the soundtrack of this game is that I want more of it, and I've left the game running in the background while I was writing this just to listen to the music. As it stands, its decent. Worth buying, especially since it's generally reasonable priced.

Simple, basic, turn-based strategy game. Ships have levels in a variety of traits you can upgrade; by the end, all ships are identical, and the only time a difference exists is in the early game when you can't afford to upgrade everything yet. Ships cannot be destroyed, only temporarily disabled; you -will- fight the entire enemy fleet every time you take one of his worlds, and losing every ship in your fleet is only a one-turn inconvenience. The level of complexity and depth is about what you'd expect out of your typical free flash game; it only looks so pathetic when you measure it against its genuine competition; actual PC strategy games that you pay for.

This is both an improvement and downgrade of Fallout 3/New Vegas, both excellent games. It is heavily faction-oriented, with two major fleshed-out factions and a couple of less developed ones, all of which you will interact with and ultimately determine the fate of. Settlements you can customize from houses and furniture to defensive turrets and artillery pieces. Long, extensive storylines. Once you've completed enough missions the game actually generates repeatable ones; you can kill raiders, supermutants, and ghouls at the same plant multiple times each. The biggest flaw is the leveling system/character adjustments, a major downgrade from previous games in the series, where the 'skills' have been completely removed and replaced with more perks, including 'tiers' of perks to accomplish what skills once did; instead of having skills in lockpicking, you need to buy levels of the lockpicking perk. In addition, level gates on these 'skills' mean that you cannot focus on sneaking, or shooting, or bargaining, for the first few levels to attain mastery; you have to be a jack of all trades. Overall; flawed but okay. New Vegas and Fallout 2 are still my favorite games in the series. This may change as DLC and mods come out.

Decent design, nice customization of ships, biggest flaw is the exceedingly random difficulty and the overabundance of unwinnable encounters. Sometimes you can fight through with patience, tactics, micromanaging, and fleeing/manuevering; sometimes you are simply so heavily outnumbered that such things are impossible. The game patches have massively improved it over time, but when the number of enemies is based on how many ships you have, it leads to the question of why would you work to max out your fleet? Scaling difficulty has its places, but they are few and far between; this doesn't seem to be one of them.

TLDR; All hype, all flash, no content, serious issues. The game has a few different maps, though aside from the moon they generally involve the same drab red-brown background with industrial interiors and sporadic signs of life. Unfortunately all of the games missions occur on the same handful of mid-sized maps; the variety of terrain and areas to visit is paltry compared to its competition. You learn very little about the opposition, your allies, the motivation, the hows/whys/history of the universe; the story is virtually nonexistant in this manner, giving you the feeling of an unfinished world. Some of the enemies look interesting, and some even have unique behaviors in combat and at different levels of injury; this is one of the few redeeming traits of the game. Level progression is very simplistic and basic, with virtually all characters of the same class differing only in appearance; and as appearance is equipment base, that in itself isn't a player choice. Equipment is very clearly better/worse, with stated damage/second values or armor ratings; you very rarely have a choice between two equivalent items. Weapon selection is sparse as well; you have a few basic categories of primary weapons, secondary weapons, and two types of heavy weapons, all but two of which simply amount to 'spitting out bullets either on automatic or semi-automatic'. Overall, a strictly average game with pretty visuals but little else to redeem it.

Summary: If you like Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, go play it again; its been years, you'll probably have fun. This game is a very pale shadow of that one and brings nothing new to the table. This game is a buggy Diablo clone and proud of it. Game creation seems to have followed these steps: Step 1: Make a Diablo-clone engine; skimp on QA; nobody will care if the game just doesn't run or you have serious problems, its free-to-play. Step 2: Populate it with the story and some of the characters from the 7-year-old Ultimate Alliance game. Step 3: Release. Where are the issues? In step 1, they made a decent-looking engine and packaged it with a terrible installer; patching the game has on multiple occasions caused it to stop working, completely aside from the occasional server outages, leading to a frustrating uninstall/redownload/reinstall cycle that Steam users can avoid some but not all of. This points to a lack of a decent QA department; or more likely a lack of paying attention to said department; and/or mediocre programming. Step 2 is the more frustrating part, however. This game's plot reads very much like the plot of ultimate alliance. In fact: "Doctor Doom has a scheme involving gathering villainous allies and artifacts so that he can have divine levels of power and reshape the world in his own image; a variety of Marvel-universe heroes combine to stop him." is the plot for both games. While Ultimate Alliance took you underwater, to the far reaches of space, to demon hellscapes, cities, and all sorts, Marvel Heroes takes you to.. mostly boring earth cities and wilderness, along with places you already saw in Ultimate Alliance. If you think I'm making alot of comparisons between the games, there's a good reason; Ultimate Alliance let you play as the whole roster for one price, was an action-oriented game you could play offline, local co-op, or online with friends, featured plenty of power customization, various costumes, and even some item collection, had jumping, picking and tossing items, and so forth. Marvel Heroes is... a 2D version of ultimate alliance with no initial cost and a much higher eventual one if you want to unlock many heroes. The gameplay is incredibly similar with the only truly noticable difference being the tedious effort of collecting and managing identical-looking pieces of gear; items that don't even impact character appearance but just background stats. Do not play this game. Do not give these people your time or your money. For the price of the Iron Man and Spiderman unlocks for this game, you can have Ultimate Alliance in one of its many versions shipped to you, and play the same story, on much more interesting locations, with a more diverse cast of characters, still play it with your friends as a team, and not worry about the incompetent programmers at Gazillion.