In 2025 a game with these production values can easily be made by a small indie team. If you had, say, 33 people on your indie dev team, you could even make Expedition 33, which has substantially higher production values than Pokemon ZA at 40% of the price. Pokemon fans may still find this game to be fun, because Pokemon fans get such a dopamine rush from seeing anything Pokemon-related that they can't possibly fail to enjoy a Pokemon game. That's great. I am happy for those people who are having so much fun that they can overlook the absolute lack of effort that goes into these games. I'm happy for people who don't mind that their money will go towards funding yachts for gaming executives rather than improving the games. However, I am not one of those people. I wonder if I will live to see a Pokemon game with decent production values.
I am not the type to give games 0. I try to see the good in things, and at least give some credit. I really don't see anything redeeming in this, though. I don't even like the music or anything. I bought the ultimate edition on Steam because I actually wanted to play it based on some people raving about it. Saw reviews calling it the best game of all time. Couldn't believe THIS is the game people are saying that about. This game has one exact way you need to progress or you are punished severely. You start off with so few options, yet only one very unintuitive way will result in not losing massive amounts of people on your first night. The first thing the game tells you is nobody has a home and you need coal. If you hyper-focus on either of those two things, people are going to die in droves. Even with a 24 hour decree to keep gathering resources through the night, you can't build enough homes in time. Even the build grid is stifling in its rigidity. That this is a preset scenario that's more or less the same every time is baffling. Any other developer in the universe would've turned this kind of idea into much more of a roguelike experience with vastly different things happening every time, and not start off with such a ridiculously punishing one-way or death outset scenario. It's hard for me to see the 10/10 reviews as anything but people who think that they've beaten some hard game, and feel this sense of accomplishment, but it's really all smoke and mirrors difficulty. Anyone can win the game if given the "right" set of things to do in the "right" order, and as such it feels like more of an extremely obtuse trial and error puzzle game than anything else.
Not that all negative reviews aren't legitimate, but it's sad to see this game partially review bombed because it's "woke" - in other words, because it has a female lead who's black. There is nothing political going on in this game, so I can't see what would be woke about it. The game's shortcomings are much more mundane. The open world design is not very interesting, and the writing misses the mark a lot of the time. It's not that it's necessarily bad writing, but the game's premise is already hard to take seriously as it is. This is made worse by the characters themselves constantly making light of everything. Is this a comedy or am I supposed to care about this place? Your parkour abilities are too strong, so the landscape barely matters unless they put massive cliffs everywhere to block you, which they do. You might feel like exploring once you get through the intro, but good luck with the dozens of massive cliffs funneling you to where you are supposed to go instead. What you can find often just turns out to be a health potion in a chest, though. As for what's good, well, the combat is alright, the spells are alright, the graphics are decent, and the faces look good. It runs well on the PS5. The accessibility and difficulty options are vast. The game's issues are pretty common in these sorts of games, so I really can't say it's a complete disaster ****. They haven't reinvented the genre, nor have they solved its most pressing issues. If you never played an open world style RPG before maybe you wouldn't mind.
I'm genuinely a Diablo fan, and don't consider this a review bomb going on here. The fact is that I can not play this game because of the constant reminders that everything is monetized. Every day I don't play, every day I don't have the battle pass, I am missing out. Every endgame dungeon I do, there it is in the back of my head that I would get more if I had only paid. I can't handle that. It's a mediocre copy-paste of Diablo 3 in the first place, so the motivation to play is already lower than it ought to be since I could just play Diablo 3 with no MTX. But I can't handle being pushed to spend spend spend like this, and knowing that I will literally never come close to maxing out my characters because the paywall is so insanely steep. I hate this. As for the PC port, the game looks very zoomed in with bad resolution when I play on my PC. Clearly the PC version was a last-minute addition.
It's a mildly fun game to just try out for a couple days, but that's where it ends. The thing is, this is a worse version of Diablo 3 in every way. It's not just that it's Diablo 3 with microtransactions. If you ignore the spending, the game itself is still a dumbed down version of Diablo 3. You have even fewer ways to customize than ever. We're down to just 4 skills being allowed at one time. The loot system is atrocious, and not just because you have to buy things with real money, but random drops pretty much can't be interesting. It'll just shovel gear upgrades at you, with sockets, which is where the power growth really comes in: filling the sockets. When I got hooked on the series in 2000, it was the excitement of just randomly finding a unique item that really set it apart. Most RPGS at that time you just farmed money, and bought gear in a shop, or just found predictable gear in a chest. Diablo was the game to shake that up and show how fun it could be to never know where or when an amazing game-changing item might be found. Now we have Diablo Immortal where we just have to pay to get better stuff. Open your wallet, and do your daily login grinds in a dumbed-down copy-paste ****. EDIT: Lowered my review from 3 to 0 after playing more and understanding just how bad the P2W is. I thought it was bad, but holy moly. That $100k thing going around is just for one single character. Imagine you want to play every class. Pure insanity.
Some people don't appreciate how much work goes into making a game with production values as high as this. No other JRPGs are capable of pulling off these kinds of visuals, much less with the scope **** like FFVII. To remake the game with these kinds of productions values and expand on the characters and plot, I mean, it honestly couldn't all be done as one $60 game; it just couldn't be financially viable for them to not split it into more than one part. I truly do not believe that this is a cash grab, in fact, I think it's always a big risk to put this much money into a JRPG. That's why major competitors like Bandai Namco have their Tales still looking like PS3 games for their last two PS4 entries. To further prove my point: Square Enix actually included two discs with my standard edition: one for game data and one as a "play" disc, because unlike the vast majority of publishers, they care about giving you the game playable on disc rather than just making you go online and download the whole thing. So no, I don't believe it's a cash grab. I believe they spent a huge amount of time and money developing this game, and that it's worth the price of a full game. What people are calling filler is the world building that I always craved in the original. I wanted to spend more time getting to know these people and locations. I usually don't like when RPGs are just an Inn, an item shop, and a weapon store, followed by another dungeon... over and over again. Spending more time in the world makes me care more about what's going on. I know that FFVII is a revered game, and many people think it's flawless, but I don't think so. I think expanding upon it helps secure its legacy as more than just nostalgia fueled fanboy fuel.
All of the positive reviews are from people who had the game to themselves. For a family it's just not fun that only one person can have the full game experience. There's really no good reason for it. The original Gamecube version in 2001 only required you have additional memory cards, not multiple Gamecubes. Now in 2020 we need multiple Switch consoles to do the same thing? Massive step backwards. Also, this game is nearly identical to every other version in every meaningful way. The quality of life improvements they added would be the equivalent of a free patch for any other major release, but in Animal Crossing you pay full price for a new game. Listen, I love the Switch and I love Nintendo, but it's a miss for me. If you never played an Animal Crossing game, and you want a very chill relaxed game to play, and you are the only gamer in your house, maybe you could give it a shot. Or if you are just hopelessly addicted to Animal Crossing I suppose you might still think this is great. For everyone else: avoid it.
If you made the same game on a lower budget, and your name wasn't Kojima, would anyone play it? I'm not here to hate on the man, but this is the kind of narrative you would expect to see at a avante garde film festival. Nothing wrong with that, but gameplay clearly takes a backseat to the concept. If there were something that could have been done to make the game more fun, it wouldn't have been done if it interfered with Kojima's artistic vision. That's a problem for me. Maybe some people are into games-as-cinema, but essentially the gameplay is that I'm spending my time balancing a giant backpack for 20 minutes trudging from place to place, often with very little happening. As you get farther in, you get attacked more, and maybe it gets more intense when you reach areas beyond where I've seen. In any case, enjoy the sounds of a screeching baby strapped to your chest when you do encounter some danger. And don't expect a deep combat system.
The only issue with this game is the length, which is only about as long as an episode of the show. But for a $10 game it's not such a big deal that it's short. I was impressed with what's there, even if it's not much. It does look and sound just like you're in the show. The art, music and voices are 100% authentic. My son is a huge fan of the show, so he got a lot of excitement out of this game. It also took a bit of time to get the final trophy which asks you to beat the final boss without taking a hit. Only 0.5% of people unlocked that trophy, so it's ironic that the #1 complaint is length yet people weren't willing to spend any additional time to complete the one challenge that the game gives you to do. In any case, I do wish they would release a longer version of this as a sequel, even though that's most likely not going to happen.
I'm going to try and keep this short and focus on what I liked rather than dwell on the negatives. Star Ocean was a dead IP, and the devs did what they could with almost no budget. The graphics suffer, but they did some cool things with the game seeing as it's not very taxing on the PS4 hardware. In particular, you can bring all 7 main characters into battle at once. You don't worry about whether you should buy equipment or power up characters you don't want to use. You just use all of them. The game has a highly customizable tactics system to help each AI understand what you want them to do. There are hundreds of character development skits. The battles take place right on the map and there's no loading screen before you fight. All your companions actually walk with you on the field! Optional quests are not that exciting, but give you reason to go back out into the world, where you'll discover that encounters are constantly changing. When you backtrack later on you will find a new set of monsters along the way. Character development skits happen as you travel to break up the tedium. Skits and quests give meaningful rewards sometimes. The combat system is pretty much like any other Star Ocean or Tales game. Later on you may be able to exploit some mechanics to become very difficult to kill, but so what? Same thing in previous entries in the series that garnered praise. The game has very few bugs, never crashed on me, has no loot boxes or microtransactions, and is plenty long enough. Give it a chance and you might like it. I'd rate it a 7.5, but I'm rounding up to 8 for purposes of this site.
I'm editing my original 10/10 review. On retrospect this turned out to be one of the worst expansions. The raiding was good, and Tanaan Jungle was a fun zone that was added later, but the rest was a failure with tons of cut content. Not that this matters much in 2018. WoW still remains my favorite MMORPG.
Most reviewers docked points for the game's framerate issues and slow load times. In 2018 playing on a Xbox One X, those issues are barely a thing anymore, so I figure the game must be worth at least an 8/10 now for X owners. The game plays out a lot like recent Far Cry games, and might appeal to fans of other open world mayhem games. There is an insane amount of stuff to do, and you can spend more time with this game than most of its competition. The big difference in gameplay from other games in the same genre is that you move around and tie things together with a special grappling hook. The story is silly and derivative without being very funny, though. It lacks most of the charm of GTA or Far Cry. There isn't much in the way of random world events. In Far Cry you might happen upon some random things that all converge into some kind of unique crazy encounter. In this game mostly it's predictable where the bad guys will be and what will happen. It also gets a little bit repetitive, though the huge number of challenges break that up a bit. I like that challenges have leaderboards that show you friend scores and sometimes let you race your friends' ghosts if applicable. The challenges can be brutal to get the maximum score on, though, and you need to do them to power up, so if you just want to rush through the story, think twice about picking this game up. The game is probably more fun for a completionist.
As a game, it might not bring a lot new to the table on paper, but the attention to details makes it shine. It's easily my favorite team shooter. While you can't make your own loadout, the number of unique skills across the characters makes it so that there's more depth than any game in this genre. You're picking from 21 sets of skills and traits that are each meticulously balanced, and no two play alike. Even within the same category of hero, each one can be completely different. As far as innovation, aren't the ultimate abilities innovative enough? They're so varied and constantly change the flow of combat, making any encounter unpredictable and never boring. Could someone unleash an ultimate that wipes your entire team if you're not prepared? On top of this, the game has an insane level of detail put into each character's backstory. It's fun to simply be these characters, and it makes me eager to see these characters used in games in the future.
An incredible sequel in almost every way except for the fact that 90% of your time is spent in the exact same areas as you explored in the first game. It's not necessarily bad that all of the original zones make a return, but it's just that you spend very little time in new areas. There are 11 or so actual new areas to go to. Besides that, the combat system is back with cool new mechanics, the story is fairly interesting, there's tons of replay to see the different endings and various outcomes, and the awesome grade system which allows you to purchase interesting perks for additional playthroughs. There are three new playable characters on top of the original cast. Best of all, the game is genuinely funny, and the characters are mostly amusing and likable. Would be a 10/10 if they could have spent more time making new areas.
I finally got around to playing this, only about 10 years after its day. It seems like people completely forgot it existed now, and it's highly unlikely it'll get a sequel at this point. Because of this, you can find it very cheap, and I recommend picking it up if you're in the mood for a good budget game. It plays very similar to Halo, despite being in third person. The main gimmick is that you can switch between different squad mates who each have their own unique skills. It doesn't force you to switch, but it can be very useful to take advantage of each member's abilities. The story is a little corny and generic, and it doesn't look amazing by today's standards, but it does play in widescreen, and it controls as well as any game of this type.
The game grew on me tremendously. I mostly disliked the characters in the first 10 hours, but they develop quite a lot. Over the course of the game's 60+ hours, you'll be presented with 400 character skits that get more and more amusing as you go. There are some bad cliches and groan-worthy moments, but by the end it's mostly a very good experience. The battle system is one of the best of all time, and the character stat development is in the hands of the player to a very large degree. Gaining levels from experience is, at best, a third of your potential growth. You'll have to discover new titles and develop weapons and armor through the crafting system to really get the most out of your team. The game features six difficulty levels to make sure you're always challenged, and an awesome "new game +" system where you're given points for how well you did in your last game, and you can use those to buy buffs that can even alter the rules of the game. For example, you can make it so that you and the monsters all do 10x more damage to each other. Again, the game just gets better as you go. The more time and effort you put into the game, the more you will find that you can get out of it.
The fact that the PS4 version came out a little better in the framerate department doesn't change how great this game is on any platform or version. It's a 10/10 game on the PC, PS3, XBox 360, PS4 and XB1. If the price isn't good for you, wait for it to drop.
I was able to score the game new for half price on eBay, so as far as price is concerned, my review isn't going to be colored by whether it was worth $60. The game at is core is really good as far as racing sims go. Everyone can probably agree on that much. Everything looks great, it runs smooth, and racing against AI representations of your friends and other gamers in single player is a lot cooler than any single player experience in any past racing sim. The online is pretty good, too, and overall very fair in handing out medals and rewards just for showing up. The achievements are even pretty reasonable, mostly rewarding you for playing the game, playing the game well, and dedication. 90% of them are earned just through good ol' playing, so you won't feel pressure to do anything ridiculous to get them. You can even do the entire game with full driver assists and super easy AI if you so choose, and you could still earn gold medals. All in all, it's mostly a good game for any skill level. Where it falls short for me is track variety. There simply aren't enough tracks. I know that Turn 10 have said that they have some complex way of adding tracks to the game to make them super realistic that takes a long time, but that's not really something the player should just shrug and look past in scoring the game. For whatever reason there can be for having a smaller number of tracks, it's still going to be a negative, and it is. The other issue people complain about that's not such a big deal to me is the number of cars or microtransactions. I'm never going to buy a DLC car as those cars simply are not better than what you can buy normally. Honestly, most people are just mad about this in theory. Looking at the stats for the game with regard to achievements and such things. 99% of gamers never get even close to being able to afford all the cars in these games anyway, so what does it matter if you could buy 200 or 1000? At the end of the day you'll only end up actually buying like 20 cars either way. There simply aren't enough credits to buy them all unless you dedicate months to Forza!
It's not that it's horrible, because it's a continuation of the plot from the main game and it's just as polished and playable as that one was. It's just too short and too easy. There are no bosses and nothing is difficult to locate in the slightest. They needed to add a new section of the city to make this a good value. For my $30 season pass, I'm a little disappointed if all I'm going to get is 4 episodes like this. I hope they put a little bit more into the next 3 chapters, but I doubt it. At least the new weapons and vehicle are pretty good, and you CAN use this as a sandbox mode since time does not pass, and it uses the same progress as the main game.
Let's face it: the only reason this game is getting such praise is that it's one of the cheapest releases on the Xbox, similar to how Flower got high marks for the PS4 just because it's cheap and looks good. It seems like a lot of games these days get reviewed more for their value to the dollar rather than whether they're worth your time. So, if money is no concern, is Peggle worth your time? Only if you enjoy interactive slot-machines. The game is heavily reliant on luck, with the vast majority of pegs you hit being a product of the ball bouncing where you never expected it to. Planning out shots to earn extra lives and make the most of your special moves is only a small part of the experience. Compared to other puzzlers like Bust-A-Move, the game simply relies too much on random chaos for my taste.
As you can see, the negative reviews are complete baloney and make no good points about any supposed flaws in this game. In reality, this is the king of rail shooters. It takes a ton of skill and practice to complete the game even on normal mode, and the mechanics are very deep. You have a lot more freedom to move and shoot than any other rail shooter out there, as you can pan the camera 360 degrees to shoot things all around you. You can even move around bosses, literally, to the front, sides, and back, as you please. Add to all this the ability to change dragon forms between 3 different dragons, and a complex leveling system, and you have a crazy gem ****. There's absolutely loads of replay value here, too. Besides just trying to master the main game, you can unlock special scenarios and the original full Panzer Dragoon game that came out on the Sega Saturn. The only flaws the game has are just in figuring out how the heck to beat some of the bosses, but as this does add to the replay and challenge, it's really no big deal. With a beautiful shooter like Orta packaged with the original classic game, you have to give this game a high score. The effort they put forth is tremendous, and it shows.
I'm a former Monkey Ball master, having completed 100% of the first two games for the Gamecube, and again on the Xbox. I was disappointed with the other handheld and Wii versions of these games, as they moved away from the hardcore tough-as-nails rewarding ball-rolling madness, and more into kiddie mini-game fests with weird controls and uninspired levels. Banana Splitz brings back the classic formula, with a regular game sure to challenge even the most seasoned Monkey Ball fans, using the same classic analog controls of old. The mini games aren't amazing, but are par for the course. Buy the game for the tough single player normal mode! Another feature I liked was the ability to generate a random level from a photo. Initially these random levels are far too easy, but if you buy a cheap downloadable upgrade, it adds some crazy variety to it that can make some of the random levels nearly impossible. Add to all this the ability to share replays and levels directly through the game itself, and you have a Monkey Ball title finally worthy of the original two.
This is the cream of the crop for JRPGs in recent years. The story doesn't degenerate into some weird spiritual battle against some ultimate evil. In fact, the last boss of the game is not even a bad guy, really. He's just a guy who slightly disagrees with you about how to best help the world. Great game that defies many cliches. The battle system is a lot more active and engaging than the average RPG, as well. I'll only take off one point for the way battles can occasionally feel like you're just mashing buttons, but overall this is a solid game worth owning for any RPG fan.
People are going crazy on the reviews here. This is a really great download title if you're a fan of old school overhead shooters. Micro transactions? You don't need to EVER buy anything, so why is that a negative? All the special items you can buy are also purchasable through in-game "exp" currency, and aren't needed to complete missions in any way, ever. if you played Halo 4, the game even gives you free upgrades. Anyway, people need to understand what this game is. Yes, it *is* a smartphone game that was ported over to the XB1, something I appreciate because I didn't want to buy a Windows tablet to be able to play Halo: Spartan Assault. Why slam them for porting this? It even adds 5 new levels for co-op where you battle the flood with a friend.
It's really too bad to see people coming back in recent years to slap a review of 0 on the original Halo. This game came out in 2001. If you limited yourself to only purchasing console FPS games from 2001 and earlier, what would you rather play? Maybe Goldeneye on the N64? Maybe Doom, but that's not even in full 3D since you can't aim up or down. The bottom line is that for its day, this was the best FPS you could play on a console by a very large margin. It's hard to debate that. It *is* still a lot of fun to play if you enjoy the genre, and deserves all the acclaim it gets.
If you look at the 10/10 reviews for the game on Metacritic, you see such lines as "maybe a interactive novel", "Best cinematic game ever", and "interactive drama". I'm quoting this because I want to make it clear that Beyond Two Souls is not really a game in the traditional sense, and I'm not trolling by giving it a 0. What this is is a $60 movie. For my money, if I want to watch a movie, I'll pay about 1/10th the price to see it in a theater or 1/20th the price to rent it. I don't see the advantage to using video games to simply tell a story. I do realize that some people enjoy this "game", but I just don't understand why it had to be a game at all. Could it not have been enjoyable as a movie? Did it have to be a $60 title? I'm giving it a zero, though, because I didn't even think the story was very good.
It's pretty clear that 343 put a great deal of effort into the game. The production values are extremely high, and it's one of the best-looking games on the market even after the release of the Xbox One and PS4. The sound is mostly great as well. The gameplay is almost identical to past Halo games, which is a good thing, but you may be a little tired of it by now if you'd played all the other games in the series. I'm only taking off a couple points for the rehashed gameplay and a couple weird moments in co-op, like trying to get through the scripted vehicle sections and having your character randomly explode because the other player died. Overall it's still one of the best shooters you can get for a console.
While it does get a little repetitive, it does show off the XB1's power in a fun way by cramming so many zombies onscreen at once. Graphically it's not going to totally blow you away, but what the game can do with the sheer numbers of zombies is really unlike anything I've experienced in a video game; I'm certain that the 360 could not handle this. It's a pretty intense game, and while it lightens up a little on the time requirements for normal mode compared to previous installments, you're almost never safe, and frustratingly so at times. Just waiting a few seconds for your posse to get in your vehicle is really painful as the zombies inevitably swarm you. Vehicles get blown up in short order, weapons break, and food is sometimes scarce. On the other hand, the game is extremely fair, letting you recreate any weapons or vehicles you've previously held from various lockers and garages. I'm trying not to give this game a higher score for being a launch title, but I do appreciate what they were able to do with this game given the rush that the development team was certainly under to have it ready on time. Ignoring that, it is an improvement over Dead Rising 1 and 2, and one of the best launch titles on either the XB1 or PS4.
For a $20 download game, this is a steal. It honestly feels like it could have been a full release. While it's not exactly that next-gen in any way, I didn't want a Xbox One so that every game I played would be somehow objectively better than past games, and I certainly didn't expect LAUNCH titles to be able to make the most of the hardware. What launch titles can? Looking at it as a game, it's the first on-rail shooter I ever played which lets you target enemies separately from your own movement. This means you can fly right while shooting to the left. In the past, if you had to dodge bullets the opposite direction from an enemy, you'd potentially miss your chance to hit something. While this can be frustrating to learn how to use properly, it's really no less of an improvement than going from Wolfenstein 3D to Quake in terms of how much more control it gives the player. Some people complain about the grinding, but there is really none. Replaying a level to get a better score, master the game, and get more items is not grinding. If that's grinding, then EVERY shooter is grindy. Think about what progression was like in other Panzer Dragoon games or even Star Fox. You would play until you got a Game Over, then replay the same levels over and over until you won. If the game feels too hard for you, you can change the difficulty to casual, too. One thing I love in this game is the different abilities and and dragon types. The options you have to change your weaponry are huge, and make a real difference. Microtransactions aren't an issue because there's nothing you can buy with money that can't be easily won in the game. I don't even know why they bothered giving you that option. The game is not designed around that at all. Overall, if you enjoy on-rails shooters like this then you can't pass this up for $20.
It's launch day, so I may be rushing to judgement here, but up through the first half of the game this has to be one of the best platformers ever made. The 4-player co-op is even better than in New Super Mario Bros. because there is more space for a casual player to keep safe while the experienced gamers lead the way. As is typical for a Mario game, the levels start off very easy but ramp up in difficulty as it progresses. The level variety and design is just the best in the industry. The double cherry power ups alone are a brilliant and well-executed idea worthy of a whole game: in some levels you can control a huge amount of clones by collecting cherries. It works amazingly well and controlling all of the clones at once is actually manageable and intuitive. If you're all about the gameplay and don't care about realistic graphics or storyline, there isn't any better game on the market. I'm saying this as someone who owns an Xbox and Playstation, too. I have plenty of games to play right now, but there's nothing I'd rather play over this.
It beats Mario Kart in variety and weaponry design and overall nuances of the gameplay. It's nice that the courses change from water to air so you're not just doing 3 laps of the same thing all the time. The point I'm taking off is for how impossibly hard it is on higher difficulty settings. This wouldn't normally be an issue, but even as a seasoned expert gamer who's conquered the legendarily difficult F-Zero GX, I found it insanely hard to unlock all the characters. I feel really bad for people who will literally never unlock some of the characters which require you to beat many missions on S class rating.
There's nothing quite like PIkmin. It's the perfect mix of strategy, puzzle, action, simplicity, style and substance. You gather and grow Pikmin to suit your needs to explore levels and recover items. The only thing I can think that might bother some people is the timer, but running out of time for a day only serves as a way to break up your gameplay experience and gives hardcore players bragging rights when they do things the fastest way possible. In no way does being speedy matter other than to give you something to shoot for when you decide to play through the story again. With new levels, new Pikmin types, better graphics and new modes, this game is a worthy addition to the series and seriously a reason to buy a Wii U. You absolutely can't find a game quite like Pikmin on any other platform.
This game got roasted for having a rocky first week, as well as the impossibly high expectations from gamers who hold past Diablo games on a pedestal. I almost docked a point for being online-only, but I'm not someone who would actually play it offline, so for me it's not an issue. As it stands, the game is currently the best ARPG out there. The server hasn't been an issue since week 1, there is now PVP, the crafting is improved, the drop rates are better, the legendaries and sets are better, the players are genuinely pushed to play together cooperatively through massive bonuses, and players can control their gameplay experience a lot via the monster power settings. Of course the game can get boring after about 200 hours, but what game doesn't? The fact is that this is the best ARPG on the market. I've played the others, and they don't really hold a candle. The design of the skills and the classes is of the highest quality. Compare to Torchlight 2 where the skill balance and class balance is atrocious.
I'm all about big risk and reward in video games. I'm the guy who plays his ARPGs on the hardcore setting. I like winner-takes all competition. Back in the day I competed for the top ranking in the Warcraft PVP when it was so insane that you had to practically have no life to succeed. Therefore, I thought I'd be the perfect guy for the EVE Online Universe. I was wrong. I appreciate EVE's freedom and brutal sandbox gameplay with a free market economy, but it's ruined by two things. First, the gameplay itself is awful. Did you enjoy figuring out how to beat that well-designed impossibly hard boss in another MMO? No such thing in EVE. If you can't find another player or group of players to have an epic battle with, you're just floating around in dead space with nothing to do. There is never any guarantee that there will be some reasonable challenge in the EVE universe for you to jump into. Since the game is driven by players only, there will be many nights where you log in and there's absolutely nothing. Some people would put me down as an instant-gratification type for saying this. I always want there to be good challenging content in a game which was put there by the developer. I don't know why EVE can't have the best of both worlds. The second issue is that the free market is sort of ruined by the fact that players can buy their way to the top with real world currency. This isn't necessarily a problem on its own, but when the game touts itself on its realistic economic principles, it sort of dampens the experience when an economic genius gets taken out by Captain Credit Card who never put any time or effort into earning his way. At the end of the day, they can add as much of this sort of content as they want with these numerous expansions, but until they make the combat interesting and give players more to do than float around in the huge scary emptiness of space, it's never going to be a game I'll want to play again.
I appreciate that this is a free to play game in development, and I understand that perhaps it may improve as time goes on, but at the heart of it this is a game that's a step back from Diablo 2 in gameplay. It's very basic and boring, but some may appreciate that it has no price tag. Worth checking out to people who value cheaper games and would sacrifice a bit of quality for saving their bank account.
What I want in a MMORPG is incredibly designed bosses requiring great teamwork to kill. By abandoning the staple roles of RPGs in favor of some sort of a weapon-based skill system and self-healing, the game pushes itself way backward in that department. I appreciate Guild War's answer to the dead world instance-play of games like Warcraft, but what we need more is a game with Warcraft's raid bosses and Guild War's leveling and vibrant world. We don't need a game to be 100% different in every way from the competition. I'm not just looking for the next WoW when I play a MMORPG I can deal with games diverging from WoW in a variety of ways but can we please have any other game which features PVE raid bosses as well designed as WoW? Warhammer Online nailed its coffin by specifically ignoring PVE raiding in an attempt to be different. Now Guild Wars 2, a beautiful game with so much to do, manages to do something similar, preventing itself from well-designed content by abolishing the tried-and-true staples of RPG gameplay that have worked so well. I'd maybe recommend this game for people who want PVP over PVE in a MMORPG.
People go on and on about the online-only, but that is only a temporary issue. The biggest problem with Simcity that's been discovered since its launch is that the AI the game uses for the citizens is absolutely abysmal. Citizens don't really live anywhere or have jobs. They just appear out of houses each day and roam around looking for jobs. If they cant find any, the housing loses happiness. It doesn't matter if all your jobs are connected via roads. The citizens will simply march to the nearest jobs and keep going door to door. What this means is that your important mining industry on the other side of town will keep closing due to worker shortages, while some citizens will still complain they couldn't find a job. The only way for a player to fix this is by meticulous trial and error or by making the city have only one winding snake-like avenue with a good distribution of zones so that it's impossible for citizens to not find the local shopping and industry every day. Somehow the game is still pretty fun for a city-builder, but I hope they fix the idiotic AI.
Starcraft 2 is simply the greatest RTS ever created. It's so incredibly well balanced between the three unique playable races that matches are televised as a e-sport event in South Korea, with top players successfully playing as all three races. With Heart of the Swarm we get more of the same quality with a campaign that gives a human face to the zerg race, pulling you into playing as "the bad guy". I didn't think I'd enjoy a whole campaign based around zerg gameplay, since I had always found their playstyle a little confusing, but the pacing of the game is perfect, and I was able to easily master the race for the first time. Most of the negative reviews on metacritic seem to revolve around the story. I think most of the plot and presentation are incredible, and generally don't understand how a game could get docked 10 full points for a nitpick with a plot point. Even if the game had the worst story in history, the online play is unrivaled in its quality and balance.
I bought this game based on the lofty overall ratings. The setting is nice, but I feel strongly that this game gets too much acclaim for the story while the gameplay is only average. In a market crowded by great first person shooters, Bioshock's gameplay is only good enough to recommend to diehard FPS fans dying for another game to play. If you value immersion and story a lot, I guess you might want to check it out. If you value gameplay, you really should check out any number of rival FPS games before Bioshock.
