Dragon Quest Monsters (DQM): The Dark Prince is a fun time for long time fans of the series with some nice quality of life improvements that don't quite go far enough to refine the formula. I recommend only hardcore DQM fans buy this now. Everyone else should wait for a release on Steam and even then wait for a sale. The DLC is not going to be worth it for probably 90% of people FYI. The "Mole Hole" is the best one, but it used to be free in past games so it's a bitter pill. With how many more monsters this time are only available through breeding, you will want the "Mole Hole" for easy access to rare monsters you've caught before if you want to catch them all (which I don't recommend in this game). I'm going to keep this review categories, but there's so many little gameplay things that affect the game that I wish I could discuss and they bring the experience down from similar priced game, like Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, Arceus, Sword/Sheild, ect. Getting to the monsters, while there are over 500, at least half (probably more) are color palette swaps. Imagine if there were 5 colors of Pikachu all just slightly stronger than the last. It's too much and sometimes it's hard to even see the color differences because they just barely look different. Also, they introduced monster sizes like Pokemon, but they did a poor job of setting limits on size. Imagine a Pikachu that is usually as large as a person, but can be as small as your foot. It's absurd and sometimes it's very hard to see monsters. Monsters have passive skill trees you invest points in every few level ups. Many of the trees are very similar, but have one or two different moves. Some have only passive stats. Sometimes after breeding monsters, your skill trees will "evolve into new ones, but it's unclear which ones will upgrade and there's lots of traps for new players run into. I love the DQM series, but I do think limiting moves to 8 like the old games and explaining how thing's work to players on a deeper level (even as optional tutorials would do wonders. Monsters do have strengths and weaknesses, but the UI doesn't do you any favors like Pokemon to tell which moves are the most effective and there are over 500 monsters to know. Monster catching also needs to be refined. You can scout like the DQM:Joker series, or throw meat and defeat the monster like in the old DWM games. Both systems don't work that well and the result is more time spent on scouting than Pokemon, with even more monsters to catch. It gets quite tedious because you will want to use moves to raise your offense and lower their defense to get a small boost in catch rate. It's still fun to collect, but it could be improved for sure. Not to mention the game artificially gates your ability to catch effectively behind beating the boss in the zone. Or at least they say they do. I didn't notice a change in catch rate after beating them, so I don't know if this feature is bugged or if it was removed. The visuals are standard for the Switch, but DQM monster animations could use some more variation or visceral damage to make combat more interesting. The game has lots of loading screens and framerate hiccups as is tradition for 3D games on the Switch. The sound is orchestral Dragon Quest tracks you heard a million times for years remastered. I would really, really appreciate some new tracks. Or more tracks. The music and sound effects need to be updated. Like the rest of the game, SquareEnix cheaped out here. No mouths even move when people talk, but the voice acting is hit and miss. The UK voice actors are a bit dry to hammy. The amount of puns distract from the store and should be used more sparingly. The story is your bog standard DQ boilerplate stuff with lots of puns, sillyness and UK English (why?). It's not bad, but you'll see every twist coming from a mile away, but it is skippable. The games UI is probably going to turn a lot of people away. You can't see the what the effects of rings do on the screen where you equip accessories. There's no quest log or dialog recap and you can't see where your supposed to go unless your already there on the right floor. If you do skip the story, it can be a pain to find out where to go next, which happened several time to me. Beware of the astroturfing the publisher is doing for this game. Almost all of the 10/10 reviews sound like they're written by the same person. 1 to 2 sentences with 0 criticism or 1 criticism that they then say they don't mind.
Metacritic ate my review with the "forbidden 403" error that I spent over an hour on. This has been a problem for a while. Come on Metacritic, get it together.
If I had to review FE: 3 Houses I'd give it a 10/10. I absolutely loved it and played it for over 500 hours. FE Engage was not mostly developed by TecmoKoei like 3 Houses was and is back in the hands of the creators, Intelligent Systems. What this means is that many of the things that really turned me off on FE Fates are back in perhaps an even bigger way. I'm going to break down this game by several categories for review. Let's start with the elephant in the room that many reviews are missing: the DLC. DLC: You might be thinking "why is DLC a topic for review"? Let me explain. While the game can be beaten without DLC, just like FE: Fates, it deeply impacts the experience. The entire game is designed around incentivizing you to by the DLC packs ($30 total). You're probably confused at this point, because most games have figured out how to do DLC without greatly affecting gameplay balance. Let me go over the systems affected, so you can understand: Gold and metals are very scarce. You can farm them in side missions, but at a very slow rate. There are some cheese methods that slightly enhance your rate, but if you really want more gold and metals, you're going to spend many hours farming. These side maps are set 2-4 levels above your highest character and have over 50 enemies, so they aren't trivial either. Do you see how that might incentive someone to buy DLC when DLC packs give you weapons, permanent stat boost items, gold, and SP scrolls (a currency used to purchase skills)? Speaking of SP, I should mention how agonizingly slow it accumulates from killing enemies and how many skills are priced so expensive that I could not afford them by the time I beat the game. You will earn about 4-5k SP normally per character over the game, but I've seen skills cost as much as 8400 SP. There is no new game plus either and none coming later either. So seriously, you can see how their desire to have you purchase DLC permeates the whole game's design. Then there is a spot in the game's story where they take away a large chunk of your power. Also, unlike 3 Houses, reinforcement spawns are infinite and provide low exp, but are just as powerful. If you have all the DLC packs the give you 7 powerful bracelets that are just as powerful, if not moreso, than this obstacle is a lot more trivial. Hardcore players will be fine, but this heavy handed approach hurts the game balance as a whole because they wants casual players to feel like they need an edge and buy the DLC. I know it's bad form to spend half a review talking about the DLC and its impact on game design, but it's not talked about by major outlets and Intelligent Systems needs to be be called out for doing it wrong again. Fates had the same problems, but to a lesser degree. 3 Houses figured out how to do a fair DLC, but it probably didn't sell as well, so we're back to this model from Fates. With that out of the way, lets break the game down into its core bits: Story: Well, if you've seen anything, you've read that the story is bad and it is. Worst in the series bad. Some of the hammiest, cringiest dialog I've read from a 1st party, AAA game. It feels like they wrote the whole game for the mobile game audience (that spends way more than us normal FE players, btw). There's many times in the story things happen for no other reason than the writers will it to happen. It constantly breaks whatever immersion you have and the world does not feel believable or real. There is very little world building and what is there is lock into support conversations with your allies. Most of these support conversations revolve around 2 characters with 1 personality trait/hobby talking about that in the most boring way possible. The only thing that saves it from being a complete waste of times is the voice acting. They spared no expense and hired many top tier voice actors that you'll recognize if you watch any anime. They do a great job. It's a shame that Bernadetta voice actor from 3 Houses players the main female character, because she is given nothing to work with. The main character is the worst thing about the game. Everyone loves you and even those that don't usually end up loving you. There's no tension in the plot at all. It's closest to maybe the Pokemon kids show from the 90s. Be aware the player has no agency whatsoever over the story as well. Routes are gone, as well as dialog choices. It's the biggest letdown of the game, considering what 3 Houses gave us. Gameplay: I'm running out of characters, so I'm going to have to keep this more brief than I would like. Many people have praised the gameplay. It's mostly what you would expect from a FE game that gets rid of all the enhancements of 3 Houses. It's closest to FE Awakening, but we now have 12 rings and 7 DLC bracelets. All of which are varying degrees of extremely powerful. Which leads me to say that this is the easiest FE to date. I think they had real trouble balancing the game.
WC3: Reforged has improved visuals and and some animations. It combines both single player campaigns from the main game and the expansion in one program. -No Clans -No Ladder -No Ladder Avatars -Blizzard owns all custom maps you make, unlike in the original WC3 -Lots of of bugs, server issues, missing voices, who knows what else -Blizzard promising things and advertising those things and those things not being in the game like the redone cut scenes. It's only $30 and it there are a few improvements, but I would wait on this for a few months while they fix the issues, unless you don't already have a copy of the game.
Don't go into Shadows of Valentia thinking you'll have a standard Fire Emblem experience. There's a lot of odd design choices, some good, some bad. Since this game is a remake, there's also some old-school rough edges that were not touched. Here are the differences: -No weapons triangle or durability. Money is used simply for upgrades to existing weapons. Your units can only hold 1 item and learn skills from that item. When you take off the item you lose access to the skill sadly. The game still has the FE problem of "arts" not being worth using most of the time. This time, Arts and magic cost health to use, so for physical arts especially, they aren't worth the hp cost and loss of a double attack most of the time. There's no UI to easily flip through your skills like in FE: 3 Houses either. -Very strange "required" skills to beat levels that the game doesn't tell you you need. There are some enemies that spawn 4-8 enemies every turn and there is a spell that will insta-kill 2-5 of them you can use every turn, for example. You will not know that the spell exists or when you'll get it, leading to frustration if you try to complete a map that requires it without it. There's several other instances of this as well. -3rd person dungeons for side quests and loot. I liked this, but there is too many generic battles and combat is too slow. Dungeons are relatively small and you have to revisit them as you get quests to go back. -2 different armies that you have to flip back and forth to. I didn't care for building up 2 different armies because you're basically doing the same thing over again. Double the grind for no reason other than to increase the play time they boast on the back of the box. You also have to use an annoying to find NPC to ship items back and forth between armies. -Tons of generic, repetitive unavoidable battles. As time passes on the world map, the enemy will send out troops to fight. Also, certain areas will have enemy armies respawn every time you pass by the area. This happens frequently and you'll be going back and forth a lot trying to find new NPCs in the same areas you have visited before. -Maps that are poorly designed. Lots of annoying mechanics that waste time and test your patience. From what I have read, they are copy/paste from the original game. I think they could of spent time redesigning the maps to be more interesting. For example, there are quite a few desert maps that will reduce movement significantly and you'll spend 4-5 turns just getting in position. Why? There are many maps that have choke points that highly favor the enemy. Since most of your units won't be 1 shoting enemies, there's a slog to get through the choke point while archers (which have crazy range in this, 5+ squares) rain down on you. It's simply not fun. That said, the story is standard JRPG anime fantasy. There is a lot of English Voice acting, which is nice, with a few recognizable voices you may have heard elsewhere. The visuals are better looking than FE Fates for the character models, but the environments, towns, NPCs, ect. are very generic and lack detail. There's a lot of repeated dialog in towns from your party members. Side quests are rudimentary, but quick normally. I find the rewards don't usually equate to the effort to complete some of them. Overall, FE: SoV is a good game, but not the one fans deserve. I would recommend this to extreme FE enthusiasts only.
As someone who has tried multiple Monster Hunter games and has had trouble enjoying them, I finally found one I that slightly turns the corner from boring to fun. I have a PS4 Pro with a hybrid hard drive and the game ran very smoothly for me. Pros: -Fantastic Visuals and great variety of biomes -UI has been vastly improved -Many annoying features from prior entries have been ratcheted down or eliminated -Levels now have lots of verticality to them, which makes exploring much less linear -Crafting involves less grinding than in the past -The game main quests are a lot more fun and focus on killing big monsters, rather than gathering mushrooms, for example, like in other entries (but there are still quests for that if you want) -Voice acting and music are good -Challenge ramps ups just about right and combat is about precision, combos, and timing rather than button mashing -Tons of great looking armor and weapons with unique passive skills attached to them in some cases, which adds a lot of depth to preparing to a hunt -Information needed to play the game is mostly included in the game! Cons -Lip Syncing does not match English voices (yes, we do deserve this) and it's not fully voiced (NPCs will do that Japanese thing of making a sound or a few words unrelated to their dialog text) -Animations are strange during some cut scenes sometimes (typical for Japanese games honestly) -UI, while improved, is still far behind Western games and clunky. Things simply don't work intuitively like they could. -Servers are unreliable for multiplayer and the rules/UI for multiplayer games are strange and obtuse. -Can be repetitive if you let it, but you can move on as well to the next hunt instead of grinding to alleviate the fatigue of grinding. -Some weapons feel vastly inferior to others in cost and skill required (may be personal preference) -Game has "garrison chores" like from World of Warcraft (some may like this, I don't) -You can (and probably should) eat before going out on a hunt (why is this in everything), but it doesn't require any effort other than a couple button presses, so it's more of a chore, albeit a short one. You can eat while on a hunt now, which is nice. -Lots of randomness in combat and important drops for crafting, which can be frustrating for some people -Short, but if you take your time and enjoy everything, I think the length was just fine.
Mario and Rabbids Kingdom Battle a strange tactical game a la X-Com or Final Fantasy tactics. Some crazy experiment happens in the Rabbids world to merge it with the Mushroom Kingdom. You move around a pseudo Mushroom Kingdom going from battle to battle that I guess will fix the world. Except it's extremely weird. I give it points for innovation in places, but the game is very no frills with some decent mechanics. Pros: -Combat can be fun, but is rigid due to how specialized each character is. Some maps are very hard without certain characters. -The music is great -Interesting new mechanics for a SRPG, like unlimited movement in a given area, dashing into enemies for damage, using a team jump to clear status ailments or mover further, ect. -Large amount of overall content -The challenges are more fun than the regular levels -Boss fights are challenging and a lot of fun -Really neat weapon designs -Game encourages thinking about problems -Only experienced a few crashes, relatively stable and I didn't notice any bugs outside of the crashes. Cons: -Forced to use a Rabbid for some reason. The Mario characters are no more powerful than the Rabbids and no less either, just slightly different. Why is the player forced to use one? -No map available while exploring, have to return to the hub to view the map. This is very tedious and frustrating when trying to simply find the next level or all of the challenges, ect. -Game is very basic with skill trees that are mostly passive bonuses. Very clear over/under tuned abilities in the tree. -Only about 5 different main enemy types + bosses. -Game is very easy or very hard, depending on your weapon level and characters used, it's ridgid -In game world puzzles are awful and cliche. Should have been axed entirely. Also, once you complete puzzles, they're sill active, so some you must navigate every time you pass through an area and without an easily accessible map it can be very frustrating -The writing is very...European? It's bad and not funny. You will not be interested or forget why you were doing this to begin with. The writing does not fit AT ALL with what you would expect from a Nintendo game (in a bad way) the Roomba character swears all the time (bleeped out of course), Mario characters talk completely out of character, ect. Most of the game your running along hitting a to occasional what zany thing the Rabbids got into. It's incredibly boring and not funny. It's like, "oh look at this Rabbid that's sitting there, I wonder what he is thinking?" ZzZzZzzz... -Visuals very basic, likewise with animations. Many maps lack verticality (despite talents for it) and the maps are all large open area connected by pipes with slightly different themes and very little non destructible cover. It gets boring to look at in-stage. Non destructible full cover might as well not exist later on, not that it really matters later on. The game is very kill now or be killed, save boss fights. If you can find your way around the maps, deal with the bad puzzles, ect., there's a fun game in there sometimes. I probably wouldn't have kept playing if I didn't enjoy tactics games and this game didn't enjoy some of the mechanics. For most I would wait until the game drops to $20-$30 if you want to try it. It's not that fun or worth most peoples time. Thank you.
Let me start of by saying I love RPGs. "RPG" can mean so many things and elements are in most games today. Divinity Original Sin 2 (DOS2) tries to be a classic "RPG" for PC in the mid to late 90s. It succeeds in emulating what made those games great, however, is that something that is still fun to play today? For me, while the voice acting of all dialog is great, the lacks any animations or facial expressions. The narrator will describe the littlest thing (even laughing, when they could just have the voice actors do it, why have the narrator say "the character laughed"?). One of the great things about RPGs like Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic, Fallout 1&2, ect. is seeing the characters react to your decisions. In DOS2, you have to use your imagination, or the impact of the story is severely diminished. It's basically a book read to you aloud. That said, the combat is very similar to DOS1. It feels like you have to be at or above the level of the enemies you're fighting or you'll have a rough time. The stats system is broken, however. The only stat you need is your classes' main stat (strength, finesse, or intelligence). Constitution does not matter (when does it even really :p) because armor scales very, very quickly with each level, making the HP bonus not needed. Wit used to matter a lot, but they nerfed it in beta because it made the game too easy, so now it on affects the turn order of your highest-wit character (really lame). It's still the second best stat due to a passive 1% increase to crit chance though. Finally there is memory, which increases the number of skills you can use at once and that's it. This is only needed for some casters and even then only a couple points. You can see there isn't a whole lot of choice in what stats you choose. That's what this game comes down to, window dressing. For me, I simply want a more interactive experience and I feel like older games like Fallout are better balanced for combat and tell a better story. You can do a lot of bad things, but nothing comes of it, no one notices. That makes it less fun to me. Graphics are serviceable here, about what you'd expect for an isometric game and dated by many other genres standards. The UI is okay in that it is functional with a keyboard and mouse, but it is poor with a controller. There is not a lot of loot in the game, you'll buy much of your equipment from the shops. However, you find a lot of crafting recipes, but finding useful ones is difficult. You can play this game co-op with up to 3 others. It's not my cup of tea, but you can do that if you want. There's also a dungeon master deal where you can create your own adventure. Could be fun, but again, not what I bought the game for, so I don't have an opinion on that. The game did not appeal to me as much as the original game did and I really had to force myself to finish the first game. I was hoping for improvement here, but gone is the quirky music and dialog from the first game that I liked. You may want to wait for a sale if you're curious about this one.
If you haven't played X-Com 2 yet, you owe it to yourself to try the base game + this expansion. There are still quite a few bugs with crashes and camera issues for in-game cutscenes, but overall this is a solid game and a big improvement over the base game. The dialog/story is still a bit campy/cheesy and the new posters for solider bonds (think Fire Emblem/Disgaea bonds) are ridiculous. A lot of the new customization options for soldiers are funny, but don't fit the tone of the game imho. Some people will love the new options though. The story doesn't really get much better here. They added some new story missions regarding the new resistance factions and Chosen. The story is still very silly IMHO (bordering on stupid) and imho it loses a bit of tension it had before because of the Chosen being goofy. It's hard to believe the aliens would run the world the way they do. For example, why wouldn't the aliens simply build a ton of SAM missile batteries/anti-air ships/UFOs over the past 20 years to control any resistance? As powerful as they are, it's a bit hard to buy into. X-com 2's greatest strength is the smoothing of the campaign difficulty and progression. New players will find the game much easier to start than the base game, as the new maps are better designed with less randomization frustrating you. There are still old story missions weaved into the game, and it's a bit jarring to go back to them, for many reasons. There's new enemies, solider classes, abilities, armor, weapons, buildings, ect. which are welcome additions that consists of the other big chunk of the expansion content. I feel like they added a lot in that regard. The new Chosen enemies are neat, but a bit out of character compared to X-Come lore, as they will taunt you constantly from your base and show up constantly. It's weird to kill something in X-Com many times and not be dead and it's weird tonally for them to talk the way they do. Overall X-Com 2 War of the Chosen is a great game, provided you can deal with a few bugs, cheesy story, and retreading many old missions. I recommend it. Thanks for reading. *I did not use any mods while playing the game for this review, however, X-Com has a great mod community and that can enhance you experience greatly, depending on your tastes.*
I've played NCAA or Madden just about every year since Madden '01. I've seen many of the changes and retracting those changes and then implementing the old as new again. So is Madden. This is one of the worst Maddens in recent years for Franchise mode. Please keep in mind I only play franchise mode offline, so my review is tailored to that. PS4 Pro is my console. -The new Frostbyte engine ****. To, me I can really only tell a difference in the lighting, not much else. In exchange for that, we get MAJOR performance issues, and again this is on the PS4 Pro. The game will randomly freeze for a few seconds during a play, which is game-breaking to me. Needs hotifixing immediately. This happens fairly often and is very frustrating. -The Frostbyte engine may also be responsible for funky animations this year. I'm encountering more scenarios this year where what happened on the field does not match what happened under the hood. -Not much new in Franchise mode this year. Some minor things like auto-scouting college prospects and regression have been added back. Owner mode is in dire need of an update. For example, the Bears have a trainer whose regression trait is "bad". Why wouldn't I fire him immediately like in the real NFL? Why are there no coaches other than head coach? Why is the owner mode the same as it has been for 15 years, whereas NBA 2k owner mode is much more robust? -Even more commentary said out of context than last year. I'm not sure if the move to the new engine caused this or what. Not very much new commentary either. -No notification in game who was injured. Commentators oblivious to this. Injury notifaction has been in past Maddens, not sure why it's not it's not implemented in this year's version. -Halftime show/post game wrap up is still poor compared to 2K sports games and real NFL broadcasts. -Legacy bugs were not fixed, like your depth chart rearranging from the the splash screen still does not stick. -Run game is undertuned on the inside and off tackle. Over-tuned run plays on the outside for some plays, broken on others (again). I don't know if this is because the game expects you to use more play maker moves and less follow your blocks or what, but it doesn't feel good unless I use only "cheese" runs with base slider settings. The good: -Kicking/Punting has been made harder this year. If you go outside the limits of the meter, expect an auto-shank at 50+ yards, a needed change. -Pass interference is called at a more realistic rate, while holding and illegal block in the back calls are slightly less frequent. -Away from the ball injuries are now actually possible in game and do happen, just like standard injuries. -QB accuracy has been reduced on the medium-low end. I was playing as the Bears rookie QB and 1/4 passes were just complete ducks that were uncatchable balls, some lead to interceptions. More RNG interceptions are not fun, especially since you have limited control over it. Granted, the animations are quite over-exaggerated so it makes your QB look like a wild-armed pitcher sometimes. -Still a solid game of football and the only NFL one out there.
Prey is a first-person shooter that tries very hard to emulate Bioshock, in that you use powers and the environment to kill enemies, not just traditional weaponry. Prey's biggest flaw is that it wants to be both a survival horror game like Resident Evil and an action thriller like Bioshock, but it pulls off neither effectively. Elements from both game-play styles get in the way of each other. Let me explain. From the survival horror aspect, the game tries to emulate the clunky controls, resource starvation, inventory management and creepy sounds/jump scares of a Resident Evil game. Problems: A. Enemies are too numerous and re-spawn each time you load into a "zone". Not just scripted events like Resident Evil, these are almost full respawns of enemies and there is no limit to how often they can respawn. You are given too few resources to deal with all of these enemies, even with upgrades. The enemies rarely drop useful resources. This strongly discourages going back to open rooms that were previously locked, or going back to do side quests. B. You get very powerful by the end of the game in some aspects, to the point that the game would be very easy if you just had the resources you wanted. You can still use certain powers to escape and run/sneak by everything if you don’t have what you need. It **** all the tension out of the game encountering so many enemies and for the most part easily overpowering them. C. No storage box to hold extra inventory. It feels like you’re required to take the extra inventory space perks. D. Lacks enemy variety/bosses. The enemies that are here are very fast, semi-random behavior, and very powerful. Early on especially, but even later, enemies can feel cheap. Tracking these quick enemies as they teleport and scurry about, some even transforming to objects in the game to hide can be frustrating. They still do high damage late, but you have more ways to deal with them. E. Story is mostly told through e-mail and audio logs. The audio logs are well done, but I find it hard to care about these people I’ve never met. It’s not interesting. I read enough e-mail at work, so I’m not sure why the devs thought reading e-mails would be fun, it’s not. I stopped reading the e-mails about mid game. The story is absolutely silly, in that it’s supposed to be set in an alternate reality of the year 2031. I guess we’re supposed to suspend our disbelief that people in the future will use tons of paper, post-it notes, and white boards, despite having modern computers, still smoke like it’s the 50’s (the game says they’ve apparently cured cancer, so smoking is considered as dangerous as a can of soda; WTF smoking still has many other issues), still leave passwords lying around exactly how companies today tell you not to, ect. Yet they also created a very impressive space station, escape pods, 3-D printing, matter deconstruction, ect. It doesn’t mesh well. It also borrows so heavily from Bioshock aesthetically that I found the game rather boring to look at. The enemies don’t help matters as they are just blobs of black. They lack personality and are neither scary nor impressive. Prey is also a problem as an action game as well. Again you’ll see why: A. Pacing issues cause the game to slow down. You get to scoot around the space station, but it is so slow and the U.I. is bad about labeling the way-points all the time, so it’s easy to get lost. It’s also large, so it’s slow to get around. Also, every time you leaving a zone or load your game, it takes literally 3 minutes for the game to load. This is on a PS4 Pro with boost mode enabled and a custom installed hybrid hard drive, which is faster than stock. Unacceptable considering how simple the game is. B. Lack of resources make the game not as fun as it could be. If it’s an action game, ammo/health shouldn’t be that hard to come by. Prey has an identity crisis. C. Cheap damage from environment. You can take absurd amounts of damage to your space suit running into things in space, or stepping on a puddle of fire, touching electricity that will jump out at you from a broken panel, ect. Since this is a first person game, these things are harder to avoid than you would think, and many times it’s easy to do this by accident and take massive damage, even with mods to reduce damage. It’s very annoying. D. The U.I. gets in the way. You only get 3 programmable hotkeys for weapons/items, so you’ll constantly be going in and out of the menu to sway/use items. Can you have fun with Prey? Sure, I liked the game enough to finish it. I got it on sale for $40 too, but I'd still say if you've play this type of game before, hold out for a price of about $20 to get your money's worth. The campaign is about 30 hours, but that's not to say all of those hours are enjoyable. Most of the game feels like a worse version of past games, executed with average effort.
Digaea 5 is a solid strategy/tactical RPG for the Switch. Don't be fooled by the "complete" in the title of this game as all it includes is the free day 1 DLC from the PS4 version. I think non-hardcore strategy RPG /anime fans will have trouble getting into this game, as it is full of anime cliches and many complicated interconnected systems. A game, like a movie, needs to be aware of how much is too much. All the systems are cool from a value standpoint, but is it fun to trudge through them over and over again on over 50 characters? No, probably not. It can be fun at times, like the new Revenge system that gives your character the ability to have a "limit break" of sorts and some are very powerful. The odd thing is some characters can use their revenge abilities right away, while others have to wait until they reach a certain point in the story, sometimes very late in the game. This causes confusing as you'll still fill your "Revenge" meter and be wondering why the game would let you fill it if you can't use it. Item world (you can go inside a randomly generated level dungeon inside an item to level it up) has been revamped as well. It's a lot more forgiving and enjoyable than past iterations IMHO. There's also a new board game "Chara World" that can be used to give your characters some awesome boosts as well. You have so many characters in Disgaea 5 that doing all these activities for each character can get overwhelming and exhausting. You do have to do at least some of it to get a high enough level/stats to progress the story. It can get monotonous. Disgaea 5 is a time sink. The story and characters you've seen before so I'm not sure if many people will like this game unless you have A LOT of time to devote to grinding and min/maxing your characters, which is the least fun it has been, simply due to the needless layers of complexity. The game scales in such a way the prior Disgaea games were much slower to progress too throughout the main story. The story is about anime and Disgaea cliche as it gets. Some people will love this, but I think many people will be bored by it. The voice acting is great, albeit the usual crew (personally I'm getting tired of Lucy from "Fairy Tail" being in almost EVERYTHING games and anime, but that won't bother you if you don't play many games/watch anime). The writing however is just okay. You have the main character that eats a lot (see every anime ever), the Etna clone from Disgaea 1 who uses people and mistreats Prinnies, a monster-servant penguin in the game, demons in the game not acting like demons should ect. I wish they mixed up the story a lot more personally, as it is too similar to prior games. The game runs super smooth on Switch docked or in handheld mode, so there is no technical problems with the game. I did have one "an unexpected error occurred and the game has to close", but it was just once, so I'm not going count that against Disgaea 5. The resolution looks good as well on a big screen, no jaggies, textures look good. Again I love tactical RPGs and have played a good portion of them. Disgaea 5 is solid, but veterans of the series may be bored, while newcomers may be overwhelmed by all the systems, even if the game introduces them gradually. I think the game would have benefited from some streamlining. As it stands, this game will probably just appeal to fans of strategy RPGs and JRPGs.
Should you buy Persona 5 (P5)? If you're a hardcore fan of the series, of JRPGs in general, or you really enjoy slice of life anime, then yes. Persona 5 is a unique experience if you've never played a Persona game before. Since it's been a long time since Persona 3 on PS2, this is probably going to be many people's first Persona game. So, I highly recommend this to people that are fans of video games in general because there're no games like Persona series. I played this game on a PS4 Pro with a custom hard drive. This minimized load times for me, but there were a lot of them. They were so short they didn't bother me however. I've finished the game at 110 hours, although you can finish in as little as 90 like my brother did. Lets give a critique by category: Graphics: Nothing impressive here. This is a game developed for the PS3 after all, ported to the PS4. The animations are worse than prior games. You character just stands there most of the game, occasionally doing a gesture. There are not facial animations at all. Even the character portraits when the character talks just have a mouth moving. They could have used several portraits for each character, like in past games/other JRPGs. The art style is fantastic and really carries the game however. There are very few object that have a model in game, for example, if I spend $100 on a gift for someone, it would be cool to see the gift being given. 6/10 Music/Sound/Voice: You'll hear some really catchy tracks in this game. The music is by far the best in the series. The voice acting is top notch, my only complaint is that some of the voice actors used are a bit too familiar and I would have appreciated new voices I haven't heard before. The game lacks musics tracks for how long the game is, which is the case in every Persona game. The sounds effects are what you would expect, I thought they were great. 8/10 Story/Writing: Here's where things turn ugly for P5. The game shamelessly follow a VERY similar structure to P3, which makes it boring to fans of the Persona series. From characters, to overall plot, as you go along, you'll see what I mean. The game also has less voice acting than expected and a lot of reading boring exposition in the form of text message conversation. The text conversations I mostly skipped through because it's small talk that just restates what the game has already gone over to death. There are some interesting characters and plot lines from the minor characters at least and the game rewards you with additional powers for spending time with the characters, so you are at least given incentives to go through the characters stories you may not like. There's so much dialog in the game between the main characters, I'm not sure if they needed as much as they put in. You will get fatigued reading unimportant day to day drivel that blows up your phone. There are more places than ever to go to than ever and while small, they all were interesting if you enjoy Japanese culture at all. There are also a ton of secondary locations that you can choose to take some of your social links to, which is new to the series and a great addition. It's not that P5 writing is bad, it's that there's too much boring dialog and that the overall story and characters too closely follow P3. This is a highly subjective category and doesn't weigh that heavily into overall score due to that. 4/10 Controls: Not much to say here as it's a very basic game to control. The new stealth mechanics are obnoxious to control as the camera doesn't automatically pan to your next cover area like it should. This can lead to you accidentally unsticking from cover and getting ambushed. Getting ambushed by the enemy early on most likely mean you lose. 8/10 Which leads me to gameplay... Gameplay: The game can be fun often, but there are several **** issues holding the game back. Namely they brought back some old school features that ****. Did anyone like that you lose a battle when your main character dies in P3? They got rid of that "feature" in P4, but brought it back here. You also got full mana and health by attaining a level in P3, but here you do not, forcing you to go back out of the main dungeons more often than you may want early on. The highly praised main dungeons are just okay. The puzzles are very easy and you are too often forced to fight more enemies than you would like do to the sticky cover controls being imprecise. Also, regardless of how high level you are, enemies will always chase you. In past games, if you were higher level than the enemy, the enemy would run away from you. The battle system is improved in that you can get some cool abilities that weren't in to old games. They also brought back guns and the ability to talk to Personas to catch them, both from Persona 1, which I thought was cool. The problem with talking to Personas is that it takes more time than the previous roulette wheel in an already long game. 7/10
I love the Mass Effect series and had high hopes for this game, but ME: Andromeda is so buggy you would think it was developed by ants. I've experienced just about every type of bug I could think of, thankfully I was at least able to finish the game and my save file was okay. I can't believe a AAA game was released in this state. DA: inquisition wasn't shipped this way, not even close. The strong point of the game is the combat, it's a lot more free flowing and fast paced the DA: Inquisition.. However, you do so much of it against the same handful of enemies it grows tedious over time and very easy. They needed a lot more enemy variety for a game this size. The graphics are fair, many worlds are barren (that's conveniently part of the story), but other areas have nice lighting effects. Animations are very dated and bad, with very few in-engine cut scenes compared to prior games. The game runs like ass, even on my set up (gtx 970, 16 gb ram, core I5, Samsung solid state drive), using the "auto detect" settings and has TONS of hidden load screens. They took all the pleasure out of exploring the galaxy by having 5 loading screens between going from 1 colony planet to another. It's atrocious design and will bore you. But that's not the only thing that drags down the game... The writing a big step down from the original trilogy. Ryder rarely has anything interesting to say in dialog wheels, but there are some moments here and there. I was disappointed I couldn't be as aggressive or persuasive in conversation as Shepard or other RPGs. Since dialog is mostly boring you will find yourself skipping it often (which is sad because this is my favorite thing in Bioware games). Also, there is A LOT more important information in the form of data pads/e-mails, ect. E.A./Bioware apparently wanted to save costs on voice acting, so much of the less generic info is in text, which is a shame. Oh, and btw the way, the ending is every bit as bad as ME 3, if you didn't like it's ending (I did). There are many unresolved plot points and this is a stand-alone game according to Bioware (wtf are we getting DLC? none is announced), which is disappointing. There is some cool info revealed in the end though, so it's worth getting to the end for that if you feel like you want to quit midway into the game like I did. There are some many pointless, repetitive side quests that I would recommend skipping. If you stick to the main quests you're going to have a much better time. Even then you can see they putt a lot of pointless backtracking and tons and tons of fighting the same easy enemies over and over to pad the game. You fight the 1 boss type there is in this games literally 5 different times. It's so lazy. Character progression is okay. It's largely copy/pasted from Mass Effect 3, which is disappointing, but you can mix and match powers from combat, tech, and biotics which is cool (although it hurts the story somewhat imho, as powers aren't used in dialog options like other ME/Bioware games). It's mostly boring passive stat boosts to you powers. I like that picking a class gives unique perks now and that you can reset your powers anytime. Melee combat is actually viable this time so being a Vanguard works really well, expect against big enemies which will still 1 shot you if you get too close. There's a weird garrison mission screen like in World of Warcraft called "strike teams". It's very lame, but thankfully you can skip it and not miss anything. The also have a system similar to the power system similar to DA: Inquisition, except it's not required to unlock new areas and is much less interesting as far as your choices are concerned. I didn't try multiplayer as it does not interest me, so please keep that in mind. I heard it's decent. All in all, I can only recommend this game to hardcore ME fans or people that love combat regardless of how repetitive it is and want to do multiplayer as well. The game is full of issues that won't be corrected by a patch or two. The game needed 6 months to a year more of development to iron out issues with numerous bugs as well as game design flaws, as the game doesn't seem to have made it out of late alpha before it was released. Here's to hoping we get updates to fix this game in the future. With no mod support like Fallout 4 had, well, only Bioware can bail themselves out.
I very, very rarely consider a game a 10, but Zelda is the best open world game since modern open world games became prevalent with the release of GTA 3. This is coming from a guy that doesn't usually like many Zelda games. Breath of the Wild still feels like Zelda in some ways, but forget most of what you knew about Zelda. Many of the things that were annoying or clunky were removed from Zelda to make the game more fun (like needing bottles to hold things, now you can just catch and put into your inventory or you can catch fish just by swimming up to them and grabbing them, no need for a fishing pole, ect.). The combat is fluid and Dark Souls like (but not hard like DS). The crafting system takes what makes it fun in other games, but still give you useful items if you make a dud. Yes weapons break quickly, but you find new ones all the time and you have other creative ways to slay enemies using your powers or the environment. The are lots of different enemies to fight with different behavior and attacks depending on their element or the weapon they hold. The real joy in Zelda is the exploration. Never before has an open-world game felt so intriguing. There's always something interesting right around the corner to discover. This isn't your run of the mill, same repeated crap over and over. I'm continually surprised how often I find or do something that was unexpected and that's what makes the exploration so much fun. The game is great at providing rewards that make you actually want to explore the world, unlike most other open world games. The art style is gorgeous even if some of the textures are low resolution. The frame rate can get choppy at times. These things are very minor and don't detract from the experience. The music is a great mix of old and new and is very appropriate and pleasing to listen too. The sound effects are fine and the classics are all there. There is little voice acting (only in cutscenes) and NPCs talk where they make weird noises before they speak like in other Zelda games. The story is more fleshed out than other Zelda games. No it's not a Bioware game, but should you explore the main story you'll get a lot of lore and exposition from the many NPCs. I don't want to spoil anything, but it's much better than prior Zelda games. The game can be harder than a normal Zelda game at first because the game has a lot of new "rules", but once you get used to it, the game is joy to play. The dungeons are broken up into small shrines, which is an excellent change. The shrine challenges are fun puzzles which are usually moderate difficulty, there were none that I couldn't figure out after trying for a while. This game is like Ocarina of Time for N64, a revolution in its time that I expect many games to try and mimic in design going forward. Other open world games simply can't compare because they aren't nearly this much fun to explore. I recommend Breath of the Wild to anyone, all ages and genders.
Dragon Quest Builders does so much right you want to love it, but there are many annoyances that will make you think "Enix doesn't understand what makes these games fun". Let me break it down by category. Graphics: Charming and pleasing to the eye, the visuals are great, albeit simplistic. You can see miles in the distance from up high, there are nice shadows and weather effects, ect. The animations are a bit basic and few in number, as is tradition for any Dragon Quest game, but they are also satisfying. The worlds are not randomly generated like in Minecraft, so you would expect more variation in enemies and environments. Sadly within a biome, there isn't too much variation. The game maintains a very smooth frame rate throughout the game, no hiccups. No bugs or technical issues as well, the game is very polished. Character customization is a joke for 2016. Pick your hair color, eye color, skin color, gender and that's it. 7/10 Sound: The same Dragon Quest music you've heard before many times. The songs are fitting and sound wonderful, but there's nothing new here. I never got to the point where I turned off the music, but it gets quite repetitive listen to the same 3 tracks for most of the game. Many of the classic sound effects are also used. This may be a negative for some while a positive for others looking for a nostalgia trip. Overall, I feel Enix (as per usual) is being a bit lazy. Oh and of course there's no voice acting, be prepared to read lots of dialog. 6/10 Gameplay: Thankfully, the game is at least fun, at first anyway. Progression starts out very slowly then ramps up as you go along. There are a lot of design choices that Enix did that make you want to say "wow this is awesome", like the ability to access a giant storage chest anywhere at anytime and overflow will automatically go to this chest. Or, the fact that you can build a fort made of dirt, then use an item to change large amounts of the dirt to any number of other materials very quickly and easily. However, once you get near the middle of Chapter 1, bad design choices rear their ugly heads. For one, when you move to Chapter 2 YOU LOSE EVERYTHING. That's right, everything. You start completely from scratch. That awesome accessory I got that reduces all fall damage to 0, gone. It's like in an RPG if you cleared the first chapter and they stripped everything from you and you started from level 1 again. It's truly shocking that RPG makers would make this jarring decision, punishing you for stockpiling resources and exploring. Instead of farming new and more powerful materials, you start from square one again. Instead of building more elaborate structures, you're back to macking small dirt hovels. Some items are simply reskinned to fit the biome, while most are unchanged. It's very hard to accept this while playing and it honestly make me want to quit right there. Enix seems to think that having monsters constantly attacking your base and then having to rebuild your rooms is fun. It gets annoying when your trying to build during the day and "monsters appear" and start destroying your town. The defenses are weak and the townsfolk are too dumb/slow/weak to handle the monsters, so stopping the monster attacks requires your intervention starting mid chapter 1. The attacks happen every day and ghosts attack you EVERY night without fail. It gets old. These monsters are easy to kill and your character doesn't have too many moves other than smashing the attack button and a charge up move that is ofter too slow to be useful (you'll get knocked out of it and if you jump it cancels the charge up). Deeper combat would not have been that hard for Enix to achieve. IN Progress...
Overwatch is a game that can be extremely fun in short bursts, especially with friends. The graphics are gorgeous and the control is smooth and responsive. Finding a match is easy and quick usually. The characters designs are interesting and their powers are impactful and fun. Why is this game not a 10/10 like some of the critic reviews, you may be asking yourself. Overwatch has several shortcomings (knowing Blizzard these will be fixed in time) that hold it back from a full recommendation to all gamers. For one this game is only a multiplayer online shooter, so you are subject to other people's success and failure as much as your own and that can be frustrating at times, especially considering the amount of teamwork required. One guy who refuses to change classes to help the team can lose you the game. If no one wants to play tank or healer, well, good luck winning. Also, there a decent amount of maps, but the game could certainly use more. If you're not the type of FPS fan that likes to like of things like strategy and meta, than this may not appeal to you. If you're very competitive, this may not appeal to you, as you can only control 1/6 of the outcome of the game, unless you make a team with your friends. Finally if you want a story mode or something novel other than standard multiplayer matches you can find elsewhere you may be disappointed. People that love online competitive TEAM shooters, will love this game, but many people will get bored quickly as there isn't a whole lot of modes (yet) or things you haven't seen before. Its solid and very well made, as is tradition with Blizzard, but it's lacking reasons for FPS vets to change over from there game of choice other than being a fun, by the numbers experience. Thanks for reading.
Don't let all the 9's and 10's fool you, this game will not appeal to everyone. As others have stated, this is a Persona game much than a Fire Emblem game. The Persona (or "Performa" in this game) you get are FE characters and there are some neat sound effects and weapons from FE, but that's about it. The story and setting are VERY cheesy and Japanese (they're scenes where the characters spin around naked and equip armor like in Sailor Moon ffs and not just the women). Also, this is the 3rd or 4th game now that I have played that takes place in photo-realistic Tokyo. setting and it's getting old. It's cool to walk around Tokyo if you haven't in other games though, so try it out if you haven't before. There are many other settings Atlus come on. I swear it borrows the map engine from Digimon Cyber Sluth, but I cannot confirm that. From the opening cinematic and dialog, you're thrust into the games first dungeon and acquire you powers, with no real setup like in a true Persona game. It's ridiculous, but if you can buy into the story, good for you. Atlus doesn't take the time to develop the characters enough to make me care about wanting to save this world. The spend about 30 min. in the beginning with uninteresting dialog before you even get to play. They do try to develop the characters, but most it standard ra-ra go team believe in yourself cliches from many other animes. They're are some funny dialog choices though, but they're very rare. The visuals are nice and the art style is fantastic as one would expect from an Atlus RPG. It's very colorful and may get you into these types of games if you felt Persona was too dark. The character animations are good, but not great and honestly need to be better for the West because the game only has English subtitles, but no dubs sadly, which greatly reduces my enjoyment of the game. The music is typical JPoP fare that one would expect from Atlus. It's good, but repetitive in places. You will have to endure quite a few musical numbers that are skippable thankfully, but skipping these scenes means you're missing out on a large chunk of what the devs put a lot of production in. The singing isn't bad per se, but being mostly in Japanese, it's hard to get into. It's a double edged sword. The battle system is good as others have mentioned, but not amazing by any means, if you have played Persona, you've played this before. The key difference is instead of "knocking the enemy down" whne you exploit the enemy's weakness like in Persona, your allies get a free attack if they have an attack of the same type you used. It feels quicker and works well. Persona vets will find battles easy, as enemies have many weaknesses, however, when the enemy finds your character's weaknesses, they still deal tons of damage and can KO them very easily. Sadly, characters are not brought back after the battle ends and you don't get a revive spell until later in the game, so you are forced into loading up on revival items, which are expensive and this makes some enemies fell cheap or unfair (just like in Persona, but even worse because the "strong" enemies level with you, even in old dungeons). You start with full control of your party member which is great . Chaining attacks together is cool at first, but you see it so often it gets old and also later in the game they get longer. As long as you defeat enemies, you will unlock new weapons for free, so the only thing you need money for is accessories (and new costumes for you team, if you want, they're cosmetic only). Persona is already a game without many armor slots, so with only one piece of armor to worry about, this is a very light/casual RPG. Unlike Persona, there are no social links and no school, but of course your character and friends are high schoolers. This trope has been done to death and it's really stale imo. Maybe that's what sells the best in Japan, but everything about the story is cliche in my humble opinion. Heck one of the characters you get in the beginning feel like a reincarnated Junpei from Persona 3, same moves, stats, and strengths/weaknesses. Another character looks like a clone of the main character from Persona 3. Their personalities are different though. Dungeons are big and empty (other than the shadows or "mirages" as they're called in this game. Their are now puzzles though, because the dungeons are no longer procedural, they are the same each time. The puzzles are stupid easy and essential involve flipping a switch. The dungeon themes are interesting to look at, at first, but they really feel like a PS2-era dungeon design still, 2 generations later. Overall this is a good game, without many bugs or technical issues and improves some areas from Persona 4, but I would only recommend it to hardcore JRPG fans, who probably did a majority of the reviews on this site. The game is cheesy and basic. With less content and things to do than Persona 4, it's almost a step backward for the series. Thank you.
