RadicalRic

Armored Core Nexus is unfairly criticized by the same things some critics praised Dark Souls for (a game that is also from the same developer). Steep learning curve and difficult battles are nothing compared to the feeling of satisfaction of building and mastering your own mech.

This game is charming, unique, happy, funny and it will surprise you sometimes. It's made with love and care, trying to make you remember the good things about videogames and what made you enjoy them in the first place. Unfortunately it's really short but sometimes happiness is meant to be felt in short bursts. It also gets somewhat repetitive and hard to get into because it's fanbase is one of the loudest and obnoxiously obssessed with it. If you have the pure bliss of getting into this game without knowing anything about it, you'll like it. And if you want your friends to play it please don't be a **** and don't tell them anything about it, it'll spoil it for them.

There's hardly any wow factor in this game. If you close your eyes and try to imagine any generic post-apocalyptic setting, you'll find everything of the concepts you imagined in the first 4 seconds. Sure, there's 50s music and fedoras, but that's pretty much it. The problem is that the Fallout series were all about crazyness, and the predecessor to this particular game was as crazy as a war between cowboys and the roman empire in post-apocalyptic Las Vegas who was now a robot controlled city ruled by an immortal mind connected to a machine. There's none of that interesting uniqueness here, just exploring a wasteland and make your own living out of scrap metal and rubber tires. There's a story somewhere in between that hardly made me involved. Shooting at things is still fun, regardless.

It's funny how a videogame that is judged for being crude is actually pretty classy. Everything here is smooth, down to the music, and the tiny details. On the higher level of things there's the frantic, over-the-top action gameplay. Fans of the Devil May Cry and God of War series will feel more than welcome by Bayonetta's presentation and build-up. You'll feel good when you dodge and you'll feel strong when you attack, and also humbled by all the bosses, the cutscenes and the tension building up only to explode at what some consider one of the best final bosses ever.

At the height of popularity of the RTS genre, Warcraft III delivered something so polished and complete that it could be the only videogame in your library at that time and you would still be considered a gamer. This game has something to hook almost every type of person. It was smaller issues, mostly relevant to competitive play, that kept Warcraft III away from it's perfection. It delivers in every other angle. There's story, there's design, there's music, there's even one of the most complete and powerful modding engines. Blizzard never planned this game to have a ending, and some are still playing it.

It doesn't feel finished, nor polished. Not even after years. There's hardly any conveyance for the player to have a sense of progression and it takes less than 2 hours to achieve most relevant things in the game. The rest of it is so niche that almost nobody will do it. Yes, building is fun, but the game doesn't test the worth of your building skills whatsoever. In fact, the only value your builds have is purely subjective and set by players, because the game doesn't reinforce it's own strengths. If voxel based builders are tools to create art, then Minecraft is equivalent to Microsoft Paint, and we're in a long road to reach something on the level of Adobe Photoshop or Paint Tool SAI.

Despite the gorgeous visuals, nice character design and polished gameplay, you can feel the lack of Yasumi Matsuno's genius. Still, this game delivers exactly what it promised. It's a charming time-waster and it's fun to experiment with the gameplay system, trying all the jobs and mastering your characters. True to it's name, it feels like a grimoire of stories of common folk that lived in Ivalice. Each quest text and notice has a simple but well-written short tale. Just don't expect anything deep or memorable out of here. You could try the original Final Fantasy Tactics for that.