Saikron

I waited to get this game for $15 bucks, and I'm glad I didn't pay full price. What really gets my goat is that early on in the game there's a 2 or 3 minute fight with a pack of werewolves that is really awesome. It's spooky, it's fun, it's exciting. The other 99.9% of the game is an unsatisfying combination of quick-time-event battles, walking simulator, and low quality cover shooter. Why? Why?! did we not have a ton of more action oriented, 0 cover based combat against supernatural creatures? Another thing that the game does that pisses me off is it inexplicably takes away my weapons. They'll give me a lightning cannon or a thermite gun and sometimes take it way literally 2 minutes later with no reason or explanation. If you pick up a rifle you like off the ground, frequently the next cutscene will cause the game to start you over again with nothing but a pistol. The game seems to be actively trying to stop me from enjoying it. The graphics are impressive, in a sense. The draw distance, letterbox format, and fake mirrors stick out as obvious crutches that were necessary to get such a pretty game running on consoles. The visual character design and the look of the city is excellent.

It seemed too good to be true that there are 20-something balanced heroes in OW, so I had to pick up the game and find out for myself. It's technically correct that the heroes are all varied and balanced, but the way Blizzard has balanced them has been to make them all have fairly glaring weaknesses that need support. There are other games that are perfectly balanced where you still feel like you can make a big difference in a game, but in OW if the teammate you need to support you fails you're going to fail too without question. Players are essentially cogs in Blizzard's team synergy machine (but they're such well balanced cogs!). I think a great point of comparison is Evolve, which many critics said was too simplistic. OW is by any measure more simplistic than Evolve, except to maintain fake balance your abilities don't do anything compared to what they would in Evolve. If you don't do something about the Shield Beam in Evolve, the monster will lose without question, and when the Support goes down if the monster can't keep him from getting revived that can be game over. In contrast, Zarya in OW has a shield that lasts like 2 seconds. Big **** deal. Reinhardt's shield can be broken by Bastion in like 3 seconds - but it's never just Bastion, is it? I can't explain why I keep playing it.

I bought this early and had a ton of fun before development was completed, but I was a little disappointed to see that not much else was added since early access.

This is essentially a mechanic-for-mechanic copy of Dark Souls. Unfortunately, the differences were to its detriment. The map is huge and confusing even compared to a Souls game, and there is no in-game map to keep track of where you are. The items aren't nearly as diverse as in any Souls game. The bosses aren't as fun as the average Souls boss. It probably would have been better to focus on quality over quantity in the boss department.

The game itself is fun. The weapons are awesome. The grind rails, lazer puzzles, and boss battles are great. What I don't like about it is that the cutscenes need quite a bit of love. Many of them seem to end like 3 seconds early, and a few of them don't make any sense. One specific time was when Ratchet helped Quark climb up a ledge after a boss battle. I said "wut? k.." because there was no explanation for when or how he got down there so it just felt really non sequitur. It seemed like some of the cutscenes were just removed and they never went back to edit the ones they kept to fit together. There was also a really frustrating bug during a part of the game where you have to stop the baddies from pressing a big red button that kills you instantly. I was using the Groovitron to interrupt them from pressing the button, but that only worked like 7/10 times. A few times I was looking right at the button. Nobody pressed it, but I still died instantly.

You can tell this game was crafted with passion. The core gameplay is similar to cookie clicker - grow A to sell for $100 so you can buy seeds for B to grow and sell for $500 and so on, but what really impressed me was how well the game conveys the feeling of living in Pleasantville USA. The townspeople are friendly with a bunch of different personalities and secret problems. I'm usually a very "get the OP weapon and beat the game as fast as possible" type of player, but **** Valley is one of the very few games where I enjoyed messing around as much as I enjoyed trying to best my own high scores.

I always feel like I'm in crazy town when I read reviews or press on this game. It's not the best or worst thing ever. It's not a revolutionary example of storytelling in games. It's not part of some secret liberal agenda to make us all gay. It's a one hour long, thesis project quality walking simulator with an emotional story. It's not worth $10.

People have called Call of Duty dumbed down and a kiddie's FPS mainly due to the ease of weapon handling and death streak bonuses. This game targets an even younger, even less experienced audience. Their main design goals seem to have been to recreate the Star Wars universe in the Frostbite engine in a game that a wide variety of people can play. This means that the game sounds and looks great. The maps look great. It's just that the gameplay doesn't get much more complicated than aiming and managing heat. I haven't been able to drive a vehicle yet, but in the X Wing you don't even have to aim. Targetting computers lock on and achieve perfect accuracy. For me this is just barely worth $60. I'll probably play it a couple of weeks and get bored. Once all the DLC is on sale for like $20 I'll get that too.

If you liked and aren't tired of Far Cry, Batman, Assassin's Creed, and Shadow of Mordor, you will probably like this too. Personally, I couldn't care less if they have crafting, combo-combat, pressing forward while holding a button, or any of the other stuff from those games. I'm honestly kind of tired of it. You know what we needed in 2013? A 3D platformer. Adding in Assassin's Creed level computer assist to Tomb Raider destroys the gameplay to the point that it shouldn't be called a platformer anymore. This TR is only a few button presses away from being a walking simulator. 3 points for graphics.

I heard that this game didn't have much meat to it when it released, so I waited 4 months to buy it. It still doesn't have much meat to it. Until you level up to 10, you can only play 2 different maps for the day. The maps are kind of simplistic, so I got bored with both maps within an hour. I had to wait until the following day for two more maps. I guess these are randomly picked because I only got to play one new one and the same one from yesterday. As far as I can tell there is only one game mode for online play, and that is to try to paint more of the map with your color than your opponent can paint with theirs. Paint rollers are so strong that two sneaky guys can flip 25% of the map in the last few seconds of the game. They're supposed to be short range weapons but you can sling paint from them almost as far as the automatic rifles shoot. Once you start to get matched with higher skilled players it seems like every game is either a boring, crushing loss or a boring, complete victory. 3/5 of the time one team is forced into their spawn and can't leave. This is partly based on team skill, but it's also based on what weapons you picked before you joined. It can be nearly impossible for one team to leave their spawn vs another depending on the weapon matchup - WHICH YOU CAN'T CHANGE WITHOUT LEAVING THE GAME! I'm not sure I'll ever put the disc back in.

Personally, I would have preferred FROM to combine the 3 DLC installments into a $20-$30 package and release that. As it is, the DLC feels a little too short with only 3 bosses a short run from each other, but at least there is a couple of cool new items. I think the best thing about it is the new level mechanics. There are puzzles that have to be solved with hidden switches throughout the DLC.

There is actually a great card game underneath the provocative artwork and boring dialogue. Players battle their opponent on a 3x7 grid with castles at each end. The goal is to play cards in each of the 3 lanes which advance toward your opponents castle and attack/defend automatically. When your castle is destroyed or you run out of cards, you lose. It sounds simple, and it will feel boring for the first few matches, but then you quickly unlock the extra mechanics that make the game more strategic. Cards can have skills and special traits that give players some tactical opportunities instead of simply duking it out with your highest attacking cards. There are some really interesting combo mechanics that make your decisions more interesting than just dropping your biggest card in your hand. You have to strategically consider whether you want to play a color combo, fuse two cards to combine their power, defend a lane, or create one powerful lane to push through your opponent's defense.

It took me 20 minutes to even get a map to completely load. I kept getting stuck waiting for the UI to come up after joining a server. In only 25 minutes of playing after that, I found several bugs that I doubt will ever be fixed. When you can't do basic things like walk up a ladder or if there are ugly looking patches on the map where the level designers didn't bother to line up the geometry, this is more than just evidence of where the game is in development. This is evidence of how much the developers care about the game and evidence of their ability to make it. This lack of quality really demotivated me to try and figure out where the actual resource caches are. I looked all over and through abandoned buildings and only found 2 containers. One needed a key that you pay real money to open, and the other one was empty. I paid only $3 for this game on sale, and I still feel ripped off.

This is very similar to many existing games, but there are 3 things that make Luftrausers stick out among those. First, plane customization is fun and addictive. You can modify the engine, body, and weapon of your plane, and each piece is unlocked by completing objectives with the other pieces. Second, you can stall your plane and let gravity take its course. This gives you the opportunity to pull off some awesome maneuvers and also makes it a little bit more difficult and interesting. Third, the art style of this game is completely unique. It's monochrome with pixelated graphics that remind me of playing GameBoy games on GBColor. I would score it a 10, but for just a single player game with one map and game type, $10 seems just a little steep. I was happy to pay $8 for it on sale.

Dark Souls II might be my favorite of the 3 games. The UI is currently a little buggy, but it has seen some significant design improvements over the previous games. I feel like in many cases it tries and succeeds to mix the best of both worlds from Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. Death is more punishing than ever, there is a stronger incentive to co-op, there are many more PvP covenants, there is a sparring arena. On top of that the game has a ton of physics and graphics improvements over previous games. Some may not like the brighter, more pastel aesthetic, but it's a fact that the technical quality of the graphics has been bumped up a bit. The physics of the game have been improved by simplifying how smaller, more numerous objects interact and instead focusing on the physics of larger objects like barrels and characters. I like seeing my clothes react and pushing boxes/barrels around at 30fps a lot better than I like watching 4251098 pieces of wood and bodies spaz about at 10fps as sometimes happened in DS1.

The mystery-solving aspect of this game is way overhyped. This is an interactive novel first, a carnival game second, and is just barely a logic puzzle game at all. I played on "Kind", or the middle difficulty, and found that the characters would more or less rub evidence in your face. I gave that a pass and continued to play, curious about the story and how it would play out, but two major problems stuck out for me. First, the titular "refutation bullets" that you use to refute false statements aren't used consistently. In some parts of the game, you are meant to use refutation bullets to support true statements. This could have been avoided with some simple rewording so that refutation bullets actually refute things. The way the system is currently designed turns the trials into word association games or "guess the best match" games instead of actually using logic to find contradictions as they relate to the case. Second, the timeline segments of trials is not fun and pointless. Basically, once the game has told you for the 1,000th time what happened because you are an idiot, it asks you to put these little pictures in the correct frames in a manga to show for the 1,0001st time what happened. Most of the time that wasn't so bad, but there was at least one timeline where two of the pictures had no discernible order. Like in the trial segment of the game, you are reduced to guessing. If you can't trust the system in a logical puzzle game, it's not a logical puzzle game. I'm sure people who have played the game are reading this and thinking "yeah well you should have play it on hard, casual1!!1" This only changes the amount of hints you get and increases the difficulty of the carnival minigames. It doesn't change the fact that refutation bullets are illogical (1/4 of the time you use them to support things, not refute things) or that putting clipart in order is lame after you have already reached the conclusion of the trial.

I've played every monster hunting game for Vita released in NA that I know of, and I was a huge fan of MHTri on the Wii, and I can finally say that MH has some worthy competition now. To be clear, Toukiden's only competition is currently on another platform. On the Vita, there isn't a better monster hunting game than Toukiden. I feel that the main criticisms that one could make about the game is that most of it is too easy. I prefer the difficulty of Tri, where the game can be difficult because you choose not to grind for better gear and therefore face tougher battles, or you could choose to grind for better gear until the battles were easier, but you probably spend more time grinding that failing and retrying boss fights. I much prefer having that choice over what happens in Toukiden, where the battles are decidedly easy until the game is almost over, and on top of that it's not difficult to keep up on gear without repeating any areas at all. All that means the overall experience in MH comes down to long periods of challenge ending in elation: "WHOO HOO I FINALLY BEAT THAT GUY!!" In contrast the Toukiden experience is more consistent and measured: "Well, that was pretty fun. Let's beat up something else." I personally appreciate both, but I think others could be turned off by either one. Sometimes that stretch of challenge in MH where you are grinding or can't beat a boss turns into frustration, and sometimes that measured gratification in Toukiden from beating up monsters turns into boredom. I'll gladly buy a Toukiden sequel on the Vita, and I hope this puts pressure on Capcom to innovate and come back to Sony.