Syzygy

For $10 you certainly get your moneys worth. God Mode is a 4 person co-operative shooter made by a new developer, published by Atlus. Yes, THAT Atlus. The one who's product line consists purely of games that are BALLS HARD. Don't fret, though, the difficulty is rarely, if ever, cheap. The gameplay itself straddles the line between co-operative third person shooter and competitive third person shooter. Kill XP and gold are not shared between players, which pushes everyone to one-up eachother, yet enemies will flood the arenas making it nigh impossible for a single player to survive by themselves (Note: Single player is an exercise in frustration) Core gameplay consists of picking between one of five maps (three of which end in boss fights) Players move from one (gorgeous) arena to another mowing down hordes of undead roman/greek creatures. A unique feature of these arenas are the "Tests of Faith", basically each arena alters the rules slightly to modify the experience, e.g. one arena might give you the "Armored" test of faith which causes all damage to be shared between players, another will swap your current weapon out for a random one every 10 seconds (even if you haven't unlocked the weapon yet), or one that reduces everyones maximum health by half but gives everyone health regeneration. Sometimes you get completely silly ones like "Party" which gives all enemies party hats! The game includes a sizable portion of unlockables, giving it more than 10 USD worth of longevity. In game you earn XP and Gold, which are used to unlock new weapons, weapon upgrades and clothes respectively. If the game isn't challenging you enough, you can choose to activate "Oaths", which make the game harder in exchange for increased gold and XP gain (The higher level you are, the more you'll be needing to use Oaths if you want to see any significant progress towards advancement) An example of the oaths are "The Thief", which makes it so you do not have armor in game and cannot pick up armor, but you get a 15% increase to XP and 20% increase to gold, or the "Warrior" oath, which makes it so your Special Ability cannot be used for similar XP and gold gain increments. While that all may sound fine and dandy, this game DOES have some issues. If you do not have a very good connection expect to see other players lagging (NPC lag compensation works well enough though) Another issue, and perhaps my BIGGEST grievance, is that voice chat is ALWAYS enabled with no option to turn it off, either for you or any of the other player. You can disable your mic through your hardware settings, but nobody should have to do that. The final issue I have with the game is that it has a rather weak start. The two weapons and one special ability you start off with are nigh useless (The SMG has RIDICULOUS spread making hitting anything outside of point blank an exercise in futlity, the shotgun has too TIGHT a spread and reloads like a snail riding a turtle, and the Shield ability doesn't even do what it's namesake says) Fortunately, you can upgrade the SMG and Shotgun into uberweapons once you finish a few matches. Other than those three grievances, I would highly recommend this game to anyone who likes "Horde Mode" shooters with cooperative and competitive elements. For only $10, you get more than your moneys worth!

Does anyone remember the combat in Civilization 4? Yeah, it was pretty tedious and annoying, wasn't it? Thankfully, Warlock: Master is a civ-style turn based strategy game all ABOUT the combat! Gameplay revolves around the 4X style of gameplay (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) and while the game RIGIDLY follows that formulae, the way it does so, combined with a friendly user interface, fantastic graphics and a variety of units with distinct appearances and situational modifiers allows for tons of replayability, completely nailing the "just one more turn" aspect of these civ-style games. The most interesting feature I found in this game, however, is the ability to allow for multiple "worlds" to exist in the maps you generate. These "worlds" are basically separate maps you can access via portals on the main starting map. These additional worlds provide unique or rare resource nodes as well as monster dens that, if destroyed, yield very powerful spells. These worlds, are of course absolutely TEEMING with powerful monsters, to the point where they often overflow into the main map, so they aren't exactly something you can just claim unprepared. Now, time for the breakdown, this score is based on a 10 point system: Presentation: 8. Graphics and art style manage to be both cartoonish AND badass, but nothing really unique or too interesting. A.I.: - 2. The A.I. is sort of all over the place, no matter the difficulty. Making the game harder seems to just give the A.I. a resource advantage rather than making it play smarter. Gameplay part 1: - 4. I'm knocking 4 points off for the hideously bare bones diplomacy system. Or, lack thereof. Every so often a rival player will attempt to extort money or mana out of you, and your ONLY two responses are "WAR!" or to capitulate to their demands. I suppose this was the developers way to try and foster a cut-throat mindset in the players, by attempting to make war an inevitability rather than something that can be avoided. If you aren't currently attempting to murder the crap out of an opponent, stealing their land to add your glorious war machine, you're plotting how to. Gameplay part 2: +3. I'm giving 3 points back due to the aforementioned "glorious war machine" thing. Because while combat is the sole focus of this game, it manages to be DAMN GOOD. Every battle, every personal campaign I have launched or fought, every one of them has felt like an epic siege. The developers took the combat system from Civilization 4 and 5 and made it actually fun and interesting. For one thing, you can't stack units on the same tile. a single squad of units is a significant time and resource investment, which means you'll be handling a siege consisting of maybe 3-5 squads at any given time. That may seem like weaksauce weakness at first, but combine that with the spellcasting system and suddenly you've got 2 squads of black minotaurs with VAMPIRIC AXES and immunity to ranged attacks, leveled up and specced for city attacks laying waste to your enemies defensive fortifications while your shamans constantly heal them to full health while you're waiting for your Apocalypse spell to finish charging. And yes, there IS a spell called Apocalypse, it's basically the nuke from Civilization 4: Beyond the Sword, except in this case it actually DESTROYS CITIES and is a GUARANTEED one hit kill to any and all units in a 3-hex diameter radius from the epicenter. The only reason I didn't give all four of those points back is because naval warfare is really... lacking at this point. There are only 2 naval units at this point, as far as I know, and none of them are any good at damaging the various sea serpents that plague the oceans (which incidentally are capable of killing your ships in 1-2 hits) Transport ships are a non-issue, as moving a land based unit onto a water hex automatically spawns a transport ship for them. Music/Sound: 0. No points given or taken away for this, as the sound effects and music are exactly what you would expect, nothing spectacular but nothing horrible either. Graphics: +1. Looks pretty without bogging down my computers framerate (I have been playing this game on a 2011 Acer Aspire laptop with AMD Radeon HD 6650M graphics card) Mics. : +0.5. I'm giving a bonus 0.5 due to the fact that I can skip my opponents turns by clicking the mouse repeatedly. Final Score: 7.5 So close to perfection, but a few **** problems keep this game from being perhaps the best 4x turn based strategy game I have ever played. Hopefully the negative elements can be fixed through either patches or expansions. I mean c'mon, as much fun as I have duking it out against the other empires on the field of battle in this game, it would be nice to be able to ally myself with another empire so I don't feel like it's just me against the world all the time.

You'll either love it or hate it. If you're one of those people who can spare 8 hours of your day every day to practice playing the game, you'll love it because you will most likely carry your team to victory all the time every time. If you have other responsibilities beyond playing games on a day to day basis you will hate it because, thanks to the broken match making system (Uber Entertainment said they would fix it two weeks ago from the time of that I am writing this review) That pits new and inexperienced players against people who might as well have been playing every hour of every day since the beta against eachother, more often than not you'll spend most of any given match sitting in your base shooting people with a gun that does a laughably impotent amount of damage unless your target is 5 inches in front of your face thanks to some weird damage falloff mechanics on the ranged weapons. The rest of the time will be spent staring at a respawn counter because your team is either unskilled enough to properly back you up, are dead, or have run off to try and solo the enemy base/team. Can you fault a multiplayer game (which at it's core, is mostly balanced) for it's community? Do you like veteran beta tester players calling you a **** and telling you to uninstall the game simply because you were trying to learn how to play the game? If you are a decent player, do you like playing a game where you lose all the time due to constantly being randomly paired with a bunch of uncommunicative incompetent boobs? The answer is yes, yes you can fault the game. The developers should have a system in place to pair experienced players with other players of their skill level, yet there isn't one, and hasn't been one since launch. Actually, just to save you some time, imagine playing League of Legends except as a third person shooter, on smaller maps, shorter matches, with funny commentators, and a far, FAR worse matchmaking system. Ok, full disclosure? The only thing keeping this game from getting an easy 8 or 9 score is that stupid, horrible, detestable matchmaking system. You'll know what I mean once you lose ten games in a row because you keep getting paired with less skilled players versus a pre-made team. Until then, this game gets a 5/10 due to the fact that it was advertised as a fun, whimsical MOBA style shooter, not a Respawn Timer Simulator.