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Seems to start off easier than the first game, but does eventually get back to its roots. Better graphics, new music (though I think an option for the originals would be nice), and a ton of content. Great game.

Great art, great music, gameplay is sub-par and suffers from serious issues. Still feels like a prototype in many ways. Later floors suffer from major balance issues. Multiplayer has several problems and I would currently call it incomplete. Multiple pods provide gameplay variety that bloats the game and are completely unnecessary - game is at its best in the standard "Escape Pod" mode and it would've been better if they focused on ensuring balance there instead of having several game modes and none of them playing anywhere near optimally. However, it is an interesting game due to its mashup of a few genres (roguelike, RPG, RTS and Tower Defense), so it's worth checking out, although I'd suggest waiting on a sale before buying it, as it just doesn't come together very well.

Terrible port of a terrible version **** game. I need 150 characters so I guess I'll just stress what a terrible port this is. Real bad. Bad.

Currently the best indie Metroidvania available on PC. Has an art style that is reminiscent of Disney's golden era. Music is phenomenal. Boss fights are puzzles that occasionally require twitch reflexes in order to overcome instead of being bullet sponges. Polarity mechanic is used well and aside from a few areas (namely one optional room near the end for a scroll) does not feel clunky. Fun to speed run a few times, game itself doesn't take more than a few hours to complete the first time and after that it can be cleared 100% in about 45 minutes.

Plays like a mix of tower defense and Final Fantasy: Tactics. Soundtrack is obviously heavily inspired by Uematsu (the main battle theme has several segments that sound like they were lifted directly from the Final Fantasy 8 battle music), it's well done but loses points for being such an obvious copy. Replaying missions at higher difficulties for increased rewards is fun on paper but does essentially amount to grinding in order to meet the demands of those challenges, instead of rewarding smart play. Defender's Quest is a bit too long for its own good. The 800x600 native resolution means that the only way to make it fill up your widescreen in order to reduce eye-strain is to stretch the image, which ruins the appearance of the art. Game is good for what it is, overall I'm excited for the sequel because I think all the concepts presented here are unique, and they could really turn this into something special.

First time playing FTL was with this Advanced Edition, so this isn't a review of what the Advanced Edition adds to the base game, but what the whole package provides. Gameplay is a mashup of roguelikes and RTS, with the ability to pause in order to make more strategic decisions when necessary. It *will* unfairly kill you at times. Once you understand the game, you'll find that you can make it tot he final battle more often than not due to good planning and a decent amount of luck, but the final battle is unfortunately where the success of your run due to the RNG elements comes into play. If you had decent RNG and great planning, you're still going to lose in the final battle because no matter how well you know the game, you won't have the power necessary to overcome the challenge. Cool concept, decent art style, soundtrack is outstanding, took about 4 hours for me to get my first victory, did a few additional runs afterwards for kicks, beat it three times over the course of 10 hours, and that was enough for me. Not a must-play by any means, but if you're looking for something to play to kill time while waiting for a bigger release, then this is a viable option.

The opinion in this review was based on the following content: Sword of the Stars: The Pit Sword of the Stars: The Pit - Mind Games DLC Sword of the Stars: The Pit - Gold Edition DLC Sword of the Stars: The Pit - Pilgrim DLC Sword of the Stars: The Pit - Juggernaut DLC Game is a very uninspired roguelike that takes place in a cookie-cutter sci-fi setting. The environments are dull. The enemies are boring. The combat is glacial in pace. The music doesn't change tracks often enough, and what is there is essentially a half-assed attempt at cloning the outstanding soundtrack to "Blade Runner". The game is way too long for how random the chance of success is. Like most roguelikes, by the time you start the game has already decided whether success in that run is possible or not, but you're playing to find out what your dice roll was. If you have a good run on Normal mode, the game will take 20 - 25 hours to complete. It's possible to get 15 hours deep in a run, lose due to RNG (because that's roguelikes), and have to start all over. That's hugely disrespectful of the player's time. The XP and Item banking systems are a neat feature to try and fix thsi problem, but they're tedious and immensely timeconsuming to fully utilize themselves, and not fun in the least. You essentially end up having to choose between two ways to approach your run: 1. You are doing this run to try and make it to the finish. 2. You dedicate the run to grinding out XP and items so that you can bank them, kill yourself, then start over with a new character on that floor and use all the banked XP/items to create a character that's a far higher level with better equipment than he would possibly be if you had arrived at that floor from a fresh playthrough. This option is way too metagamey, and isn't enjoyable in any way. The highlight of the Mind-Games addon are the psionic powers, and they are incredibly boring. There should be the ability to create your own character, but instead you are forced to choose from pre-mades, which I can only assume was done so that if you wanted more variety in starting setups you'd feel inclined to purchase the character DLC (which I don't suggest anyone does). The way the new X-Com games do multiplayer (point system, each skill/stat/equipment purchased drains from the point system) is how a custom character loadout system could work in "The Pit". The exclusion is utter bullocks. Crafting is tedious and dull. There are far too many items in this game compared to how many recipes there are, so you end up filling your inventory with a bunch of crafting items that may very well end up having no synergy within your run, and then dying before you can ever craft something useful. This is a very bad game that nobody should bother playing.

Neither game is nearly as impressive today as it was back at original launch. The remaster does some nice touchups but overall it still looks like a remastered PS2 game, and since the big draw of both these titles when they were new (mainly FFX) was how hard they pushed the tech, the game is left to rely a lot on the gameplay. Far too many cutscenes, watch more than you play for the first 20 hours or so. No cutscene skip, which should've been implemented for the Remastered version. Battles get repetitive fast. Needing to have every party member do something each battle to get XP makes grinding become very tedious very quickly. Music remixes are a nice touch but completely unnecessary, some tracks (like Via Purifico) are absolutely butchered in the new renditions, overall this was an unnecessary feature and I really would've appreciated an option for the Original tracks. FFX-2 is as painful to sit and play as it's always been. Cool battle system, but everything about it is incredibly embarrassing to play, even when alone. What's really odd is there are frame drops in certain areas, and during spell effects. The game runs at 30fps, but constantly has drops to 20 or lower when big spell effects go off. This wasn't the case with the original titles, this is a matter of upgrading the graphics a *bit* for the remaster, and then failing to optimize properly. If you've played these games before, or still have the original PS2 versions, I'd recommend waiting for a price drop before picking this up. FFX is still a very solid game overall which is what gets this a score higher than 1, but as a remaster, this package leaves a lot to be desired.

Not worth paying for, and probably not worth your time. Plays like a game some kid would make as a homework assignment. It's obviously trying to be a very cheap version of Metroid, but it's missing all of the elements that make a proper Metroid clone so great. I realize this was made by one guy, but so was "Cave Story", which is also a Metroid clone, and played like the developer gave it much more love (it had more varied tilesets, more enemy types, better graphics, and it even had a soundtrack, which this game sorely needs). Doesn't feel like it had a lot of playtesting, either. From the midway point onward, it feels like the game was rushed, and all of the puzzles and timed underwater sections end up falling flat on their face. The combat reminds me of really bad shooters from the NES era (namely "Total Recall" and "Robocop"). The fall damage in this is also pretty ridiculous. Even after you get your shock stabilizer upgrade (very early in the game), you still take damage if you fall more than three feet, and due to the complete lack of healing items in the game (and that for some reason enemy damage effects your shields first, while falling damage immediately affects your health), you'll likely find yourself walking into rooms on a sliver of health, and then falling just over three feet and getting the "Game Over" text. Honestly, this is a demo you shop around while looking for employment in the game industry, not something to be sold to people for $5. I like the idea here, but it doesn't play like the creator cared enough to do it right. This is not the way to start building brand awareness, and I'll remember this experience when "Magnetic Realms" releases their next game. I am really tired of new game developers thinking that releasing a trashy indie game for $5 through Greenlight is their ticket out of the mundane 9 - 5 grind. Take out a loan so you can quit your job and go full-time with your game development and hope your product is worth it, or stick with your day job and only develop in your downtime and take the five years it'd take to do your first game right, whatever, find a way to do it right and give your early projects the resources they require to be competitive on the market. You aren't a big dog yet, you're really going to have to work to win anyone over, startup projects like these are the worst way to go about procuring long-term success for a business.

One of the best platformers since "Super Meat Boy" (Super Meat Boy is far better, though). Single player is a lot of fun, co-op is an entirely different experience (you don't just go through the single-player missions with a second player, you're given all-new challenges that require cooperation). The online Arena modes feel like a throwaway feature, which is how I felt about the non-story modes in "Castle Crashers", but opinions will vary here. Music is superb. The taunting narrator is a fun twist, but he does run out of things to say and quickly starts repeating himself. You can, however, disable the frequency of his comments, or turn him off entirely, through the "Options" menu. Controls fine on keyboard, but I've always felt these games are best with a gamepad. I wish these guys could release a game every couple of years (it's now been six years since the original release of "Castle Crashers" in 2008), but maybe the reason they don't is because they'd rather make inspired games than simply churn out something to keep their name in the industry. Two major drawbacks are the musical selection (there aren't that many tracks in the game, and they start repeating themselves very quickly), and the time it takes from confirming "Retry" to a mission resetting takes far too long for this kind of game. It also would've been a huge plus if they got the narrator voice actor to record even just 20 additional lines, as he starts repeating himself way too quickly as well. I got this game for $10 during the launch sale, and I highly recommend it at that price. It's no "Super Meat Boy", but I don't think we'll see a game that steals the throne for a long, long time.

$40 for Paladin class and a new act, the rest of the content are things that should've been patched in for free, since it isn't new content, they're adjustments that finally takes Diablo 3 out of Beta status.

Overall a good experience for $15. Difficulty is either too easy on "Normal" or an archaic grind on "Hard", where everything takes 5x as long because it's simulating the grindfest difficulty of something like the original "Dragon Quest". HP regeneration system out of battle could be better, can't use party members abilities out of combat to heal so left gathering wishes for maybe 10hp per plant or using your cursor to heal your character for 1% of their HP every 3 seconds. You only have two active party members during combat and a larger cast to choose from than the average "Final Fantasy" title (excluding FF6 here), so I think it would've been better if they'd bumped the party size up to 3 and added an extra enemy or two to make the difficulty scale. Graphics are gorgeous and so is the soundtrack. No world map to explore or shops to buy equipment/items in. Outside of the grindy leveling system (only if you're playing on hard) and the classic JRPG battle system with a twist, this is really just a lip-service JRPG with some modern 2d indie adventure elements thrown in. Every line of dialogue in this game rhymes, and more often than not the writing is cringeworthy because of this. It'd be different if they wrote it as a poem to make sense, as it is it's like they went out of their way to make everything rhyme, even if it didn't make sense, it just had to fit their agenda. It isn't nonsensical in a "Doctor Suess" way, it's nonsensical in an "average kindergarten student writes their first haiku" way. Not a "must buy" by any means, but if you're a fan of JRPGs it's worth checking out because not only do we rarely see games like this these days on consoles, we hardly ever get something like this on PC. Doesn't instantly make it an outstanding game for being a few drops of rain during a drought, but it's a welcome change of pace nonetheless.

Retro art and soundtrack can't make up for what's an underwhelming game. Plays like a mashup of Borderlands, Contra, and River City Ransom, and doesn't do any of them effectively as a result. A cool experience if you're looking for something to co-op with a friend, especially 2 - 4 players as that's rare these days, but outside of that this is another painfully average indie-styled retro game.

Remember those old-school NES games that were insanely difficult, not due to design, but because they were technically broken? That's what "Dark Souls 2" is. Not only is it obviously a terrible PC port despite claims that PC was the lead platform (then why do enemies in the distance only animate at 30fps, why is the UI so obviously designed for console, why is M&K functionality still garbage?), but the game itself plays worse than a "Souls" game ever has. This is likely in large part due to this being the first "Souls" game that isn't made by the original "Souls" team. If you need more info on this, google it, but bottom line is "From Software" felt that the "Souls" franchise had become successful enough that the people who made it good could do... whatever they're doing now, and the next entry (Dark Souls 2) could be made by "From Software's" B-Team. Playing as Melee is pretty much broken this time around, as enemy tracking is impossible to outpace. In DeS/DS1, you could see them winding up for an attack and roll out of the way, but now they spin on a dime and do not stop their facing until their attack has landed. So, instead of rolling when you see the attack coming, you have to roll during the window right before the attack lands, which is much, *much* more punishing, and *far* more difficult to execute. DeS/DS1 were punishing but fair, DS2 is punishing for the sake of being punishing. Gone as well is the tactical one-on-one combat, not just because of the above, but because of the game's tendency to throw entire rooms of enemies at you at once. In DeS/DS1, you could lure enemies off large packs to make them easier to handle, or if you alerted one enemy in the room you would only pull that enemy and *maybe* whoever was nearby. In DS2, if you trigger on enemy, you trigger every enemy in the room. This makes the focus on co-op much heavier, as you're going to *need* two other people around you spamming attacks just to clear more areas. The vast majority of boss fights are copy-pasted from DS1, and the "new" boss fights are just bosses that look new but use mechanics that anyone who's already played DeS/DS1 will immediately recognize. There's also the issue of item durability. In this game, your weapons are going to degrade at a much faster rate, and the only way to restore them is to use extremely rare and highly expensive Repair powders, or resting at a bonfire. This means that, more often than not, your favorite main-hand weapon is going to be rendered unusuable before you reach the next checkpoint. There's also a bug in the game that makes it so swinging your weapon through enemies who are in the "dying" animation, or swinging your weapon and having it clip a co-op phantom, will cause it to degrade at 300% the rate as well. These two combined make for a more ****, OCD melee-combat experience. This is also the first time I've played a "Souls" game and felt like it needed a map. "Demon's Souls" was split into 5 seperate worlds which made it easy to keep track of things in your head, "Dark Souls" was open world but everything fit together very cohesively so again it was easy to keep track of things. "Dark Souls 2" feels like they threw a bunch of zones together and didn't care about how they connected to each other, they just wanted them there. Navigating is an absolute chore. It's entirely possible to be exploring your first time, and find yourself stuck in areas where the only way to get out is to die by jumping into a chasm/pit, or returning to a bonfire (with a spell or item). "DeS" and "DS1" had *some* of this as well, but not nearly to the extent that "DS2" does. The "Souls" series is all about overcoming unpleasant surprises, but the only unpleasant surprise "Dark Souls 2" delivers is that of a mishandled entry in a beloved franchise, with the only feeling left afterwards being that of wasted time. "From Software" decided they could save money by hiring lesser talent to make a game that'd get success by brand name alone. And sales-wise, it probably worked, but from now I'm going to be far more leary when I look at the next title from "From Software". It's very disappointing to recognize what "From" has done here, because it means that the "Souls" franchise will never be as good as it used to. Yet for how good the last two games were, there was still a lot of room for improvement, and now we'll never know how good this series could've been. Like everything else, it comes down to the people in charge intentionally ruining something so they can increase their profit by a few percent. Once that starts, there's no going back. If they feel like they have "f u" money after just two big titles, then quality from here on out is only going to get worse for "From" titles.

The biggest problem of Natural Selection has always been that even in the most casual of matchups, there is a heavy reliance on teamwork. There's no way to Rambo in a game like this, which means you're only as strong as the people you're working with. It's great as a high-level competitive e-sport, but for people who just want something to play in their free time, this isn't the right game. If you're a newbie you're going to get chewed out constantly by people who *know* what they're doing and are really vocal about how bad you are to the entire team (since it isn't just a matter of K/D ratio, you need to coordinate resource captures, base strikes, base defense, buliding, etc. etc.), or you're going to be the guy that knows what he's doing, and feel like a loser for getting frustrated that people who don't play as much as you are ruining a *video game* for you. Aside from that, the load times are still ridiculously long, and the game has ludicrously high system requirements, either because it isn't well optimized or it's too big for its own good (the longer games go on, the more tech both sides have which means more effects going off at once, and there's also more buildings, more creep for the game to render). It's a really great concept, but the realization is that a game like this is too massive to be wielded. The engine collapses upon itself regularly, and you aren't going to even be an "average" player without being able to play this game like a full-time job. The 6 is not because it's a bad game, it's just too ambitious for its own good. I feel like the development team is composed of a bunch of hardcore gamers that are passionate about their work and wanted to take a genius idea they had and share it with the world, but they didn't have anyone around to rein them in and keep them in reality. In NS1 or NS2. Which is a real shame, because if this game was even half of what it is right now, it'd not only remain as a unique multiplayer FPS in a sea of derivative titles, it'd likely actually be a better game all around.

One of those games that hit the nail on the head the first time around and as such doesn't need to do anything but improve its graphics over the years and still be the best multiplayer FPS on the market. Added game modes are fun, add a bit of spice to the game, but Classic CS is what I came for, and that's where the game shines. "Deathmatch" has the spawn issues that plague CoD (because it's just an insta-spawn gibfest instead of a coordinated effort), Arsenal is fun, you have a lot of community maps to pull from as well but you don't get to play these on ranked. And that's the game's only downfall as far as I can see. I feel like the ranked system should have a smaller map pool that changes every week, as it is if I select every map before queuing I keep getting thrown into Dust 2, because that was and still is the most favored CS map by the community. Would be nice if they did something to force people out of their comfort zones in competitive mode, to me that's the whole point. Aside from that, still has dedicated servers for free, better hit detection and far fewer latency issues than modern titles that cost $60 and charge you for every map pack they release. The only reason I ever stop playing Valve games is because like everything else, I get eventually get bored and feel the need to try something new, but I always come back to Valve titles. They just do it so much better and give so much more value than everyone else in the industry, and this was even the case before they started earning that Steam money. If they ever flip the switch like Blizzard did, PC gaming will truly be dead.

The people that made this must have genius level IQs. Absolutely mind blowing. Whenever I go back to it, I realize how much every other FPS before and after **** in comparison (yes, even the original "Deus Ex" and "Human Revolution" missed notes that this game constantly nails on the head). Not only is it an amazing single-player title, we got some game-changing multiplayer mods out of it as well (Counter-Strike, TFC [which was a *much* improved version of the Quake TF], Natural Selection, Science & Industry) that were absolutely *free*. Guys setting up servers in their basement and players getting pings better than you can get in CoD or any other console multiplayer title. Those were the days. People who got into gaming after all this have no idea what they missed. Kind of like getting into "The Beatles" *after* the hippie movement. Still a great band, but the music doesn't have anywhere *near* the same impact it would've if you were there when it was happening.

One of those rare experiences in life that's so good, I can't think of anything to say about it. Unfortunately, Metacritic needs at least 150 characters, so that's why this line is here.

This game is like water torture. It's the sort of thing you might subject yourself to once in life because you're trying to prove how tough you are, but after about 5 minutes you realize all you're doing is subjecting yourself to a pointless torture that provides no benefit for undergoing. In fact, it probably makes you a worse human being to be around, because now you have a real ****** experience in your memory banks to have flashbacks to every now and then. Could've been a great game, and honestly I don't have a problem with challenging games, I generally enjoy them (I got "Golden God" on the 360 version of Super Meat Boy, and I beat "Terror from the Deep" back in the day), it's that the way this game works means it needs to be *PERFECT* in design or else you're basically playing a broken, unfinished game. Want to send your soldier in to flank an enemy for a guaranteed OHKO shot, so it can't OHKO one of your high-ranking members on the Alien turn? Cool! Charge up in there, get behind him, aaaand.... where's that flank bonus? ****! Now that soldier you just sent in for a guaranteed kill is actually dead next turn, and it's all because of a bug! Hope you aren't playing on Iron Man! Want to toss a smoke grenade to provide units with some cover so they don't get slaughtered next turn? Cool! Throw that smoke grenade, aaaaand.... it fell through the level! Cool! Now you just blew that squad member's turn and at least one of the guys you meant to cover with smoke is gonna die! Hope you weren't playing on Iron Man! All they really needed to do to fix 99% of the problems (since most are movement and LoS related) is make movement work like the original X-COMs, where you moved step-by-step and each movement took action points (let's say you have 100 action points, one step would cost 10). So if you set up a flank and it fails? Then take one step to the side and BAM now the flank works, cuz it was just a bug in that *one* square on the map (which is really all it comes down to). But instead they decided to give you two action points in this game, one movement in any "blue" range is 1 AP and going beyond that is 2. I guess they did it to make the game less overwhelming, but three cheers to Firaxis, because this simple change has made their game an unplayable mess, even though *EVERYTHING ELSE* has the potential to be good, it just isn't worth it. Now that the "Complete Collection" is out, they're obviously done supporting this game and are moving on. I know my review is late, but if you're a latecomer and are considering this game, stay away. Honestly, having this game in my Steam library now is like having a leaky tap in the house I can't fix. Aside from that, "Enemy Within" is a case of an unnecessary expansion, just like the Triad Character DLC was totally unnecessary for the base game. None of the new content is exciting, the best feature is the new maps, everything else just seems to bloat the game. They didn't have to rebuild a new engine, pretty much all the "new" assets are re-colored assets from the first game (that thing game developer's did during the late 80s/early 90s because they were limited on space, now some try and get away with it because they're lazy), yet for $40 you're basically getting what would've been $10 DLC in 2006 (and had people crapping bricks over). If you *REALLY* need to play this broken mess for some reason, get EU and ignore this overpriced, unnecessary addon. As far as I can tell, they priced it as high as they did so they could release a couple more patches to fix their broken game, without actually fixing it.

This game a perfect example of how Kickstarter and Early Access is letting video game developer's get away with stooping to increasingly depressing lows. "Dragon Commander" is an unfinished game that came out of Early Access status not because it was ready, but because Larian had another title that finished its Kickstarter funding so they wanted to get to work on that (Original Sin). What we're left with is an unfinished game with a lot of potential (Dragon Commander) that asks $40 when it's left in a late-alpha state, and another game (Original Sin) that people are currently giving the developer's money to work on when it's in the exact same condition, and when Larian has been allowed to get away with cashing in on one unfinished product, what's to prevent them from doing it again? Especially when there are players that seem all too content to give developers money to work part-time hours on games with no incentive to bring them to true gold status because hey, they're already making bank off unfinished work! Gets a 1/10 anyway because the soundtrack is amazing.

An amazing game that has some core issues that prevent it from realizing its full potential: 1. The levelup system is a waste of time. When played on the default difficulty (which is what I encourage, otherwise the game is so easy its boring or so difficult it's unrewarding), you gain XP from monsters until you're on par with their level, at which point killing them becomes completely pointless. This means that you have to grind each zone just to make your character be able to survive that stage, because of this I feel pacing would've been better if you could just play from start to finish with *no* leveling system because in its current state, it does nothing but pad out game length. 2. The backtracking is annoying. I enjoy the Metroid aspect when it's done well, but in this case, most of the things you backtrack for aren't even optional unlockables for boosts, they're story-related items that you need to find in order to progress. It just feels like another way to pad game length, by making you redo areas you've already seen in order to get to the next one. 3. Bosses battles are really well designed, but insanely punishing. Whether this is an issue or not is really up to taste. You don't get to use any recovery items, when you're on-par with the level of the boss (which is only whatever's possible on the default difficulty, since "grinding" only gets you to "par"), it only takes a few hits to die. Some boss fights can go on for upwards of 5 minutes, even if you know what you're doing, and if you get hit a few times, you die, and have to start the fight from the beginning. Some of the fights are really interesting from start-to-finish, others start repeating mechanics really quickly, which makes them get boring very fast, as they become battles of tedious endurance as opposed to interesting battles. 4. There's almost too much dialogue in a game that seems to be focused on being an ARPG, and really, I didn't find myself liking any of the characters. However, the soundtrack is absolutely stellar, is is most of the stage design. It's really just some of the old-school mechanics being too old-school for their own good, but considering this is a remake **** that came out in the 80s (Ys 3 - 1989), that kind of explains itself, and as far as remakes go, this is one of the best that's ever been done (not as good as Resident Evil 1 on the Gamecube, however) - it took the game from 2D to pseudo-3D with much better boss encounters and stage design. It still plays like an old PC game though, and I wouldn't recommend checking this out unless you have the time on your hands to dig through some RPG history. If nothing else, you should check out the soundtrack. This has some of the best tracks you'll find in any RPG.

Literally took me just over a year to beat. Not because it has that much content, but because it's so challenging that I kept having to take extended breaks from it in fear of returning to the glory days of gaming where I snapped controllers in half or threw them at my TV because the game did not give a **** about my skill level, I either achieved what it was demanding of me or I did not see the next level. When I finally got 200/200 achievement points, I took a screenshot and put it in a super-important section of my email, as a permanent trophy of the frustration I endured in order to get a useless trophy. It's a video-game pride thing. I do kind of wish we had more of these games, because it reminds me a lot of the early days of gaming, but I also realize why we don't have a lot of them. It's just too punishing to be a sustainable business model, but damn, did I ever love this game while it was making fun of me for being unable to eat bricks. Only real issue was playing with that crummy 360 dpad. If this were playable with a SNES or PS controller, it'd be a sublimely infuriating 10/10.

One of the best games I've ever played, but not the best platform to play it on (that goes to the 360 version). There are still some bugs in the PC version, the controls are kind of a mess in some of the PSP modes (ie. the "Princess 30" PSP mode has the key bound on the right to shoot left, key bound on the bottom to shoot up, so it's advised to rebind these keys before starting, but the keybind menu doesn't make it very clear what button does what so it does induce a bit of frustration to get working), and cheaters on the PC version ruin the point of attempting of competing on leaderboards, but otherwise this is a solid game. It's a mashup of what makes all golden-age RPGs great, without some of the things we conveniently forget makes those games a bit of a chore to play these days. If you don't have a PSP or 360, then it's still worth checking out the PC version. However, I think the 360 version is the best, as I have yet to see any evidence of cheaters on the leaderboard (booting up my copy of the 360 version shows I still have top 10 scores from when I first played it at launch, and the people beating me are only doing it by slight margins, signalling that people aren't cheating and just getting *marginally* better times on the best possible solutions for each map), and they did away with the PSP modes that didn't feel all that great. Unfortunately, they couldn't emulate the success of this game in its sequel, but this is one of those games that I think will get more appreciated for what it was as time goes on. It's in the same tier of SNES greats like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest as far as I'm concerned. 8/10 on PC due to bugs, control issues and cheaters ruining the leaderboards, 9/10 if you play it on 360 (no bugs, no cheaters, guts the boring PSP modes in place of more story-centric adrenaline-fueled puzzle mayhem), PSP is somewhere between those two.

Probably the greatest comeback in videogame history (aside from perhaps the original Final Fantasy, though that was playing with far smaller stakes than FFXIV was in its original iteration). Best parts of the game are the animations and music. Has a distinct JRPG feel. Questing is tedious at times but I expect that with any MMO. Most revolutionary aspect of this game is probably the Extreme Primals, which is a good and bad thing. Good, because they are the most intricate boss fights I have ever seen in any MMO, but bad, because the fact that it's an MMO means there are latency issues that can cause wipes in this fights due to a simple lag spike. It's like playing Super Meat Boy and needing to make a perfect jump to clear your perfect run, but getting a lag spike when you hit the jump key, so you just fall off the ledge into a pit of spikes and die. Thought the endgame was pretty decent (it's the standard MMO login for dailies affair) until the implementation of the "Atma" questline, at which point I decided to quit. Everything from 1 - 50 was overall extremely enjoyable, I do not see this as being a long-term game for most people, but seeing as you can get this for $30 right now (and often less due to sales) for the PC version, it's worth checking out for the free 30 days and enjoying the ride from 1 to 50. If this were a single-player game, the experience would be so much better, but unfortunately the "theme-park & dailies" MMO aspects start hurting the game the deeper into it you get, and this does detract from the Final Fantasy experience. While it's a far cry from what FFXIV was in its original form, it still shows why some franchises are better off sticking to what they do best, and this is a franchise that was never going to see gameplay benefit from going online. It's just more potential for monetizing, and that does nothing for the gamer but devalue the experience.

This is a review of the 2013 PC re-release. Despite being a decent update to make the game compatible with modern machines, it's a painful reminder of why some good things are better left on the nostalgia shelf. This game was great for its time, but there are too many design decisions that stick out like a sore thumb and make it difficult to enjoy in modern day. Even with the improved 3D models, I would still suggest people who want to relive the FF8 experience find a PSX to play it on, as that's the way it was meant to be played. Even if you patch the PSX music into this game (that's right, SE did not update the re-release to use the much-superior PSX soundtrack), it's still a relic of an age past, and the best way to experience relics is to experience them in their original form. Which is on a PSX, with a PS1 controller, with disc swapping, and memory cards that you save your 40+ hour save files onto and live in fear of them randomly corrupting themselves, requiring you to start all over. This is a good attempt by Square-Enix to make even more profit off products they made in a time when making high-quality games seemed to come naturally to them, but the Square that exists is not the Square that made those games. I would much prefer to see them proving that they can *still* make quality games, as opposed to trying to remind everyone of how much better they used to be.

I have a hard time expressing what I feel about this game. I gave it a lot of time to try and enjoy it, but at a certain point I realized I was putting more effort into trying to enjoy it than I was actually enjoying it. It isn't that it's bad necessarily, it's that it lacks all the charm that made HMH1 such an amazing experience. I don't think the designers even know what made HMH1 so good, because even as someone who played the original for over a hundred hours while aiming for top scores on the leaderboards, I can't even tell you what made it so good. It came out of nowhere, it was an amazing game, and I couldn't get enough of it. It's like a lightning strike. It was so randomly amazing that it can't even be properly dissected. It had that "X-Factor" that so many products claim to have, but is only ever obtained by complete accident. HMH2 plays like Marvelous AQL was trying to hit all the notes HMH1 delivered, but that's the problem. HMH1 didn't feel forced or practiced. It's like they had the right people at the right time working on the same thing, and something amazing happened. HMH2 feels forced. Everything about it just feels tedious in comparison to HMH1. It happens in every industry. Led Zeppelin had plenty of songs, but only one "Stairway to Heaven", and how do you top something like that? How did they even make that? I bet they don't even know. And that's what I think HMH1 is. It's the video-game equivalent of "Stairway to Heaven". It's amazing and epic in every regard, the reasons that make it such a legendary experience will never be able to be fully explained, and as a result nothing that follows it will ever live up to the same experience. It isn't that HMH2 is bad, it only suffered the misfortune of following HMH1. On its own, this game might've been a 7 or 8/10 derivative JRPG, but as a follow-up, it made me feel physically depressed to play. I know that sounds extreme, but I was so in love with HMH1, to see this happen... it's like Hangover 1 to Hangover 2, or Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2. Sequels to something mind blowing rarely ever work. The game developers accidentally created something amazing with the first release, and they're going to continue to rehash it as many times as they can because life is long and they want to keep themselves employed, but this franchise will never be as good as it was when it first started. If you didn't like HMH1, you might like HMH2 because it plays more like every other JRPG on the market than the odd whatever-the-hell-that-was that HMH1 was, but if you loved HMH1 as much as I did, this game is probably going to be a brutal reminder of why good things can't last. They rarely occur, and they're always so amazing that they can't be recreated or relived. Just have to hold out for that next moment when it feels like lightning strikes, and enjoy the hell out of it for knowing how fleeting that feeling is.

Plays like Dragon Age 2 as an MMO. Spend more time running around than doing anything, and when you *are* doing something it's extremely boring. All interiors look the same, even when you get to a new quest zone (which will take you about 24 hours of /played per zone). Dungeon layouts are always the same, house layouts are always the same, there are only two or three tilesets throughout the game. Giving you flashbacks of Dragon Age 2 yet? Quests are boring, they try really hard to keep it interesting with the fully-voiced quest dialogue, but that doesn't remove the problem of going into the same layouts with the same tilesets over and over and over again. Group dungeons are abysmal, as the "Holy Trinity" mechanic (tank/dps/healer) has pretty much no depth. There aren't aggro tables, tanks can't hold aggro on anything, which means they're pretty much useless in dungeons. Range is best here because they can kite mobs endlessly, if you're a melee DPS or healer expect to die over and over because they didn't bother to build a proper PvE experience for groups. PvE in this game is really just a crappy single-player experience with a $15/month fee, which I view as a single player game that charges you for its DRM. PvP is the laggy zergfest that Dark Age of Camelot was, the difference is DAoC came out in 2001, this is 2014, why can't ESO do any better? The game is called "Elder Scrolls" but doesn't feel like "Elder Scrolls" at all. There's no Crime system in the game, Stealth is abysmal so if you like playing Thief types in the other ES games, you won't enjoy it here. The Mage and Fighter guilds are criminally underutilized. The skill system feels like Guild Wars. It doesn't have the sandbox feel of the ES franchise, this is another linear MMO that's trying to keep the mass of people in the same herd and shuffle them along to endgame. Loot upgrades are boring and almost all of the equipment looks the same. The game isn't very good at delivering a sense of progression. There is no central Auction House in the game, instead the game has Guild Stores. Each guild can have a maximum of 500 members, you can be in 5 guilds at a time, but if you list something in Guild A's store, Guild 2 - 5 will not see it. This means you're only ever listing items that 500 people can ever see (assuming all 500 members are active players). Because of this, you're better off vendoring most of the stuff you'd otherwise be listing in the Auction House in a proper MMO. Tons of progress-stopping bugs and glitches. Some people have no issues, others seem to be getting nothing but issues. This has been a problem with RPGs since the beginning, but in an MMO, you can't just wait, your subscription is ticking. Can't finish a quest? Move on to the next one. But all too commonly, you move on from one glitched quest to find another glitched quest to find another glitched quest. You can't even grind to try and get a sense of progression when your quest book is filled with broken quests, because monster XP is abysmal - you can't even grind group dungeons for XP because you only get 1 xp per monster kill. They did this because they wanted you to be out in the world questing and going through their storyline, not grinding mobs to get to 50 ASAP and skipping through all their work. This wouldn't be a problem, except what they *want* everyone to do be doing, is what's broken most of the time. Last time a big-name video game company released an MMO this broken because they thought they were so big they didn't think they needed to care, they had to fire the original staff, take the game off the shelves, tell everyone they were "sorry", and spend two years rebuilding the game. That saw the game re-released into something that was *much* better, and that's pretty much what I feel Elder Scrolls Online needs to do. This isn't a matter of issues that can be ironed out with some patches or addressed with a major content patch or expansion, it's that the entire game is in such a terrible state that the only way to fix it is to take everything apart and try again. This is just an abysmal piece of work, and I wouldn't trust anyone who had a hand in the making of this game with serving me my morning coffee.