inimical

Anyone who played beta over the past 4 months knew this game was no where near ready. They doubled down on releasing it this quarter and now everyone else has paid to join the beta. Activision has ruined Blizzard.

Although I do see the fun in this game, there are major things holding it back. First off, there are bugs on the Switch. I've had the screen locked in a zoom-in mode several times already making it very hard to play, and the game has even crashed twice now. Second, there are random jumps in difficulty in some stages where it goes from rather easy and manageable to impossible. Third, restarting is soooo monotonous at times. Truly burdensome to get near the end, lose to a boss, and have to start the same easy grind again until you're further in, hoping you get as lucky on good items and spells as last time. It's a $5 game at most, and they need to fix the bugs still.

This could have been an amazing game and amazing follow-up to the first Xenoblade Chronicles if not for some frustrating time-wasters and annoying balance issues. The world is simply massive, and thanks to fast travelling, it really works well and is an enjoyable experience... if it progressed in any sort of logical way. By design, the game intends for you to revisit parts of the already massive open world to tackle certain caves, or upper levels, or hunt certain mobs of tyrant bosses. But they over-do it. You can simply be running around and aggro mobs that will one shot you. There are level 10 mobs hidden behind level 50 ones that will wipe you out and total your Skells just because the graphic for them didn't load fast enough, and they have a laser beam that can destroy you in one shot. It's really frustrating, and trashing Skells can become massively expensive. Maybe they just don't want you to explore places so carelessly, but really it just doesnt consider the technical limitations of loading slowly and it makes the game suffer a bit. While hero and class design is pretty good, the massive number of characters, often with the same or very similar class type as each other, adds unnecessary complexity without adding much to the story. There are several Gunners+ class characters, several Sheildbearers, ect. You -could- choose one to you style, of course, but then again not really. Not without having to regrind 45 levels into the new characters your pick up later in the game. While the ability points you accumulate are the same for all characters, the levels are not, giving this unnecessary burden a really annoying aspect of the game. It really begs the question of why they would do this, because there are already other shared aspects in the game, and there is already a friend scale called Affinity which creates barriers for characters to go do certain quests together. While I really want to love this game, and enjoy its style, theses added time-wasters and realistic inconveniences make the game a bit frustrating. When tackling difficult missions in your Skell, you're usually just better off saving the game beforehand, and crashing it if you accidentally pull too many high level mobs that trash your skells, because they simply cost too much to replace. If they just did the following, it would be a much more enjoyable game... 1: Share character levels 2: Use Miranium to repair Skells/Repair automatically after revisiting town 3: No quest limit 4: Allow characters to upgrade class 5: Make enemies with +/- 15 levels ignore you, minus guards to certain areas 6: Lower/remove probe placement cost 7: Too much empty space in NLA

When it was first released, it had some potential for becoming a good mmo. Ultimately, after a couple months I quit due to bugs ruining the experience. I recently tried to reinstall and see how it's come along, but it's still a buggy mess. Not worth the time.

I had pretty high hopes for this game starting out, and while I've played it regularly for about a year and a half now, I must say it hasn't lived up to expectations. First, while I really enjoy the vs AI matchmaking of the game, and can congratulate them on a fairly regular stream of heroes being released, it unfortunate that they overlook several big aspects of the game. First, they treat most of their loyal players like **** They regularly give away heroes that people paid real money for for free during promotions. While it absolutely makes sense to soften the burden of new players into a constantly evolving games, giving away heroes that are month or so old for free is basically a big middle finger to active players. Second, things like this that dissuade regular players from sticking around often leads to a bigger problem of insanely long queue times. Playing ranked frequently requires queue times near 5-7 minutes, which is rediculous, because half the time you actually join a game the gap between MMR rating is pretty huge. 1 Diamond, 2 gold, a silver, and a bronze or so.... If they're doing that, then why did I wait so long?? Just throw me into the first 5 people that queue, right? -.- Third, I would argue that this game is less toxic than League of Legends. That's pretty important, since LoL is pretty terrible in that regard. It is nice to have a play system where an accidental death isn't the end of keeping up. On the otherhand, the player base is maybe only minorly better, and most toxicity tends to dwell near ranked like most games, which takes forever to join games in. Fourth, and finally, the skins in this game are huge missed opportunity. The design team and the production managers are honestly just really weird. They sign off on weird skin designs regularly. Everyones style and appeal is different. There is surely some you'd love. But even on the ones that are good and appealing to you, they end up choosing just the ugliest alternate colors; All solid green, all red, no darker tones and weird designs kind of ruin it. The best ones tend to be the Master skins that are available for in-game currency only and have high level requirements. It's nice, but begs the question of why. If they had any sense, they'd just tap into Blizzard's trove of original game gear sets, designs and themes and double their skin inventory just based off that. All in all, its a fun game if you're a bored Blizzard fan. Otherwise, it's just a strange MOBA that fails to live up to its potential and doesn't treat their loyal players well. I'd avoid it if you haven't already.

Just Dance 2017 Gold (Wii U) is a really a solid game with some major technical blunders... yet again. While I am pleasantly surprised by the music and dances included this year, with at least half being enjoyable and the other either out of personal taste or excessively silly, it is really only held back by the technical problems and gimmicks which don't add much. The Just Dance Machine mode where you use the Just Dance style to mimic acts to recharge a space shift is largely boring. There we're a couple that we're really funny, but right when you start to get into it, it changes to one a bit twitchy and not always sensed properly. Also, its about 70% watching filler and actually 30% moving, which makes its feel like a missed opportunity. Technically speaking, it would be an improvement over the Just Dance 2016, as they seem to have fixed the super annoying buffering issue that kept dropping your game entirely, and now it just has a buffering wheel which then, after pausing your game for however long, couple seconds or more, it continues where it left off. It begs the question, why??? Why not just at least offer to buffer it before starting if you happen to be getting it often one day. Or add an option in. It's obviously some rather sloppy design here without any practical considerations. Uplay and all of its incredibly lame glory is just terrible on the Wii U in the first place, but doesn't even properly unlock the bonuses in the game when purchased with points in Uplay. Nothing else to really say, it just doesn't work. And for the grand finale, at least a few dozen people, myself included, for all platforms, are not receiving their download code for the 3-months of Just Dance Unlimited that is included in the Gold Edition. So while they might have made a slight improvement to the buffering issue that made Just Dance Unlimited almost useless for 2016, and they might have added a few extra songs and a search feature since that time, none of that matters since Ubisoft Support, over a week and counting, has been unable to provide me with the code and just tells me that my case is in elevated status. Not to mention I personally am incredibly skeptical of even the buffering issue being truly fixed once the holiday season rolls around and their servers become strained. All this leads me to thinking that a game which truly is the best in its genre is basically not worth your money, lest you be plagued with annoying technical issues and feel cheated out of half of your purchase.