I really, really wanted to like Darkwood. One of my favorite reviewers was in love with this and I decided to play it for my spooky Halloween game this year. Unfortunately the core gameplay loop became repetitive and I lost all interest in actually finishing it. This is already a niche game (survival horror that effectively manages both survival and horror elements), so it definitely "isn't for everyone" but even for fans of the genre I can't recommend it. While the game tries to hide it and mixes things up with special events, the core gameplay loop consists of: shopping/repairing your current hideout, scavenging & exploring new areas for about 10 hours of game time (one second IRL is one minute in-game), final preparations to defend yourself at night, and then finding something to do on your phone during the 9 hours of night time. The biggest problem with this game is how night is just a huge waste of time. Environments become dark at 18:00 and after 20:00 the darkness will actually start damaging you outside of your chosen hideout. There are unique events that happen at night but most of them are just psychological horror SFX, like creepy ambient noises and lighting changes. This is all without considering the monster attacks at night; You will need to huddle in a corner behind a wall of defenses in order to protect yourself at night because of how poor your vision is. When I quit the game a few days into Chapter 2, my defenses didn't even matter because there was a new enemy who could just spawn inside of my hiding room. While night time advances at double speed of day time, it's still a huge waste of your time. Lights on at 20:00, sunrise at 7:00, and a one hour time skip (sleep I guess?) will start the new day at 8:00. You need to start returning to your hideout at at least 18:00 so this means literally half your day is wasted by the night. Enemies become predictable and very frustrating to fight with the clunky combat system. They like to pretend to wander at night, triggering traps and opening random doors, but they always psychically know where you are despite you making no noise. During the day time the simplistic AI likes to rush straight at you and many track you if you sidestep. Aiming a gun causes a cone to be drawn, drastically reducing your FOV. This means when an enemy lunges at you and lands behind you while aiming, they'll be invisible to you until you swing around. New enemies will spawn in explored areas but the loot they drop is almost always just EXP food. Ammo scarcity means that you'll be relying on traders all game to keep more than one weapon loaded. Enemies in Chapter 2 are practically mini-bosses with their unique movesets, fast attacks, and quick movement. Combat eventually became so frustrating that I was annoyed by running into anything. I hate to review games without finishing them but I am done with Darkwood. I loved the game during the first and second hideout and enjoyed the atmosphere and difficulty changes in the third hideout's area. Unfortunately, Chapter 2 became really miserable for me and I have no motivation to finish the game. I definitely understand how someone could love this game but I don't have the patience to finish a game that I feel actively wastes my time. Your mileage may vary; This a game that "isn't for everyone" within a genre that "isn't for everyone".
As of June the main draw of Audioshield (being able to play songs from YouTube) has been disabled with no word from the dev on a fix for it. This is also affecting the other games by this developer so it's pretty astonishing that nothing is being done about it for over three months now. While its not "literally unplayable" (you can still play local files), there is no support for other streaming services like Spotify or Google Music. Sure I have a gigantic music collection but I've bought almost no new music since subscribing to Spotify two years ago. What about the actual game play? It's nothing amazing: you deflect orbs flying at you with shields that have gigantic hitboxes. The beat matching feels very similar to Audiosurf (also by the same dev), meaning it's all over the place. One song will match perfectly yet another track within the same genre at the same recording & compression quality will "miss" half the song. Some songs will track to the vocals while others will miss the bass line. Pefecting a song isn't as rewarding as previous releases by this dev because of the sloppy beat matching and overly forgiving controls. I did enjoy this game for a few months while YouTube streaming still worked but I cannot recommend it in its current state.
The storytelling, game mechanics, and RPG elements have honestly all been dumbed down as much as possible to make this virtually a very long FPS game. The story is too similar to 3's except with NV's initial wandering and a third act that feels like a very long epilogue. Dialogue is absolute garbage with every conversation being (More Info/Lore), (Yes), (Sarcastic Yes), and (No). Of course, "No" actually means "I'll come back later" and all dialogue choices eventually lead to the same conclusion. There is no room for real role playing, speech checks are all solved by Charisma, and your dialogue choices seem to only really affect your companion's opinion of you. Skills has been removed and everything is crammed into perks now. Perk upgrades beyond the first have excessive level requirements, essentially punishing you for not playing a jack-of-all-trades character. In my opinion this is even worse than Skyrim's Mary Sue syndrome because there were several times I leveled up and I just sat on the perk point until I was allowed to upgrade the skill I wanted to use. Some perks don't even make sense from a VR perspective (how do I know when I'm hip firing or standing still?) and many are so niche that they seem like a joke (Lead Belly, Solar Powered, V.A.N.S., Robotics Expert, Mister Sandman to name a few). Equipment customization appears deep at first look but it's all just vertical progression gated by perks. Higher level upgrades require rarer materials of course, but like mentioned previously the grindy nature of the perk system means you might never max out a weapon's upgrades. Almost all weapon upgrades are strictly better than their previous iterations and bigger guns always do bigger damage. Good weapons are very rare to find because almost all human enemies drop unusable garbage Pipe weapons and legendary enemies were still dropping unique rolling pins & walking canes for me during the last mission. Legendary enemies throw off the balance of the random encounters and vary wildly in strength; A legendary bloatfly will explode like any regular one but a legendary BoS soldier will turn you into Swiss cheese (while having a second health bar and dropping a vanilla laser rifle). Well that's most of the core game's problems so let's get into the mess that is the VR edition: VATS ****, damage feedback ****, and power armor combat ****. Aiming is already difficult in VR since you're aiming with your actual hands and Bethesda put no thought into any kind of aim assistance with VATS. VATS is very difficult to aim and likes to pop around seemingly randomly; l I would usually just give up and take the shot as long as the accuracy wasn't 0%. I understand wanting to keep the HUD minimal for immersion but some kind of damage feedback is necessary. I died several times because someone was beating me in the back of the head while I was fighting someone else in the opposite direction and didn't notice. The lower portion of the HUD that shows HP, AP, and your compass is also too low to look at casually so it wasn't much help during firefights to gauge how fast I was dying. Combat in power armor also has severely reduced feedback; I understand that having a deathclaw throw someone in armor in VR would be a huge mistake, but you also can't just dim the HUD and freeze movement for few seconds to replace that. Some extra audio and HUD cues would really have gone a long way but this seems like another case of Bethesda laziness. Lastly, I'm sure the actual game looks good, but in VR everything looks like mud. I had to crank up supersampling to 2.0 just to make out proper silhouettes of people in the environment. Fallout 4 is a constant stream of mediocrity, a barely not boring slog through yet another brown & gray wasteland. This is by far my least favorite of the three FPS Fallout games and is brought down even more by its VR problems. The thing that disgusts me the most about this game is how I still sort of want to play it. Fallout 4 isn't a tech demo or a 20 dollar, 2 hour "experience", but a fully fleshed-out actual video game. I got this for free with my Vive so I don't regret playing it too much but I can in no way recommend anyone spending any amount of money on it. Bethesda has butchered Fallout to a new low once again; this lazy turd is like a tedious and unfunny Saints Row version of Fallout, a caricature of a caricature that has completely lost its way.
Enter the Gungeon is simply an unenjoyable soup of poorly implemented design decisions. Released almost a year after Crypt of the Necrodancer, I had high hopes for this considering how well that game merged genres. However, Gungeon (like most modern indie games) seems more focused on fitting into modern design tropes rather than transfiguring its components into something greater. Gungeon is hard to recommend for anyone who isn't already a fan of masochistic, RNG-laden indie games; I don't see myself ever playing this again. Where others in the now-bloated Rogue-like/Rogue-lite genre have succeeded in combining genres, like FTL or Necrodancer, Gungeon fails spectacularly. There is way too much RNG with loot and rewards: some floors will have only one weapon drop or you might go for a whole floor without finding a health drop until you beat the boss. Even if you do find a weapon, it might be something that has friendly fire, making the boss fight even more miserable. Bosses are ripped straight from bullet hell games with a health pool to match. You will often spend 9/10ths of the fight spamming dodge roll while shooting off-screen and using the boss's health bar to aim. Bosses have way too much health are a battle of attrition from the first floor. Map generation is bland and generic with each floor consisting of roughly a dozen similar-looking rooms with the only real game play difference between tilesets being the type and number of hazards. The sound effects are subdued and cheesy, the music sounds like stereotypical stock video game music from a TV show, and the graphics consist of ugly, chunky, pixelated blobs. When analyzed independently, this game fails at either being a decent rogue-like or bullet hell. If better implemented, I think this could've been successful in more competent hands. All of the patches and updates have made small improvements but nothing strong enough to fix my core issues with this game. I don't recommend Gungeon for anyone besides fans of rogue-likes looking for more punishment and broken keyboards.
Shadow Tactics is by far the most difficult stealth game I've ever managed to finish. While Blades of the Shogun isn't for everyone, it is an expertly crafted experience that combines adept storytelling with complex yet easy to control stealth gameplay. I would highly recommend this for anyone who enjoys stealth games but, because of the nature of the genre, it is hard to recommend to newcomers because of the steep difficulty curve and its dependence on quicksaving/quickloading. It's hard to talk about the story without spoilers because it's only 13 missions long (and I don't know anything about Japanese history) but it at least feels more grounded in reality here than most stealth games. There are no magic spells, no ninjutsu scrolls, no ridiculous acrobatics to fly around the map. Your characters are believable human beings and while yes, two of them are actual ninjas, they just move more gracefully than other humans in their world. The only tools at your disposal that really require suspension of disbelief are actually the old sniper's gear. While the plot becomes predictable after the halfway mark, it is still motivating to watch it unfold even if your characters are going through constant suffering and strife. For hardcore fans, each mission has 9 badges for bonus objectives: 3 are mission-wide primary objectives (like not entering water or not using a specific character's skills), and 6 are secondary objectives that involve some mutual exclusion. This means even with perfect gameplay it will take multiple playthroughs for perfectly clearing a mission. Initially the gameplay can feel constrictive, as if there's only one way to play through each mission, but as your skills improve your strategy will widen and each map feels like a playground... Well, for most missions. Some of the latter missions had me ragequitting from the lack of cover and every enemy having 2 people watching him. The last mission also breaks away from the play style of the rest of the game and feels impossible without sneaking through long distances with one character at a time. Overall, the campaign is well crafted and enjoyable but certain missions I'm okay with never playing again (at least not without a walkthrough). The game is clearly designed for savescumming; if you don't want to be quicksaving and quickloading every minute or so, this isn't the game for you. Apart from that, Shadow Tactics is a beautifully crafted and well paced stealth game that only comes along every few years. This is a must-have for any fan of the genre and, with a great deal of patience, I highly recommend it.
I have pretty conflicting feelings about this game. When I played it originally on the PS2 around 2005, I loved this as much as RE1-3 because I felt it brought a lot of new gameplay and game design elements to the series without straying from its roots. Since I haven't played it in about a decade at this point, this was almost a new experience for me to replay it and I have to say: it hasn't aged well. Resident Evil 4 is hard to recommend in the current year; if you can tolerate some older game mechanics and unintentional cheesiness, you will enjoy the experience but it definitely isn't for everyone. The biggest game design issue I have with the game are surprisingly the controls. While I loved the tank controls in RE1-3, they feel out of place in a third person shooter. Leon always feels stiff and slow, as if you're steering a bowling ball instead of the Hollywood action hero the game thinks he is. Two control methods are available but neither really fixes this problem. "Classic" controls are the way the game controlled back in 2005: tank movement with mouse aiming and your POV locked to your aiming or movement direction. "Modern" controls acts like a twin stick system, with freedom of movement with WASD and camera/aiming independently being done with the mouse. I would normally prefer the Modern system but there is no camera snap/reset option available. This makes movement very frustrating because you have to constantly aim the camera manually while walking around. Coming from games heavily inspired by RE4, Dead Space 1 & 2, the default controls feel really archaic and the modern controls feel unnecessarily clunky and cumbersome. I don't expect the original game released before DS1 & 2 to have better controls than its "predecessor" but I would expect a "Modern" control scheme to function with better nuance. Apart from the molasses controls, you still have the original RE4 experience here along with your post-game padding. Replaying RE4's Leon story in 2017 feels like two separate games; Up until the Salazar fight, the game's atmosphere is much more survival horror-esque but feels aimless and meandering. Salazar's fight feels like something out of Code Veronica, after which the game completely jumps the shark and is practically a different game. If I could just replay the B-movie absurdity of the post-Salazar campaign I would replay it almost annually like RE2 & 3. Unfortunately (possibly because I beat it 3 times previously) half of this game is a cheeseable snoozefest thanks to the RPG-7 and the ever-present Merchant & overly frequent saves. RE4 is still a good game worth playing in 2017, but in hindsight I now prefer RE2 & RE3 for annual replays. Much of this game feels like padding and without better controls it is frustrating to play. I would still recommend it to fans of the series but only once you're tired of replaying RE1-3. The HD upgrades have improved it visually but there aren't enough new enhancements to make this worth purchasing again if you already own it on another platform.
CRYPTARK is yet another indie "rogue-lite" that suffers from the issues almost all modern indie games do: bad level design/randomization, forced permadeath, and gamebreaking bugs. I would not recommend this unless, like most games on Steam tagged with Rogue-lite, you are okay with spending $10 on a game you'll become very frustrated with and probably never complete. The basis of any video game involving moving a character through an environment is good level design. A well crafted map can be the difference between de_dust and well... anything experienced in this game. Level generation in CRYPTARK is a non-sensical, cluttered mess filled with rooms that are empty except for a single enemy, doors that open into solid walls, and rooms with multiple doors but only one locked entrance. Enemies will also ignore these shortcomings and can fly and attack through doors and even some walls, turrets will shoot hitscan lasers from off-screen, and spawners will send armies after you from literally the opposite side of the map. On top of that you have to deal with the visual clutter on the screen from the derelict art style. I understand that these maps are supposed to be on an abandoned, long adrift fleet, but that doesn't mean everything has to be so claustrophobic and visually noisy. I enjoy the tactical challenge presented but you're usually fighting against a bad or cluttered level design rather than a complex or hand-made map. Of course, being an indie game in 2017 means you have to have permadeath. This makes sense in the "Rogue" game mode provided but there's really no reason to not have a save system in the main Campaign mode. There is clearly some sort of save system in Campaign too because when the game crashed on me it kicked me out of the ship I was in and brought me back to a mission select menu. At this point I'm just going to asssume any indie game that forces permadeath is too lazy to code a save system because there's really no reason for it in Campaign. You might be thinking "What's wrong? Can't handle permadeath?" I wouldn't mind attempting an Ironman run if the game actually worked properly. I attempted roughly 10 Rogue mode playthroughs and 3 of them ended at the Cryptark because **** bug crashing the map. This would kick me out to the main menu and force me to restart the entire run again. I have played and beaten actual rogue-likes before so I find this kind of punishment completely uncalled for in a game mode that is mandatory to unlock the Cryptark Excavation mode. I feel no desire to continue playing until Rogue mode is playable so I can actually unlock the last game mode. This might be fun for a few hours once you get past the massive learning curve but it's yet another indie rogue-lite that most people won't complete. I personally won't recommend this until they can fix the bugs and prove that the level generation has been improved to look less like a monkey-coded mess.
Playing through the "original" XCOM: Enemy Unknown, I felt like it was purposefully neutered; it was like the game was designed to be as dumbed-down as possible while still maintaining hallmarks of the series. At first I thought I was because they were just trying to release it as widely as possible (you can play it on your phone at this point), but now I see it was actually a market test. To put it simply, XCOM 2's launch version is the game that EU should've been from the start. With the addition of DLC and now a full expansion, XCOM 2 is now essentially XCOM 2.5 and is GOTY contender two years in a row. Taking place 20 years after the events of the first game, aliens firmly control Earth and XCOM as it was previously known is no more. While the original's atmosphere was very militaristic and coordinated, XCOM 2 is now very guerrilla and disorganized. Your supporting cast don't trust each other, everything is held together with duct tape, and your soldiers look like post-apoc cosplayers for a long time. New combat variables and mission structures, along with vastly more powerful aliens, create a dire atmosphere that makes every mission feel like it could be your last. While most missions in the base game were timed, I never felt this timer was too restrictive and the expansion adds a lot of non-timed missions to the mix. Overall there is a good variety of mission types now and most missions are flexible enough to let you bring a variety of squads (even on hard). While the individual DLCs are hit-or-miss (a lot of it is overpriced cosmetics), two really stand out. "Shen's Last Gift" let's you build a kamikaze robot army with their own skill trees and loadouts and "Alien Hunters" adds 3 persistent mini-bosses that spawn randomly in missions with unique powers & gear that you can obtain for your own soldiers. One DLC clearly stands above the rest: the new "War of the Chosen" expansion is impressively expansive and is well worth the asking price. The new faction system gives you access to three opposing resistance groups with their own skill trees, weapons, flavor, and backstories. The Chosen are three nemeses that mirror the class structure of the new allied factions. They will stalk your base, invade your missions randomly, kidnap your troops, and eventually will have to be assassinated with a 2-part dungeon crawl-esque mission. While one of them is clearly stronger than the other two, they are all a challenge at any point of the game and will grow in skill and strength if you do not deal with them timely. Tons of other smaller features, including new enemies, maps, and the soldier bonding system, flesh out this massive expansion. In my opinion it's worth it buying the base game just to experience the flurry of new content the game throws at you with War of the Chosen. XCOM 2 has grown and improved incredibly since launch. Yes, there are still some bugs and the new expansion created new ones. Yes, the game still crashes but not nearly as bad as EU. Even though XCOM 2 only crashed on me about 4 times in 100+ hours, I still wouldn't recommend playing Ironman without a backup file. If you can ignore the rare technical issues, I would still highly recommend buying this and eventually War of the Chosen after an initial vanilla playthrough. Even though it's an amazing expansion, it adds so much to the game that it would probably overwhelm and turn off new players (especially people coming from vanilla EU).
Even though it took them seven years, I'm glad that SEGA & Platinum were brave enough to finally port a modern light gun game to the PC. Of course, you might look at Vanquish and be bewildered, confusing it for yet another generic console port cover-based third person shooter. Everything about Vanquish seems to emulate an arcade experience, from the walls of enemies thrown at you, to the neon green HUD & cheesy sound effects, to the frenetic campaign & cutscene design. As expected of any good arcade game, nothing going on really makes sense; the plot is just an excuse to create new locations and introduce bosses. Follow the adventures of Sam Gideon as you rocket-slide from cover to cover until you somersault-kick a Russian space robot in the face and spray LMG bullets into his allies in slow motion during the fall back to the ground. Sam's movement is purposefully clunky, with loud mechanical grinding and slow animations, giving him a unique feeling from other Platinum Games characters that is more mecha than dancer. The only complaint I have about the combat is landing a melee attack will deplete your Augmented Reaction gauge. Normally when you enter low health, AR (slow motion) will trigger until your remaining gauge runs out, giving you ample reaction time to kill a few enemies around you and/or get to cover. Getting down to low health without the AR available will quickly result in you dying because of how many enemies are attacking you at once in most situations. This however is a small nitpick and the only negative I can think of when it comes to anything in regards to gameplay. Melee combat's effectiveness varies wildly depending on the situation and is often more useful for making yourself airborne by kicking off of terrain. The complexity of combat slowly unfurls itself as your struggle to survive causes you to innovate with mechanics. This is yet another Platinum masterpiece that is easy to learn but difficult to master; watching YouTubers pull of complex maneuvers is as exciting as watching a DMC or Bayonetta playthrough despite the vastly different gameplay design. Vanquish does everything it can to defy your expectations from a third-person shooter. While the music, SFX, and voice acting are all mediocre, everything else about this wild ride **** elevates the experience to something special. Yet again, Platinum created something unique and memorable out of what could've been just another cover-based shooter. Even though it's seven years late, Vanquish is still an excellent experience that shouldn't be overlooked.
Shadows of the Empire is a genuinely bad, clunky mess of fanfiction that is at times barely playable. Sliding around with early 5th-gen single joystick tank controls, you control Not-Han Solo, Dash Rendar, through 10 levels of miserable auto-aiming (except during the extremely disappointing flight sequences) on a mission to escape death at the hands of frequent bugs & broken physics. Of course, calling this auto-aim is generous; even the original DOOM's auto-aim pales in comparison to the "aim in their general direction to snipe your enemies" you'll encounter in this game. Most alt ammos are useless because they either don't ahere to the default blaster's auto-aim or are too close range to be used outside of a specific boss. Don't even bother trying to use the Not-BFG since you'll end up killing yourself half the time from self damage. The only two levels I didn't hate were the Hoth mission and surprisingly the obligatory sewer level. I thought the sewer map had surprisingly good level design which reminded me of a Quake map but otherwise most levels are either boring or too frustrating to enjoy because of the aformentioned issues. I wholeheartedly admit I bought this just for the nostalgia rush of getting to play the initial Hoth map again. While it was a much more miserable experience that I remembered as a child, there is still a glimmer of that diamond of fun in this abandoned coal mine ****. I would only recommend purchasing this if you enjoyed it on the N64 as a youngling and want to experience a working version of it again on Windows.
Nier is a genuine masterpiece that defies conventional expectations and design norms. While not flawless, Nier is undeniably a work of art that is greater than the sum of its parts. With a wide variety of gameplay styles, a remarkably well-written story with incredibly deep characters, and a memorable sound track complete with a proprietary language, Nier is a definite contender for Game of the Year awards. PlatinumGames, while not known for deep complexity in their combat systems, have still managed to form a brand for themselves in the past few years thanks to big successes such as Metal Gear Rising and Bayonetta 2. Their heavily-stylized "character action" game design fits perfectly into the anime-esque world of Nier: Automata: characters swing and throw teleporting greatswords twice their size with ease, slow down time to teleport-dodge enemy attacks, and run with an acceleration that feels like a 2-legged racing game. This also extends into the flight sequences, where you command a transforming airplane mecha with a moveset not dissimilar to your grounded counterparts. While the ground combat is even more simplistic than MGR (you can often just hold the "light attack" button [while dodging] to auto-combo normal enemies), there is such a huge variety of gameplay that you never get bored. Flight combat, hacking sequences, creative use of locked camera angles, and even mini-VNs all break up the hack 'n' slash to create what is probably the most creative mainstream "AAA" game in the past two console gens. It's hard to talk about how good the writing in Nier is without spoilers. To put it simply, Nier is broken into two parts, each being played across two characters. One character, who surprisingly becomes the focal point of the story, has a gradual mental health degradation which even the game's support characters make it a point to notice. Most Japanese media seems to take characters who are "supposed" to be evil and has them instantly snap under pressure, typically caused by one traumatic event like a loved one dying. This game's character goes from a happy-go-lucky straight shooter and suffers multiple depressing events that I felt affected me more than him at times. His decline into insanity isn't a simple breaking point but a good dozen hours of misery that was so well written that it became the main driving force of the story. While replaying portions of the game again as a different character can become tedious, their story line splits provide a fresh look at each character and the main story itself. So many great ideas and designs are incorporated into Nier: Automata that its hard to cover all of them in a simple written review. Nier frequently defies player expectations, creatively breaks the fourth wall, paints a rich sci-fi lore with excellent world-building, and leaves enough room to fill in the blanks with your imagination that I expect a fanbase similar to Undertale to crop up around it. Nier is the best game I've played since The Witcher 3 in July 2015. Hopefully it receives the attention it deserves because games like this are really once a gen masterpieces.
The gameplay, from the satisfying weapons to the excellent level design, is top notch. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of New Order and the few parts that did make me rage were just because of the difficulty spike from playing on Hard (and the fact that I'm a big baby). All of the voice acting, sound effects, music, and graphical stylization create an engaging atmosphere that feels part action movie and part comic book with enough sentimentality and gameplay variance to avoid being shoehorned into either's stereotypes completely. While things do get a bit too ridiculous at times that it's hard to stifle your laughter (the last quarter of the game is Jewish Super-Science vs. **** Super-Science), the majority of the game is so sternly constructed that you feel compelled to continue just to follow the characters and storyline (shocking considering this game's iD roots). Overall this is a masterfully constructed FPS game that shys just short of being too modernized or too cinematic. I heartily recommend picking this up even if you only play through it once.
If you own a mobile device and enjoy CCGs, you've probably played Hearthstone at some point. I quickly grew frustrated with it after a few hours due to many, many cards choosing not only random targets but sometimes random damage and random effects. Thankfully Cygames came along and improved on Blizzard's design decisions with Shadowverse. Although it isn't perfect, this is currently my CCG of choice because of the smooth cross-platform play, simple yet engaging game design choices, and the generous free-to-play elements. I've stuck with Shadowverse for so long compared to Hearthstone because of how much they've improved on the formula by simply cutting back on RNG and narrowing the power levels of cards. At first I was a bit shocked to see that you can only have five cards total in play at any time; however, as I played more classes I realized that many cards are actually balanced around this. You will almost never see a card in another CCG that says "Summon X of Y until the battlefield is full". The majority of cards let you choose targets, provide exact numbers, and have clearly defined interactions while still managing to fit in voice acting and flavor text for both the normal & evolved versions of each cards. This is the first mobile CCG I've played that is actually engaging & robust enough to feel like an actual card game. Being a collectible card game, you'd expect some heavy-handed "P2W" elements. Coming from Magic: The Gathering, where non-rotating decks can easily cost over $500, I was pleasantly surprised to see how cheap individual boosters are, how easily you can craft the cards you need to make a cohesive deck, and how many freebees the devs hand out. You have dailies which reward in-game currency for simple tasks like winning matches, a daily login reward system which doesn't penalize "missing" days (and refreshes instantly after cycling instead of cycling once a month like most mobile games), and free booster handouts for major events like tournaments and new expansions. If you do choose to spend money on boosters, you are incentivized to log in daily to purchase a booster for 50 crystals (which comes to $0.99 if purchased on impulse). I also have many more hours on Shadowverse than shown on Steam because of how smooth the cross-platform play is. All devices are linked through your Cygames account and share the same clean UI which, although slightly clunky because of no scaling on PC, makes the game very easy to pick up and play on my PC, phone, and tablet. This is probably the first CCG I've played where having a match run away from me hadn't made me rage because I was too comfortable lying on my couch swiping animated cards on my tablet. Of course, nothing is perfect and Shadowverse has its share of problems created by new design decisions that I'm afraid will never be addressed. At the start of each match, there is a "coin toss" to decide who goes first without a chance to pass. Of course, if there were an option to pass, almost everyone would given the huge advantage the second player has. From a MTG perspective, going first is advantageous for aggressive decks because (although you don't draw) you can play and attack first. In Shadowverse though the person going first still draws but the person going second draws twice and gets an extra evolution point. What's an evolution point? One of the new gameplay mechanics Cygames added is the ability to "evolve" your cards: each follower can be transformed with additional stats and occasionally new triggers. In my opinion these two bonuses give a huge advantage to the second player which is unwarranted considering how bad 1-drops are. Being a Japanese game, there are also huge card balancing issues: like most CCGs, there are individual cards that are powerful enough to shift the meta and create a miserable conveyor belt of netdecks ready to steamroll you. Typically cards like these will get banned or balanced but so far there has been no action taken against obvious offenders. In fact, the devs have gone so far to say they don't think these cards are causing problems despite what you hear from high ranking players in both the Steam & official forums. Even without the meta-warping cards, all classes have a few cards which define their archetypes's build paths, creating a barrier for entry when trying to play a different class than the one you've spent all your vials on. For now, I am cautiously optimistic for Shadowverse's future. Hopefully Cygames wakes up and acknowledges some of the issues and either creates a ban list for ranked or a Standard format to cycle out cancerous cards. In my opinion, this is currently the best mobile and best digital CCG available and I would recommend it for newcomers to the genre and veterans alike.
Madness takes digital form in your quest to grind your brains out in Darkest Dungeon. On the surface, you will find elements of city management, a complex party system that requires you to balance not only classes but their post-spelunking ailments and illnesses, multiple tilesets with a variety of bosses that require different strategies, and a bevy of trinkets and baubles with equally weighted good and bad stats. All these elements (despite the RNG) combine into an enjoyable experience for the first dozen or so hours. All this is fun and games until you clear the first boss for each dungeon and the problems with randomness and luck really show their ugly faces. RNG holds every gameplay aspect of DD in it's iron grip; from miserable combat accuracy (for both you and the enemy), interacting with curios, suffering from permanent debuffs, and even being able to run from battle are all randomized. I love board & card games so I'm used to rolling dice and suffering for it but when the entire game is determined by luck it gets infuriating. Imagine playing Monopoly: you land on an unowned property only to have to roll dice to determine if you can buy it, roll again to determine if you can put a house on it, and then your opponents get to roll when they land on it to determine if they have to pay you. Every step is a roll of the dice (not even counting traps) with your characters gaining stress randomly while walking and sometimes forcing you to interact with obviously bad curios because of a permanent trait they have. Of course, RNG can always be brute forced because this is a video game and anyone who has played an RPG before knows how to brute force any kind of difficulty: grinding. In order to beat anything above the first tier of bosses, you are expected to have the best gear possible on all your characters in order for them to survive. With a max roster size of 28, characters running away or suffering from multiple crippling ailments, and permadeath (because why not?), you're looking at spending several hours grinding "easy" dungeons in the hope of bringing back some cash without your party suffering from any more permanent debuffs or dying. Near the end of the game, losing a max level key party member can spell the end of your progression and send you back to the grind mines. Since launch, they added the ability to upgrade your recruiter to occasionally bring you higher level recruits, but this also requires grinding up multiple buildings just to have the chance at buying non-unleveled heroes. These are all complaints about how the game was "meant" to be playing though. Through the options menu you can choose to mitigate some of the RNG but it still leaves a lot to be desired. Most of the miserable elements above aren't covered in the menu and removing & replacing them would completely change the game. I don't hate the individual elements that bring this game down but when combined it just feels like Darkest Dungeon despises the player and is actively trying to stop you from playing it. I'm sure the devs thought this was some kind of clever meta-torture based on the Lovecraftian horrors you run into but I didn't find it amusing. There will be a small, masochistic audience that will sink their teeth into this and grind it for hundreds of hours (only 1.3% of the people who have bought it on Steam have beaten it, including SAM users) but for the average person I would not recommend it.
With the constant deluge of generic indie coin-collecting platformers the video game market in general has been drowning in for the past decade or so now, it was pleasant to play a fresh breath of the mostly forgotten sub-genre of the action sidescrolling platformer again with Seraph. While I enjoyed the majority of the game, I cannot recommend it because of the poor level design, an inability to backtrack or grind, and the monumental difficulty spike with the last boss. Akin to 2D shooters of old like Abuse and the original Duke Nukem, Seraph is about shooting your way from one side of a level to another while unlocking some doors and grabbing ammo along the way. To put it simply, this is essentially a 2D "FPS" game with full auto-aim: Seraph requires you to focus on dodging attacks and performing acrobatics to transverse a level instead of gathering rings or saving animals. This auto-aim system helps create a more cinematic experience by greatly increasing the combat speed and encouraging flashy movement instead of spending time every enemy counter mouse aiming. However, this is often detrimental to long range combat and against faster enemies; you will often find yourself being required to be point-blank to get shots in despite having no melee system against mostly melee opponents. Several abilities also require you to be close-range for them to trigger or work properly which feels more like an intentional concession to the auto-aim rather than adding variety to the combat system. All problems aside, the combat is mostly good and is unique enough alone to make this worth playing. Sadly, no amount of good combat can salvage a game with miserable level design. Being a modern indie game means Seraph has procedurally generated levels which it of course doesn't do well. If I didn't know better I'd think the devs only made 5 unique rooms, flipped them, added some connectors, and threw them into a randomizer. You can add a new coat of paint with a few different tilesets but its painfully obvious that no one cared about the level design when you see the same rooms every level (with each level taking about ~5 mins to finish!). Some of the larger maps I actually got lost in and wished there was a map function (not because of any maze-like level design but because everything looked the same!). I would've really preferred fewer hand-made maps than the mess of random junk maps this poor game received instead. As the difficulty rose and I struggled to finish the last few maps, I really wished I had some way of backtracking to level up my "account" more. Again, being an indie game in 2016, this game has a system comparable to permadeath with no level select option. Dying in this will set you back to your most recent checkpoint which, not only can be several maps prior, but also interrupts the storyline flow by making you replay map's intro & outro dialogue. The only real way to grind up your character's permanent stats is by doing daily quests and survival missions on the leaderboards. While it's a nice attempt to create a community, a once per day challenge that only pays out once the challenge is closed isn't very conductive towards reaching goals with your character's growth. Why would you need to grind in a sidescrolling platformer? I didn't feel the need to until I reached the last boss which was an absolute nightmare. Playing on a seemingly average difficulty of 5.5 (I got downgraded several times from dying on the last maps), it took me probably 3 of my 9 hours of game time on Seraph to beat him. A combination of fast-tracking homing shots, teleporting full body-sized AoEs, a PBAoE on the boss that is larger than his hitbox (and pops up when you get close to him), and heavy randomization on both numbers of shots and time between shots makes this a bullethell boss without access to bombs. I was ready to uninstall several times because no build or weapon type seemed to work. As far as I can tell, I just got lucky with the volleys he decided to fire the time I beat him. A truly miserable experience that is further unsatisfying by the cut-to-credits ending. Overall, Seraph is a decent game. There are unique concepts here and a real effort at lore & world-building despite being a simple auto-aim shooter. I want to recommend this because I enjoyed most of the game but I can't because of the apparent traps of modern indie game design. Helmed by a more competent developer I imagine this could've been GOTY material; Instead, Seraph is just another indie platformer but with guns and demons instead of coins and cute animals.
This is the first game in a very long time where I actually dreaded the bosses. An excellently atmospheric Assassin's Creed-esque adventure game held back by cookie cutter play-by-the-numbers recycled boss fights and a predictable game structure. Its a real shame that the bosses are so phoned in because its the only thing keeping this game from being excellent. I'd highly recommend picking this up as long as you don't expect anything from the bosses going into them (I actually yelled at my computer at how lazily they were designed at one point). Pros: +Incredible attention to detail in all aspects of the game +Non-linear world that feels packed with things to do +Very fluid combat that is actually challenging on Hard +"Puzzle rooms" that don't involve pushing boxes +Balances stealth, combat, and platforming enjoyably +Crams in as much Batman lore as possible while keeping enough of it optional +Everything with Scarecrow Cons: -Incredibly bad (lazy) bosses -Sometimes feels like "Adventures in Crawling in Vents & Kicking Grates: Batman Edition"
Part rhythm game, part dungeon crawler, Crypt of the NecroDancer is a well-excuted and original concept that marries its inspirations effectively without sacrificing too much from either genre. While it doesn't dig too deep into either genre's traits, if you enjoy rhythm games or dungeon crawlers you will find something to like here (if you can look past its flaws). The meat of the gameplay revolves around spelunking through four zones of four stages each, with the first three having a small pool of possible bosses at the end. By keeping with the rhythm of the track and timing your actions to the beat, you are rewarded with a multiplier bonus that increases your gold pickups (and which later on enhances some equipment). While this is very important exploring the first two zones (especially as a new player because your loot pool will be low), zone 3 becomes extremely hectic with very aggressive monsters, lots of damage traps, and higher base gold pickups. The coin multiplier is useless except for gear once you reach Zone 4 because the gold pickups are so large that you can ignore it completely outside of combat. This seems to go against the design decision of adding rhythm elements and makes the game feel more like a barebones mobile-esque experience instead of DDR with swords. This might change with other characters (of which there are 10 to choose from), but the zones felt very similar in terms of game design when playing with Melody and Cadence for me. Even though the game only has 16 (randomized) floors, you have a great deal of customization options from the level select hub. Different characters completely change how the game plays; a monk who dies from touching gold, a bard who ignores the rhythm and turns the game into a turn-based crawler, and a miner with infinite kickable bombs are some examples of how the gameplay can be radically modified. CotN is also completely playable with a dance pad because everything is controlled with the arrow keys! This alone gives it my "Best One-Handed Game" award for 2015. A level editor and a seeded All Zones Mode are also included for enthusiasts. Overall, Crypt of the NecroDancer is a superbly unique experience that is cheap enough that anyone who has played DDR should dust off their dance pad for. While it isn't the deepest rogue-like or the hardest rhythm game, there is enough content included to sink your teeth into for at least a dozen hours.
Pillars of Eternity is a good CRPG that feels held back by a bland story and combat that gets easier and tactically simplier as the game progresses. There is plenty of content to explore (including a personal castle to upgrade and a deep dungeon to explore for fancy loot, room for actual roleplaying with extensive dialogue options, and unique classes that alone are enough to make me want to replay the game) but the majority of it is too similar to previous games in the genre to really stand out on its own. While I love Obsidian, this repurposing of old ideas and design choices just doesn't feel like the dream project it was supposed to be. PoE gives you plenty of important decisions to make and lets you know every chance it can that these decisions matter. However, one very important sequence of events near the halfway point in the game in particular stood out in breaking that illusion. At one point you reach a crossroads between two factions, one of which you previously sided with. Various speech options let you continue to side with them or roleplay other options. However, the Big Bad shows his face and spits on your decisions, making your previous questing and choices moot. It is very frustrating to play through because you're just stuck there watching it play out with no input on what is happening, only to suffer the consequences later. Something more cryptic happening off-screen during these events would've been better writing and would've had the same effect without being so frustrating to play through. The end boss also feels very contrived and added for the sake of having a last boss for a video game. Most of the game you're chasing him and always 2 steps behind him and yet in this last bastion he decides to face you face-to-face. I feel like he was supposed to be an Irenecus clone but he comes off feeling whiny and shoehorned. I would've really preferred pushing him and the "twist" leading up to the final area into a sequel or expansion because it really detracts from the rest of the game. While I enjoyed my time with PoE, I find it hard to recommend. Overall, it felt quite bland and dry compared to CRPGs of old with only the few unique classes and the deep character interactions really standing out to me. If you've played CRPGs before and are on the fence about this, try a pillar of the genre such as Baldur's Gate 2 or Icewind Dale before dropping cash on this.
A mixed bag that attempts to build on the strengths of the original but seems to struggle against its own design. I love how much larger the new maps are but that is also one of the games biggest issues; Much of the game is spent shift-looking far ahead of you to line up the perfect shot while hiding behind cover because a missed shot means a counter-shot from off screen can kill you. Too many of the maps were a complete joke with you spamming walls of shotgun fire off screen in the hopes of killing stuff (and actually succeeding) and rewarding you with a huge combo or punishing you with a bullet in the back from off screen. I guess rooms made out of entirely glass were popular in the 80s because there are also tons of windows this time around, meaning enemies from outside of your vision can shoot to kill from multiple rooms away. Melee is usually an option but with long corridors and tons of breakable windows its often unrealistic to melee everything everytime. If the game was in a different engine (with some kind of first person option) or had a zoom feature I would've really loved this and it would've felt like a significant improvement over the original. New characters, bigger levels, more weapons, and a psychedelic story are great and all, but when the core gameplay is this frustrating and unwieldy it is difficult to recommend. If you enjoyed the original its worth picking up but I wouldn't recommend it for newcomers to the series despite being completely seperate from the original (outside of lore).
By some miracle of ineptitude, Magic Duels somehow manages to be worse than DotP 2015 across the board. In terms of game design, gameplay content, the cash shop, and even down to the card selection, this is by far the worst work by Stainless Games yet. Wizards need to seriously re-evaluate their digital presence and either needs to find a new studio to work on these games or stop making them altogether. Gone are the extra game modes, challenges, and even campaign deck construction of previous years. Instead, we have a 20 mission campaign (with unadjustable difficulty) with tutorials sprinkled throughout that can only be played with uneditable decks that get "upgraded" after completing missions. How are they upgraded? It's hard to tell, since most of them are very bad from the start and the game doesn't tell you what changes it makes to your deck. Gideon's deck is the most playable and even that is just dumping your hand and turning everything sideways. I get the feeling that they thought that cramming the challenges of old DotP games into this game's campaign would be a good idea but it really doesn't work. This campaign is (once again!) a terrible introduction to MTG for new players since it ignores deck construction, has a locked difficulty, and has many purposefully unbalanced fights. Once you finish the very short singleplayer content, you have the incredibly deep and rewarding online play to look forward to. 2-Headed Giant is back! ...But you can't get coin rewards from it. There's a ladder system and matchmaking system finally! ...But server/game crashes and disconnects will give you no rewards. You can quickly play games through Steam invites with your friends! ...But there's no rewards. Playing MTG is fun and all but its frustrating when everyone is playing with the same trash and new boosters are hard to come by because of the stingy cash shop system. Even if you do decide to sink some cash into this game, you're only getting SIX cards per booster! Physical MTG boosters, while in all honesty are meant to be played in Sealed or Draft and not solely to be cracked for value, at least have 15 cards in them for a MSRP of $4. At the worst conversion rate, you're looking at spending $2 for a six card booster. At $39.99 for 7500 coins, you're spending roughly $0.80 per six card booster... but at this point why not spend your $40 on actual MTG cards (or a new video game)? The worst part about this is that even if you do get the most bang for your buck with the coins, you are still gambling on boosters and aren't guaranteed to unlock every card. Opening overpriced boosters might be acceptable if they had anything worth playing inside of them. Origins is the worst core set I have ever played with, full of worse version of old cards that are purposefully designed to be weaker and/or bad. This set has the format design of MM2015 (which was also terrible to actually play with and people just rare drafted it) and the mechanics design of Theros (Renown is an obvious leftover from Theros's crap keywords). Do not waste your money on physical or digital boosters of this product. It amazes me why Wizards hates money so much. I understand they want people to dump their money into either physical product or the digital variants available on MTGO, but then why release a barebones mobile game every YEAR then? These games make the MTG brand look bad (because MTGO is poorly advertised) and with every annual release, the DotP series is on the front of everyone's desks. Did reviewers see the improvements to MTGO's UI and layout during its last upgrade? Not really, because MTGO has been out for 13 years. Did reviewers see Stainless drop a complete turd the past two years, with more content stripped from each annual release and with more cash grab attempts built in? Even if reviewers haven't, the playerbase sure has noticed it judging by Steam reviews. Wizards needs to wake up and find a new dev to work on these games. Stainless has been dragging their ass since the beginning of the DotP series; releasing cookie-cutter annual rehashes with slightly different cards every year, and with recent years actually removing content. Even with being a free2play CCG, this isn't worth your time because of the cut content, lack of polish, always-online connectivity, and incredibly stingy rewards for online play.
The Witcher 3 tells the story of Geralt of Rivia, a globe-trotting drunkard and gambling addict whose delusions of grandeur alone rival most other media on the market. While heavily padded with sword fighting mini-games and lengthy cutscenes (that required a bowl of popcorn), this is an excellent CCG that will keep you glued to your screen. While building your Gwent collection, you will visit two very large open world maps (that could have been their own game if handled by a different dev), two smaller open world maps, and multiple unique locations on your quest for a better deck. The only real disappointment is that the Monster deck takes a very long time to find cards for and by the time you have a playable deck, all your other decks are significantly more powerful. Regardless, Gwent is an excellent CCG that requires a lot of forethought, mind games, meta strategy, and a bit of luck. ...Outside of Gwent, the actual story is excellent for an open world game but I found it lacking compared to the previous two games. The story line is especially weak during the full length of Novigrad, which I felt was padded by the undercity politics and a mountain of sidequests of wildly varying level requirements. It didn't help that about half of that part of the main quest involved pulling Dandelion's butt out of the fire again either. Ciri's playable parts do an excellent job of breaking up the occasional tedium and help provide a perspective of the game's events from the other side. Your actions and choices also have major consequences on the story, often more impactful than you expect. From big to small, Geralt changes individuals lives and shapes the course of history with his political choices. Many times throughout the game I found myself going through side quests (even though I didn't need the rewards) just to find out what would happen. TW3 is also the "Witcher-est" of the three games. This game really shines when you are just doing random monster hunting quests, following tracks and discovering clues about a monster's whereabouts, or looking for the hideout **** of thugs. Geralt narrates his observations and helps push the gameplay forward with his thoughts on events and locations. The character build options also provide a lot of variety; this is the first Witcher game where I found myself unable to easily settle on a build. I respecced at least ten times during the course of the game, switching between melee, signs, alchemy, and all sorts of halfway builds in-between. Despite "downgrade" claims, The Witcher 3 is a gigantic, beautiful world to explore that pushes modern consumer PC technology to the limit. The story line is the best I have experienced in an open world game and deserves to be played through at least twice to experience different effects your actions have on the story. From the cast of colorful characters to the caves full of loot, everything feels handcrafted and lovingly made. This is one of the best RPGs I have played in a very long time (with actual roleplaying elements too!) and I can safely recommend it to anyone looking for a mature adventure through a gritty and immersive world.
A Tower Defense/Third-Person Action hybrid in the style of "Orcs Must Die!" based on Canadian lore. The game's structure is broken into pre-mission cutscene, pre-mission preparations, the actual defense of your structures on foot, and a post-mission cutscene, with no deviation in this structure. Of the twenty missions available, the first few are thinly veiled tutorials which quickly ramp up in difficulty once supernatural enemies are introduced. Unlike most games, the difficulty doesn't budge; for the most part it was a non-stop train ride through a frustratingly difficult game. I was finding myself quickly frustrated and had to restart missions many times because of accidentally hitting myself with a lethal trap, getting sidetracked defending one objective while another was being destroyed, or just dying from being overwhelmed by enemies I was unprepared to face at full health because they "dodged" a trap I set for them. While the story is good enough to push you forward and explain character actions and interactions, it really feels like it was stretched thin and simply made to build a game around. There are no sidequests, no mini-games or diversions, no non-main story character to chat with, or even any non-story or non-shops to visit while in towns. I loved the game's atmosphere and environments but much of the game feels rushed and lazy, as if the devs said "this is good enough, ship it!" The story also seemed to end abruptly and un-satisfyingly, as if the devs couldn't decide to lead into a sequel or not. I would love to see a sequel that wasn't such a barebones narrow corridor of gameplay. Simple touches, like actually being able to walk around in towns, would have added much to the atmosphere of the game. This could have been a cozy, atmospheric game with a unique spin on Tower Defense, but instead it feels like a quick in-betweener for a dev looking to make money for his next big project.
Essentially two games in one, The Desolate Hope combines familiar gameplay elements from vastly different genres to create something greater than the whole of its parts. While clunky at times, it feels refreshingly creative despite doing little new. Normal levels play out like a simple sidescrolling platformer where you collect resources and unlock & upgrade abilities. Every map has one boss that you have to beat four times; although it sounds tedious, they mix things up by moving the boss entrance around the map and drastically increasing the difficulty of boss tiers (which essentially forcing you to play through other levels and then backtrack). This helps breaks up the flow and promotes exploration, instead of just steamrolling through the maps one at a time. The bosses that you are preparing for during the platforming segments are the crux of the gameplay; it is really refreshing to look forward to a boss battle in a western game. These play out like JRPG battles, with your party of AIs on the right throwing their "spells" at the boss on the left. It took me a while to get used to it because its very fast and click-happy, with bosses often acting faster than your whole party can. Eventually the combat gets so fast that you have to use special abilities to automate certain functions (trying to avoid spoilers here!). Herein lies my biggest complaint because once the combat gets truly challenging and gives you all your tools & toys, the game just plays itself. While I really enjoyed this game, I don't see it getting a sequel anytime soon considering how it ends. Hopefully once the devs are done milking FNAF we will get a spiritual successor because The Desolate Hope is a very creative and colorful take on a futuristic apocalypse.
Prior to its release, a lot of the previews made the game look like a reskin or DLC for Saints Row 3. I held out hope that the devs were going to expand beyond expectations considering all the wacky aliens, superpowers, and ridiculous weapons they were adding. Instead what we got was essentially Saints Row 3.5: a big & stupid Michael Bay sequel that feels like a really long add-on to SR3. SR 2 & 3 had some restraint and at least attempted to build up to their big action sequences. SR4 starts off with a bang and never stops in the worst way possible. The only thing that breaks up the action sequences are a few comedic moments and nostalgia pandering scenes but even these manage to go over-the-top. Seriously, who has played SR1 and why is so much of this game wasted on referencing it? Many of the rest breaks I took while playing this were just to detox from the Michael Bay-ness of everything; I love blowing up spaceships as much as everyone else, but there's a point in time where you just want to walk through the city and beat pedestrials with a giant . Much of the game feels like you are forced to take the most explosive route possible through everything; I really wish there was an ability toggle button because simply bumping into pedestrians or vehicles while super sprinting will have the police shooting lasers at you for miles. The majority of this game feels like action for the sake of action with most of it feeling unrewarding and boring at times. Adding to the rushed feeling of SR4, much of the game doesn't feel playtested. For example, Explosive Blast's chain reaction will kill whole flashpoints with a single fireball from any distance, while the Buff ability feels like a joke considering how late in the game you get it. Weapons have plenty of issues too; some weapons are completely useless unless you are handed them for a mission (obligatory useless sniper rifle, Alien SMG, Dubstep Gun, etc.) while others slaughter everything unupgraded (Disintegrator, 'Merica, etc.). I found myself using garbage weapons or abilities just to complete in-game challenges because otherwise I would've just used Blast & the Thump Gun for everything. The storyline feels really slapped together too. Why bother with more simulation exploits when you have a suit of giant power armor in the real world? Everytime something cool happens in the real world it feels like the game drops an arbitrary hurdle for you to overcome inside the simulation. The whole in-out-in-out just feels like padding and an excuse to turn off superpowers for missions, especially considering your Health upgrades carry over into the real world. I really would've enjoyed more time spent in the real world... Perhaps the first part of the game inside the simulation with all the ridiculous superpowers and the second half in the real world, fighting Zinyak on his own turf? Overall it just feels like a missed chance simply because the devs wanted to recycle as much as possible. So is SR4 just extended DLC for SR3? Yes, but really, really long DLC. I feel like they stretched SR3's assets as far as they could go and whipped together some quick alien tech from recycled STAG parts. People might try to draw conclusions between this and GTA 3 vs. VC & SA, but those were completely new environments, characters, vehicles, and so forth. SR4 manages to even reuse 3's map despite Earth being destroyed (whoops spoilers!)! Should you bother playing SR4? If you've played any of the previous games, you will find something familiar here. If you are new to the series, don't expect "GTA With Aliens" because this is the most bombastic Saints Row yet. I enjoyed this but it would be my least favorite Saints Row if SR2's PC port wasn't garbage. I recommend giving it a shot but 2 and 3 are clearly better games.
Have you played an RTS within the past 10 years? Then you probably have seen everything worth seeing in Etherium already. The biggest issue with RTS games nowadays (and other "dead genres" being "revived" lately) is that they try to get away with being just "good enough". There is nothing groundbreaking, nothing creative or inventive, no new game design ideas present here and, despite having its release pushed back multiple times, feels like instant bargain bin fodder during a genre drought. Outside of the mandatory multiplayer, you have a campaign with convoluted rules (with each side having their own secondary victory conditions) and a skirmish mode. The campaign is very frustrating because of simple oversights, like not being able to save during your opponent's turns and a star system UI that doesn't provide enough information. I spent easily almost two hours defending my territories during opponent's turns simply because quitting the game meant restarting the opponent's turn. This is of course on top of all the issues present in the actual gameplay... ...of which there is little to mention. The main objective (and single game mode) is to either destroy the other player's main base or deplete their tickets by bombarding their mothership with turrets high in the tech tree. Regions of territory are strictly defined and can have only one base inside for adding upgrades onto. The problem with the territories having a fixed size is that smaller territories only allow smaller bases. This creates claustrophobic maps, with clearly defined chokepoints that force you down a corridor to your opponent's base. Most of my campaign victories were from converting the neutral factions on the map and attack-moving them into the enemy's main base. The absolute bare minimum went into Etherium's factions and their unit design. Units for each race have creative names like Standard Infantry, Siege Vehicle, and Bomber. Races share all the same units (!) with each having only 4 unique units. This might be acceptable in a turn-based strategy game where you have 20+ factions or dozens of units, but here you only have about 6 different units for each unit type. Each race also shares 3 of their 6 faction skills, similar to Dawn of War's faction ability system. Everything about the races just feels very cut-and-pasted and bland and makes me wonder why this game's release was pushed back multiple times. I am ashamed to have fallen for the hype for this game. If you are thirsty for a good (or great or amazing, whatever) RTS, then revisit an old one instead of wasting money on this. This game couldn't be any blander or generic if it tried. If a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter could eventually type out the complete works of William Shakespeare, then this game is proof that they can code a video game too.
Somewhere along the line, something went seriously wrong with the direction of this game. While the original Borderlands was nothing groundbreaking, it was greater than the sum of its parts; a cohesive, run-and-gun action RPG that pulled the quest for better loot out of high fantasy dungeons and into the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Borderlands 2 on the other hand feels like it was originally supposed to be a console MMO (that was then canned when Gearbox got the message that MMOs don't make money anymore) and instead repurposed it into whatever this mess is. Let's start with the most glaring gameplay issue: weapon proficiencies have been removed, resulting in everyone being mediocre with every weapon type. Throughout my playthrough of the campaign, the majority of my weapons felt like they were spraying wildly; even rockets from launchers would come out at random angles, often missing a target ten feet away from me. Instead you get Badass points, a system designed to reward you with stat upgrades for doing arduous tasks such as breathing or shooting bad guys. Sure it might sound cool to have more options, but when you're made of paper and all your weapons spray like you're trying to shoot with a jackhammer it feels more like you are disabling handicaps instead of improving your character. The worst part is these stat increases have diminishing returns and you are forced to spread them; less chosen stat increases appear more often when you rank up, preventing you from rapidly increasing in any one stat. Your Badass rank is account-wide, meaning all characters will gain their buffs. If you're somehow addicted to this game, that's great for your alts, but I was obvious dead weight for my veteran allies online. Loot options feel much more constrained in BL2. Gearbox can brag about the millions of guns but when the only worthwhile weapons are at the top rarities, who cares about all the blues and greens? Weapon effectiveness seems to dropoff a lot faster in BL2 (probably because of no proficencies), with the only weapons worth using more than 5 levels being uniques and legendaries. Of course these weapons should be the best and last for a long time... but why should I be expected to pull serial codes from internet social media to get a guaranteed "worthwhile" weapon? I saw a single legendary weapon drop during the 25 or so hours I spent playing through the campaign and even that was a mediocre rifle that was unusable after a few hours. The majority of the game I was using quest rewards because they were the best weapons I could find. Again, who cares about the millions of guns when I'm using generic handouts from NPCs anyway? Of course all of this is just the surface of the problems with this game. After years of patches there are still tons of bugs (mouse cursor doesn't appear with a controller plugged in, getting stuck in surfaces, mouse movement breaking, various broken textures), the writing is terrible with all the characters being turned into unlikeable jerks, the story is way too long and padded with checkpoints for fetch quests, map edges are poorly defined resulting in seemingly random death pits, character classes are blander, weaker, and more boring than the original... the list goes on. I honestly hated this game and I just wanted to finish it because my brothers did. I would not recommend this miserable experience to anyone.
Have you ever played a game so amazing that you don't know if you'll ever play a game as good as it again? ...MGR isn't that game, but it sure is close to it. MGR is probably the best example **** being more than just the sum of its parts. The combat is a bit button-mashy (with slowly reacting AI) on lower difficulties, map design is mostly point A to point B, and the weapon variety is very limited. Somehow the game overcomes its shortcomings by combining ridiculous over-the-top cutscenes, a diverse OST with tracks ranging from traditional MGS-style ambience to blood-pumping boss themes, and a cast of uniquely difficult bosses that all feel like properly fleshed out worthy opponents for your anime cyborg ninja. Western devs are trying so hard to remove bosses and "video gamey" elements that when something like MGR comes along it feels like a breath of fresh air despite doing nothing revolutionary. MGR is a video game made by people who actually play video games and it shows. Bosses will beat techniques into you and make you get good, only to have the next boss require you to "unlearn" and adapt your previous strategies. MGR's bosses are an outstanding example of good game design in every way possible... I honestly can't remember the last time I played a game with such memorable boss fights. MGR manages to feel like an extension of MGS while standing on its own strengths. With a plausible plotline (within the MGS universe at least), charismatic bosses, a likable supporting cast, and actual character development in an action game, MGR creates something unique by smoothly melding a bevy of genre staples. I don't know if MGS fans will want to pick this up, but its hard to deny the adrenaline-pumping awesomeness of Metal Gear Rising.
Have you ever been so completely immersed in a game, loving every minute of it and every minute detail, only to be smacked in the face by a huge glaring issue that makes you not want to play the game again? The AI in this game is the guilty case in this scenario for me. Despite previously making a 4X strategy game (Endless Space) and an expansion for it (along with a year or more of updates), Amplitude for some reason forgot to teach the AI basic strategies. For example: in my most recent game, I found another faction roughly three regions away from me who was neutral towards me. They then proceded to send a settler into my territory, yell at me when I attacked it, settled a city (after retreating with the settler), and then begged for mercy when I steamrolled their defenseless city. After agreeing to a cease fire, they then chastised me for controlling territory next to them (the city I just captured). The most baffling part of this is that the AI seems to be as bad if not worse than vanilla Endless Space's AI. I would've expected going into this that Endless Legend should have playable AI after the dev's previous experience. On top of the terrible (unplayable?) AI, you have tons of network issues. Even with just one other person, the game can still desync or crash if someone's connection has even a lag spike. Although its a nice touch to have drop-in-drop-out gameplay in a 4X, joining a friend's 3 player game to replace an AI ended up desyncing the rest of them and effectively ended the game since they hadn't saved yet. There is an option to resync the connections but it doesn't seem to ever work properly for me or any of my friends. Often times I feel like I am fighting with the game itself to make my cities do more than one thing at a time; each of the 4 "X's" requires absolute focus in Endless Legend. Although I love the struggle against the planet itself, I wish I could disable certain handicaps. Ramping research cost for all tech (including previous eras), paying influence to engage in diplomacy, and winter's random increasingly powerful debuffs and durations are just a few of the wrenches the game throws into your nation's machine. An eventual endless winter comes if you play for a very long match, causing your production and troops to slow to a crawl. I understand from a lore standpoint you have to make the game difficult to play against, but even SMAC's Alpha Centauri was more hospitable than Auriga. Outside of the AI and network issues, Endless Legend is fantastic. I love the unique popup map layout (reminiscent of Game of Thrones's intro), deep levels of zoom, a creative twist on combat that combines the best of old and new 4X combat systems, and harshness of the game environment. I really want to like this game but as of now I can only recommend it for 4X enthusiasts with a LAN. Hopefully the devs continue working on improving the AI and we won't need to wait until an expansion to "buy" working AI.
Banished is a fantastically atmospheric, albeit barebones, city builder set in pseudo-colonial times. You start off with a handful of ragged outcasts thrust into the wilderness with a mission of building your own civilization from the landscape. Because of its small scope, Banished is also much more personable than more robust city builders; instead of managing multiple cities or even a nation, you start with four to six families and grow to a few hundred people (or more, depending on how long you wish to play a map). This isolation combined with little charming touches, like knowing each citizen's personal info, excellent ambient sound design, and a slower paced game speed, makes Banished the most atmospheric fictional city builder I have played. Although there is a rough "progression" to what you can build via resource requirements, any building can be built at any time depending on what your city needs. Real strategy comes in properly timing and planning your construction; While Banished is a pretty laid-back game, a sudden influx of nomads can bring diseases or cause starvation if your city isn't prepared and construction takes significant manpower and cross-profession coordination. This flexibility can be overwhelming for a new player trying to survive their first winter but thankfully Banished's tutorials are well constructed and actually worth playing through even for veterans. Your city's growth (and essentially the game's difficulty) is tied to how much or how little you want to build, leading to a more relaxed game than most city builders. Even though I loved most of this game, I spent a lot of time fighting with the villager's AI. While Banished strictly doesn't have win/lose conditions, it is heart-breaking to watch your citizens die from starvation while they are harvesting crops or gathering fish. Other AI issues emerge much earlier in the game, like farmers acting like laborers and not tending their fields during the summer. Laborers also seem to act erratically; when you assign multiple removal tasks, they seem to work in arbitary priority. Constructing multiple buildings is a huge pain with trying to coordinate the laborers with the builders; I eventually resorted to laying down a "building plan" and mass-pausing construction, unpausing one building at a time to be built. Maybe I don't understand all the intracies of the AI but 50 hours in and I'm still frustrated and often resorting to using the "Increase Priority" tool. Banished is also missing many things that add challenge and depth to other city builders. This is essentially the "kiddie pool" of city builders with no crime, polution, budget balancing/taxation, or non-essential buildings. With 31 construction options, everything you build is for managing food, housing or supplying citizens, or transportation needs. There are some minor trading elements but its mostly there to keep your city growing once you run out of certain resources. Once you have a stable city running all there is to do is make it bigger while avoiding starvation or disasters. The same could be said of many games but I always look forward to building a sports stadium in SimCity... here it feels like it's just food, food, and more food. If you haven't played a city builder before, Banished is a great place to start. Veterans looking for a more laid-back experience will get a few dozen hours out of this while alt+tabbed with something else. Nothing here is groundbreaking but what there is is a great change of pace from playing certain other sims at Cheetah speed.
After the great success that the first "season" of The Walking Dead was, I was totally hyped and ready for round 2 with this game. Sadly, Season 2 fails on just about every level to surpass or even meet the original's quality. Telltale's Walking Dead now suffers from the same issues that the TV show is burdened by: overall terrible writing with characters who have very generic motivations who get killed off when the writers run out of ideas for their storylines. Unlike the original, the characters have no clear direction or plans for survival beyond finding food and shelter for the day; while this is reasonably realistic, its also incredibly boring. A domino effect of hurt feelings goes through this story, with characters behaving erratically (often contradicting their previous motivations and ignoring friendships) because other characters were behaving erratically. Everytime something bad happens, Clementine has to save the day while the adults bicker and threaten to kill each other. Most character's actions in these episodes are illogical and your choices and actions have even less consequences than in the original game. Even with Telltale behind the wheel, TWD: Season 2 has already fallen into the shallow strides set by the TV show. While I still recommend the original, Season 2 is a decidedly phoned in 8 hours of "gameplay" that isn't worth wasting your time on.
Half dungeon crawler, half resource management sim, Dungeon of the Endless is a simplistic "Rogue-like" set in the Endless universe. The thing that sets this apart from so many others in its genre is how you keep your party alive; major slots on dungeon floors allow you to build Major Modules (used to harvest resources), along with minor slots for offensive, defensive, and supportive modules. Three resources are harvested per door opening and modules add to their production: Food for healing, leveling, and recruiting heroes, Industry for constructing modules, and Science for researching upgrades and resetting your party's ability cooldowns. A fourth resource, Dust, is much rarer and is used to power the crystal you are escorting, which in turn powers rooms for modules. Gameplay is both turn-based (new resources are harvested from when you open a door to a new room) and real-time (combat, movement, healing, etc.), keeping you constantly engaged despite the AI-controlled combat. The first few floors are simple enough to clear out but about halfway up you need to decide which is more important: risking your party's lives and possibly the crystal itself or running to the exit ASAP? Keeping a balanced party and wisely spending your resources will make or break your runs. Luck is always a factor but I felt that once I knew how to control the flow of spawns and properly construct defensive chokepoints that most of my losses were admittedly my own fault. This game rewards planning and strategy instead of demanding you get lucky unlike other recent Sci-fi rogue-likes (looking at you FTL & SotS: The Pit!). Newcomers will be overwhelmed easily and probably give up easily because the tutorial is terrible and most of the game's systems have to be studied on the wiki, even with the extensive tooltips in-game. Although it practically plays itself at times and still could use some polishing and TLC, Dungeon of the Endless is a very unique Rogue-like and is worth checking out for fans of the genre.
Ground Zeroes has been accused of being a paid demo, a single mission shipped to simply hype MGS5's eventual release. However, I found it to much more than that; My most recent MGS game being 4 at it's release in 2008, I felt quite rusty going into this. Ground Zeroes is a good warm-up for MGS5, consisting of six missions that take place in the same ficticious Cuban military base, Camp Omega. The "Ground Zeroes" mission is the meat of the story, involving the rescue of two minors on opposite sides of the base that were apparently major characters from Peace Walker. Interspersed cutscenes and collectible cassette tapes flesh out the character's back stories and their experiences on the base. The extra missions provide vastly different approaches and playstyles to infiltrating (or assaulting) the base, ranging from a helicopter ride providing covering fire to an assassination mission that fails easily if you are even spotted. After you finish each mission there's still plenty of unlocks and time trials for purists, along with the last two missions for waxing nostalgia. Ground Zeroes helps to connect the events of Peace Walker with MGS5 and acts as a catalyst for the time jump been the two games. Overall, this probably won't win over any new fans but is a thoroughly fleshed out "VR Mission"-style side game that provides a solid intro to The Phantom Pain.
Despite calling itself a dungeon crawling RPG "Rogue-LITE", Ziggurat plays more akin to a classic arcade game. I could imagine walking past this in an arcade as a kid, waiting for my turn while watching people popping quarters between lives, and typing in my initials as ASS into the high score board once I ran out of allowance. However, this isn't an arcade game; It calls itself a dungeon-crawling RPG, and should then be held up to those standards. Is a 5 level dungeon with floor consisting of a dozen or so randomized rooms a proper dungeon crawler? No. The only definitive RPG element here is picking between two perks after killing so many enemies. So what's left? A magic-based FPS? Bunny-hopping and circle-strafing to dodge bullet hell spell spam? Ziggurat is extremely underwhelming. Short on content, the "rogue-lite" "depth" of this game (which is increasingly becoming an excuse to be lazy) means you'll just be replaying the same 5 levels over and over with different characters that you can unlock. If the game was 20 or even just 10 levels long, with more rooms, you might have an actual game here. As it stands, I feel like I spent $12 on a paid demo. I do not recommend this game as it stands unless the devs really step it up and add more content.
"It's over... It's FINALLY over." After drudging through DOS's heavily padded campaign, unlocking the "real" final, final boss, and beating it after a crash on Turn 30, this was all I could think. Divinity: Original Sin starts out beautifully by dropping you off in a large seaport town called Cyseal, the start of your murder mystery. The first dozen or so hours are gripping; not because the plot is particularly good, but because Cyseal feels like a handcrafted cRPG town of old, a gigantic playground for your heroes to explore. However, even within this first area, the game's problems start to rear their ugly heads. The Journal system is almost useless. Quests are just dumped into your book with no filtering or sorting options besides being able to toggle visibility of completed quests. Two very important quests (one was required to continue the story and and another to unlock the "real" final boss fight) were lost in the list of tedious & ambiguous side quests that I picked up along the way. The Journal is also wildly inconsistent with how quests are followed and marked: some quests will drop markers for each part on your map, while others are so vague they will have one line of text saying "congrats! you did it!" with no indication of how to continue the quest. Too many times I had to go to Google just to figure out where I was supposed to go for a quest because the journal, local NPCs, and pocket portal friends were clueless or just too vague. The plot, its pacing, and the gameplay's pacing are all terrible. Many parts of the game involve listening to long-winded NPCs tell you their life story so you can pick up a side quest from them that will simply unlock their store front (or something similarly unimportant). D:OS is overly compartmentalized; you can feel the devs saying "Okay, combat NOW! Okay, 5 hours of NPC chat NOW!" I don't have a problem with reading text in a RPG but D:OS often feels like NPCs are chatting just for the sake of chatting. The story is heavily padded with long, boring sequences that stray from any semblance of plot that the game tries to carry. Too many times I loaded up my saved game and thought "What am I even doing here? Where am I supposed to go? What does this have to do with the story?" The main story itself is godawful too, shoveling in every trope the devs can think of (ancient evils awakening, chosen heroes with amnesia, pandora's box, an evil church, an evil twin sister, etc.) that attempts to twist and turn through a series of often predictable events that your characters have little effect on. Despite having little voice acting, there are few real dialogue options; most of the time during important NPC conversations, you're sitting there reading page after page of text, pressing 1 repeatedly until you get the chance to press 2 because you have a key item in your inventory from a side quest. Even though the combat system is enjoyable and has plenty of room for character customization, I often found it an exercise in frustration. D:OS's combat isn't hard or even particularaly challenging, the game just plays itself better than you do. Enemies often "cheat" by teleporting in more foes after you engage them, a la Dragon Age 2, along with summoning pets of their own. While the Magicka-style elemental combos are a unique touch to a cRPG, enemies often utilize them in unexpected ways, like shooting lightning at a pool of blood (that came out of an enemy you killed) to stun your hero for at least 2-3 rounds (not counting additional stun checks while the field is active). Combat often comes down to who can CC who harder, turning fights into a knockdown/blind/stun-fest while you beat the punching bag enemies before they can summon pets or kill your mages in one enemy's turn. At least a third of the spells in the game have direct upgrades making many early spells obsolete in 20 or so hours (why use a single target version of a spell when the AoE has the same AP cost?). This would be reasonable in a MMO but in a single player cRPG where the highest spell req is level 20, it just looks like lazy design. Like the plot, combat is too compartmentalized; many areas have large swaths of nothing, while the last map in the game has a party of 4-8 mobs every screen width. Tons of smaller issues plague this game. A clunky inventory system where important quest items gets easily lost in a sea of crafting materials. A frustrating crafting system that rewards guesswork and wiki-reading more than ingame exploration. A tedious Rock-Paper-Scissors minigame system for winning dialogue checks. A painfully long mandatory stealth sequence against invincible enemies that will kill your heroes in 2-3 hits. Although I think Divinity: Original Sin is a decent cRPG and I recommend it to fans of the genre, I feel no desire to ever play it again. Too much of D:OS is just tedious busywork in a predictable story that is stretched too thin to be consistently enjoyable.
After all the problems DotP 2014 had, I was really hoping that the devs had taken a step back and rectified the issues with it (deck construction locked into Sealed mode, bad challenges, restrictive campaign, etc.). Instead we get a barebones version of MTG that does everything wrong that it possibly can. Problems are apparent right when you start up the game; the UI is slow and heavily animated, obviously being designed for a touch screen interface. Instead of being given 1-2 prebuilt decks like in the previous two annual releases, you are given a choice between deck archetypes. However, you have no idea what cards are actually inside your deck before you lock in to using that "Intro Deck"-strength deck which can really screw you over at the start of the game. For example, I picked a supposedly B/G Reanimator deck but the only reanimator card in it was Rescue from the Underworld (a high costed, slow reanimator that requires saccing a creature as an additional cost). Because you are picking an archetype and not an actual deck, you also don't get unlocks specifically for your deck; while this gives you more freedom in deck construction, new players will be baffled about what they should add to their deck or how to edit it properly. A "Suggested Cards" tool is available but it isn't very trustworthy; using it with my best deck (G/W tokens), two of the three recommended cards are Phytotitan and Pelakka Wurm. While you can finally build your own decks with DotP 2015, you will really struggle to put something playable together without buying cards for real money. Buying all the cards in the game will cost you $20 and individual "planes" of cards will cost you $5 each. If you could just drop $20 on unlocking everything in the game you would be looking at spending only $30 total on DotP 2015. Of course, it isn't that easy... many of the best cards available (including Stoneforge Mystic, Doubling Season, Kozilek, and more) are locked behind "Premium Boosters" which give you 10 random cards for $2 (physical boosters in Standard cost between $2-4 and have 15 cards each). Last year's gambling mechanic was bad but it was only restricted to the Sealed Deck mode. DotP 2015 has essentially become Pay2Win with these boosters because the cards inside can be used in any game mode, including online. Speaking of online play, there barely is any! 2-Headed Giant has been removed for no reason and no other game modes have been added. You can only play 2-4 player FFA with your custom built decks; no Archenemy, no Planechase, no new modes. With the addition of deck construction and the rise of popularity in Commander/EDH, it is really disappointing that even that wasn't added. The only good thing that I can say about this is that they finally added non-basic lands. Deck construction is a nice touch finally but the rest of the game has suffered for it. It seems that in order to release the same game on every platform they had to cut content to make it work on mobile devices. DotP 2015 has a tedious, boring, and grindy single player campaign, no Challenges, no multiplayer modes outside of FFA, and no tools to introduce new players to MTG except for the tutorial. This is the worst DotP game made yet (even worse than the original DotP which was removed from Steam) and not even fans of the series should bother with this blatant cash grab.
There's a lot to say about this game so I broke it down into three catagories: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Skip to the bottom for a synopsis. The Good: +DaS2 is still huge. There is a lot to explore and there's plenty of hidden areas with tough bosses. +A larger, more open game world. +More character interaction. Much of the lore is fleshed out via NPCs as you journey through the game, with characters having more to say (and more to sell). +Better networking and better co-op. A new ring essentially makes your summon sign only visible to your friends. +More accessible covenants. While most covenants in DaS you had to jump through hoops just to find, overall DaS2's covenants are easy to join and more enjoyable to level. +Dual wielding is greatly improved. Power stancing lets you swing both your weapons in new combos. +Magic is greatly expanded and includes a new catagory for Hexes. +Greatly improved NG+ experience. Bosses drop new items, new enemies spawn in special areas, and some bosses gain new mechanics. The Bad (huge problems that will [probably] never change): -Terrible map design. Most levels are very simplistic, with some even being a straight corridor from beginning to the token boss. -Heavily unbalanced covenant rank-up requirements. Heirs of the Sun's 30 sunlight medals can be achieved in a few hours for max rank, while BoB & Blue Sentinel's 500 kills requires NG+ or nonstop victories in the arena (losses count as -1 rank points... why?). -Overabundance of forgettable, humanoid bosses. Some are recycled later in the game (or later playthroughs) as normal mobs or bosses. Many bosses have similar attack patterns and fall apart when you circle strafe and roll. -Swarms of enemies everywhere. While DaS focused on intense 1v1 fights, there were occasional cannon fodder slaughterfests. DaS 2 will regularly throw multiple heavily armored & long-reaching (polearms, ultra greatswords) enemies at you. -Parrying and riposting are harder to perform and less rewarding. Even if you manage to riposte, you can now be damaged while riposting by the swarms of enemies in DaS 2. -Overabundance of healing items and consumables. There's no reason to start as a Cleric because of 3 different purchasable lifegems (HoT consumable), 12 Estus Flask+5s (easily attained on first playthrough), and 8 other consumables that restore spells or cure statuses on top of healing you. -Terrible plot and story telling. The last few levels (and especially the ending cutscene) make no sense and it feels like the devs just wanted to add "cool" stuff to pad the game. The Ugly (nitpicking and balance problems): *Iframes have been removed from backstabs, ripostes, using fog gates, doors, and other environmental actions. *Roll iframes & estus flask drinking speed are tied to a stat. *No pyromancer starting class. You have to get roughly through one-quarter of the game to find your first flame and pyromancy and its very easy to miss. *Tons of balance issues with both PvE & PvP. Near the end of the first playthrough magic becomes very powerful, even in PvE. In PvP most spells worth using in PvP will kill you in 1 or 2 hits even with strong magic defense. *No un-cracked Red/Blue Eye Orbs and cracked orbs aren't sold by NPCs until NG+. *Changes to equip load mean everyone is some kind of hybrid class, doing normal rolls while wearing full Havels with a cloud of Persuers- err, i mean Affinity over them while waving a flaming katana around. *Cheaters are currently a huge issue on the PC version. You can now be invaded while Hollow and not being human is a big HP handicap, meaning you will run into cheaters much more often than in DaS. Dark Souls 2 isn't much of an honest sequel to Dark Souls; Being more akin to a numbered Final Fantasy sequel, with the only connection between the two being some equipment & spell names as far as I can tell. While it will win tons of GOTY awards, it also has a ton of issues that need to be addressed before it will be remembered as fondly as its predecessor. DaS 2 is definitely worth playing, but it feels like a rushed cash-in made by a B-Team who were told how a Souls game should be made (and then went and did their own thing anyway). Hopefully FromSoft's next Souls game has some actual soul to it... Otherwise we might just end up with another Armored Core situation with a new half-assed sequel being pooped out every few years.
If you've ever wanted to play your (music player of choice)'s visualizer or a 90's screensaver, here's your chance. Best used as a visualizer or screensaver instead of an actual game if you don't do drugs. Hard to recommend or put down; this just seems like a pretty college project with lots of customization options.
This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Deadly Premonition is hard to write anything for without giving away spoilers, so I will break this down into two sections: A simple spoiler-free "Pros & Cons" section with a summary of my review, followed by a spoiler-filled review. Pros: + Lovable characters in a charming setting + Extremely relaxing atmosphere and gameplay pacing + Hilarious dialogue and (mostly) gripping plot + Tons of side quests and post-game content to explore Cons: - Frequent crashes (both random & reproducible) - Terrible port that isn't optimized for modern PCs - Clunky, unsatisfying combat with terrible SFX - An overabundance of ammo, healing items, and other pointless pick-ups (food & sleep were almost never needed) - Many boring, drawn-out travel sequences that are unskippable - Terribly timed and overused QTEs - Tons of muddy, low-rez textures - Heavily compressed low-rez cutscenes - A ridiculous ending that almost ruined the game Overall, Deadly Premonition is a one-of-a-kind game. I would recommend you at least give it a chance because you might not experience a game like it again. It certainly has its ups and downs; the good parts are excellent and the bad parts are godawful, but in the end you have something really memorable here that is worth playing... if you can get it to work properly. Spoilers below, you have been warned! I went into Deadly Premonition expecting "Resident Evil with FBI Agents" and instead received "Shenmu with Zombies". While the town of Greenvale is very charming and cozy, I feel that more attention went into the production of this digital town than anything else. It's a great place to explore but I felt no reason to considering how literally overburdened I became with pickups (many times my extra storage also became full) just by playing the main story. Its a shame Greenvale's attention to detail wasn't put into the combat sequences of the game; the Resident Evil-esque generic horror music becomes very repetitive and the combat's SFX are weak, hollow stock effects that almost put me to sleep many times. Although the game starts out believably enough, with you chasing a string of serial killer murders in a quiet town, the game started to introduce "supernatural" elements that I assumed were the main character hallucinating. In fact, the other world invasions seemed to all be in Zach's head up until you control Emily in the clock tower and she has to deal with them too. At this point I was really worried that the whole game was taking a literal approach to the events happening. I don't know if the game was rushed, or if there were massive re-writes, but things got really, really stupid during Episode 5 & 6 at the end of the game. I wish more time had been spent on fleshing out a proper psychological thriller rooted in reality rather than the supernatural DMC-style boss fights and plot changes that comprised the last two episodes of the game. All this is assuming you can get the game to run (and keep it running) on your computer. Even with a fan-made patch (provided by Durante, the man behind DSfix for Dark Souls) that has been updated many times since launch, DP is plagued with random freezes, random crashes to desktop, and freezing at reproducable spots. Lots of other small issues caused me to replay tedious sections of the game (opening the browser in steam overlay crashed DP almost everytime, alt+tabbing WILL crash the game, etc.); even though I finished the game in about 17 hours, I have 24 hours clocked on Steam because of all the issues I had. There were many other small issues that detracted from the game, such as sound moving around seemingly randomly between speakers if you don't have Windows set to Stereo sound, that make me wonder if ANY QA went into this game. While I wanted to love this game, the last two episodes were a jarring and ridiculously over-the-top change of pace that felt like jumping from watching an American TV series to watching the last two episodes of an anime. In fact, Deadly Premonition plays more like an episodic TV series, broken down into bite-sized chapters (with "Previously during the investigation..." segments) than an actual video game. Deadly Premonition is a very unique experience but definitely won't be appreciated by everyone. If this game worked properly, I would be more apt to recommend it. As it stands, it is a crash-riddled mess than is probably better experienced on a console.
Single player card game where you dig through two 54 card decks on a time limit to defeat the very uniquely named big bad, "Darkness". Most card games have enough randomization because of the shuffling of cards, luck of the draw, and so forth, but for some reason Chainsaw Warrior feels the need to add die rolls to almost every action, including stats during character creation. On Hard difficulty the game can be over before its even begun because of bad die rolls for stats or bad card draws for equipment (because you're only allowed to chose catagory, not specific items). [Quick anecdote: Mark Rosewater at WotC noted that the main reason the Star Wars CCG failed was because fans hated having to roll dice for everything in a card game.] Even if you perfectly pick your loadout and get decent stats, many cards in the play decks have incredibly gamebreaking abilities. For example, one card makes you reshuffle all the cards in the deck and start over, another will break your sole win condition weapon, and another will make you lose several turns (randomly decided how many, of course). The most frustrating part is these cards might as well say "You Lose!"... but they just tease you into playing an unwinnable game. Many cards also have stat debuffs (zombie venom or radiation) that stack over time and are difficult to remove, providing yet another way for you to lose the game. Of course, being a cheap, direct iOS port also brings a slew of other issues. A touch screen interface with gigantic oversized buttons, "click-click-click to play" gameplay, and worst of all, savescumming. The decks are shuffled at the start of the game and are never reshuffled unless you trigger a certain trap. While this is realistic, it makes for bad video game gameplay. To put it simply, you can save the game every card and reload if you make a huge mistake or if you want to redo a fight (even the end boss!). This removed all of the challenge and distilled the game down into simple die rolls and restarts. While it is ignorable, you will still probably restart the game when you pull one of the previously mentioned "almost game-ending" cards. Chainsaw Warrior was probably a lot more fun to play sitting on the couch on a weekend afternoon but is a huge headache in its poorly ported video game form. Only recommended for nostalgic value or for owners of the original game.
Another drop-in-drop-out F2P shooter, except this one is third person and has a wacky asthetic! Loadout probably had some potential at one point, before the overbearing cash shop came into play. As it is now I find it hard to recommend, despite being F2P because of the cash shop, broken matchmaking, terrible map voting system, and a limit of 4v4 for every game mode. Even though it claims to be "all about the guns, baby!", the weapon customization is limited to four types of guns that share almost all the same parts. There is little room for creativity because of the tech tree system; more complex upgrades require "previous" unlocks to be bought using the in-game currency, Blutes, which are tallied after every match. Although you can test out upgrades before you buy them, you can only test out what you can unlock on the tech tree currently. Once you unlock a part it is permanently unlocked, but only for that weapon (even though many parts are copied across weapon types). This leaves you struggling to upgrade your weapon parts (which gain exp as you use them) to increase their stats (damage, accuracy, RoF, etc.!) as your fellow players race through upgrades and power up their base damage & accuracy while using cash shop exp boosters. This all leads to another huge problem: Matchmaking. The "Casual" matchmaking, where the majority of the game modes are held, seems to simply slap together 8 players and split them into teams. It does this so haphazardly that the forums were flooded at launch with complaints about parties joining a lobby only to be broken and split between teams at the start of the match. Matchmaking also doesn't seem to care about player stats or skill level because before the end of match weapon levels were disabled, many times you would see players with level 8+ weapons in a game of level 1-2 weapon players. This is a huge leap in passive stats that would take a non-boosted player dozens of hours to attain and leads me to believe that there simply is no real matchmaking outside of the competitive mode. Loadout is simply another barebone F2P drop-in-drop-out FPS (in third person this time!) that demands you spend cash if you don't want to be left behind. Some will find this amazing and stick with it for months but many others, like me and the rest of my friends, will play for a dozen or so hours, notice all the problems with the game, and just move on.
Super Hexagon can best be described as a twitch rhythm game where you dodge increasingly complex line patterns spawned off screen, flowing inward to your hexagon. While I love the music and the concept of the game, I had a hard time even playing it because of graphical issues. With V-sync turned on the whole screen seems to "move" and caused me motion sickness very quickly (something I don't have a problem with in any other game). With V-sync off there was constant screen tearing, sometimes occuring multiple times a second in multiple parts of the screen, which gave me headaches. I think this game would be a great party game, something to pass the controller around while everyone takes their 10 sec-1 min turn attempting to pass a level. However I felt physically ill trying to play it and wouldn't recommend it to anyone considering I haven't had issues with motion sickness in a video game before.
People who bash Dark Souls for its "Artificial Difficulty" haven't played Enemy Unknown. This game takes a well known PC series and consolifies it, dumbing down the base building to a single base, dumbing down the soldier customization into locked equipment slots with a shallow skill tree, and dumbing down the combat into praying you don't get flanked by enemies who get free turns and stat bonuses. On Normal difficulty the game is too easy, with enemy AI being dumbed down... yet on Classic difficulty they get free accuracy and critical hit buffs. Ironman Mode is unplayable because one year after launch and there are still frequent bugs and crashes that will count your mission as a loss after you restart the game. While you definitely get your money's worth with EU's lengthy campaign, be prepared for a lot of frustration due to your troops getting one-shotted regularly in the early missions, 3 marines missing their overwatch shot in the same turn on the same enemy, your troops shooting each other while panicked (in cover!), and not being able to hit the broad side of a barn until your unit is so kitted out they look like a Space Marine from W40k.
Remember how frustratingly hard Super Ghouls & Ghosts was? Well what if a poor, starving indie dev took that idea, made everything in the game randomized, and made all the bosses larger versions of normal enemies? This sums up the over-hyped waste of hard drive space that Rogue Legacy is. I hate everything about this game from the dungeon being randomized every time you die, to your new characters having all randomized stats & classes, to the forced meme garbage and terrible attempts at humor. Rogue Legacy is what I have come to expect from recent indie garbage: a repetitive, over-randomized, bullet-hell spamfest with shoehorned "rogue-like" elements and hideous graphics that has no redeeming values apart from being a FOTM for streamers & Youtube "celebrities".
A very unique and flavorful puzzle game where you play as a Cold War-esque border checkpoint immigration inspector. Each in-game day is timed and presents new challenges, such as new paperwork, denying access to immigrants from a specific country, or looking for an individual on a wanted poster. There is always a sense of urgency with your income and the livelihood of your family depending on you to make a quota while the immigrants are harassing you to work faster. With a branching story that changes based on your actions during the days (and your post-work "upkeep" choices) and multiple endings, there are many ways to play through this exceptional experience ****. Papers, Please is a standout spin on life in the Cold War-era Soviet states that, while depressing and repetitive at times, is something that any puzzle game fan should pick up.
A clunky, ugly, Civilization-style 4X strategy game that is overly complicated and makes little effort to explain itself. Fallen Enchantress makes a big deal about its RPG elements, even including a win condition where you can practically play it as a single player RPG to defeat the ancient evil while virtually ignoring your in-game neighbors. You can also equip your (legendary) heroes with armor, weapons, and trinkets, put points into large active & passive skill trees, and use them to enhance your cities, increase your resources, or just go out and kill big monsters. However I feel all this added complexity takes away from the strategy elements of the game and are poorly explained; there is only ONE 10 minute tutorial for the whole game, with everything else explained through tooltips, brief popups and an in-game encyclopedia. In fact, many of the new game "tutorial" popups just link to the in-game manual's page on that topic. If you can look past the low quality, repetitive music, terrible graphics with flat, undetailed textures and poor character models (why is everything so ugly when there are so many close-ups of your heroes?), clunky UI, and tinny SFX, you might have fun with this game. Fallen Enchantress is a very mundane 4X Civilization style strategy game that tries to be something bigger but is too underdeveloped to be worth playing.
Originally "released" in 2011, this is a prime example of everything wrong with indie games today. Dejobaan released an unfinished, buggy, short rhythm game based on their 2009 release, "A Reckless Disregard for Gravity". With very few maps, indistinguishable beat-matching, and recycled gameplay elements, the devs dropped this game to work on other projects only to "release" it again in 2013 thanks to the Steam Early Access system. Although this game has improved (thanks to more income by being put to the top of the Early Access section of the Steam store), it's still an incomplete, shallow, rhythm-less mess that still isn't worth playing 2 years later.
While it has improved a lot from the "1.0" launch version, not everything has changed for the better. FFXIV is completely average and doesn't try to excel at anything. The storyline has been changed from a quest every 5 levels (give or take) to a hand-holding, tunnel vision, JRPG-style story that leads you from one quest hub to the next and locking you out of everything that you haven't done a tutorial for. I appreciate the attempt at a longer and revamped story but it has so many small problems that, while being the highlight of the game, is still sub-par for both JRPGs and story-centric MMOs. Many parts of the main story are NPCs literally just handing you extra "kill X" and "loot Y" quests that have become a cancer on MMOs. Everything outside of the story quest you are currently on is locked out until you are "allowed" to do it; for example, I had two mounts I earned during 1.0, but I wasn't able to use them until I completed a level 20 quest that I didn't have access to on my level 50 character because I wasn't that far in the story yet. If you're looking for a JRPG, try replaying one of Square's older games instead. The combat has been reworked into a hotkey spamfest. Like most modern MMOs, once you find your "rotation", you will be facerolling for most of the story and into endgame. "Red circle dodging" has become ridiculous in 2.0 with most endgame content requiring more running in circles than actual fighting. Playing a melee class is infuriating with many late/end game enemies spamming ground targeted AoEs that have a habit of one-shotting non-tanks. In short, the gameplay has become a slower version of GW2 with even more AoE spam from enemies. Endgame consists of grinding the same 2 dungeons for months to get tokens (why don't the dungeons drop token-strength gear?) to upgrade your gear so you can grind harder dungeons to get bigger numbers. All equip from 1.0 has been streamlined into just bigger numbers and stripped of unique stats & buffs; AF quests used to require a party to help and rewarded some of the best gear in the game with Job-enhancing stats. Now AF is trivialized, handed to you for finishing solo content and discarded once you get Darklight. Everyone looks the same, uses the same rotation, and is running the same dungeons to increase their numbers. After 2 years of reworking, FFXIV still has too many small problems to really be any better than "good". With all the huge changes in 2.0, many old problems were fixed but many new problems were introduced. Overall this is an average MMO, using average gameplay elements seen from many other popular MMOs while introducing no innovation or creativity. There is too much pandering, too much recycling of content, and too much rehashing of old FF elements (what does Lightning from FFXIII have to do with this game?). FFXIV is a western gameplay jigsaw puzzle pieced together by an eastern dev who bring nothing new of their own to fill in the gaps.
Dreamcast held a diverse collection of colorful & creative exclusives during its lifespan, with Jet Set Radio being the most popular title that wasn't ported proper until over a decade later. Finally on PC with the original soundtrack (minus two tracks), JSR is a flashback to older game design featuring expansive, diverse levels that reward exploration, an eclectic electronic soundtrack that blends genres fluidly, and the creation of a new graphical rendering style with cel-shading. The level design is excellent, with many hidden routes and shortcuts which are integrated into both escape and chase sequences, making even recycled maps feel fresh. JSR's soundtrack is incredibly diverse and creative, adds to the uniqueness of the experience; combined with the colorful character cast, the introduction of cel-shading, and the varied gameplay, JSR feels like its own world, a unique spin on the early 2000s Japan. While the main story isn't exceptionally lengthy, it's worth picking up just to experience this one-of-a-kind game; JSR is truly an innovative and unique experience that is highly recommended for anyone with a gamepad.
This game was like a dream come true for me. A lot of people complain about it being repetitive, shallow, boring, etc. and I can understand how they can say that. However I really enjoyed the freedom of movement and beautiful scenery. It's like you're a Middle Ages Batman! With time travel! I would've picked up the sequel on launch day if it wasn't for the overbearing DRM.
