suzakuii

Game is a MOBA game, therefore it falls into the typical jungle/ lanes. However zuma was added into the game as an alternate source of income. This source of income is typically slower than income of lanes by about 20%. People playing zuma typically fall behind and must play catch up after doing it for 10 minutes or so. The rewards for zuma is great, usually shifting the balance of the lane by a bit or make a jungler's ganks much stronger. While I did like the flavor zuma reward scrolls it brings to the team, i feel some stuff is a bit out of balance. First of all, match making. While i know the game is slightly under populated, but it gets frustrating being yellow 1200 rating vs a purple 1700 rating. Second, talents are essentially items you bring into the game so you can purchase. These talents are found by completing matches (or doing some castle stuff). Talents range from yellow, green, blue, purple, orange (the best, though its not employed regularly so purple is prob best most people will be using). so for any amount of money, your stat growth is varied essentially by how good of a talent you bring into game. Starting out you are a yellow player, generally you fight against yellow players only. But when you start getting matched with purple players as a yellow player, you will soon feel the difference. Lets say both players are lvl 20 (max lvl 36) same character, one will do ~1000 damage nuke while the purple character will do 1500-2000 damage nuke. The difference in level is felt really hard as game progresses. Obviously, skill at playing game is more important than talents still, but having better talents than your enemies will give yourself an advantage (starting mid/late game). Early game is defined by your personal skill as acquired talents are not being employed at a huge degree yet. Pass lvl 10 or so, difference will be felt. Lastly, match making can take forever and a day to find (3-8 minutes), whats worse is most of the time you will not be able to change your character selection. I've been in games where my team is only squishies and have 2 supports. You pick a character before entering queue which is why the team composition for solo queue sometimes is complete garbage (I have done a match of 4 tanks 1 dps against a team of 4 dps 1 support. The tanks can cc a few, but all 4 dps focus down on 1 carry and then win the rest of team fight easy) Castle feels like a secondary thing they just tack onto the main game. It is for people to do something whenever they got time to take care of it. However it does give people advantage in game by having a well developed castle (starting lvl 30, you can get perma boost to characters in game, but that will be a while). Clans are also found in castle and takes resources to level up. Working on castle is not a bad idea. If you are a free player, getting silver might be more difficult. Consider using castle as an alternative way to make silver (silver are used to recover heroes' vigor and buy new ones. heroes without enough "vigor" can still be played but will give you less rewards upon finishing a game) Overall, this is a nice game to pick up. when player base gets larger, the match making can have easier time to pick up fairer matches in terms of both skill level and talent level

Overall not too bad ****. The best thing about this game is still the PvP. The pvp became better with the WvWvW system implanted that could affect your PvE. Many times people resort to just clicking everything they can when it is off cd. Not a particular effective way of going about PvP. Theres a certain element of anticipation and knowing your enemy before engaging recklessly. Everyone will start off reckless, myself included, but as you play your character class more, you realize theres more than just spam can save your tail. Perhaps waiting for them to start channeling then stun them would be wiser than just stunning them upon seeing them. dodge roll back as you see them charging toward you. Stealth the moment you enter a fray (people don't even know you are there) and start reviving downed allies. Many more possibilities can be explored. Unfortunately PvE of this game is kind of lack luster. Daily achievements helps you level up your character, but always the smae thing. Dynamics events attracts your attention for the early game, then after a while it all became the same. Defend spot/character/building for x waves of enemies, kill the leader of y group to disband, collect z items and deliver. However theres a few very interesting dynamic events. Early dynamic events has almost no consequence for failing. However some would actually have a town wiped out and events will follow to try and restore the town back to normal. Other really interesting events includes bosses that rarely spawns, like a dragon that will be almost 100x bigger than you. These although fun to try and kill, there will be too many people around, it lags the crap out of you. Story for the characters seems rather generic. Each choices in the character creation affects your story line for like the first 30 levels. After that all the stories are just the same. There are some choices in paths of the story like using brute force, sneak and assassinate, or like gather info. Ultimately it just makes you fight in a different setting and still merge back to main story afterwards. Fighting in PvE is purely spamming. auto set your first skill to auto cast. This just means that is your normal attack. everything else have a cool down you will probably use the moment it is off cd. PvE has auto adjust to level of surrounding if surrounding is weaker than your total level. This way you will still feel like doing something in the beginning areas (esp areas of other races) don't feel like you were simply overpowered. There are some rather intricate mazes/jump quests layed out in just about every map. Can try to find the secluded entrence by your self and everything afterwards is pretty straight forward with the jump quest. Each level up is not too difficult. It feels nearly the same as going from lvl 8 to 9 as lvl 79 to 80, there really isn't your typical grind fest of like 10 days to get 1 level. Aside from the few set backs, I think this is a game that deserves and good look at

Perhaps the thing that got me instantly hooked onto this game was the story. It is just too dam good. Puzzles were really tough to figure out on the hard difficulty. I love both the puzzle aspect and the story. Never could you imagine how well designed were the puzzles that is just screwing with your brain for hours on end. In the end I gave up part way on the hard difficulty and finished the game with sufficient challenge in the medium difficulty. Having alternate endings were nice, but still only the Catherine ending is the truly awesome one. Perhaps the only thing keeping it from a 10 from me is the camera, a few occations camera and walking around boxes don't quite go well together, can't see yourself or what you are really doing. Overall loved the game, buy it only if you like puzzles and enjoy an awesome story, rent and play on easy if you want to watch like an hour kick ass story.

Diablo 3, somewhat a step back from diablo 2. Though the graphics is much better, many of the original aspect of the game is lacking. First would be the skills and character build customization. With every patch, it just seems blizzard is changing the skills enough so people would stop using their current configuration and adopt a different one. Although it is debatable not selecting stats was a good thing, I feel it was just missing an aspect for you to actually explore different built path. Because of how they worked scaling, there could really be one stat allocation method anyways. So I guess it is a fine thing they locked the stats lvling since 90% of the stats come from equip anyways. Diablo 3 had a rough start at first. Now Blizzard is putting forth more changes and making big improvements to the system. Now there are slightly more balanced skills minus some obvious mistakes of changing 300% to 1500% more damage (as the primary thing that pissed me off, how did they even release it like this). Regardless things are getting over simplified, skills are almost all the same across all players of the same class with every patch. Tried to make people have a choice, but in the end a few clicks away and change the entire build to adjust to the patch changes. Crafting system for equipment is beyond terrible now. People can easily find ilvl 63 items and hope to get something alright than get a godly ilvl62 crafted item which is just equiv in stats to that ilvl 63. Diablo 3 did do well with letting people have individual drops. The norm and nightmare mode is reasonable for difficulty as well, letting fresh players have a lot of fun playing it. After that it is mostly gear grind or just spend a little on the auction house to get all the top gear and breeze through the difficulties (another aspect that really annoyed me, RMAH)