xveganroxx

At its best, Team Kirby Clash Deluxe is like going to Disneyworld as a child and getting mugged by Goofy and Mickey for crack money. There isn't a lot of game here - just a handful of recycled fights from an actual Kirby game - but the monetization is impressive. Every single item, every single quest, and all the energy you need to run them is monetized. The whole thing comes out to $27 - spoiler? - but that isn't really the point: even though it would be low on content for a $30 game, at least if it were sold for a ticket price like that you could progress through it naturally. As is, you can't - there's a lot of grinding of the already extremely limited level selection. There's no online multiplayer, and playing with the AIs feels kind of like running an extremely simplified WOW raid with a team of caffeinated eight year olds.

Of course it's not a very good Fire Emblem game, but it's not a very good gacha-style gambling mobile game either. Gameplay-wise the only resemblance it has to Fire Emblem is graphical: there are no items, weapons, spell choices, activated skills, pair up/support, etc. Even the basic combat system is gone: there are no critical hits - there aren't even hit/miss chances, all attacks hit. The result is that there is virtually no strategy in the game: the winner of the battle is whichever side has higher star and higher level heroes. 5-star heroes - the only ones you'll want if you want to play multiplayer - are rare and only obtained through the gacha. On average, you can expect to draw a random one for about $30, or a team of four for $120. Even if there was passable gameplay that probably wouldn't be worth it.

I'll just get this out there out front: I liked Gates to Infinity. I know all the criticisms - not enough Pokemon, too easy, no hunger mechanic, streamlined, etc., but I loved the 3D models and the campy after-school-special plot. That said, PSMD maintains a similar plot and the same great graphics while adding all the Pokemon, more complex mechanics, and a much higher difficulty. PSMD goes a lot harder on the "roguelike" genre by adding Emeras: small, temporary, randomly generated bonuses you can collect in dungeons that can be extremely powerful and make or break your expedition. The connection system is another new mechanic - you can finally catch them all, and you no longer have to rely on a low-percent random chance of Pokemon joining you. PSMD does everything right: great soundtrack, great graphics and art direction, enjoyable plot and characters, challenging difficulty, and new mechanics that fit in perfectly. If you pick on PMD game to play it should be this one.

There's a fun game hidden somewhere in here, but it costs hundreds of dollars to play. It costs $1 for about 4 minutes of play. $60 could buy you a brand new AAA title, or it could buy you four hours of this. That's two or three days of reasonable play time max.

Download it and play it. Seriously, you need to see it to believe how outrageous it is. This could have just been a straight-up World of Warcraft clone, but the developers really went the extra mile here: all crafting relies on a single premium currency called "labor." Not only do you need labor for crafting, but you need it for almost everything else - including simple things like looting. No, you don't have to pay for it - it trickles in at the paltry rate of 1 per minute of ingame time, which isn't anywhere near enough for any kind of crafting, or even for looting enemies. Paying the subscription does NOT fix this, it just doubles the pathetic rate you acquire "labor." One way people have found around this is autorunning into walls overnight so they have enough labor to do five minutes of crafting in the morning. Seriously, if you've got time you should try this just to see how free to play can be done so unbelievably wrong.

This is the definitive Dark Souls experience. Yes, you will die, sometimes seemingly unfairly. Yes, you should use a 360 controller. Yes, people will invade you and stab you in the back. No, if someone tells you "Try jumping for treasure!" off a cliff, you shouldn't. No, you can't play it on a 2005 Celeron with onboard graphics. Yes, this is the most immersive and rewarding modern action RPG experience available. Get it.

I'm not a rabid Blizzard fan - in fact, I haven't liked anything they've made since Diablo 2/Warcraft III - until this. Hearthstone is accessible, fun, and free. It doesn't do anything incredibly new, but it is refined and has a lot of character, making it one of the best iOS TCG choices - second only to Solforge, in my opinion, though Hearthstone is far better polished.

It's not done yet. You'll realize that at some point during your play experience - and after over a year in "open beta," and even longer with a functional cash shop, that's kind of a downer. The gameplay makes up for it, though. If you ever played Mass Effect 3's multiplayer and wanted more, this is the game for you. Warframe has very weak lore, almost no story, and a lot of repetition, but it also has extremely tight and fantastically fun running and gunning gameplay, and enough character and weapon variety that you can keep trying new things for months. Add regular weekly content updates to that and you've got a game that offers a lot for a very low price. This is a game that is much more fun with at least one other player, but even solo it is worth checking out.

This is a painfully bad MMO that is skinned with excellent Elder Scrolls lore. The environment is pretty nice, the soundtrack is good, the art design is good if uninspired, and the voice acting ranges from cringeworthy to excellent. That's all the good stuff. Here's the bad: there's no active combat, there's no open exploration, and of course it's priced above every other MMO offering (game cost + subscription + cash shop). It will be free-to-play soon, which will bring in its own problems I'm sure, but I don't see any fixes for the lack of combat or exploration. If you ever shot an arrow into an enemy from a distance in Skyrim, don't expect anything like that here - you target an enemy and click, there is no aiming involved. You can't explore, either, since if you try to leave the area you're in you'll find the next area has much higher level mobs, so you have to grind, move on, grind, move on, etc. Also, the mob AI is laughable. Enemies don't attack you unless you're 5 feet away from them. There's limited instancing, so when you enter a dungeon everything is already dead and dozens of bots and other players are camping the spawns. This is a mess of an MMO that could only be recommended to masochists or people who are willing to put up with awful gameplay just to experience Elder Scrolls lore. I thought I was one of the latter, but it turns out that I'm not. I think anyone interested in this would be better off playing either WoW or Skyrim (or The Secret World, which has lots of its own problems but does what ESO tries to do in a much, much better way). Avoid this mess ****.

Boo. I guess if you've never played an adventure game before and are a diehard zombie fan, there might be something here for you. If you've played any decent adventure game before, though, stay away. What's wrong with this game? First of all, it's painfully boring, and there is a lot of pointless dialogue. The voice acting is (mostly) very good, which helps a bit, but the dialogue really isn't written to a very high standard. What's worse is the "game" aspect of it: there's very little that you do, the "puzzles" are rudimentary at best, and your "decisions" don't change anything important. As an example, early in the game you are given the opportunity to help one character or another escape from a zombie. Regardless of your choice, the same character is saved. Bottom line: If you're a fan of adventure games, pass on this. If you're an adamant fan of The Walking Dead, and find this on sale for $5 or less, go ahead and pick it up but prepare to be disappointed. Telltale's recent other adventure games aren't groundbreaking or fantastic, but they're much more cohesive, interactive, and fun than this.