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sg2tiger · 6 years

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Back again for another year of games!! I dunno, making these lists is kinda fun, and it also tends to help me actually finish games I’ve started, so I’ll probably keep doing it at the end of the year for as long as I can be bothered.

As usual, the images mostly speak for themselves, but the obligatory TL;DR reviews are under the cut. May contain spoilers.

—————————————— Kingdom: New Lands (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud —————————————— For a game that only requires one button and a joystick (or some WASD if you're into that sort of thing), Kingdom is surprisingly fun. I hesitate to call it 'tower defense' because it's not, but it's definitely got a similar sort of feeling to it. Like tower defense meets resource management/building game. You - the monarch - ride around on your horse and use your carefully-managed budget of coins (and by carefully-managed I mean you can and will probably run out at some point and fuck yourself over if you haven't planned well) and recruit peasants to join and defend your steadily-growing kingdom. Give them a coin and either a bow or a hammer and a peasant will become a worker, to build and repair your towers, or an archer, to hunt by day (to earn you coins) and defend your towers from the monsters who come out at night. You can have workers cut down trees to expand your kingdom further, allowing more room for towers and eventually farms to be built to keep your coin supply steady, and upgrade your intially-tiny campsite into a true fortress. Your goal is essentially to keep building your kingdom out as far as you can across the island, while making sure it's not overrun by the monsters who get steadily more powerful every night. The monsters can and will destroy your towers, and if they catch your workers and archers they'll turn back into wandering peasants who you will need to seek out once more to give new coins. This can be tricky, too, since their campsites may be deep in the woods, and night can fall quickly if you venture out there unprepared - having the monsters attack while you're not behind the safety of your castle walls can instantly spell game over. If you manage your resources right, though, you will eventually have enough of a coin surplus to repair the broken ship lying somewhere in the wilderness, which you need in order to escape the island and move onto the next level.

All in all Kingdom is as mechanically simple as it gets, but can prove quite a challenge to survive. I think my best game lasted about 38 days, and I did manage to get at least to the second island. Plus, the visuals are absolutely gorgeous, with beautiful pixel art and lighting. It's a great game to play if you just want to unwind without thinking about anything too complicated.

—————————————— Stardew Valley (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud —————————————— If you like Harvest Moon, you'll like Stardew Valley. I'm sure this has been said a million times, but really it's about as simple as that. That's not to say SV is just a 'HM clone' of course, but the similarities and inspirations are abundantly clear. There's a lot to do, interesting characters, and even a lot of mods if you get bored of the base game after a while. I think I got through about my first year before I started losing steam, and never got around to tinkering too much with mods. I should go back and give it another go sometime.

As consequence of writing this review practically an entire year since I last played, I can't think of anything more specific to say. But I do remember enjoying it.

—————————————— Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud —————————————— If you liked Borderlands 2, I can't think of a good reason NOT to play TPS. It seems to get an awful lot of undeserved hate simply because 'it's not BL2', which, well, is stupid. Borderlands 2 is a great game and I can understand people feeling like TPS didn't quite live up to that reputation, but that alone doesn't make it a bad game. It's not Borderlands 3 after all - it's The Pre-Sequel. It exists to fill in the gaps between the first and second games while providing an experience and humor more similar to the second, if somewhat shorter.

One thing I particularly liked and hope we see again in future installments is that the player characters felt more real. They actually TALK to the other characters during the storyline quests, rather than feeling like essentially blank slates outside of their combat banter and backstory Echoes (of which I was never able to find all in BL2). It made me feel like my character was more involved in what was going on, and actually had more of a connection to these events and characters. I played Athena in my singleplayer game because she's the narrator of the framing story, but I was Nisha in my multiplayer game and played with a Baroness and Holo-Jack. It was fun hearing the vastly different types of commentary depending on which one of us handed in a quest, which gave more variety to the characters. I'd like to do another solo run as someone else someday even just to hear all their unique quest responses.

Also, managing O2 isn't THAT bad once you get used to it. It's a little bit of a pain early on, but once you get a decent Oz-Kit it's pretty manageable. Oxygen bubbles are plentiful on the moon's surface, and there's a lot of zones that take place almost entirely in oxygenated areas to boot. Plus, slamming is a lot of fun. I thought the mechanic was a nice way of differenciating the game a bit more from BL2, in a sorta gimmicky way without feeling terribly frustrating. Also, the grinder made getting Legendary weapons somewhat feasible compared to BL2, and there were many times I'd just spend over an hour going between the loot chest and grinder over and over. ...I mean, I don't do that. Using a save editor to give yourself infinite gold keys and playing the whole game with purple guns is cheating, and I would never do that in BL2 or TPS. Not ever.

Anyway, TPS was fun. I never got around to playing the DLC, so I guess I'll have something to look forward to next time I get the urge to do a new solo playthrough as a different character.

—————————————— Riff Racer (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Recommended ——————————————

Another one of those 'zip around a track to your own music collection' games, so naturally I had to take a look at it. Audiosurf was my first Steam game, after all. Unlike Audiosurf, though (to which comparisons are inevitable since they're similar at a glance), Riff Racer is actually a RACING game. At least to the extent that one can race against oneself. You basically load up a song to generate a track, just like Audiosurf and similar games. If you're the first person to ever run that song, any other player who ever plays that song will be racing against your ghost - likewise, if you do a song someone else created first, they're the score you wanna beat. There's no actual other cars on the track though, just you and a lot of obstacles to avoid, ramps to jump and curvy tracks to drift. Drifting is the main way to earn points, and is also the most fun part of the game. It took me a bit to really get the hang of it, but once I did I started seeking out songs that were likely to have a lot of tight corners to drift around. I was floored when I actually managed to pull off the achievement for drifting 16 beats in one maneuver, because for the longest time I could barely manage to drift 4. And the feeling you get when you're actually able to beat a powerful ghost is [relieved] [okhand]

Of course, a lot of people play this sort of game just to chill out and not worry about things like leaderboards and high scores. That's totally fine too!! It's a great game to just sit back and chill out with, just drifting along the track with your favorite tunes. I would definitely recommend this one to anyone who's into games like Audiosurf - I get the feeling it's a bit of a lesser-known gem, and it totally deserves some more love.

—————————————— Persona 3 Portable (PSP) FINAL VERDICT: UNFINISHED —————————————— I started playing this in March, I think...as I write this, it's December, and I still haven't finished. I know P3 is one of those games that makes the 'must play' and favorite lists of a LOOOOT of people, and many will hail it as the best JRPG of all time...but I have to wonder how much of that is just being blinded by nostalgia. I certainly don't think there's ENOUGH of a difference between the Portable and PS2 versions that I'm missing some great secret that makes this game so much more amazing than I can see, at least.

I haven't picked it up in a while (I've played it on and off throughout the year) but I believe I'm somewhere around the end of September or beginning of October in-game. So I'm certainly not dismissing it after only a few hours. In fact, I'm not dismissing it at all - as a MegaTen fan, I do want to finish it at some point. Really, I just keep getting burned out by Tartarus. For me, games are games - if all I wanted was a compelling story and interesting characters, I'd read a book. A game needs to first and foremost engage me with its GAMEPLAY, and while I do enjoy story-driven games with interesting characters, that alone isn't enough to save it if the GAMEPLAY isn't engaging me enough first!! And Tartarus is just...bad. I'm sorry, but one dungeon with semi-randomized floors where the decor only slightly changes periodically as you climb higher and every single floor is practically the same grind of collect items/attack or avoid enemies/find the stairs...that's just not fun. Like not even a little. It got old somewhere around the second block, and by now I'm on, what, fifth or sixth? I can't remember, it's all the fucking same. And while I enjoy MegaTen combat, and P3 is sorta similar to the push-turn system, even those get old after a while of the same 3 encounters ad nauseum for the next 15-odd floors until you hit the next boss. It didn't take long for me to start playing with my volume muted outside story segments (I use the undub patch, otherwise I'd probably have it muted for the entirety of the game) because I was sick of hearing the same OOOOOH YEAH!!! DADADA-DA DADADA-DA!!! over and over again. One thing I've always hated is games that run on having a LOT of battles and grinding, but only one piece of battle music outside boss fights. It's cruel and unusual.

Anyway. Tartarus aside, the game's alright. I personally find social links a little odd, because I'm linking with people unrelated to my struggle against the Shadows (I still haven't hit lofty the requirements to link with the girls, and outside the PSP-exclusive non-canon Girl Route you can NEVER link with your male teammates). It's this bizarre sort of disconnect - I understand that these people are part of my life in their own ways, but it feels very segregated. I should be bonding with the people in my party, the ones living in my dorm, my fellow Persona users who understand the stress we're under and can relate to my struggles. Instead, I'm cringing at a wannabe playboy who thinks his teacher wants to bone him, or a rules-obsessed student council jerkbag, both of whom I have to tell what they WANT to hear and not how I ACTUALLY feel because it's all about leveling up those sweet sweet link ranks. Devil Survivor 2 used a similar link system (most likely inspired by P3, since I believe that came first), but instead of being random people from my class/town I was actually linking with my party members. Being able to bond with the people I'm spending most of my game with felt a lot more meaningful to me than the P3 links - in fact, for the first in-game month or two, I kept waiting for some of my early links to find out about Shadows and get moved into the dorm as playable characters. I was very surprised to find out that they just ultimately had nothing to do with the main gameplay and storyline whatsoever. Maybe that's the point. Maybe there's some profound reason for this that I don't know yet because I haven't finished the game. But to me, it feels disjointed and unrelated to the main game I'm supposed to be playing here.

Social Links, and Tartarus. Aside from the storyline itself, those are basically what make up this game - and I'm not terribly fond of either. Sure, I'm enjoying the story well enough, and the glimpses I get of my party members through the main storyline and things like the hidden camera videos...but that's not enough for me. The GAMEPLAY needs to win me over as much as the story, and it's just not. I'd like to stick it out and finish it, and I do still pick it up from time to time...but there's a reason I haven't finished it despite starting it so many months ago, and this is basically it. I simply don't find it fun. And it's great if it's the favorite game or best JRPG for a lot of people? But it's not that for me.

(I'd also like to play P4 and even P5 someday, but I don't own any consoles so I'm basically riding on the popularity of things like Dangan Ronpa to convince more Japanese developers that porting their games to Steam is worthwhile...otherwise I'll probably never get to play either of those)

—————————————— Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Recommended —————————————— While I ultimately burned out before I could finish my NG+ all the way through and then go to Bitterblack Isle, I had a lot of fun with this game. DLC aside, I basically 100% completed everything else - all normal quests (had to catch a few missable ones on my NG+ for the achievement), all regular notice board quests (including the annoying ones like mining a fuckton of that one rare mineral or getting 100 clumps of hair or whatever it was, and the one with all the skulls), and even got all the badges (also including the missable ones on my NG+). The badge sidequest should absolutely have an achievement attached. I'm not sure why I bothered actually...personal satisfaction, I guess. Either way, I only bother to put that kind of effort into a game if I really enjoy it, so that says it all right there.

Dragon's Dogma, on the surface, is a fairly generic fantasy RPG. The world of Gransys is pretty dull - aside from the small village where you grew up, there's pretty much just the One Big City, and long stretches of wilderness with a fortress or two. The NPCs are mostly generic peasants with a handful of quest givers, aside from the story-important characters...and everyone talks in this weirdly forced archaic style where 'aught' is the most popular word in the entire world. Hearing your pawns say the same 3 stock phrases over and over again also gets really old - yes, I know that goblins ill like fire, I've probably killed more than a million of them by now!! The story is also told in a really confusing style to where you probably won't grasp what's actually going on until you go through a New Game+ - not because it's terribly difficult in itself, but just because of the odd way in which the game gives out information. Having to talk to an NPC 3 or 4 times in order to hear all they have to say in a given conversation doesn't help matters, either, because if you don't know enough to do that you may well only speak to them once and then walk away, simply not having enough information to know what just happened. It's basically Capcom trying to apply JRPG logic to an open, WPRG-style world, and it doesn't always work.

That aside, however...the real meat of the game is in the combat. The hack-and-slash combat and multiple character classes with their own abilities and playstyles is what really makes the game. I found it similar to Kingdoms of Amalur, if slighly more robust - not surprising, though, since it's from the same company responsible for Devil May Cry. So you can be certain that the combat always feels engaging and solid. The best part to me, though, is the giant monsters. After a while you'll get sick of cyclopes and chimera (the most common large monsters), but in the early game they're appropriately terrifying. You're ENCOURAGED to climb up on them and go after their weak points, rather than standing at their feet slashing away like an idiot. If you're fighting a cyclops, naturally you'd go for the eye. But what if it's an armored cyclops, with a helmet protecting the eye? Then you have to get the helmet off before you can really damage it. If you're fighting a chimera, each part of the beast does something different - you generally want to kill the snake first so it can't poison you, but meanwhile the goat is shooting magic at you and the lion is tearing you to shreds with its claws, so situationally it may be better to take out one of those parts first. With each part, you disable and severely weaken the beast, making it easier to finish it off. Every enemy has a weakness like that, and it's particularly important for the giant ones. And God forbid you don't take advantage of the weaknesses when fighting a dragon (sorry, a drake/wyvern/wyrm), you're pretty much guaranteed to die.

Another thing I really liked was how much nighttime really ups the terror of encountering giant dangerous enemies like this. Gransys isn't nearly so big a world as it tricks you into thinking, because there's no mounts and fast travel is fairly limited/difficult for the first half of the game or so. This means that if you want to get anywhere significantly far across the map, you're going to have to pack enough lantern oil and prepare to travel during the night. Night in Dragon's Dogma - even with a lantern - is PUNISHINGLY dark. This is the kind of darkness you WISH your Skyrim lighting mods and ENB could achieve. Your lantern only illuminates a small circle around your character - just enough to see where you're going and not bump into things. But not enough to warn you of a chimera about to leap at you from the darkness before it's far too late to dodge...something that happened to me once during the early game and nearly gave me a heart attack (I don't play horror games because I can't handle jump scares, but this chimera had more or less the same effect on me). You have to be very cautious and very quiet, and sticking to the roads can mean the difference between life and death. Resource management is also important and you can't just stock up on 300 mega-heal potions at once - even in the late game, you'll still only be buying/finding the lowbie herbs, so you've got to combine them together yourself to make more powerful healing items. The crafting system is also forgivingly simple (a case of 1 + 2 = 3, across the board) so it doesn't get overly tedious to have to spend a little prep time rifling through your bank storage and combining some items before adventuring.

The pawn system is also a lot of fun (despite how much their repetitive dialogue will grate on you after the first hour). I've always preferred that JRPG feel of traveling with a party of adventurers to the WRPG style of being a wandering solo hero (I'd travel with 3 followers in Skyrim if having even one follower didn't tip the game balance so far in the 'too easy' direction). By mid-game I'd basically settled into Magic Archer as my class, so I'd usually have a fighter (my pawn), a mage (dem heals), and either a ranger or strider to fill in the gaps. It really captures that sort of oldschool JRPG feel of traveling the little 8-bit lands with your little 8-bit party...but like, in a 3D third-person open-world(ish) way, so more immersive. I only wish there were more dungeons - after backtracking to the catacombs and the canyon place 300 times within a playthrough, it got pretty stale. But the first time through the Water God's Altar I remember feeling like this was a JRPG-style dungeon given life, with the puzzle solving that's almost never present in WRPGs.

In the end, while Gransys itself always left me wanting something more, the core mechanics of the game were solid enough to keep even the multiple backtracking trips to the same 5 places fun. And while the story was a bit convoluted in how it was told, once I really put together what HAPPENED in the end, I was speechless. Not to say it was some kind of incredibly profound, award-worthy storytelling experience, but it was one of those moments where it all clicks together at once and the realization sets in and you just sit there for a few moments thinking, 'oh my God'. I won't say anything more so as not to spoil it, but don't be quick to dismiss the story as just an excuse plot for a game that's only about the combat, either. All in all I'd definitely recommend this game to anyone who enjoys RPGs, J- and W- alike, and I really really wish we'd get Dragon's Dogma online someday, or another single player game as a sequel, or something. I just want more.

Guess I'd better get my ass to Bitterblack Isle.

—————————————— Sunless Sea (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud —————————————— Having played Fallen London before (on and off, with very long breaks in between because I keep forgetting it exists...then I go back for a bit, rinse, repeat), I sorta knew what to expect with Sunless Sea in terms of narrativ style, setting, and general weirdness. What I didn't realize was just how HARD it was gonna be. Within less than 5 minutes of making my first character, I got eaten by a shark. Amazingly though, through numerous EXTREMELY CLOSE brushes with death and, dare I say, miracles...my second character (Tigeru 2, in a name scheme that shows just how long I expected this character to last) is miraculously STILL ALIVE. In addition to surviving, though, Tigeru 2's life goals consist of finding the bones of their lost father and also killing crabs. Lots of crabs. Like, all of them. Because fuck those guys. Anyway, it's hard to REALLY give a solid verdict on this one given the general style of the game and the fact that I haven't gotten very FAR yet...but it's good at being what it set out to be, and that's a difficult exploration game set in the Fallen London universe.

—————————————— Darkest Dungeon (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud —————————————— I had my eye on Darkest Dungeon for a while before it left early access, but was never quite ready to drop any money on it because the reviews would often swing wildly between positives and negatives. Conceptually, I loved the idea - that the reality of dungeon crawling would not just be heroic, climactic battles but also stress, resource management, and fear. But while it sounds good on paper, it also sounded like something that might work better as an anime plot than a video game, because maintaining those exact same resources could quickly go from 'fun' to 'chore'. Anyway, I finally decided to take the plunge during the summer sale, and it's almost addictively fun...in small bursts. It's the kind of game where I can get caught up in the 'just one more level' dynamic for a while, but also the kind of game that feels repetitive and tedious after so many runs fighting the same enemies over and over. But I also think that I'm playing it 'wrong', in a way - because I don't want to lose the characters I've worked so hard to build, I'm playing it too safe. I'm so terrified of dying against bosses that I've actually OVERLEVELED my best characters, not realizing that characters who are TOO strong will refuse to take on levels and bosses they deem beneath their ability. If your heroes are too strong for the weaker missions, you just won't be allowed to bring them.

Some might call this a type of 'fake difficulty' but I'd disagree because it really does enforce the game's entire theme. Which is actually kind of nice because it ensures you're forced OUT of that 'playing it safe' comfort zone that I was trapping myself in, waiting until you're so OP you can stomp anything that comes your way. That sort of gameplay goes against everything Darkest Dungeon stands for - the whole point of the game is that you're NEVER going to be truly prepared for the horrors that lurk here, and that there's no such thing as weak enemies or an invincible party. Your preparedness to tackle a dungeon lies not in your character's levels and OP abilities but your ability to manage resources, trinkets, phobias and diseases, and picking the right heroes for the job instead of steamrolling every level with your 4 favorites. And even then, there's the RNG...which is something I really hate, and the subject of many negative reviews, but I honestly think it also makes sense for this game. Again, no matter how prepared you are, you're going up against unspeakable eldritch horrors here. YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY ACCOUNT FOR EVERY CONTINGENCY. Sometimes you can do your absolute best and things will still end up going terribly wrong because you were just unlucky. Heroes will die. You may have to drop rare treasures and flee just to save at least one life. It's bound to be frustrating, sure, but it's the very nature of this game to be like that. All you can do is make the best of a bad situation, and rebuild from your losses to continue on. No, it's not going to be easy - but if that's what you expected, you picked the wrong game in the first place.

—————————————— Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: BUGGY AS FUCK ——————————————

I grew up on Baldur's Gate (well, Baldur's Gate II moreso) when I was just a wee child. Thus, when I found out they were rereleasing 'enhanced' editions, I was very excited. However...anyone who has played Baldur's Gate or similar CRPGs from the days of yore knows that they're long, and often tedious games. So while both enhanced editions sat in my Steam library for a long time, I could never bring myself to actually want to sit down and PLAY them because the idea of starting such a long saga was daunting. But during the summer, some friends I often play co-op games with proposed the idea of doing a multiplayer run...and it sounded fun!! At first.

At least, until we realized that Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition was barely 'enhanced' at all. Aside from a few new characters, it was basically just the original game...bugs and all. And there are a LOT of bugs. In fact, this is quite possibly the buggiest game I have ever played, and I wish I were exaggerating. We tried our best to deal with the snags and press on, but it eventually just got to be too much, and none of us were really having any fun with it. Thus, we decided to call it quits and do a multiplayer run of Neverwinter Nights II instead.

Unless you're a hardcore fan of the originals or a serious masochist, I couldn't recommend this game. Maybe the enhanced BG II is better...and maybe someday I'll find out. That was literally my childhood game, after all. But BG I EE...is just bad.

0/10 would not Enhance again.

—————————————— Tabletop Simulator (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Recommended —————————————— Simultaneously not an actual game, but yet, every game known to man. You know that feeling when you walk into the local comic and games shop and see all these really cool games that you and your friends would have a lot of fun with...if your friends didn't all live halfway across the country - if not other countries entirely? Because I know that feel, and it sucks. Enter Tabletop Simulator, where those games probably already have mods...and if they don't, you can make your own with just a little ambition and elbow grease!! In fact, I've got 181 hours in TTS currently, and I'd wager less than 50 of that was spent actually playing games with friends - the rest has been me MAKING games to play with my friends. I made Umineko Clue (AKA Clumineko) as well as a version skinned for my friends and our roleplaying OCs...then I adapted the Risk-based game of gang warfare that I'd made as a final project in my game design class in college...then I just spent ungodly amounts of time decorating a 3D room with 3D objects to play games in with my friends, AND applied the same treatment to revamping the Clumineko mod into an entire 3D room based on the iconic witches tea room. Never in a million years would I call myself a 'modder', but I actually learned how to do some basic stuff in Blender and Unity ENTIRELY so I could make fun games and shit to do in TTS with my pals.

It may not be a 'game' so much as a sandbox physics engine with which to make and play many games with ease, but even so I'd be hard-pressed not to call it one of the best games of all time. If you have a good group of online pals I seriously could not recommend this one enough.

—————————————— ICEY (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud —————————————— At the very last minute I found out about the Steam Link bundle deal in which you'd get the normally-expensive device for $1 with purchase of a little-known little 2D action game. Despite not having a great interest in the Link, I could hardly pass up the offer to get it for a dollar, and the game seemed pretty fun besides. On the surface, ICEY is a pretty fun little action platformer...but ALSO on the surface, it's a meta game. And that's because it advertises itself in exactly this way. That's the biggest flaw with ICEY, I think - you don't make a meta game and then say 'hey, this secretly is a meta game!!'. If it had downplayed those aspects and just branded it as an action platformer with maybe some cryptic hints that there was more to it than that, encouraging players to explore and find out what's going on in the game's multilayered world...it would have been a lot better, and maybe could have gone on to become a cult favorite instead of flying under everyone's radar. That aside, it's a pretty good game. The action is actually quite fun on its own, and uncovering the various endings is entertaining. The English voice over could use some work, but it's a Chinese game that only recently even GOT an English voiceover, apparently, so it's hard to fault that too much. Again, the meta aspects would have been more enjoyable if the game didn't advertise it outright, but it's alright.

I haven't actually finished it yet (think I have another boss or two to go; I got stuck and haven't yet gone back to it) but if the story actually ends up making sense in the end that'd be nice. I'm sort of waiting for that kind of payoff because right now everything just seems a little nonsensical. For what it's worth, though, I did have fun playing it.

—————————————— World of Warcraft: Legion (PC) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud —————————————— I first included WoW on my 2015 games list, back when I first started playing. My verdict was essentially 'it's okay I guess, but it feels super dated all around and not very welcoming to players expecting a more modern game'. Well, obviously that hasn't changed - old content is still old content - BUT, with Legion, I feel like the newer content is at least taking steps in the right direction towards making the game feel less dated overall.

Legion was actually my fourth WoW subscription. Since my best friend has been playing for like 8 years and is really into the game, I get free subs thrown at me at least once a year, and I play for a few months until next time. My previous subscription ended just on the heels of Legion's release, and the changes to all the classes hit me pretty hard when suddenly my preferred Rogue spec (Combat) was altered so completely that I just did not want to play anymore. Everything I was used to was retooled, if not completely gone...and I was angry. But having an entire year to cool off and lose that muscle memory, I came into Legion with a fresh spec (Outlaw) and a new region to explore.

Legion content was definitely the most enjoyable to me so far. After making it through all the older content during leveling, my highest version during my first subscription (and review) was Pandaria, so I spent by far the most time playing in that zone. I liked the aesthetic, but the gameplay still felt dated, and I spent most of my time working on my farm or building rep with two factions who had mounts I wanted. Draenor wasn't TERRIBLE, though I had more fun building my garrison than I did questing the actual Draenor zones. Legion was the first time I felt like I actually had a LOT of different things to do, and had a real sense of character progression for the first time. I admit I know almost nothing about WoW lore (nor do I care to go down the rabbit hole of learning it), so there was a lot of ??? during the main Legion questline, but I still felt like I was being engaged in a real STORY for once. The cutscenes and voiced dialogue went a long way to making the game feel less old-fashioned, for one thing. For another, having the order of each zone be up to player's choice because of leveled enemies gave me some much-needed freedom during leveling, and not feeling like I either had to stick around in a lowbie zone with no EXP for the sake of following a storyline...or moving through the zones so fast that it wasn't even worth bothering to follow along with the stories because I'd only abandon them all halfway to move onto the next higher-level area. In Legion, I ended up doing basically every single quest in a zone before moving onto the next one (though I'd then do all the mandatory dungeons in one burst rather than one at a time). I actually read through the quest text instead of skipping along and just trying to hit 100 as soon as possible. And when I DID hit 100, halfway through Highmountain (having done Azsuna and Val'sharah already), I continued the Highmountain quest to the end and then did all of Stormheim.

Hitting level cap no longer felt like I'd met the 'goal' of the expansion, and had nothing really left to do but fuck around. After finishing all four main zones, there was Suramar, and the Broken Shore. There were world quests and the reputation tied to those. There were the class weapon quests, and the goal of gaining the class mount. There were even the falcosaur quests which I just barely managed to finish before my sub ran out!! Plus, having played September/October/November, I also had a lot of holiday events to work on (it was my first Brewfest, and then I went about finishing the Halloween and Thanksgiving achievements I didn't get last time I played in the fall). And in addition to all of THAT...I also got my Hunter through the rest of Draenor so he could do Legion content, too. I had wanted to make a Demon Hunter after that because it seems like the sort of class I'd enjoy playing, but I didn't end up having the time for that. Point being - for the first time, Legion gave me a whole lot of stuff to do, and I never really felt like I was 'done'. Every time I met one goal, there was another to work towards. That's the kind of experience I feel is really important in a game like this...but something I always sorta felt I was dragging myself through in past subscriptions, where I'd spend more time doing pet battles or trying to get transmog gear and mounts and basically anything but actually questing. This time, the questing and dungeoning didn't feel like a chore, or just a means to an end. The whole Legion experience managed to be enjoyable - and I never even wound up going to Argus.

By the time I play next, the newest expansion will be out, and I'll have even more to do. I hear there's gonna be new playable races this time, so maybe I'll even end up making another alt once I get my Rogue and possibly my Hunter through the expac content. Plus I can still make that Demon Hunter and go through Legion again. All in all I think WoW is finally breaking through my initial perceptions of it being a dated game, more fun for long-term players or hardcore raiders and not so much for newcomers who are more into PVE. What the new expac brings remains to be seen, but for once I'm optimistic that I'll end up having some fun with whatever that is.

—————————————— ARK: Survival Evolved (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Recommended —————————————— Growing up, there were three things in particular that captivated my interest (and also conveniently my Lego sets): pirates, ancient Egypt, and dinosaurs. Assassin's Creed: Black Flag captivated the first. Assassin's Creed: Origins will no doubt captivate the second, once it drops in price enough that I can actually buy it. And since I somehow doubt that assassins existed in the prehistoric eras, picking up the third interest is ARK.

I'd been watching ARK with a close eye since the early access days, precisely because the very concept of taming and riding dinosaurs sounded rad as fuck. It made it from my 'following' list, to my wishlist, to my 'groans sadly' list during every Steam sale when it'd drop no lower than $18 which was still far more than I was willing to spend on an early access game whose reviews were always swinging wildly between positives and negatives - particularly in the optimization department, as I had doubts that my computer could even RUN the game comfortably in its then-current state. Finally a friend of mine (who had bought and refunded the game several times already, also I believe due to optimization issues) had started playing it comfortably and generously gifted it to me about a year ago, just a short time before it finally left early access and went for full standard retail price. As predicted, I could barely run the game...even on the lowest graphic settings, with no sky effects and on the low memory setting, I was getting about 15 FPS just trying to walk around on the initial beach where I'd spawned. I sadly had to shelf the game and hope that I'd be able to play it someday in the future, when it was either optimized better or I'd upgraded to better hardware.

Now, both of those things have happened, so I decided to give it another go. Now that I can run it at an average 50 FPS on a mix of medium to high graphics settings and have actually been able to PLAY the game, it's the early days of Minecraft all over again, and I can't stop. I've been playing both singleplayer and multiplayer with a friend on an unofficial PVP server, and each game is sort of its own experience. The PVP server has everything set to 10x, so gathering resources and EXP all goes REALLY fast. I'm already like level 70 after only playing two days of multiplayer, and we've gone from a somewhat crude houseboat base to a slightly less crude base in the mountains with a decent crop of early to midgame dinos (we had more, but some died to alpha raptor injuries with others being on the wrong end of a tame and otherwise non-hostile T-Rex and its fertilized egg). Meanwhile in singleplayer, which I've actually spent more time in (only doing multi when my friend is available), I just hit level 30 and am only now starting to feel confident enough to venture away from my crude campsite on the beach where you first spawn...and have faced more than a few setbacks already. I did turn my dinosaur tame settings up to 10x (because waiting several REAL WORLD HOURS to tame critters is like, unreasonable) but otherwise I'm running just standard growth rates for everything, plus going solo...so it's a much slower experience overall. I want to keep my singleplayer experience a bit slow and steady, with more of the intended 'harsh survival' feel to help me better grasp the basics of the game before getting too adventurous playing on servers without the help of my friend, but once I feel that I've got a good handle on the game and its dangers I will definitely branch out more.

Between PVP, PVE and mod-based servers, not to mention the other official DLC maps, ARK is a game with a LOT to do. If I ever actually manage to conquer The Island, there's still a ton of content left waiting for me, giving the game a long life with lots of replay value. The only thing is that I tend to get burned out on games that have SO much to do and little in the way of like, actual endgame goals, so I'm sure I'll hit that at some point - but for now, I'm just having a blast enjoying the ride.

—————————————— Fire Emblem Heroes (Mobile) FINAL VERDICT: S'Alright —————————————— I don't normally include mobile games on these...well, probably in no small part because I don't normally PLAY mobile games. But, being a fan of the main Fire Emblem games, I decided to check out Heroes back when it first launched earlier this year. And it kept my interest for several months, which is impressive considering, again, I'm not really that into mobile games. I was impressed by how much it captured the same basic feeling of a Fire Emblem game despite being distilled down into a simplistic bite-sized mobile system - incredibly easy to just pop on and kill some time, but also enough to provide a challenge for those who want it. The 'story' was never really anything more than an excuse plot, but it's not as though I would have expected much more for a game like this in the first place so I don't really dock any points for that. All in all it's very good at being what it set out to be - a simple implementation of Fire Emblem as a mobile gatcha game.

Before long, however, it got very stale. For quite a while, new characters were introduced few and far between. It felt like 90% of the roster either came from Awakening or Fates (at the time the most recent games in the franchise), with almost everyone else from the Marth games. Games like Path of Radiance and Sacred Stones had next to no representation. As someone who has yet to play Fates, having that HUGE pool of characters from both games making up most of the heroes felt alienating from the start. Naturally, in a game like this, you most look forward to getting your favorite units...so for me, that part of the appeal was already lost, since most of my favorites weren't even IN the game. By the time they started adding in more variety my interest in the game was already waning, because it just felt like there wasn't much to DO. Once you've cleared all the story maps, it's basically just grinding your units up in the training tower, doing the arena 3 times a day (unless you build up a small fortune of dueling swords over time from the daily login rewards, which I did), and waiting around for a decent challenge map Tempest trials didn't even exist at that point. Of course, there was always quests, which for a long time I did try to complete as many as possible of before the month was up - the problem is how incredibly unfair so, SO many of the quests are. Almost every one with a worthwhile reward requires all 4 units to survive, which is fine...good rewards should be earned through challenge. But when you add to that '...and you have to use all red units' or 'a team of fliers' or something extremely specific like that, and the map is specifically designed to pit you against a bunch of blue units or archers...asking all four units to survive ON TOP OF THAT is just outrageously unfair. There's a big difference between the sort of strategic challenge of a regular Fire Emblem game and the kind of 'fake difficulty' imposed by these quests, and it got to where they just plain weren't fun anymore.

Without wanting to do quests, things got boring quickly. Sure, they introduced skill inheritence, adding a new layer of customization...but not only does that sort of micro-managing not appeal to me personally, but having to go up against ridiculously overpowered units in the arena and losing constantly made THAT not fun anymore either. No longer was it just about what units you got lucky enough to pull in a summon and took the time to raise to 5 star max level, but ALSO about what units you were lucky enough to pull and feed to your 5 star max level units to create the most broken and unbeatable character builds. That was around the point where I stopped logging in every day, only playing sporadically...and then, eventually, almost never at all.

I know by now they've introduced even more changes. Suddenly there's been a huge surge of new characters from the new and upcoming games, and then I log in and see that winning in the arena now nets you coins and other items that I have no idea what they're used for, or how I see some kind of element marker next to my name that I also don't understand. There's new story mode quests now, it seems, but for me it's all just too little too late. The initial months of the game were very stagnant compared to now, and it wasn't enough to keep my interest. By now, my lofty arena rank has fallen due to inactivity, and my once massive stockpile of orbs has dropped down to less than 10 because the most I might do is hop on and run one of the new summoning events in hopes of getting a character I actually care about, but end up walking away with 5 3-star Ests yet again.

I'm a Fire Emblem fan, but not a mobile gatcha game fan. It's hard to really say whether I'm FEH's target audience or not. All I know is that I had some fun for a while, but that time's now passed.

—————————————— Dragonball Z: Dokkan Battle (Mobile) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud —————————————— After the above review, it may be surprising that I ended up giving another mechanically similar mobile gatcha game a try. It's no secret to most who know me personally that I have a very love/hate relationship with Dragonball. It was my adolescent obsession and the reason I even got into this crazy anime world in the first place, and will always hold a special place in my heart...but I also despise literally everything the franchise has become, and Super just plain does not exist in my world. So why would I play a game that basically exists to promote the Dragonball of today, full of Super characters and weird SSJ3 fusions and all kinds of other stuff that I hate? Peer pressure, mostly.

That aside, I've only been playing for a few weeks now (I think my consecutive logins are in the 20s, and I've logged in every day since I began), but I'm enjoying it so far. There are a lot of systems that are naturally very similar to FEH given they're both the same genre of mobile game, but in most cases I feel that Dokkan implements them better. For instance, duplicate units. In FEH, all those 3-star Ests are useless. 3-stars are almost never worthwhile for skill inheritence, and the effort it would take to rank them up is simply not worth it when you could invest your feathers in 4-star characters. In Dokkan, however, I can use those duplicates to increase the special attack of the original, or to unlock paths in their hidden potential. Plus, ranking up weak units is a lot easier. A 3-star Est may not be worth investing the time into raising, but an R or SR Dokkan unit can be trained with very easy-to-acquire training items and awakened to a higher level - and oftentimes awakened even further if they're given a Dokkan mode. In the event that you pull characters that truly are useless, you can at least cash them in for some trade points that can be used to buy rare items or characters in Baba's Shop, or just sell them for Zeni, which will get you more use than the small pittance of feathers you'd get for releasing duplicates in FEH.

Of course, aside from sharing those gatcha game staples, they're two totally different games and it's probably not entirely fair to compare them...but since I have played both and have no experience with other gatcha games, naturally I'm going to compare my experiences. Gameplay-wise, Dokkan seems at first like a pretty simple 'tap to match the colored line' game, which is a far cry from even the simplified Fire Emblem strategy battles in FEH. The complexity of Dokkan comes less from the orb tapping itself and more from the other aspects of team building. Using units with good skills, and who share links to power each other up, is often just as important as getting your purple character to get a long chain of purple orbs. Gathering medals from maps and using them to train and awaken your characters, and unlocking their hidden potential, are all more important in the long run than tapping the pretty colored lights. Basically, the actual 'battle' of Dokkan Battle is the least important part...though they can still require some strategy in the more difficult missions (where just having your purple unit grab a lot of green orbs isn't going to be 'good enough'), and you can still feel satisfied if you manage to pull off a really long chain and activate a super attack at just the right moment.

As I said, it hasn't been long. I may very well get bored of Dokkan in a few months just like FEH before it. But for now, I'm having fun, and I think a lot of the gameplay is more fair and balanced than the often-frustrating FEH. I will probably continue playing at least a little bit each day for some time yet.

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