Diablo 3 came with great fanfare, Torchlight 2 had some good marketting, I've read about Path of Exile here and there and the same goes with Grim Dawn, now in alpha. Why am I starting with this? Because I never knew that The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing was an Action RPG. I never knew it was coming out on steam and I looked at it the day it came out only to see what kind of game it was. I didn't think it was going to be incredible, as the title suggests.
I have to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of huge fantasy RPGS like the witcher, skyrim, kingdoms of Amalure, and the like. They have huge towns and even bigger maps where tons of people offer you tons of quests and tracking everything is a pain. You have a bunch of items that you pickup everywhere, some you could sell (but hold on to), some that might be used to craft something sometime in the future, you get a couple of skills and powers, some of which help you, some of which aren't enough to have you manage to defeat very strong enemies (that you can go fight right away because the world is so big and some foes are bound to be stronger than you) and you learn through trial and quick-saving what you can and can't do.
Epoch is quite like Infinity Blade. It plays similarly (With simple swipes and touches), has similar mechanics (you level up and buy things to get better) and kinda also looks like it (interface-wise), but I like it all the same! It has some issues that I'm going to get into later on, but is a neat way to spend a few hours getting good stuff and reading about the story.
I don't have much of an opinion on golf games in general but I've heard good things about Super Stickman Golf 2, so I gave it a shot. It's a very quirky golf game where the stages are setup to make you use your powerups carefully to get good scores. The stuff around the core game - level up system, equipment, challenges - is also pretty neat and difficult and getting everything is taking quite some time.
Scribblenauts Unlimited is fantastic, charming and very interesting. That makes for a very good review if you're into that kind of game but a poor way for me to look at it and suggest things that could be improved. I usually am very nitpicky when I look at games because my goal here is basically to play armchair game designer and say 'well maybe I would've tightened up the graphics on level 11!' but if the game is all fine and good, it's a bit hard to do.
BioShock Infinite is such a weird game in a way that I wouldn't have expected. It's a very good first person shooter, don't get me wrong about this, but some of the choices they made, both in design and the use of tech here and there are turning me off a bit from it. That being said, the story is way too interesting for me to stop playing the game even with valid design complaints. I played a few hours of the first BioShock and while I can see how the game's beginnings are similar, I'm not sure of the recurring themes that I would've been looking for as I played Infinite.
Defender's Quest: Valley of the forgotten is a tower defense with light RPG elements that intrigued me as soon as I saw the screenshots. I love tower defense games and I have sunk countless hours into classics such as Gemcraft and Defense Grid so I decided to try this one to see if it was any good. And it is! Not perfect, of course, but full of neat little ideas.
I had no prior opinions about the Far Cry franchise as I don't like First Person Shooters, the hook of the open world aspects and crafting elements of Far Cry 3 drew me in and I'm surprised to find it a very enjoyable game experience with some flaws here and there but mostly amazing gameplay systems. Tons of content to explore and a lot of organic open-world goodness here and there, crazy vehicles and some customisation, FC3 is a good shooter.
Does Hotline Miami really need to be that gory and messed up in a graphical and auditive sense? Not really, I'm quite sure it would've worked as any other kind of game with different aesthetics and another theme but the weirdness of it mixed with great gameplay systems, customization and an interesting story that reminds me of the Killer 7 and the No More Heroes of this world; A story weird enough you want to know more, enough to play through any bad gameplay there could be. Luckily for HM, there's not much bad in here.
Dungeon Defenders is a great take on the tower defense genre, I really enjoy playing it. I bought it on iPod (And it was a terrible experience all over) and waited maybe one year then I bought it on Xbox360 (Split-Screen Coop is not great and the griefing options were many) then on PC with all of my friends. Dungeon Defenders mixes action-rpg with loot mechanics and tower defense systems to create a nifty little game with some flaws that I'm going to look at in the following article.
I've been playing a ton of Cook Serve Delicious over the past two weeks and boy is it fun. In its most simplistic form, Cook Serve Delicious (Henceforth referred to as CSD) is a stressful microgame collection glued to a restaurant management sim game. It's also very indie, not sold on steam yet and programmed in Game Maker, I suppose that taking a look at smaller games should be made with a more forgiving mind, but the ideas and designs can still be judged on the same level.
Writing one of these looks at Borderlands 2 is quite difficult because while I had good things to say about torchlight 2, the best part of that look is to think about ideas to improve the game and its systems. Borderlands 2 is big, complex, well-crafted and polished, but not without minor flaws. Taking terrible games and suggesting ways to make them less so is easy, taking great games and having to scratch your head on how to refine some systems here and there can be tough, but doable. No game is perfect for everyone but I don't want to be seen as nit picky; I'm offering the view of what I think is flawed in these games I take a good look at. Don't get me wrong, for me to play that much, the game has to have something!
The original Torchlight took most of its ideas from Blizzard’s Diablo 2 and Torchlight 2 follows the same pattern. It would have been interesting to see where Runic’s title splits apart from the craft of similar games, but barring really neat ideas, some mechanics and systems just don’t cut it to make a deep action RPG. Seeing the promises of mod tools makes me think that it would be possible to tweak Torchlight 2 and see if my ideas hold up.