Healer: A Light In The Darkness said it was going to make me the healer in a World of Warcraft-like raid. One guy, using multiple purchasable skills and different tiers of talents, helping a team of tanks and DPS characters to fight enemies. That sounded like fun! So I went and tried it.
I have never played a game in the Call of Juarez franchise; For me they all seemed like bad first person shooters about drugs, or something like that. I've heard and read good things about this one and I decided to give it a go. I'm pretty happy that I did, it's a pretty good game and the 15$ price tag makes it even better.
I used to play a game in high school called Motherload. You had a little ship with a drill and you could drill down the earth to find treasures, but it was dangerous. You had to be careful about bumping into the walls and floor, you were overheating constantly and running out of oil was a death sentence.
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 don't mind fighting games on the iPad, Infinity Blade proved to me that it's doable and you can have complex, fun fighting systems even with the limited control options. I wondered what kind of game Injustice would be on the iPad, being sure that it couldn't be a port of the hit console mortal kombat-like fighter. I was mostly right, it's not.
There is a great balance act when you're building an open world game; You need to have a main storyline compelling enough to have the player want to go forward with it and at the same time you need to have enough side activities to justify having the game being open world. A big open world without stuff to do in it only feels like a reason to run around (or drive) only to get to the next story beat. Sleeping Dogs succeeds at being a fun open world game with a few weird mechanics here and there but mostly interesting stuff to show.
I didn't back Star Command when it was on Kickstarter because I rarely back kickstarters, but I decided to give it a shot when it launched on the iPad a few weeks ago and see what kind of space game it was. This game has charm but a few issues that could easily be fixed. Okay, some issues are tougher to crack, especially the crew control, but I'll try to offer some insight on what is wrong with Star Command and what I would do with it.
I really love Neverwinter, I've had the most fun with it than with any other MMO in the last four years. After my /played is over fifty hours, I really want to play it some more instead of writing this, that can't be a bad thing. The game isn't perfect of course, and some of the F2P systems are quite annoying me, but it's got neat mechanics and plenty of stuff to do, so I'm going to write this and then go play it some more. I'm also trying a new format for my ideas that I will be spreading here and there in bold instead of making separate paragraphs about them. Tell me what you think!
This game does on-screen virtual buttons in a satisfactory manner, I haven't played many games like that but I found the controls good for an iPad platformer game. You jump with the B button and fire with the A button (and you can drag the A button up to fire upwards) while moving around to dodge enemies and projectiles, jump over pits and collect stars and skulls. There are tons of levels and tons of things to unlock.
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've heard stories about EVE Online, stories about crazy schemes and wars and how you could do anything, be anything, as long as you invested the time (and sometimes money) in it. This is all very interesting, of course, but trying the game myself was something I needed to do and I understand some of it after a weekend of playing it, but it's not for me, it's quite boring, to be frank, full of seemingly useless systems and confusing progression. Is EVE an MMO? Probably, but not a World of Warcraft style MMO. I'd rather play one of these, they have less freedom in them, but everything you might be able to do is easily understood.
I feel like there's a trend with iOS games that I'm unsure about. The trend of having subpar core mechanics but really great fluff, random loot, leveling systems, skill trees and collectibles are added to games with weak gameplay loops. Nameless: The Hackers RPG is one of these games, I love everything around it but the main thing you do in it - fighting in turn-based battles - is poor. Also the anime style is not what I'd like in that kind of game but that's not relevant, design-Wise.
I didn't review Starcraft 2 for two reasons, one is because I wasn't writing this blog when it came out and two because the review would have went like this: Starcraft 2 is an almost exact copy of the first starcraft game with better graphics (expected), a dumber story (expected) and almost no change at all because the game needs to be playable competitively by people who played Starcraft 1 for ages (also expected), I wouldn't have much more to say, you build SCVs, you gather minerals, you spawn marines and you shoot guys. Or you make zerglings, or you spawn more pylons. What about this new expansion then?
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.
iOS games are very interesting because they can do microtransactions and try all kinds of business models to get things to the player and get money in return. Slayin is kind of squandering that opportunity even tho it would be very easy to implement hooks here and there so the player has the incentive to spend some money to get things in return. That being said, the gameplay loop is too simple and short as of right now for me.
EvoLand is a small indie project that was greenlight to Steam talking about 'the story of the evolution of RPGs'. I liked the idea so I decided to take a look at it. I love games where you evolve through concepts by way of unlockables and I love RPGs, and EvoLand scratched both those itches with varying degrees of success.
Nimble Quest is similar to the 'snake' game, you need to move a line that grows longer without touching anything, nor the walls, nor the other parts of your snake. In this case, you have a line of heroes that walk alongside arena-style maps where you have to defeat enough enemies before you can proceed to the next level. You start with one hero from a list of fifteen heroes or so (albeit they are but all locked at the beginning) each with their attack types and armor values and then you acquire more heroes by finding them randomly in the levels.
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.