I really enjoyed the first Half-Minute Hero game, in small bite-sized chunks of adventures, you went around fighting things, solving simple puzzles and completing challenges in less than 30 seconds (with some help from the money-grabbing time-rewinding goddess). This sequel bogs it down with long cutscenes and moves to a more linear way to frame the game instead of the level system it used before. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much.
Games where you match blocks are not that rare, but I love those with RPG elements and clever mechanics here and there. 10000000(000?) was a good example of such a game, but Block Legend is less so. I found that a few mechanics were superfluous or not well thought out and the progression was almost doing more harm than good.
Diablo 3 was pretty okay, but I didn’t play it much before the expansion came out. Now it’s all I play, more or less. In simple terms, the expansion added Loot 2.0, new difficulty levels, act 5, the crusader class and adventure mode. These things work together in unison to make a damn good game that I’ll play a bunch.
Out There is a brutal space adventure game where you are an astronaut in a spaceship and you need to go at the bottom right of the map. To do so, you spend fuel, oxygen, break your spaceship instruments, find alien planets, make decisions, spend fuel, salvage something for precious iron, spend fuel, then drift endlessly in space. I enjoyed it, even if I couldn’t make it very far.
The last time I reviewed Marvel Heroes, the Marvel Universe action RPG, I wasn’t impressed. There wasn’t much to hook me to play more and I found a bunch of things that bothered me. There are still a few of these, but 220 hours later, I think I can safely say that I had a great time with this updated version of MH.
While it might look like an innocent match-3 game with RPG mechanics, Puzzling Rush is terrible, for the single reason that never ever, any mechanics are explained, leaving the player with a bunch of symbols and ‘HELP’ screens that are confusing and impossible to decipher.
A little strategy game with some good old decision-making weaved in, The Banner Saga has style by the bucket and spends a great deal to construct an interesting world around familiar and simple good gameplay mechanics.
Epoch 2 is very similar to its predecessor, but I liked it nonetheless, the basic infinity-blade-like game where you have a few spots to move and a few actions you can take against wave of enemies suffers from a few weird things here and there but has quite a lot going for it.
OFDP is an interesting little game, although it is very unprofessionally made. Borderline racist voice acting and questionable ‘funny’ texts spread here and there made me groan as I tried to progress through the game, which by itself is pretty much fine, and even a bit novel.
A card game where you play your units and other special moves using maths, Calculords is mighty interesting, but a bit confusing as far as the deck building goes. I really enjoyed my time with it even if it felt like the screen didn’t detect my tapping some of the time, which was quite annoying.
EDF is it’s own thing. It’s an arcade shooter where you mow down waves of bugs, spiders and other robots while collecting silly weapons and slowly becoming stronger as you go through a bunch of maps with little objectives besides killing everything. Lousy technical performances and limited couch co-op, however, are limiting my ability to enjoy the new PS3/Xbox 360 one. How does the PC version of the last one fares?
Blowfish meets meteor is unfortunate. On one hand, it has a terrible control scheme for a breakout type game where taping left and right is imprecise and unpractical, on the other hand, the early level design felt so boring that I just turned it off.
While sometimes games have terrible stories and art that might weird you out, it’s only in extreme cases that I will be prevented from playing a game because of these things. LTAP is a fine RPG - with a few issues here and there - that maybe would’ve fared better with different graphics and tone.
Threes is simple fun, it’s an addictive little puzzle game and while it’s distilled to the core of it’s gameplay concepts - almost to a bare-bones extreme - its simplicity allows for a fun five minutes here and there of moving tiles around.
There rarely are games where you control obviously French Canadian lumberjacks fighting werewolves, especially with tower defence elements thrown in there for good measure. Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves has a neat concept and some interesting elements surrounding the core gameplay, but the act of actually playing it feels clunky and not very fun, so I couldn’t get very far into it.
As far as iOS platformers go, SpellSword is fine, you pick up cards that enchant your weapon with various spells while killing monsters, looting rupees and completing missions, between them, you upgrade your character and buy more gear. It’s fine, but it would be better on something with actual controls.
I usually try and look at videogames to see their flaws and how I would improve upon them if I myself would have made that same product with all the time and money I would need. Or indeed, having the source code, knowledge of how everything works and all the time in the world to tinker with it. There’s too much of that to be done with Iesabel, it’s a broken mess.
I would love to make an action RPG like this one could be, the classic hp/mana game, maybe with a twist or two. Iesabel has close to no redeeming qualities - much like baby geniuses - besides that it’s a shipped product that you could play if you wanted to. That’s more than much of what I’ve ever done, small personal projects with no outreach nor fans. In any case, all the menus and voice acting in this game are terrible and badly translated.
The gameplay was also pretty bad, difficulty to aim, even basic controls were confusing, enemies killed me way too fast for no reason, menus are assigned to weird hotkeys, stats and skills are poorly explained to irrelevancy, I couldn’t figure what my stamina was, nor why my character was a naked person getting murdered by mosquitoes. Or that giant wooden door in the middle of nowhere, or just the basic movement that didn’t work.
I suppose that showing exactly what stats do is a neat idea, maybe adding a small arrow with the ‘before’ and ‘after’ value would help this particular system work a bit better, but that would be like adding a bandaid on someone cut in half. I think this game is also an Android phone game, working with a touchscreen, it must also be terrible there.
Anyways, I love Action RPGs and I always want to try different ones, but this one… Nah, don’t play Iesabel, even I couldn’t fix it. (Also, what do the orbs in the skill tab mean? I think they represent stats required, why not just name them out?)
Castle DoomBad is a tower defense game where heroes infiltrate your towers via the main door and windows to try and rescue a princess to bring her out of the building. Your job is to build traps and summon minions to kill the heroes before they reach her glass cage. Yes, there are two currencies and one is more premium than the other one, but I never even felt the specter of microtransactions ruin my fun.
Puzzle Quest Galactrix is a sad puzzle videogame in the line of other great Puzzle Quests. It’s core gameplay is perfectly fine, mind you, but it is ruined by abysmal controls between fights and poorly designed UIs and quests. I enjoyed my time solving puzzles and fighting, but everything between that was painfully boring.
Quest Lord is an old school RPG where you move in a 3d environment in first person. It’s very confusing and quirky and I lost attention pretty fast after not being sure where to go, fumbling around with a weird UI and not being sure if certain features of the game were bugs or just weird things.