Reviews

Darksiders 2 takes the formula established in 1 and adds in an RPG progression system. There are two skill trees, one for “casters” and one for “melee”, but in practice both involve plenty of melee hack-and-slash combat. There’s now also a full loot system, with armor pieces, weapons, and trinkets. Some have unique effects, but most are randomized. The combat itself seamlessly integrates skills into the hack-and-slash gameplay. Death, with his signature scythes, is faster and has more combo potential, but there’s also slower, heavier hitting weapons to play with.

The story takes place immediately before Darksiders 1. It takes Death beyond Earth to some truly spectacular fantasy-style worlds, and is also a good bit longer. The environments and world are a step above the first game, and there’s a cast of characters you meet along the way.

The main dungeons are great, with almost identical dungeon treasures to Darksiders 1. Puzzle design is good, and there’s loads of optional dungeons and puzzles to explore.

The remaster is purely visual. Controls have been left untouched and most bugs are still in the game. For the most part, this isn’t an issue, but, just like Darksiders 1, the camera and aim sensitivity is all over the place. I had to mess with steam’s controller API for a bit to get aiming and camera controls to an acceptable place.

When Guild Wars 2 released back in 2012, the MMO landscape was dominated by World of Warcraft. WoW set the status quo for MMO's: grind (and grind some more) for levels and better gear score, subscribe for $10 a month, play an unremarkable story, get loads of questionably useful skills and talents, ruin your character by applying skillpoints incorrectly, and pay for yearly expacs. Power creep was rampant in the genre, and everything seemed to develop into "lifestyle games" that you couldn't take a break from without falling behind the rest of the players who had more time to play than you. 

Guild Wars 2 defied (and still does defy) these seemingly set in stone genre conventions. It had a "pay once" model without any subscription fees (it is now free-to-play). It had an involved, fully voiced story tailored to your character. It had a continuing story told in seasons of Living World content. It had a focused, directed skill and trait system that left you with 10 skills and three specializations. It had an intelligent scaled leveling system that reduced your level depending on the zone, allowing you to play with lower level players. It had content that was worth doing at any level. It had massive 100+ person world bosses. It had balanced PvP that put all players on an even playing field by giving them access to all the same skills and equipment. It had a marginal (5%) gap between easily acquired Exotic Gear and more difficult to acquire Ascended Gear (which is STILL the best gear in the game 8 years later). You could fully change your character's build at any time. It had massive hundred person World vs World Vs World battles. 

Guild War 2 was a better game for lowering the gap between casual players and hardcore "lifestyle" players. It was a better game because it was fun first, and grindy second. You played because it was fun, not because you were constantly trying to keep up with your competition.

And the game only got better. Heart of Thorns added in new Elite Specializations that gave each class access to a new weapon type and dramatically changed its playstyle. Guardians got bows, Necromancers got greatswords, and more. They also added raids, which, if it weren't for some pretentious groups in the community, would be very fun to drop into. The new maps they added were hit or miss, but they required a level of coordination between as many as 150 players that is still a sight to behold to this day.

Path of Fire added what may be the best implementation of mounts ever seen in an MMO. You transition from walking to mounts seamlessly, and each mount has a specific mechanical purpose used for traversing the world in a new way. Group content only got tighter and more enjoyable, however it required significantly less coordination than Heart of Thorns maps. 

I don't expect GW2 to be genre defining, but I wish it were. It's not perfect by any means, but it's still a positive direction for MMO's. It takes what made the genre great and embraces it, while minimizing the impact of what makes the genre inaccessible and tedious. 

Back on its release, Darksiders 1 was described by many as “Legend of Zelda meets God of War.” They weren’t wrong, and the Darksiders series continues to be a blend of other genres with metroidvanias.

The Darksiders games follow the story of the four horsemen of the apocalypse: War, Death, Fury, and Strife. The artistic design is the brainchild of Joe Madureira, comic book artist of Uncanny X-men and Battlechasers. This distinct art-style is the icing on the cake for the hack-and-slash gameplay.

Darksiders 1 is the most Zelda-like of all four titles. There are classic dungeons, classic unlockable items that allow for additional exploration, and tons of areas you can backtrack to in order to unlock health and mana upgrades. Customization is minimal. You always use War’s sword Chaoseater, but have the option of using a Scythe or Gauntlets as your secondary weapon. You also have a few activated abilities you can take advantage of. You do have the ability to change what “enhancement” is attached to each weapon, but the impact they have is pretty minimal. Combat gets repetitive, but it’s balanced nicely with exploration, puzzles, and scripted action sequences.

Some elements of progression are annoying, like leveling-up your weapons. As you kill enemies, your weapons gain miniscule amounts of experience and become more powerful. The main issue is that only the weapon that deals the killing blow gets any experience.

In the remaster, the controls have been mostly untouched. This is simultaneously a good thing (the combat controls in the original were tight) and a bad thing (the aiming in the original was way way too sensitive). Fortunately, it hooks right into Steam’s controller API that allows you complete control over inputs and layouts. I had a few crashes while playing the remaster, but mostly my experiences were positive. Graphics look great.

For a free game, Path of Exile delivers in spades. It has tons of build variety, a cool skill tree, an interesting "your skills are socketable gems" system, and some interesting Unique/Legendary equipment. Up to level 80-90, through the main campaign, through many of the maps, and in much of the end-game content, it's an exceedingly well done Diablo clone.

Then it gets really bad. Your damage falls off really hard with no clear avenues for improvement. Your survivability becomes nonexistent with, again, no clear ways to fix it (getting one-shot by offscreen monsters is a regular occurrence at level 80+). The game becomes balanced around "best-in-slot" gear for only the most meta builds, creating an unenjoyable power creep for casual players. The only fix for this is to look up a build guide, invest a bunch of currency in respeccing and acquiring hyper-specific gear, then completely dominating the game for no apparent reason. For those not intimately familiar with Path of Exile's specific mechanics, there's not much chance for you to make it to the highest tiers of content on your own.

Then there's the paymodel. The game and all it's content is free. You have to pay for extra stash space. The starting stash space is woefully inadequate, with absolutely no way for you to effectively participate in trading, or even effectively store your currency. To get the minimum tabs to get started, it would likely cost $10. I consider this the price of the game. Apart from tabs, there's a host of cosmetics. There's no other gameplay affecting microtransactions.

The economy in Path of Exile is completely and utterly ♥♥♥♥♥♥ beyond repair (in Standard League). This is a real shame, because their barter-style economy had the potential to be extremely effective. Each currency item can be used to upgrade and modify items, in addition to being traded between players. These money sinks aren't enough, however, and end-game farmers make everything good prohibitively expensive for casual players. This is an inevitability for this type of game.

For all it's shortcomings, PoE still provides enough fun to play, but it has no clear avenues for progression at high level end-game content. Unique/Legendary items are trivialized by increasingly powerful Rare equipment, and only certain builds can participate in all the end-game content PoE has to offer. You'll frequently be asking yourself "What am I doing wrong?" when you die repeatedly.

How to fix the game, in order of importance:
1. Make changing your build easier. The puzzle of finding something that works is only enjoyable when you aren't heavily punished for finding a wrong answer.
2. Either remove one-shot mechanics entirely or increase visual clarity. Also, zoom out the camera so you can actually see the monsters that attack you at a range.
3. Provide every player with a currency stash tab.
4. Make every unique have a level 70 variant. Having the coolest effects stuck on the worst equipment severely limits build variety. This might help make Unique items worth using again.
5. Add in damage numbers, death recaps, or anything that makes it easier to determine if you're doing things right.. Most of your build choices are pure guesswork, especially if you're a minion build.
6. Add in more currency sinks to help fix the economy, or limits on the amount of currency that can be acquired quickly.

Grim Dawn is almost everything I ever wanted from a Diablo-like.

Grim Dawn's character customization is probably the best in the genre. There's 9 classes available, each with tons of passive and active skills and modifiers to choose from and upgrade with Skill Points awarded every level. You can choose a second class to combine with the first at level 10. There's 3 core stats (Physique, Cunning, Spirit) to upgrade with Attribute Points. Then there's my favorite, the Constellations, which you upgrade with Devotion Points gained by exploring and finding Shrines throughout the game world. Between these three customization options, there are literally hundreds of builds and ways to make your character unique. Unfortunately, the complexity of these three systems is one of Grim Dawn's weaknesses. It's pretty easy to create a bad build. (Don't worry, you can respec)

Grim Dawn's campaign, world, and levels are all linear and static. There's no randomly generated maps like Diablo. Enemy placement is somewhat random, and item drops are mostly random, but apart form that, Grim Dawn's replayability comes from its three difficulties (Normal, Elite, Ultimate), the Crucible arena mode, its Rogue-like dungeons, or the Shattered Realm (Diablo's Rifts). Once you reach lvl 100 and finish the game on Ultimate, there's not really many other challenges to overcome. The progression isn't endless like Diablo's Greater Rifts. Luckily, it takes a good 100+ hours to reach that point.

Grim Dawn's itemization is hit or miss. It's significantly more in depth than Diablo's, but that comes at a cost. There's 9 different damage types and resistances, attributes bonuses, cast speed, attack speed, skill bonuses, and skill modifiers that can all role as random affixes on all equipment. Even though gear is almost constantly dropping, this makes it pretty rare that you will find something that your character can actually use. Diablo's smart-loot system is a big improvement over this. The good part, though, is that non-legendary gear is significantly more interesting and useful, even for endgame characters. Grim Dawn's legendary items, while powerful and impactful when you find one you can use, are also less interesting. They rarely modify skills or open up unique gameplay opportunities like Diablo, and mostly just give large boosts to damage and skill levels.

Grim Dawn's systems can also be pretty cryptic at times. For example, life steal only applies to weapon damage, and damage conversion math can get tricky. Some other systems will take some getting used to if you come from games like Diablo, like damage scaling linearly instead of exponentially, or the importance of Defensive Ability and Offensive Ability. Many of the more intricate systems are not terribly well explained, so if you're not a veteran of the genre, it's easy to get lost and forget to shore up your resistances or armor absorption.

Would recommend to pretty much anyone remotely interested in Action RPG's. There's something for everyone here and, despite its shortcomings in endgame content, it's still one of the best in the genre. DLC isn't absolutely necessary, but Ashes of Malmouth and Forgotten Gods add tons of new items, 3 new classes, and 3 new Acts ontop of the existing 4. If you finish the main campaign and like it, definitely pick them up because they add a lot to the experience.

Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom is a game that feels made for children. The themes and pacing feels right at home with Studio Ghibli films and works, but is out of place in a game with this degree of mechanical complexity.

 My memory of Revenant Kingdom is fuzzy, so this review is written largely from an incomplete memory. Revenant Kingdom's story was presented very well, fully voice-acted with quality animations and even some specially animated "anime" cutscenes. There's a varied cast of characters (each of them playable with their own style of gameplay), with equally varied quality of voice acting and writing. Some characters are shallow and 1-Dimensional, others experience radical changes throughout the story. Some characters have decent voice acting talent, others sound like literal children who have never done voice-work before. I enjoyed Lofty, but hated Evan, for example. Combined with several awkward time-jumps, I was never able to get fully invested in Revenant Kingdom's story.

 In terms of gameplay, though, Revenant Kingdom is actually pretty solid. Its combat is reminiscent of the "Tales of" Series (with significantly less complexity), featuring hack-and-slash RPG party-based gameplay. Each character has a fairly unique playstyle, supporting casters and physical attackers equally well. It also features a separate "warfare" mechanic where you command squads of soldiers recruited from various kingdoms in order to expand and defend your own. It wasn't awful, but it lacked depth. Then there's the city-builder gameplay, which bore resemblance to a mobile game. Resources are accrued in real-time, which can stall your progress if you're playing through the game quickly. Besides that, the city-builder was implemented surprisingly well, integrating itself into all aspects of the gameplay and story. I became fairly invested in the well-being of my city throughout my adventure.

 The world is very well put together, building off the solid base in the first Ni No Kuni. The Studio Ghibli style remains visually pleasing, and it's more technically impressive than the original. There's plenty to explore, but not all of it is very rewarding. There's tons of eye-candy present throughout the main story, so that helped retain my attention.

 If you're a fan of JRPG's, Studio Ghibli works, or the original Ni No Kuni, Revenant Kingdom is a solid buy, especially so at a discount. Don't expect a very mature story, crank up the difficulty, and enjoy the gameplay systems they've put together.

I'm writing this review about 2 years after completing Pillars of Eternity, so my memory of it is a bit hazy. I mostly have fond memories of my single 100 hour playthrough, which sometimes felt more like reading a good novel than really playing a game.

Pillars of Eternity is a cRPG. If you're unfamiliar with the term, it means the game has similarities to pen and paper roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder. Unlike those games, however, Pillars of Eternity was designed from the ground up to be played digitally, so you won't be bogged down by some of the awkwardness that comes along with playing a tabletop digitally. This doesn't mean the system is easy to pick up, however. It will require a lot of reading of in-game tutorials, glossaries of terms, and help menus. Fortunately, all of this is in-game and won't require you to look anything up online. You can also pause the game at any time to micromanage your party's actions, reminiscent of Dragon Age: Origins.

The game's narrative plays like an oldschool "choose your own adventure" book, with stat checks and dialogue options and choices scattered throughout every encounter. If you've played Fallout: New Vegas, you're familiar with the caliber of writing Obsidian is capable of when it comes to branching narratives, and Pillars of Eternity is no exception. There are moral quandaries as well as more simple decisions, and the main scenarios are voice-acted to boot. There's one encounter in the DLC that I disliked (assigning a motive to one of my decisions that didn't exist), but aside from that I never felt like I was unable to stay in character.

There is a lot more to talk about in this game, like the stunning visuals, the bleak atmosphere, the fantastic DLC, the mysteries of Eora, dungeon crawling, dragons and wizards, basebuilding, and the like-able (or not so like-able) cast. In the end, its just a stellar roleplaying game that I enjoyed getting immersed in every night.

Get into character and forget the real world exists for a little bit. Don't rush the experience, and enjoy it like you would a good book.

Celeste could have been better. It's a classic example of how level design can go terribly wrong, preventing a good game from becoming a great game.

For what it's worth, I'm a veteran to the genre of platformers, and I completed all b-sides, c-sides, and Chapter 9 (Farewell). 

I'll start by saying that Celeste has a fantastic movement kit. It's a very good example of "easy to pick up and difficult to master." The Dash feels great, and on the Switch, it has great haptic feedback. The developers put a lot of time and effort into tweaking the timing of the dash to make it really shine. It's what makes this game good. The technical tricks like "wavedashing", perfectly timed jumps out of bubbles, and dashing into wall jumps feel great to use and add some much needed depth to the basic platforming. These also allow for some pretty cool tricks when getting through levels in a quick way. There is "hyperdashing", however, that feels horribly inconsistent and more like a glitch than an actual intended mechanic. 

The controls are the first major issue. The developers decided that using "raw input" for the joystick would be best, forgoing the usual Quality of Life additions that other platformers use to make sure you go left when you press left and right when you press right. This resulted in a frustrating experience on some levels where I accidentally dash diagonally when I want to dash left/right. It took a very long time for me to train up the precision necessary to avoid doing this, and I still do it from time to time. The most confusing part is they acknowledge this issue in interviews and in design, even making the downward dash have a smaller input on the joystick than the diagonals, but refuse to actually implement any sort of fix. 

The controls I could mark up to the Nintendo Switch. Perhaps it was a quirk of the joy-cons and would be better with the Pro Controller (it is) or with the joy-con d-pad (which has its own issues with diagonal inputs). The level design, however, is what turns Celeste from a fun, technical experience into a frustrating one.

The levels in the base game are appropriate level of difficulty. A few screens are really tough to pass with all the Strawberries (Celeste's optional collectible item). The level design does a great job of teaching the player how to play the game. Many b-sides are even appropriately difficult, teaching the player the more technical, "hidden" mechanics very well. However, a vast majority of the content in the game after the credits role will be an exercise in frustration. Levels begin to require insanely precise movements, with spikes and obstacles that only serve to make the timing required even more precise. In Farewell (the final Chapter added to the game as DLC), almost every single screen will take tens, if not hundreds of tries to pass. Some particularly egregious examples include 3 to 4 minute long levels that restart if you fail anyone on the way, or a level that requires 6 wavedashes in succession, one of which requires almost frame perfect inputs to execute. I could go on and on with examples of frustratingly difficult level design, with spikes and hazards added everywhere. Just know that most of the really challenging levels will be exercises in muscle memory, not your platforming ability. 

To address all these issues, this is what I'll say: not every platformer needs to be Super Meat Boy level of difficulty. Meat Boy was a novelty. It wasn't "good" design by any stretch of the imagination. It was just difficult for difficulty's sake. Take a step back and realize that, while difficulty and speedrunning have their place, it's not a good idea to make that mandatory. While I realize that Celeste's difficulty lies in its "post-game" content, the game is simply too short to call that optional. This is good for those who like the challenge (like me), but bad for basically everyone else. It makes Celeste a great "spectator sport", but not a great game.

There are enough puzzles in this game to make the puzzle design worth mentioning. To acquire each Crystal Heart (another rare collectible, one per level) you must solve a riddle of sorts. By and large, the puzzles are done well. There are a couple really well done puzzles, but also a couple really poorly done puzzles. One of the worst offenders is a puzzle that requires knowledge of Super Mario Bros 3 eastereggs/speedrun strategies to solve.

The art, music, and animations are all great: great pixel art, very varied and interesting environments, some solid tracks (and some not so solid tracks), and smooth animations. The story, on the other hand, is elementary, but likes to pretend it's more insightful than it is. Madeline, the protagonist, suffers from depression. Celeste Mountain gives form to her dark inner self (dubbed "Badeline" by the community) that hampers her progress. Madeline must make amends with herself in order to climb the mountain. There's another character, Theo, that is a caricature of modern social-media obsessed youth. This is portrayed as a positive thing, so I'm not sure if it was intended to be a caricature or if the writers are just that bad. The story, if it were written in another medium, would be appropriate for young children. Here, it simply feels out of place. At the very least, it does its job of pushing the game forward well. 

Overall, Celeste was enjoyable to complete the first time. When going back and completing the challenges, I had to take it in short bursts to avoid both the frustration and the hand cramps that resulted from the difficulty and precision required. I would recommend Celeste to two different demographics. Firstly, people who want a simple, short, platforming experience. The base game is short, but appropriately challenging, and the challenges can even be fun if you are picky about which ones you play. Secondly, to veterans of the genre who want a challenging, if frustrating, experience. There's not much room in between these two extremes, unfortunately.