★★☆☆☆ Fallout Shelter is a great Vault management sim! for the first hour. Then pacing falls off a cliff, and it becomes a generically non-interactive mobile game, that you can poke for about 5 seconds once per day. Still, its free, and has decent features, and arts, and Fallout flavor.
+ Fallout Theme + Lite management sim + Story text for dwellers sent to the wasteland
- Very limited playtime per session - Can't freely move rooms once built - The map is stupidly setup so you can only build 3x3x2 rooms, instead of 3x3x3. - Having a controller plugged in, breaks the game, and doesn't seem to be a viable input method to begin with. - The quest system is... a thing. Its combat system is horrible, it isn't entertaining to watch, and has literaly no gameplay/input involved. The timer to begin and end a quest is pay-walled. And basic inputs while on quests are combat locked and buggy.
★★☆☆☆ This HD remaster needs an HD remaster. Fable Anniversary is an HD re-release of an old hack'n'slash RPG with simple morality systems, but its not especially HD. People seem to love Fable 1, and hate Fable 3, but I would recommend the opposite.
+ Nice music + Hire bodyguards + Good Performance + Title screen is a book + Skill line specific exps + Interesting spell variety + Decent fast travel system + Buy property to live in or rent out
+- Worldmap makes a decent loading screen +- No coop, but this game is old, so that's excuseable +- The boast system is a somewhat interesting idea, betting bonus objectives on quests, but handled clunkily and not very dynamic
- Scars - Can't jump - Stealing isn't marked - Clunky spell selection - Escort quests hijack the game - Camera snaps when you end input - Have to go back home to levelup - Manually advance voiced dialogue - Weapon sockets/gems are permenant - Bodygaurds and escort NPCs can die - Clunky menus with tabs inside of tabs - Lockon to friendly targets on accident - Morality and NPC interactions are... lets just call them simple - The 2ish hour intro/tutorial to this game could be removed entirely - Bad save system, that only saves generic checkpoints, and doesn't even do that accurately - Picking up Exp orbs is a tedious mess, even with the pull, and they often get stuck behind objects - Graphics are pretty awful, for a remake made purely to improve the graphics, they may actually be worse than the original - Official mod support? There are only a handful of mods, and all of them look terrible. Supposedly the modding tools don't actually work.
★★★★☆ "Live Another Life in Another World". If only every game could boast that as a key feature.
+ Ragdolls + Fitting music + Captain Picard + Optional difficulty + Fast Travel & Quick Save + Immersive and varied world + Loot everything from everyone + Interesting quests and locations + Fully voiced endless NPC dialogue + Countless ways to complete quests + NPC and Faction relationships/alignment + Unique and detailed spell crafting system + Varied equipment, both visually and functionally + NPCs. While they can occasionally get laughable, this is probably the most alive NPCs have ever been. They have schedules, they have conversations with eachother, they have unique appearances and stories, you can fully interact with all of them, and they react somewhat reasonably. There isn't a single civilized NPC in this entire game that is just a copypaste non-interactive background filler, aside from maybe city guards. + Considering this game is 10+ years old, the graphics hold up pretty well. With a few extra settings forced on from your Nvidia control panel, it can even compete with most modern indie releases. Aside from faces, ohgod the faces.
+- Can't kill important NPCs +- Mage is by far the best playstyle +- Levelup skill categories by using skills relevant to that category. While this is an interesting idea, it causes some lame issues, like AFK running into a corner, or spamming spells at nothing to grind exp.
- UI is painfully clunky - Inventory weight limit - 3rd person is not viable - Graphic performance varies greatly, between 30 and 300 FPS - So many "come back tomorrow" quests, which don't even update when tomorrow is ready
★★★☆☆ Overhyped. Buggy. Clunky. Inferior to the 20 year old SNES game its based on. Still no multiplayer, which was announced over a year ago.
Stardew Valley is by no means a bad game. Minor bugs and clunky controls are the worst of it, and the music is 10/10. However, it is massively over-hyped for what a simple and inferior product it is compared to many alternatives:
Try the original Harvest Moon on the SNES; its nearly identical. Try Innocent Life on the PSP, it puts a unique spin on the genre. You could even have a somewhat similar experience in Ark, if you were to play it singleplayer. Factorio is also vaguely similar, if Stardew had a degree in rocket science.
★☆☆☆☆ How do games like R6:Siege even exist? Its like selling a bicycle and car in the same market, for the same price. Actually, this bicycle costs way more, because lootboxes.
Reasons to Buy: + Inspector Gadgets + Junkie rush when clutch + Constant idle times make you productive IRL
Reasons to Bail: - Broken netcode and high pings - Rubbish PvE that might as well not exist - Addictive, zero content, PvP only, toxic cancer simulator - 3 anti-cheats, but still in Top10 most cheated games on Steam - According to the devs, they want it to take 25hours of grinding to unlock a new operator (or pay2win). That's already ridiculous and insulting, but based on my experience, it actually takes closer to twice that long.
1. Take one of the most fun games in decades. 2. Turn it into an anti-fun cancer simulator; because Overwatch. 3. Profit?
Technically, they still exist, but I liked custom matches, on custom servers, on custom maps, with instant respawns and 32 players fighting over the central CP for an hour. Now, instead, you get a small, unbalanced team of tryhards, with respawn timers so long you might as well AFK, and a time limit to make 110% sure you can never have fun.
Still better than Overwatch.
PS: Spies are game-breaking built-in hacker-trolls; with invisibility, invincibility, infinite ammo, and the ability to 1shot everything. They should be deleted from existence.
★★☆☆☆ Wildstar has a long list of interesting features, but poorly designed core MMOgameplay.
- The combat system is anti-fun garbage. No auto attacks, and slow telegraphs, make it feel like backwards, unresponsive, meaningless spam. - The quest system is confusing, unintuitive, clunky, and hard to follow. Both accepting quests, and finding their objectives. - Core in-game "addons" can fail. With a warning that pops up as if they were made by some incompetent 3rd party. To the point that when you talk to NPCs, nothing will pop up. - Dead playerbase, doesn't even hit the top 100 on Steam, and in my few hours playing, I never once saw another actual player - I don't much care for the graphic style or races, but that bit is personal opinion. Maybe you like being a cartoon space rat.
★☆☆☆☆ Yet another zero-content PvParena, this one has the worst combat system ever designed. This game feels like a bad indie game, even though its made by a big company.
- The combat system in this game is either broken, RNG, or there is some core mechanic that I missed. Pressing the proper block button doesn't guarentee a block. On the off-chance that your character does a perfect block, staggering the opponent, they can recover from it before you can counter-attack, making the entire system pointless. Half the time, an enemy not even locked onto you, looking the other direction, can somehow block your attacks. Dodging often fails, unless it only has like 1 iframe on a 100 frame animation, and enemies can seemingly block-break through your dodge. The lockon system is awful, though required. None of it makes sense or feels right, and the 3 combat directions are utterly pointless and overcomplicates an otherwise shallow system.
+- Bots +- Map gimmicks, like gatehouses that can be closed +- The Samurai vs Knights vs Vikings is a cool concept, but goes completely to waste. +- Executions, some of these look really cool, some of these look really crap, their integration with combat doesn't flow right
- uPlay - Stamina - Overpriced - Ugly graphics - Kill/execution steals - Poorly mapped controls - Maps are poorly designed - Team color isn't always blue - Can't re-customize banners? - Crap revive/respawn systems - Long delays between matches - 1shot people by falling in holes - Non-Rewarding leveling system - Reinforcements flash into existance - Downgraded graphics, as is the Ubisoft way - Game black screened on me, had to Alt+F4 it - Join into a match already dead, to replace a bot - Hold a button to confirm some menus, but not others - No audio notifaction when matchmaking finds a match - Menus are almost as clunky and unintuitive as combat - Scoring and capture systems in dominion make no sense - Combat is awful. Clunky inacurate mindless button mashing - Equipment effects stats, not just vanity, and barely effects vanity - Keyboard/mouse controls are garbage, controller is barely better - No health regen, breaks the non-1v1-1v1 combat system even worse - When using a controller, the game flips between PS4 and XBOX button display - You can't jump down from places, so any time you climb a ladder, you get stuck - Borderless window mode is there, but disabled? (this enabled after restarting the game) - Bad modes, aside from maybe 1v1, but with the combat system so broken, thats not viable either - Only 9 classes, 3 very similar ones between each faction, and they couldn't even manage to balance them - Combat is designed purely for 1v1, but you will never 1v1 unless you play that mode specifically
★★★☆☆ Click your way through lite-story dungeons, customize your combat style with cards, levelup and unlock new jobs.
+ Moogle and Fairy + FF theme and tie-ins + Rewarding progression + Free2play, no harassment to spend money + Decent graphics, considering its a mobile game
+- Flashy but samey combat animations +- Backtracking through already redundant battles in dungeons +- Deep but pointless combat mechanics, as the game auto-plays
- Bad english voices - Re-used enemies/bosses - No character customization - Clothing only change based on class - Equipment is only a class specific weapon - Cards are a poor replacement for a party system