Prey Review

The First 15

Right away I have to say that the start screen music is perfect.

First I have to choose my gender. I’m male so I choose male. It’s the year 2032.

I leave my apartment and get onto a helicopter. The city looks really good. I can see the mix of new buildings along with “old” 2017 buildings. I arrive at the company headquarters and am greeted by a science probe which informs me that my brother is waiting for me.

I go through a series of very basic tests. The scientists are making this out to be some kind of huge deal, but I can’t figure out why. After the third test the scientist gets attacked by some kind of alien creature.

I wake up the next morning and find that things aren’t quite right. For instance, the hallway doesn’t go where it normally did. I grab a wrench and use it break the glass windows of my apartment so that I can escape…

…and walk out onto a soundstage. What the hell is going on?

Story

Several decades ago astronauts encountered the Typhon. The Typhon are an alien species with an unknown origin. America and Russia team up in secret to build a space station where scientists began studying the Typhon. Eventually they develop a device called a neuromod. A neuromod can teach a person any skill in a matter of seconds by remapping a person’s brain as if they had actually learned the skill.

Of course, everything eventually goes horribly wrong. The Typhon break containment and begin killing the people on the station while simultaneously growing some kind of weave, purpose unknown.

The story for Prey is as shallow or deep as you want it to be. A lot of the story is about the Typhon running amuck and trying to decide how to handle it. This mostly involves a lot of shooting things until they die. But there’s a deeper undercurrent that talks about memory, identity, and what it means to be an individual. There are choices that have to be made and repercussions for each decision. Players can dive into this or choose to ignore it as they wish.

Interface and Controls

You can set weapons to left, right, and down on the D-Pad to quickly swap between them which is nice. Up is reserved for the flashlight, which you almost never use. I wish the game allowed you to set a weapon to up as well.

The inventory has a number of issues that should be simple to fix (which leaves one to wonder why they weren’t fixed before release). These issues mostly arise when the player’s inventory is nearly full. The first issue is that items which should stack, don’t always stack when they enter the inventory. A single push of a button sorts them into a single stack, but having to go into the inventory, sort it, and exit out every time the player collects another item which fills their inventory gets annoying. The other issue is that if the player tries to pick up a weapon which takes up more than one inventory slot, the game will claim the player’s inventory is full even if the player has enough room but doesn’t have enough open inventory blocks that are side by side. Again, going into the inventory, sorting, and exiting out will fix the problem, but it’s bad design that such a thing is even necessary. Simply put, the inventory needs to auto-stack items that enter the player’s inventory, and if necessary auto-sort to fit larger items such as weapons.

I had a lot of trouble figuring out where I needed to go for some of the objectives. A few times I would follow a quest marker only to realize that it was just leading me to another area of the ship entirely. Other quests simply didn’t have a quest marker and reading the quest text still didn’t tell me where to go. The quest indicator should be another color if it’s in a different area of the station, and another QC pass on the quest text would have been nice.

I ran into an issue during spacewalks where it was next to impossible to track points of interest. The green dots would appear, but the only way that I could get the labels for these dots was to turn off all primary and secondary objective markers. The developers need to make it so that the labels will appear around all markers in the direction you are looking rather than one at a time.

Gameplay

The best part about Prey is how the game rewards the player for exploring. There is the primary objective and several secondary objectives, but a lot of the best gameplay is when players try poking their heads in nearby rooms, exploring down unknown corridors, or sometimes even just visiting entirely different sections of the ship. Unlike a lot of games that only let players go a little ways off the beaten path, Prey lets players explore for hours if they so choose in whatever direction they want. Some areas can only be accessed by progressing the story of course, but by and large the station is one giant playground to explore.

One of the core concepts of the game is the neuromods. Neuromods allow the player to learn new skills to fight better, hack doors, repair broken systems on the station, and a myriad of other things. I was particularly impressed with how I found every potential upgrade worth taking. At the start I wanted them all. And that was before the game doubled the amount that I had available to me. Mostly the player has to find neuromods, but they can also be constructed, up to a point. Once the player tries to make too many, the game locks them out and requires the player to go on a sidequest to unlock them again. I enjoyed how completing that sidequest became the most important goal to me even over the primary objective.

Eventually the player finds a scanner with which to scan the Typhon. Doing so unlocks new Typhon abilities that the player can learn. These include every ability the Typhon know such as mimicing objects, hurling fireballs, mind controlling people, and more. The ability to mimic objects was particularly interested because it allows the player to enter areas that normally are inaccessible. It takes a big mental shift to consider that the way past a locked door is to transform into a coffee cup and roll in through the mail slot.

The concept of the Mimic enemy is very cool. Mimics will (as the name suggests) mimic another nearby object and lie in wait. When the player gets too close the creature will drop the disguise and attack. This creates a lot of tension and leads to some interesting gameplay moments. When players first explore an area, they have to keep an eye out for duplicate items (one of which could be a mimic). And if they ever go back through an area, they must be wary of anything that wasn’t there before.

Turrets add another interesting element to the game. When I found my first turret I felt like I’d found my savior. I would carry it around with me while I explored the lobby and let it do the shooting since I had a very hard time hitting the fast moving mimics with my pistol (and the turret has unlimited ammo). Each time I walked in front of it, the turret would scan me and declare me free of Typhon material. It wasn’t until later that I realized why this was so important. If you choose to install Typhon neuromods, the turrets will start to attack you on sight. In this way they go from being a savior, to being another enemy. I found it to be a very interesting role reversal.

I especially liked the way the game handles spacewalks. I sometimes got turned around, and upside down, but it felt like a “natural” part of floating in space. The controls felt intuitive despite the lack of up and down.

The GLOO Cannon is Prey’s equivalent to Half-Life’s gravity gun. The GLOO Cannon does serve a purpose in combat, but its real use is for climbing walls and putting out fires. It gives the player a freedom of movement that takes a while to fully comprehend. Areas that at first appear flat hide a verticality that takes some getting used to. The game does a good job of showcasing what you can do with the weapon to get players started.

Another interesting weapon is the Q-Beam. The Q-Beam does reverse damage. This means that rather than lower the enemy’s health like most weapons, it begins to fill the enemy’s health bar from left to right. Once it fills the enemy’s health bar completely, the enemy disintegrates into its base elements that the player can collect. Since the beam only has to reach the enemy’s current health, players can combo other weapons with the Q-Beam if needed. My only complaint about this weapon is that the energy buildup decays very quickly. This makes it hard to use any other weapon after building up any kind of charge in an enemy. I would like to see the energy from the Q-Beam never decay once it applies to an enemy.

Grenades in this game are the worst weapon to try and use. Throwing a grenade is often times a study in futility. Without some kind of trajectory indicator it’s hard to tell where the grenade will go. Sometimes it doesn’t go far enough or it goes too far and misses the intended targets. Other times it bounces off something that the player might not even realize is in the way. This actually killed me when a grenade I threw bounced off a box and landed right underneath me before going off (though I did get an achievement for it). I would like to see the developers add in a system that shows the player the trajectory of the grenade before it gets thrown.

Then there’s the shotgun. The shotgun is by far the strongest weapon in the game and pretty much renders the others obsolete. The problem is that even with such a powerful weapon I still found myself crafting tons of ammo for it so it was actually fairly well balanced. But it highlights that the other weapons just aren’t good enough to keep up with the enemies of the game. I would like to see the designers boost the strength of the other weapons a bit rather than nerf the one gun that seems to really work. Also, it would be nice if players could upgrade the wrench to make it a more viable option rather than that thing players have to use when they run out of ammo.

The game allows players to equip chip mods which give various passive effects. I like the chip system, but one chip specifically I do not like. One of the chips allows players to detect Mimics while they are hiding as other objects. I feel like this removes a major element of the game and cheapens the experience. On the plus side, the chip does not work on Greater Mimics, but I still feel that it should be removed from the game.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy a game that rewards exploration and has more than a few jump scares.

You will not like this game if you want a more linear experience or if you strongly dislike jump scares. The game has some sense of horror to it, but after a while you get used to the Typhon.

I enjoyed this game mostly for the freedom it gave me in exploring the station. The combat is interesting and I felt challenged even on Normal difficulty. The Typhon abilities are also a nice touch with mimic being the most unique.

Nier: Automata Review

The First 15

I go to start up the game and find out there is a 2.6 GB update file. Time to do something else while that downloads.

Finally the download is finished. Here we go.

The game opens up with me and my team on an attack run. My teammates keep getting shot out of the sky. This is not going well.

I’m taking out more and more enemies. My fighter just transformed into a gundam. Now instead of just shooting forward I can turn and shoot all around me. And there goes the last of my teammates. Now it’s up to me.

I destroyed everything and I have arrived at the target location, but my suit/ship was destroyed so now I’m on foot. For some reason there’s a giant buzzsaw trying to kill me.

Story

The story takes place in the very far future. In this future, aliens have invaded earth with an army of machines. What remains of humanity now lives solely in a fortified bunker on the moon. Humanity then creates the NoRHa, an army of combat androids to use against the machines. Of course, things aren’t quite that simple. Players begin the game as a combat android named 2B whose team has been sent in to eliminate an enemy threat.

Nier: Automata definitely channels some elements of Ghost in the Shell in how it explores both the lives of the androids and the lives of the machines left behind by the aliens who for some reason haven’t been heard from for centuries. Some of it is almost human, while other aspects are completely alien.

Players get paired with another unit named 9S who tends to be the more thoughtful one. He does a lot of talking where he discusses his ideas about the past and thoughts on life itself. 9S makes himself likeable with his humor, and shows his depth when discussing more metaphysical subjects. He has a deep desire to explore which acts as a nice balance to 2B’s more militaristic approach to the world.

The player’s character, and the other NoRHa, can be recreated from backup copies and put back into the field. The story explores this idea of limited rebirth with some characters “forgetting” things that happened after their last backup when they are reassembled due to death.

While exploring out in the world the characters often come across pieces of the distant past from a time when humanity still lived on earth. This is probably intentional by the writers, but more often than not the resulting conversation becomes about how weird humanity was.

I also want to highlight the music in this game. A lot of it was somehow both creepy and yet appropriate. A few areas are designed to have players wonder “what the hell is going on?” and the music in those areas is absolutely perfect.

Interface and Controls

There is an option in the settings menu to self-destruct on death. It doesn’t really seem to do anything, but the game requires you to enable it as part of the opening sequence. I found it very telling that both characters seemed to find this completely normal.

By default the game automatically adjusts the camera while running. At first it was driving me nuts because it kept moving the camera down and I was having trouble seeing things in front of me over my character’s head. Thankfully the developers included an option to turn off vertical auto-adjust without also having to turn off horizontal auto-adjust. I wish more games, especially third person action adventure games, had this option.

I found the chip system to be particularly compelling. With this system players acquire chips that provide enhancements for a cost. Players can equip as many chips as they want so long as the total cost of the chips is less than the character’s maximum allowed cost. Players can even choose to unequip parts of the interface such as the health bar or the minimap to free up space for other chips if they wish. Interestingly, even chips that do the same thing can have differing costs. Players can upgrade chips by combining two of the same level. Of course, upgrading a chip increases the cost. The new cost for an upgraded chip is based on the cost of the two chips being fused together. The cheaper the base chips, the cheaper the resulting chip. This created a lot of interesting decisions about which chips to upgrade and which to wait and see if I could find another of the same time with a lower cost. My one complaint about this system is the chip that restores health upon killing an enemy. In a game where you are constantly defeating numerous enemies this provides the player with almost limitless health outside of boss battles. This is especially true during the shooting minigames where enemies are constantly streaming in from the sides of the screen. It led to me almost never having to use any healing items and thus having a plethora of them whenever it came time for a boss battle. I feel that the designers should make this chip only equipable on easy mode as they did with several other chips.

Something that’s created a bit of a controversy is players can buy trophies/achievements using the in-game currency. Once players complete the game three times, they unlock a merchant who will sell them trophy unlocks. So rather than have to do a given task, players can instead farm money and then buy the completion of that task. I personally don’t like this as it leaves no distinction between those who did it the “hard” way, and those who simply bought it. Also, there are guides online telling players how to add their save file to the cloud, buy a bunch of trophies, then restore that save and buy a bunch more. Since trophies are tied to the account and not the save data, players keep the trophies even though they overrode their save file with the one from the cloud. I feel like there are too many negatives with a system such as this one for it to have made it into the final game.

Gameplay

One of the first things to happen to me was I reached the first major boss of the game and died. Rather than start again from a checkpoint, the game actually ended. I got a screen telling me that my failure led to the machines wiping out the remainder of the NoRHa, and then the credits began to roll. When I went to start a new game, it told me I had unlocked ending W. I found it interesting that they “hid” an ending in the opening sequence of the game.

My second time through the beginning stage I noticed a number of hidden routes which then unlocked access points to different areas I’d been to previously. Strangely, this idea of creating shortcuts to areas players previously had to reach using the long way never really continued through the remainder of the game. There was the occasional opening of a blocker between zones, but nothing to the extent of what was available in the starting area. Most likely this idea was something the designers toyed around with early on but ultimately abandoned for the remainder of the game.

Having played the original Nier I was expecting a game which involved a series of constantly shifting game types and I was not disappointed. At any time the game can shift from a third person action adventure to a top down shooter to a side scroller and back all within minutes of one another. The original Nier even had an entire dungeon that was one big text adventure, though I have not found anything similar in this game as of yet. The developers have done an amazing job allowing the gameplay to transition from one game type to the next rather frequently without it feeling disorienting or frustrating. This more than any other system is where this game truly shines. During your second playthrough you can even initiate this transition when you hack enemies. This is done through a simple top down shooter minigame similar to Geometry Wars. Although, this version requires you to press a button to fire in addition to moving and aiming with both sticks.

During the first playthrough as 2B, players come across corpses. These corpses represent other players who have died during their own playthroughs. Other games have done similar things, but this game is unique in how it enables you to interact with these corpses. When players activate a corpse, they first choose to pray or not to pray. Praying for a corpse will create and send an item to the owner of that corpse. Then players can harvest the corpse for money and materials, or reactivate that corpse at which point the fallen player’s character becomes an ally for a short time. That ally will be as strong as the player whose corpse it is was when they died including their weapons and level. Players mostly tend to find corpses for players who are the same level since players tend to reach each part of the game at roughly the same level. But every once in a while one of those corpses turns out to be a real monster and for a time cutting through enemies is a breeze.

During my first playthrough I encountered a number of chained chests that I could not open. My one complaint about them is that the game doesn’t ever tell you that there is no way to open them until your second playthrough. I kept wondering if maybe there was a sidequest that would allow me to open them until eventually I looked it up online. Players run into them constantly, so it is particularly annoying to think that maybe they missed something that would allow players to open them. I wish the game had been a little more upfront about when players would gain access to these chests. All it would have taken was a message when players tried to open them stating something like, “This container cannot be opened until events have reached their ultimate conclusion.” This would have helped to alleviate a lot of frustration.

As I’ve mentioned several times already this game is designed to be played through more than once. The core story is excellent and feels mostly complete once you reach the end for the first time. That is…until you start the game again, this time as another character and you begin to see that there’s more going on than you initially thought. Then you beat the game a second time, and start it again. And that’s when things start really going downhill. The ways in which the developers leverage the New Game+ mechanic are impressive. I wish more games took the time to explore the possibilities of a New Game+ as this one does. It turns out there are actually 26 different endings, one for each letter of the alphabet.

As is becoming the norm these days, when players die they leave behind their corpse. They must then retrace their steps and collect their corpse to restore things such as their chips. Nier: Automata takes things one step further in that if the player dies again before recovering their corpse, then the corpse with all of their things is lost forever. I personally never had an issue recovering my corpse the few times I died. But I feel like potentially deleting items that might have taken entire playthroughs to collect/construct is a bit too harsh. I feel that corpses should last forever until you collect them since it is intended for the player to be able to collect their corpse.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy a game that is constantly shifting gameplay types. Nier: Automata is about having to constantly change how you play. Each area can include multiple gameplay types. The exploration of being a machine and the questions about life are also a strong draw for those who enjoy such things.

You will not like this game if you want to play a specific type of game. Nier: Automata is many different games all rolled into one. The transitions between them are very smooth, but if you dislike constant change than you find the gameplay frustrating.

I personally very much enjoyed my time with Nier: Automata. The story was compelling, there was enough “unexplained” events to keep me wondering, and the differing gameplay types kept things from ever feeling stale. This game represents a perfect example of how to take multiple, seemingly disjointed ideas, and roll them up into one coherent package.

Horizon Zero Dawn Review

The First 15

First comes a lot of cutscenes that cement my place as an outcast. I’m also getting a lot of shots of the wilderness which is admittedly quite beautiful.

It seems my name is Aloy (similar to alloy, which I doubt is a coincidence). One day while out and about as a child I manage to fall into a hole in the ground and find myself in a cavern that looks like the ruins of an old underground installation. I’m exploring the space while my character makes comments. It seems that this game takes place a great deal of time after the fall of human civilization.

I come across a room with a strange metal object inside, but I’m unable to get in due to the rocks in my way. Maybe I can find another way inside further in. I come across a dead body with something on its ear. I pick up the object and place it on mine. The object appears to be a computer complete with heads up display. I find it very interesting that I just ‘found’ my interface for the game.

I continue on and encounter a room with a bunch of recordings. After listening to them I believe I’ve encountered what I think is a group of people who planned on committing suicide. That’s not at all creepy considering I’m currently playing as a small child. At last I manage to make my way through the ruins and find my way back outside.

Story

Horizon Zero Dawn takes place many years after the fall of civilization. The only thing left behind from that civilization are old ruins and a nearly infinite number of machine creatures. The main character, Aloy, is raised as an outcast from a tribe of hunters but goes back to compete in a trial that allows her to become a member. But more important to her, if she wins then she can demand the leaders tell her who her mother is.

Despite some complications, Aloy leaves the lands of her tribe in search of answers. Unfortunately for her, those answers are quite dangerous and a number of people will stand against her. Of course, even when she does manage to find some answers they only seem to lead to more questions. And naturally, to find those answers Aloy must face even greater dangers.

I want to commend the writers for managing to keep the story feeling personal throughout. Even as the world and story continues to expand and grow, players remain rooted in the character who at times really could not care less about some of the things she discovers. She has her own goals and despite the worldwide implications of what she finds her search remains personal.

Something I found particularly impressive was the way in which the writers handled religion within Aloy’s tribe. The tribesmen would pray to the AllMother which could have felt awkward or pathetic, but the writers never made the people feel obnoxious or naive for believing as they do. In fact, a few moments even manage to highlight the beauty of their religion and its ceremonies. In our world where, more and more, people tend to make fun of other people’s religion, it’s nice to see a story treat even a fake religion with such reverence.

There exists a unique dichotomy between the world aboveground of the wilds and the world belowground of the ‘world of metal’ as Aloy calls it. Going from one to the other is both jarring and completely natural. You can see how each has influenced the other even though both worlds stand very much in opposition. Unfortunately the story doesn’t explore this ying-yang relationship as much as I would have liked.

Interface and Controls

I alluded to this earlier, but the way in which players acquire the game’s interface rather than have it available to them from the start is quite unique. I like the way in which they did this, though I think they could have done more with it. Since the interface is a part of the game, I would have liked to see players be able to collect different visual overlays for the interface. For instance, players could unlock a futuristic overlay, or maybe one which makes gives the effect of being constructed using watercolors. The interface would still function exactly the same regardless of which overlay is used, but the option to make custom alterations to the look would have been nice.

Your spear vanishes whenever the character sheathes it on her back. I realize it’s a bug, but it’s extremely noticeable and damages the sense of immersion to see it constantly appear and disappear.

There are several different types of quests. One of those is tutorial quests. Tutorial quests become available whenever you unlock/acquire a new weapon. They’re a great way of getting the player to try out a new weapon. The one problem with them is that they won’t progress unless they are set as the active quest. So even if you use the new weapon in the correct way to complete the tutorial quest, it won’t update until you set it to be the active quest and do it again.

Photo Mode is something I completely wasn’t expecting, but which I now wish every game had. In short, whenever you pause the game you can enter Photo Mode. In Photo Mode, the game remains paused but now you can manipulate the camera to zoom in, zoom out, or change the angle the camera is looking at the main character. There are also a wide selection of filters and effects you can apply to the camera. Then, once you’ve got everything set, you can take a screenshot. The result is some absolutely incredible shots that truly feel epic and can help capture moments from your journey.

Easily the worst part of Horizon Zero Dawn is dealing with the camera during battle. Since there is no way of locking onto a target, you must manually rotate the camera in order to keep an enemy in view. This is especially annoying since several enemies will charge at you (and then past you when you dodge out of the way). This also leads to a lot of getting hit by enemies from offscreen. I would like for there to be a way in which you could lock onto a target and have the camera automatically follow that target. For the controls, the designers could remap L1 to be target lock/unlock, and have the touchpad on the PS4 controller bring up the weapon wheel.

The other annoyance with the camera occurs when aiming at things in the sky (such as flying machines). The camera is positioned a little behind the character, which means that if you are crouching or standing in tall vegetation when aiming up the plants will obscure the camera even though the vegetation is not between Aloy’s eyes and the target. The game needs to fade out any objects that are between the camera and Aloy.

Items are rather annoying to use since you have to cycle through them all one at a time using left and right on the D-pad and then press down to activate the one currently selected. Instead, I would prefer if you could assign an item to left, right, and down the same way in which weapons are assigned to the weapon wheel. Players would also have the option of activating an item from within the inventory menu as well.

Gameplay

I like that one of the first things you can do once you gain the ability to move around freely is revisit the cavern which you fell into as a young child. Now that you’re older you have the strength to break through some of the rocks that previously barred your way into certain areas. It created a nice dynamic to see an area both before and after so close to one another.

Combat in Horizon Zero Dawn is about a lot more than simply unloading damage into an enemy machine. Instead, every machine has different weak points that can be targeted. And each of these weak points needs to be targeted in a different way. For instance, if a machine has a canister of blaze (essentially fuel) on it, then hitting that canister with a fire arrow will cause the canister to explode. On weaker machines that might be enough to destroy it, and on other machines being on fire might reveal previously hidden weaknesses for players to exploit. Some enemies can even have their weapons removed and turned against them if players can manage to pick them up. Boss battles tend to take this system to the limit and require the exploitation of these weaknesses in order to defeat. This system of strategic dismemberment makes for some extremely compelling gameplay and makes fighting the machines quite enjoyable.

The development team did a fantastic job on their climbing system. Climbing along surfaces feels very fluid and near effortless. My only complaint is that the actual climbing areas are all rather simplistic. I would have liked to see a bit more complexity involved with areas you climb around on.

Early on you come across a merchant (and all merchants after him) who will sell you maps that show you where all of the important collectibles can be located. The maps themselves only show you a general location and it is still up to you to snoop around to find the item. I really like this idea of introducing such maps near the start of the game rather than at the end

The fast travel system is a little awkward. Traveling itself is fine, but each time you travel you must consume a fast travel pack to do so. What makes this feel weird is you end up having an almost limitless supply of fast travel packs as you play through the game. Eventually you can even buy a fast travel pack that truly is infinite. I always felt like the travel packs served no purpose other than to take up inventory space. I would like to see the designers remove the need for these packs from the game altogether.

In this game the cauldrons act as dungeons. At first glance they all seem the same, but each has its own setup that makes it feel unique. And as with any good dungeon there is a boss fight at the end. Cauldrons do a great job of both reminding players of the metal world hidden beneath the surface as well as taking what is mostly an open world game and for a while narrowing the focus down to one room at a time.

Players can compete in trials that earn them marks for completing the trial within a certain amount of time. Each trial has three rankings depending on how fast you finish it. The problem with hunter marks is that they are only useful once you’ve visited all of the sites and completed all of the trials. Rather than have bronze, silver, and gold rankings for each trial, I would prefer it if each of the trials only had a single pass/fail ranking and the Hunter’s Lodge handed out rewards for completing 5, 10, and finally all 15 of the trials instead.

As you go through the game you find merchants who will sell you more and more powerful weapons. Often times you can even skip straight from the normal version to the most powerful shadow version. In a game that has you gathering so many different resources, it feels odd to simply buy better weapons rather than acquiring a base model for a weapon and having to craft upgrades onto it until it becomes the most powerful version. I would have liked to see them add in a crafting system for weapons where possibly players would acquire designs and then have to collect the necessary resources to construct the design. Each weapon would have a basic design, and then be upgradeable using upgrade components. The designs for these upgrade components could be bought from merchants with each upgrade component affecting several different weapons. For instance, a bowstring upgrade component could be applied to either of the bows available. I also dislike that you cannot upgrade your spear with the exception of a single side quest.

One nice quality of life feature in this game that I hope to see in more games is that whenever you have to follow other characters they will move at your speed. So if you walk, then they will walk. If you start to run, then they will run as well. This gave me the ability to slow down if I wanted to listen to a conversation and speed up if I wanted to get things moving along.

Treasure boxes hold an odd place in the game. These boxes can be found in various places, or handed out after completing a mission. Opening the box reveals the contents which players can remove and their inventory. I believe this was the developers’ way of ensuring that players always got their rewards even if they did not have any inventory space. And, every time players encounter a new merchant, the merchant ‘sells’ players a free treasure box with some common resources inside. There is no limit to the number of boxes the player can hold. As a result, this led me to often times hold onto a box and leave the contents inside since it allowed me to hold onto more resources than my inventory would usually allow. In essence, the boxes became a sort of pseudo second inventory. I like having the boxes be for rewards from completing missions, but I think the designers went too far with it when they allowed players to collect boxes from corpses and chests. I feel like they should have restricted them solely as objective rewards.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy a good personal story and a unique way of thinking about combat. Both are compelling and will keep you interested all the way up until the end.

You will not like this game if you dislike combat with a lot of constant motion. You spend almost as much time dodging out of the way as you do firing arrows. Combat also requires a lot of very precise hits which can be difficult for some people especially on consoles.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a very enjoyable game with a strong story and a unique take on combat. Thinking about enemies as a series of different parts rather than simply a target to unload damage into gives each machine a truly unique feel to it. I very much enjoyed this game and I believe others will as well.

Fire Emblem Heroes Review

The First 15

I boot up the game and the first thing I have to do is a download. This seems to be the new norm for mobile games these days. There’s music playing during the download. It feels appropriate, but it’s not the typical Fire Emblem music. I thought the goal here was to make players feel like they are playing a Fire Emblem game. Music is one of the easiest ways to put people into the right mindset. Oh well.

Download is done, now I get to watch a very pretty cutscene. I have no idea what’s going on, but I see a lot of familiar characters. Did I mention it was pretty?

And straight into battle we go. I’m working my way through the tutorial on how to how to move and attack. Dragging characters feels a little odd. It seems I can’t drag a character to a space, and then issue an attack. I’m not sure I like these controls.

Along the way I get a bit of the storyline. Fire Emblem Heroes is set in a separate world that contains portals which connect to all of the other “worlds” from the rest of the Fire Emblem series.

Tutorial done. More downloading! 319 MB this time, yikes. Seems to be going slow. No doubt their servers are being bombarded by people trying to download the game. This could take a while.

Story

The story for this game is a combination of clever storyline, out and out RPG tropes, and some rather tongue in cheek humor.

The overall story line is that players have been summoned to the realm of Fire Emblem Heroes in order to act as a tactician to help the Askr Kingdom defeat the Emblian Empire. There are portals in the world to the different worlds from the various Fire Emblem games which the Emblian Empire is using to go through and brainwash heroes into fighting for them. The Askr Kingdom is trying to stop them. But this is made a bit more complicated by the fact that the Askr royalty can only open portals. It’s the Emblian royalty who can close portals. But seeing as how they want access to these worlds, they aren’t inclined to do so. I found it to be a very clever way to pull everything together to make the game work.

Worked in with the original story line are some rather thinly disguised plot ‘twists’. For instance, as you go through the missions, your party members tell you about their friend who disappeared during a battle. About the same time, a mysterious stranger begins showing up here and there wearing a mask. No one could possibly predict how this is going to end…right? Frankly it seems a bit foolish to come up with a strong backstory, but then butcher the rest of the story with crap like this. Just because this is a mobile game doesn’t mean this sort of nonsense is going to fly. Hopefully this is the exception rather than the rule moving forward.

Other parts of the story are very clearly meant to be less than serious. For instance, the object that summons the player is a magical bow. The player also seems to be the only one who can use the bow properly. The bow is used not by firing arrows at the enemy, but by summoning heroes. Yep, you have a magical weapon that fires heroes. The characters of course seem to just glaze right past this fact. So just go with it.

Interface and Controls

There are two versions of the controls. One is more familiar to Fire Emblem fans and the other is odd. Strangely, the tutorial teaches players how to use the latter version. The odd version of the controls involves dragging characters to where you want them to go or on top of who you want them to attack. This method feels imprecise and makes it difficult to position characters if there are multiple locations to attack an enemy from. It feels especially awkward for ranged character who will snap from where you released them to where they need to stand in order to attack several squares away. The other version involves tapping a character, then tapping a location to move to or a character to attack, and then tapping again to confirm the order. This will feel more familiar to Fire Emblem fans and personally just felt more precise. I feel like the tutorial should emphasize this version of the controls or maybe even show players both ways of playing.

You can see the attack area of a unit by selecting it. If you hold on an enemy unit it shows you their attack area even when you select something else. The designers also added a nice quality of life feature by letting you tap a button at the bottom labeled ‘Danger Area’ which shows you the attack areas for all of the enemy units. Being able to see enemy attack areas leads to a lot of interesting gameplay as you duck in and out of different enemies’ attack range.

I like that the game is very upfront about the chances of earning a rare hero when players spend orbs on the Gatcha system. Players can see their chances of earning a rare hero before they decide to ‘spin the wheel’. More on this system below in the Gameplay section.

The game offers players the ability to upgrade their castle. The problem is the game doesn’t give players any sort of indication that this is even there. Players can only find it by clicking on a tiny button to bring up the menu for purchasing upgrades. It would have been nice for them to include even just a single screen that brings the player’s attention to it.

It bothers me that some of the quests aren’t retroactive. For instance, when you clear all of the Normal mode missions it asks you to then clear the Hard mode missions. But if you’ve already cleared them then you have to go back and re-clear the last mission in a chapter before the quest will update as being complete. It would be nice if quests for doing story missions would check to see if a particular mission has already been completed.

Gameplay

Before I get into the core gameplay I want to talk about something that has become a common practice among players, reset marathons. Players can reset the game by deleting the game from the mobile device and reinstalling it. Doing this starts them over. The reason for doing this is players earn 20 orbs very quickly. Orbs that can be used to roll for new, hopefully more powerful, heroes. Not all heroes are made equal and a few are truly exceptional. Given the difficulty of acquiring a second set of 20 orbs versus resetting the game, players find it easier to reset until they receive one of the top tier heroes. I myself did this just to see how it felt. It was pretty boring, but after doing it twice I received the archer Takumi. At the time I simply knew that Takumi was a 5 star rank character. Later I found out that he is one of the (as of the time of this article) top three heroes in the game. So for me at least it was worth it. It made the starting hours spent “playing” the game rather boring, but as a result I had a guaranteed powerful character to use right from the start.

Right out of the gate the game provides a series of story missions. Each of these is rather short and consist of only a single screen. The story is divided up into chapters with each chapter containing five missions. Once players clear a chapter on Normal, they unlock the Hard and Lunatic difficulties. These difficulties are just the same mission with higher level enemies. It does extend the mileage of the campaign mode, though it doesn’t really add much. On the plus side, completing a mission on a higher difficulty for the first time does reward an orb. It would be nice if some of the missions were more than just a single screen and had more than simply 4 or 5 enemies.

The game, like a lot of other games, uses a weapon triangle. Blue is better against red is better against green is better against blue (those of you who have played Kingdom Hearts x should find this familiar). But within that are some other matchups that should be familiar to fans. Archers absolutely destroy flying units, casters are good against heavily armored characters (provided they can stay out of melee range), etc. All in all the combat feels very much like standard Fire Emblem, which is exactly what I want it to feel like. So props to the designers for successfully making the transition to mobile.

Another staple of mobile games is energy (called stamina in this game). In order for players to start missions players must spend an amount of stamina. Stamina is both good and bad. It’s bad of course because it limits how much you can play. A rather sad amount of time is spent waiting to be able to play the game. On the other hand it’s good because it limits things like reset marathons and gives you a good ‘stopping point’ for when you’re playing. Unfortunately in the case of Fire Emblem Heroes the designers dipped too far towards the bad side. Stamina recharges at a rate of 1 energy every 5 minutes. That’s an excessively long time to wait when some of the missions can cost 15+ energy. I think the developers realized they overshot the mark because the second day after release everyone received 10 free stamina refresh potions and they removed the stamina cost from swapping around skills. I definitely hit the wall on the first day where I wanted to keep playing but couldn’t. The designers didn’t do themselves any favors limiting people’s ability to initially enjoy the game in such a hamfisted way. At the very least they should lower the time to 1 energy every 3 minutes. But more importantly I feel like the original missions should have never had an energy cost on Normal difficulty.

The big element of this game is the Gatcha rolls system. Currently players can earn a fair number of orbs just by playing with which to buy new heroes. The problem is that the system is mostly random. Players aren’t guaranteed to get a good hero. There is at least some bad luck prevention in that the chance of receiving a five star hero increases with each hero players get that isn’t a five star. But there’s no guarantee that the five star hero will be a top tier hero or that it won’t be a hero the player already has. A lot of this system plays into people’s nostalgia. Everyone who’s played Fire Emblem has their favorite hero (mine is Lyn). But the odds of getting that specific hero are slim. This then encourages players to earn more orbs to roll for more heroes. But there’s a limit to how many orbs a player can earn. Mostly this is limited by Stamina which prevents players from binge clearing all of the missions on the various difficulties. And when players finally finish all the missions that’s it until more content is released. As a result, the only other option left is to purchase orbs with real money. When I first looked at the conversion rate for money into orbs, I felt it was absurdly low. I knew I’d never pay so much for so little return, and I was ready to blast Nintendo for such a thinly veiled ploy. But it would seem that a lot of other people don’t care that the ratio is as bad as it is and have purchased orbs regardless. There was even an article about a guy who spent $1,000 on orbs. So while I may think that buying orbs is little more than a scam, I have to concede that the designers seem to know their audience well enough to understand that they would be willing to spend so much money on so little gains. So I guess hats off to them for getting people to spend so much money on an otherwise free game.

Something I actually like is that a character always has the same skills regardless of its star rank. Lower rank heroes, however, are locked out of learning advanced levels of their abilities. This definitely creates an incentive to raise a hero to a higher star rank in order to gain access to better versions of their core abilities. That said, the given stats of a hero have some randomization, meaning that the same hero at level 40 will be a tad bit different in their final stats.

And now we reach the absolute worst system in the entire game, Player vs Player. The basic PvP system is this. Players enter the arena and are provided with three difficulty choices, Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced (Easy, Medium, and Hard). Players choose one and the battle begins. Players don’t compete directly with other players, rather the enemy team is made up of heroes taken from another player’s roster but controlled by the AI. If players defeat the enemy team, they earn points. All of this works great. It’s how those points are earned and used that’s the problem.

PvP is, currently, the only way to earn feathers which you need to increase the star rating of your heroes. Unfortunately the system itself is very poorly explained. The way it works is you battle until you lose or reach seven wins. Once you complete a ‘run’ your points are tallied and that is your score for the season. The only way to increase your score is to start another run from scratch and end up with a higher total at the end. The problem is there are a ton of hidden mechanics for scoring that aren’t explained anywhere. These hidden mechanics require you to go hunting for information online if you want to get even a decent ranking. And then you have to have the right heroes to both win and earn the max amount of points for winning. You do get some feathers just for earning points, but the lion’s share of feathers each season (seasons last 5 – 7 days) are given to those who ranked high. This is an awful system that blatantly rewards players with the exact ‘right’ hero composition that nets them the most points per win. It would also be nice if the game went more in depth into the ins and outs of your PvP score. At the very least a breakdown of your score after each match would help players see how they can improve their score from game to game.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy Fire Emblem and don’t mind a large amount of randomness when it comes to which heroes you will receive.

You will not like this game if you’re looking to get a specific hero unless you’re willing to spend a lot of time resetting your game or a rather absurd amount of money (and even then there’s no guarantee).

Fire Emblem Heroes as it currently stands is a decent tactics game with an awful PvP system. In the end though, mobile games like Fire Emblem Heroes usually live and die by their special events. If the events happen frequently enough and are fun, then the game will do well. So while the game is nothing truly special at the moment and is mostly riding a wave of nostalgia people have for the different characters, what it becomes still remains to be seen.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

The First 15

The story starts with two videos from my character’s girlfriend. The first one is happy and carefree. The second one is decidedly creepy and frantic.

The gameplay opens up with me talking to a friend on the phone about why I’m here. Good to know that I’m smart enough to at least let someone know where I am.

I spend a few minutes walking through the forest. This game really loves its invisible walls. Fortunately it’s daytime. There are a few creepy objects lying about, but nothing too scary yet.

Eventually I come upon a rundown house. I open the side door and peer into what looks like a gaping maw of pure blackness. I am being told that I have to leave the safety of the daylight and enter the blackness if I want to search for my missing girlfriend. Against my better judgement, I step on through.

Inside is complete darkness. Fortunately I brought along a flashlight. I wish I had brought along a brighter flashlight, but I’ll take what I can get. I very slowly start to explore the house. It’s seen better days. The food is all rotting. The boards creak as I walk over them.

Wait, was that a person I just saw?

Story

The main story manages to remain creepy from start to finish. Even as you learn more about what’s going on the knowledge never really makes things any less scary, it just transforms them into a different kind of horror. That they can maintain such an atmosphere for the entire duration of the game is quite impressive.

Occasionally you find VHS tapes. Watching these tapes puts you in the shoes of another character for a short time. I found these to be a very clever way to expand the story while maintaining the sense of immersion.

Interface and Controls

Many times throughout the game I found myself wondering where I was supposed to go next. The map lists objectives, but doesn’t tell you where to go to complete those objectives. A line of dialogue sometimes points you in the right direction. But if you quit playing and continue again later, you may have forgotten where you were told to go. Of course other times the game just never says. Having such unclear objectives often times lowered the tension since I spent so much time just wandering around areas I’d already cleared trying to figure out what to do next.

As you approach an item a small indicator appears above the item. When you get close enough it displays the button for you to press to interact with that item. Out of all of the systems in Resident Evil VII, I found this to be the most distracting. The pop-up icons look so out of place that frankly they caused me to lose my sense of immersion every time I went to pick up an item. And as with all horror games, there are items everywhere if you take the time to look for them. This only gets worse when you use a supplement. The supplement allows you to see the pop-up icon for items from much further away and through walls. So while the supplement lasts, you constantly see a bunch of tiny icons floating all around you.

Personally, I would like the pop-up icon be replaced by a white outline of the item once the player is close enough to ‘notice’ the item. The item itself would then gain a grainy white filter over top of it once the player was close enough to pick up the item. As for the supplement, I would rather the supplement cause some sort of synesthesia reaction. This would cause items to create sound that players could follow to locate the item. The supplement would need to last longer than it does currently to allow players time to track down the item making noise, but I feel like this would be far less damaging to the game’s sense of immersion than the current system.

Inventory space is limited which is supposed to create decisions about what to keep and what to toss. Unfortunately what actually happens is you waste a bunch of time going back and forth to your chest where you can store all of your unneeded items. This is mostly due to the need to actually store quest items.

Quest items also take up inventory space, though I honestly can’t figure out why. Each time you acquire a quest item you typically use it a time or two right away, then never need it ever again. And so all they seem to do is limit your inventory space until you manage to dump them into your chest. There’s also the issue of having to pick up items during a fight. The game doesn’t warn you that you’re going to need the extra space before the fight starts, so you end up having to spend time clearing your inventory in the middle of a fight which usually gets you killed. Of course once you die you then have plenty of time to clear enough inventory space before retrying the fight, but it just feels awkward. Instead they should give you less overall inventory space, but remove the need to store quest items in that space. It also might be worth exploring the idea of removing the chest as well.

Gameplay

This game utilizes a system of checkpoints for if you die. Unfortunately the designers have a tendency to be somewhat sparing with where they place these checkpoints. I imagine they did this to create a sense of fear over dying. Unfortunately, it had the complete opposite effect. When you die and reset, everything is in exactly the same place as it was the last time you went through. Enemies appear in the same locations, items are in the same hiding places, everything is exactly the same. What the designers failed to anticipate is that when you walk through the exact same hallway knowing nothing is going to jump out at you, fight the exact same creature knowing exactly what it is and where it’ll come from, and find the exact same items knowing that picking them up isn’t going to trigger anything (or even if you know one of them will trigger something), the game stops being scary. There was a particularly egregious section in the basement. I only died 4 times, but the entire area is a series fights and dying on any one of them forces you to redo all of them. As a result of this repetitive section, it absolutely killed any sense of terror I had about the game since I knew where everything was and how it would come at me. This loss of fear stayed with me for a while after I made it through this section of the game and had a negative impact on the remainder of my gameplay. I’m not saying that bad checkpoints ruined the game, I enjoyed Resident Evil VII. But the predictability of the environment gave me a chance to concentrate on the enemies long enough to learn all of their tricks so that they too became predictable. The game could benefit immensely from some randomization. Having enemies appear in different locations and shifting items/traps around would go a long way towards keeping players on their toes even when they are repeating a section of the game due to a death.

One other complaint about the gameplay was the lack of indication about a boss’ health. There’s often no indication that you’re actually damaging a boss rather than just making it angry and wasting ammo. One of the bosses would flee whenever I damaged it, making me think that all I could do was scare it off. As a result, I wasted a lot of time wandering around trying to find a way to actually kill the boss when all I had to do was chase it down and unload more bullets into it. It would have been nice if periodically the boss would indicate it was actually being damaged such as having pieces of it break off. I don’t need an HP bar on the screen, but I do need some indication that I’m actually doing damage.

Something very odd was going on with the health and/or damage I dealt to enemies. One enemy would go down with 4 shots from the pistol, and the next identical enemy would take an entire clip plus a shotgun blast to take down even though I shot it in the exact same spot as the first. I’m not sure if this was due to enemies having different amounts of health, weapons doing variable amounts of damage, or some other mechanic which I wasn’t aware of, but whatever the case, it made dealing with enemies odd since some went down easy while others required an obscene amount of hot lead before they died. This might have been intentional to make enemies feel more unpredictable, or it could simply be a bug. In the end though it seemed to simply lead to a lot of cheap deaths when an enemy hit me despite the clip of ammo unloaded into its head.

I should point out that despite the negative aspects of the gameplay listed above, I did very much enjoy my playthrough. The game certainly has its flaws, but it succeeds at creating a compelling horror experience despite them. Remember this site is largely about dissecting a game and trying to find ways to improve upon it.

Conclusion

You will enjoy this game if you like a well crafted story which will scare and creep you out on a consistent basis. The type of horror you experience shifts many times but never goes away.

You will not enjoy this game if you frighten easily. This game is designed to scare you and it certainly will do that at some point (even if you don’t frighten easily).

Resident Evil VII: Biohazard is a well crafted game with a more personal story than your usual Resident Evil title. Despite that, or maybe because of it, the story manages to maintain a constant sense of horror. The gameplay suffers a bit from some aspects becoming predictable if you die often enough in the same area (often enough being 3 or more times). All in all though, I enjoyed my time playing this game.

Pokemon Sun & Moon

Introduction

When I was younger I played a lot of Pokémon. I bought Pokémon Red when it first came out and later bought Pokémon Yellow. I managed to get all 151 Pokémon (including Mew). I then continued on with Pokémon Silver, but stopped playing before the next entry into the series. Now I felt like it was time to jump back into the series and see if it was everything I remember it to be.

The First 15

I start up the game and am asked to pick my character. I’m a little disappointed by how few choices you have when it comes to making your character.

The opening cutscene shows a young girl trying to escape from a lab. She nearly gets caught before whatever pokémon she has in her bag teleports them out of the lab.

Now we’ve moved on to my character who it seems has just moved to the Alola area. I’m starting to notice that people all smile a lot.

I find it a little weird that even the professor calls my mom ‘mom’.

After a lot of cutscenes I finally get to chose my starter pokémon. I chose Litten the fire cat as my starter. My reason is that it looks the coolest of the three.

Now equipped with my starter I’m ready to go!

Story

There is a decided lack of tension between characters in the game. Everyone remembers the constant tension between Red and Blue (Ash and Gary) from the first game. But in this game it seems like everyone is always friendly. I feel like the lack of a rival does the game a disservice. It by no means ruins the story, but I think the story could be better if there was a character that acted as a true rival for the player.

In Alola, Team Rocket is replaced by a gang called Team Skull. Unfortunately, whereas Team Rocket managed to actually feel like a real threat and defeating them became a priority, the members of Team Skull are mostly characters who are very clearly trying to compensate for being weak by acting tough. This makes defeating them feel less like something you need to do, and more like something that you might as well do since you’re already here. Even their leader is hard to take seriously. I remember Giovani being someone you could respect (granted I was a lot younger at the time). Unfortunately this new group does not elicit the same response.

Interface and Controls

Players gain access to the Ride Pass which allows players to mount up on different pokémon. I like how this replaces the old HM system, but it feels a little odd to be able to just call up a pokémon anywhere I want without having first captured that pokémon. I think you should have to capture the pokémon you use on the Ride Pass. I’m also not of fan of how Sharpedo completely replaces Lapras. Technically you can’t fish while using Sharpedo whereas you can with Lapras, but this just feels like the developers last minute realized Lapras was useless and so they removed something from Sharpedo to make Lapras feel ‘different.’ I’d like to see them give Sharpedo the ability to be fished from and then simply remove Lapras as a mount.

I wish the game had a quest log or a notebook of some kind for tracking quests you get from NPCs. Often times I’ll meet an NPC who wants me to do something for them or trade a pokémon with them. The problem is that if I don’t do it right away, I usually forget about the quest until I revisit the area later on.

One of the biggest missteps the game takes is with the Battle Royale. Players are introduced to the Battle Royale through the story at about level 20. Players participate in one which is a lot of fun. Naturally players are going to want to do a few more before they continue on with the story. Unfortunately, pokémon who participate in the event are all level 50. Pokémon over that level are set at level 50, but pokémon under that level are not leveled up to 50. This basically means that the player, having just been introduced to this new system, has to immediately leave and come back much later in the game to participate. I really wish there were Battle Royales available at level 20 so the player could participate immediately upon being introduced to the system. I would have liked to see the developers add in a series of one-time level 20 battles that reward the player with an item and unlock the normal level 50 battles upon completion.

One of the things that made the game much harder than it should have been is after defeating a pokémon that belongs to a trainer, the game tells you what pokémon they will be playing next. Unfortunately, all it tells you is the name of that pokémon. As someone who hasn’t memorized all 700+ pokémon I usually had no idea which pokémon was about to be summoned next. I would like to see the new pokémon displayed in the bottom screen along with its type(s).

I appreciate that when I’m selecting a move the game will indicated if an attack is super-effective, normal, not very effective, or will have no effect on the opposing pokémon. This is extremely helpful since it means I don’t have to try and memorize a giant strength/weakness chart.

I actually didn’t even realize that I had access to Pokémon Pelago until a random NPC I spoke with told me about it. There needs to be some sort of tutorial added that takes players there once they unlock access.

Gameplay

Early on enemies have a habit of overusing debuff moves which ultimately means they never do any damage. I think it’s intentional in order to make at least the start of the game really easy for new players. This is a great way of giving players enemies with pokémon that are the same level but are still very easy since the player could have chosen any of the three starters.

The game gives you access to the Exp Share item very early. Personally I feel like this is one of the best decisions the game makes. By having the Exp Share all of the pokémon in the player’s party are constantly leveling. This makes it so you don’t have to spend time farming experience or constantly swapping pokémon at the start of every battle if some of your pokémon start falling behind. The early access to Exp Share means you can always use the pokémon you want to use, but the others in your party will be strong enough when the time comes for them to shine.

In the old days (Pokémon Silver) pokémon would full heal when they leveled up. They don’t do that anymore, which is probably for the best.

The game strikes a nice balance between random encounters and avoidable encounters. Walking in tall grass or inside of caves causes the player to encounter pokémon at random, while others can be seen spotted beforehand. I like the mix of encounter types and how they made each area feel unique.

Replacing dungeons are the Island Challenges. These challenges require you to navigate through an area, usually a cave, while completing some kind of quest which then ends with a fight against a totem pokémon (basically a supped up version of a normal pokémon). While fun, the challenges tended to be quite easy and the fights with the totem pokémon were also quite easy if I burst down the totem pokémon right away. I like that they’re trying to change things up, but their one-hit KO methodology prevents things from being as interesting as they could be (more on that below).

My largest complaint about the game is that most of the fights come down to one-hit knock outs. Because of how much damage pokémon deal at a time, hitting an enemy pokémon with a super-effective attack will usually KO that pokémon (or vice versa) without giving the target a chance to do anything. There were a number of times when I would put out a pokémon of my own only to have it get knocked out without being able to attack even once. Because of this I found the majority of the game to be rather easy since I could stick my Butterfree out first which usually had at least one attack that was super-effective against anything the game threw at me. And if it doesn’t, then I could just switch to one of my other pokémon who did have a super-effective attack. I would have liked to see fights be a little more of an actual fight. That means that even a high damage super-effective attack wouldn’t do more than one-third to one-half of a pokémon’s health. I just feel as if the constant one-shotting makes the main part of the game too easy and a couple select fights much harder than they needed to be.

The first time I was defeated it was to a trainer who played a Meowth that used Bite. Bite is a move that has a chance to make the opposing pokémon flinch, thus skipping their turn if the opponent goes second. Unfortunately for me, the enemy was faster and proceeded to make my pokémon flinch every turn until eventually they all fainted without being able to attack even once. Losing purely to RNG like this felt so completely awful. A feeling that just got worse when I went in again and defeated her without any trouble the second time. I feel like the designers need to be a little more careful not to give enemies moves like Bite which can potentially cause the player to lose without being given a chance to do anything due to bad RNG.

Z-Power is a new mechanic which allows players (and very rarely enemies) to supercharge a single attack once per fight. I actually found Z-moves to be a bit underwhelming from a gameplay perspective since they’re mostly just a more powerful version of an existing ability. It’s a good attempt to try and follow up on Mega Evolutions, but it just doesn’t have the same effect. Z-moves also tended to make wild encounters even easier than they already were since a Z-move is almost always going to one-shot the target even if it isn’t super-effective. The upside to Z-moves are the animations that play when players use one. Some pokémon have unique Z-moves which generally have some of the best animations.

Mega Evolving is a system from the more recent games. In Pokémon Sun/Moon players aren’t given access to it until after the main storyline is already completed. I feel like this is done to further highlight the new Z-Power mechanic.

Something I want to highlight about Pokémon Sun/Moon is that players can spend an almost unlimited number of hours playing this game. Even once you beat the main storyline there are several other storylines that follow it. Besides story content there is the collection aspect. Players can catch pokémon to fill up their pokédex. And once that’s completed then players can try to collect the rare shiny variation of each pokémon. Between that, breeding and hatching eggs, online battles, and a number of other gameplay features players can easily pour hundreds (maybe even thousands) of hours into this game.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy collecting a seemingly limitless number of creatures, training them, and taking them into battle against enemy trainers or players.

You will not like this game if you don’t know many of the pokémon by name or you dislike games that have an over the top cheerful atmosphere.

Pokémon is (as it always has been) the ultimate collector’s game. With over 700 pokémon (over 300 catchable between the two games in the current expansion) players have plenty of things to chase after. But even for those who aren’t into filling up their pokédex, the game is still a lot of fun with an engaging story. There are a few missteps such as Team Skull lacking a sense of danger and the constant one-hit KO attacks, but all in all I enjoyed my time playing this game.

Dishonored 2 Review

The First 15

I boot up the game and have to install the day 1 patch. It’s 9 GB! The game is 37 GB total. I just had to download a quarter of the game, which took hours. Whatever happened to games being ready out of the box?

Once I finally start up the game it asks if I want to go through the tutorial. I decide I do and the game has me playing as Emily as Corvo runs her through an obstacle course. The tutorial is short and rather effective. I think I’m ready for the main game. I choose Medium difficulty.

The story starts out all smiles and rainbows but very suddenly turns into blood and death.

You have to choose whether to play as Corvo Attano, the main character of the first game, or Emily Kaldwin, the ruler of Dunwald. I chose to play as Emily Kaldwin.

Something I remember from playing the first game is that there was a method in which you could play through the game without killing anyone. I check through the trophies (playing on PS4) and sure enough there is one for not killing anyone. There’s also one for never being spotted. I decide to do a stealth, no-killing playthrough.

It actually took me a rather long time to figure out that I could escape the room they locked me in by opening the window and walking along the balcony. This early on it would be nice if the game did a little more to make me aware that windows even can be opened.

Now out I get my first chance to deal with an enemy. I sneak up behind him and choke him unconscious. Easy enough. I sneak downstairs and do the same to the next guy.

Next there are three guys with one of them boasting about what’s happened. I kind of want to kill them, but I’m doing a no-kill playthrough. Eventually the one boasting walks towards me so I hide around the corner. Once his back is turned I sneak up and choke him unconscious. Now I get back my ring so that I can use the secret exit.

At this point the game tells me that I can fulfil the requirement of ‘neutralizing’ the man I just choked out by either killing him, or by locking him inside of the hidden room. I carry him into the room and Emily makes a wicked comment about how she hopes he enjoys being surrounded by wealth but unable to use any of it since he is completely locked inside. This was so much better than killing him.

Now I exit the room and continue on with the game.

Story

The overall story is a little too formulaic. Everything starts out as rainbows and butterflies until the evil relative comes in and starts killing the nobility. She then uses her magic to turn whichever character you’re not playing as into stone. From there the main character is forced to flee and sets out on a quest to retake the throne. This sort of story has been done before many times, and sadly Dishonored 2 doesn’t do anything to help set itself apart. There aren’t that many characters and even the characters that do exist don’t seem to interact very much.

Everything you do is for the “good of Dunwald” or its people. But frankly, I never really saw any people worth retaking the throne for. Where are the people who make me want to save them? Everyone I meet (soldiers and civilians) is either selfish or just plain evil. All of the quests (even the optional ones) are about getting someone something they want in exchange for something I want. Where are the characters who just want a safe place to sleep? Where are the mini-storylines where a frightened child asks me to save her family only for me to arrive too late? Where are the people for whom all I can do is give them one of my healing potions and have to apologize that I don’t have the power to do more for them? Emily keeps going on and on about how she always wished she could be free from the throne. Well now she is. But she insists that she has to retake the throne despite the fact that I never really meet anyone who I feel is worth retaking the throne for.

For the sake of keeping the game going the storyline works. But it stops at being just “good enough” and relies on the gameplay to carry the majority of the game.

Interface and Controls

There is no indicator when you go to pick something up that your actions will be seen as theft. You only get find out it’s theft when all of a sudden a civilian runs away screaming and/or the guards show up and try to kill you.

The game kept giving me tips about ways in which I could use certain abilities. It especially liked to tell me about possession. It took me a bit to realize that possession is unique to Corvo whereas I was playing as Emily. The game should only show tips for abilities that your current character can use.

I disliked that I always had to have the sword equipped. While doing a no-kill playthrough, the sword was only useful for killing bloodflies or breaking boards. But every time I went to cast Dark Vision or do anything else I had to pull out my sword. This is more of a roleplaying feature, but I would like it if equipping an item to my left hand or using magic didn’t automatically pull out my sword.

Spending mana is odd. Some abilities cost mana, but then that mana regenerates provided you don’t try to use another power before it’s done regenerating. Others cost some mana and regenerate some, while others cost mana and don’t regenerate any mana at all. None of the abilities warn you about the cost, so you mostly just have to learn by using them. Though in the end mana starts to feel pointless since you almost never spend it fast enough. I played through most of the game holding 10 mana vials (the most you can hold) and only ever used them if I found another mana vial and wasn’t already at max mana (which wasn’t that often). I would have liked to see the designers be a little more creative with their resource system.

When playing as Emily Kaldwin, she has an ability that allows her to teleport a fair distance. One of the upgrades allows her to instead teleport objects and enemies to her. This can be useful for grabbing hard to reach items or pulling an enemy into a chokehold. But since both versions of the ability are tied together and the ability auto-adjusts based on what you’re targeting, I would occasionally pull something to me (like a corpse) when I meant to jump behind an enemy. The pull is considered non-stealthy and so it would cause nearby enemies to spot me. I would have liked to see these two abilities be actual separate abilities.

I dislike that you can’t sell things to merchants. I spent most of the game with a full supply of various grenades and other traps that I’m never going to use because they are lethal and I was doing a non-lethal playthrough. I also spent most of the game with ten health and mana potions since ten is the max you can hold and I never really needed them. This is probably more of a comment about the uselessness of some items during certain types of gameplay (in my case non-lethal stealth), but I explored a lot and ended just leaving behind a lot of what I found since I was already maxed out.

Gameplay

I chose to do a no-kill, no-alert playthrough and to play as Emily Kaldwin. This means that I can’t kill anyone (included bosses) and I can’t be spotted (so I have to use stealth). This meant a lot of saving and loading when things didn’t go quite the way I wanted.

I want to commend the level designers on creating some absolutely superb levels to move around in. Very quickly you learn that there is always another way to get to where you want to go. Most of the time that means going up or down and jumping from balconies or crawling through alleyways. With the use of powers players can access even more areas. Also, not only are the levels beautifully laid out, but the attention to detail is superb. They clearly spent a lot of time placing odd bits and ends such as trash, benches, and other objects the exist solely to dress up the scene. Each level

One nice addition to the typical stealth formula is that guards will notice if other guards go missing. If a guard walks away and comes back to find a fellow missing, that guard will start investigating the area. Ironically this actually tends to make taking down the second guard easier since you don’t have to do anything to get him away from his normal patrol which allows you to sneak up and take him down too.

If you’re going for no-deaths or no-alerts playthrough you have to babysit it. Every time you go to save you have to check the stats page to make sure no one died or spotted you. Several times I’ve gone to check my stats only to find out that someone, somewhere, somehow died even though I never killed anyone. One time I managed to subdue all of the enemies between me and the end of the level. I checked the stats after subduing the last enemy, no alerts. I walked to the end of the level probably 100 feet away and somehow when the end of level stats page came up I had one alert. So I had to reload the save and walk that same 100 feet again, this time without any alerts. They really need to do a better job on this because it started to get really annoying when I had to check my stats every single time before I saved.

The AI cheats. What I mean by this is that the enemies will always walk in your general direction whenever they’re searching for you. It’s easy enough to test. Just bang on something to alert the enemies in the area, then go hide somewhere. No matter where you hide, the enemies will always path towards you without fail. I suspect the designers did this intentionally to try and create extra tension, but instead all it does is cause a break in the immersion of the game because you can literally see the game feeding the AI scripts controlling the enemies information about where you are that they shouldn’t have. They designed a good stealth system, but this kind of heavy handedness creates a negative play experience that cheapens their efforts and ultimately undermines the player’s sense of immersion.

Something I found very odd is that civilians are amazingly good at noticing the player. Guards gradually notice the player. The longer they see you or the more flashy your actions the sooner they realize what’s happening. But a civilian will go from uninterested to screaming in terror in a flash. Not only does this feel extremely odd that the guards are worse at spotting the player in stealth than the civilians, but it’s also annoying that there is no state between being hidden and being spotted for civilians. I would like to see civilians be given the same sort of gradual detection system that guards have.

There is a very noticeable lack of stealth oriented bone charms in the game. There are plenty of ones that help in combat, but I found a grand total of one bone charm that did anything for me while in stealth for the first half of the game. Even when I did find a few more they didn’t really do much besides make health and mana potions even more useless than they already were. I would have liked to see a bit more creativity and diversity with the bone charms.

One of the best parts about the original Dishonored game that makes a grand reappearance in Dishonored 2 is the ability to beat the game without killing anyone. This includes major story characters (aka bosses). Every major enemy has a way in which they can be defeated without killing them. Sometimes this causes the character to become friendly, other times one could argue the end result might actually be worse than killing them. But either way, it’s neat to really explore the level and discover alternate pathways to victory beside a straight up fight.

There is a “no-powers” mode which I did toy around with for a bit, but frankly I found it to be rather boring. When you chose to forgo the mark you don’t just give up your powers, you actually give up everything in the upgrade tree. Runes you collect now just give you a chunk of money instead. Powers are one of the best parts about the Dishonored series and without them the game feels like so much less. I’m not against them offering this as an option, but I feel like the designers did themselves a disservice by adding a trophy/achievement to beat the game using this mode. Doing so exposes how shallow their game becomes without them. I would like to see the “no-powers” option still lock the player out of using magic, but allows the player to earn passive abilities at a cost. For instance, maybe for every rune spent upgrading your character it lowered your maximum health, or caused you to take extra damage. Or maybe the runes cause you to glow which makes it easier for enemies to spot you. Either way, I feel like locking the player out of the entire upgrade tree was a mistake and they should have tried to find something of a middle ground.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you’re a fan of dark fantasy games which offer a fun arsenal of weapons and abilities. This game excels with its level design and also offers strong replayability though it’s different gameplay types.

You will not like this game is you are looking for a strong story or do not have much patience. There will be a lot of saving and reloading especially if you decide to try and complete the game without being spotted.

Dishonored 2 is a fun game. The level design is top notch and the arsenal of weapons and powers truly allows you to become the master of your environment. Unfortunately a weak story and a few design flaws prevent this game from truly becoming the masterpiece it’s trying to be. That said, I had a lot of fun with it and I think most people will too.

Metal Gear Solid V Review

First 15

The game starts off very slow. Following the opening cutscene in which Snake is injured, you spend the first 15 minutes of the game sitting in a hospital bed. There really isn’t much else to say because not much else happens. You spend a lot of time moving your head around and simply observing the doctor and nurses as they take care of you and the patient next to you. You even have to be sedated a few times after you have a panic attack over some of the things the doctor tells you. I will say it was interesting to see a game that’s not afraid to have such a boring opening in favor of a more cinematic feel. That said, I did feel like the game had made its point about how long it takes Snake to recover from his injuries long before the first actually interesting thing happened.

Of course, once things got interesting, they got really interesting.

Story

The story is quite dark and revolves around a world similar to our own history in which war is the norm and lives are given the same value as ammunition. Most countries use private military contractors to carry out their less savory work while keeping their own hands clean. In the midst of all of this, there is Solid Snake and his company which tries to bring a little good to the world. Unfortunately, that mentality invites predators whom ultimately destroy the organization in the opening cinematic.

The beginning of the game is about Snake literally dragging himself back from the dead so that he can start anew. The opening story mission is graphic, gut wrenching, and not for the faint of heart. It paints a very bleak picture of the world that has developed while its best champion has been out of commission. The first mission, minus the seemingly endless time spent stuck in bed, is precisely what I want to play. It is the kind of story/gameplay that has made the Metal Gear Solid series such a powerful force.

There are two major highlights of this series that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain does not forget. The first is people with powers and abilities that go beyond the norm. In this game those characters are front and center right from the start and every time you encounter them they bring a sense of both dread and wonder. The second is the metal gears, from which the series gains its name. Here too the game hits its mark as the player slowly catches tantalizing glimpses of a metal gear as the story progresses.

All this probably sounds fantastic, and it is. The problem is, the story comes to a screeching halt once you gain access to the base. Now with a base of your own, you must go out and gather resources in order to upgrade your base, research weapons, recruit soldiers, and whole host of other management type things that frankly do absolutely nothing to further the storyline. I’ll go into this more in the Gameplay section, but suffice it to say that the game does a great job of starting strong only to shoot itself in the foot.

One thing that never made any sense to me was the way in which you recruit new soldiers. Some are earned through mission rewards which makes sense, but the majority of early recruits you get by incapacitating enemy soldiers and then having them airlifted back to base where suddenly they convert from wanting to kill you on sight to deciding that you’re the commander they’ve always wanted to follow and they will lay down their lives for your cause. The game offers some sorry excuse about “reprogramming” them as justification, but frankly the whole thing just felt weird every time.

Interface

One thing I will say for the developers, despite the fact that there are a million different things you need to do in a menu, for the most part everything is laid out in such a way that you can very quickly and easily find what you need. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part if I needed to see something, I could find it without any real trouble. The one big exception to this was I wish they would put extraction points on the normal map. If you want to know where to go for an extraction, you have to navigate away from the map and pull up the extraction menu to see where they are. It’s a minor issue, but you run into it at the end of every mission so it’s quite noticeable.

They make clever use of the PS4 touchpad in that the bottom left corner brings up a menu while the bottom right corner takes you directly to the map. It feels natural to use despite technically being the same button. I have a feeling I’ll start seeing other games doing the same.

I very much dislike that you can’t see optional objectives until after you complete a mission. Often times the optional objectives require only a minor variation on what you’re already doing, but you won’t know that until after you’ve completed a mission which then forces you to repeat the mission if you want to go after them. Frankly it just feels like a cheap way to add “replayability” without having to actually add anything to the game.

I don’t know why, but it seems like every time anything at all happens, the game decides that it’s a good time to start putting some credits on the screen. I probably saw Hideo Kojima’s name ten times in the first three hours of the game alone. Eventually I started wondering if this was some kind of gag (the series is famous for its subtle jokes), but they never really presented it as one. So I’m just left to wonder if I really need another reminder of the people who made this game.

Gameplay

The core gameplay is quite well done and each of the systems works rather well with the others. The main flow is to approach a new town or outpost, scan for threats from afar and mark them using the binoculars, then move in and systematically kill or incapacitate all of the threats without being spotted. Once all of the threats have been eliminated, finish up any mission objectives, collect any available resources, and then move on to the next area. Eliminating enemies generally takes up the lion’s share of your time due to waiting on opportunities to separate one soldier from the rest in order to take him down without alerting the others. This gameplay and the tools the game provides to facilitate it mesh very well with one another into a coherent whole. On the other hand, you can certainly go in guns blazing. But even if you prefer the direct approach, it’s still probably worth your while to do a bit of sneaking to eliminate a few enemies before you open fire.

Reflex mode is a new addition to the series wherein after being spotted the player has a few seconds during which everything slows down. This allows you a brief window to try and quickly take out the enemy before they have time to call out of backup. These moments are very high tension and create a nice sense of spiking adrenaline. This contrasts nicely with the more slow and even stealth gameplay.

The evac system is both extremely useful and somewhat hilarious. You gain the ability to attach a balloon to an unconscious character (human or large animal) which causes them to rise up into the air for a few seconds, before they go rocketing into the sky to be picked up by a recon plane. The game does this very tongue in cheek as the person or animal being evaced gives a very amusing cries of dismay whenever he/she/it goes rocketing into the sky. From a gameplay perspective this system strikes a nice balance between still having to carry a person you wish to evac (since you can’t evac a person while indoors) while thankfully not forcing you to carry a person for leagues and leagues to a landing zone as you have to do in the prologue mission if you wish to rescue all of the prisoners.

One thing I found extremely annoying was that the silencer has durability. This means that you can only fire a weapon ten or so times before the silencer breaks. This might have been fine if I could bring some backup silencers with me, but I can’t. And once the silencer breaks, I have to call in a chopper to airlift me out before I can get another one. You can eventually research better weapons which have silencers that last longer, but it takes a lot of time to unlock those upgrades and in the meantime you’re stuck with the worst silencers in the history of any video game ever.

As I alluded to in the Story section, the joy of the game comes to a grinding halt once you start getting invested in the base. The storyline vanishes and you’re forced to grind through a dozen or more nearly identical missions whose sole purpose seems to be to prolong the game while enabling to the designers to reuse the same assets. Sometimes you have to kill a general, others are to extract a prisoner, or maybe even collect some intel. But in the end all of the missions basically play out the same and you very quickly start to get bored with the repetitiveness of it all. Every mission basically comes down to: approach settlement, scan for threats with binoculars, sneak around eliminating enemies (unless you just use the direct approach because you’re so tired of waiting for enemies to patrol), finish eliminating enemies, gather resources, complete objectives (if any), and move on to the next settlement. Rinse and repeat. It’s fun at first, but when you do this three to five times a mission with almost nothing to change it up, by mission thirteen the fun is pretty much used up.

There is even a daily login bonus. A daily login bonus! This alone should have thrown up giant red warning signs to the developers that something was desperately wrong and the game had gone quite far astray. I bought this game to play a gripping single player story campaign, not so I would have to treat it like a free-to-play iPhone game.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy micromanaging a base and a roster of recruits or if you’re willing to at least wade through a ton of menus and side missions each time you wish to advance the story.

You will not enjoy this game if you don’t like repetitive missions or if you don’t like sifting through dozens of menus after each mission.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a game that contains two games. The first is the exactly the kind of game I was hoping for from a sequel to the excellent Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriots. Sadly though, that game is trapped behind another game which is a mess of menus and repetitive side missions that you must wade through in order to play the game you actually want to play. You would think that in the Definitive Edition at least they would have given you the option to bypass the busy work, but sadly they are sticking to their guns and the game as a whole suffers for it.

Aragami Review

First 15

The game opens into a hazy cutscene showing me something I’m sure is important, but without any sort of context I can’t tell what it’s supposed to mean.

Now I’m into the normal game, and it looks absolutely beautiful. The environment, the main character, everything looks stylized and yet realistic at the same time.

The game drops me right into it and quickly walks through teaching me how to use my abilities. The game also teaches me about being in shadow and to avoid the light.

The way they shows me what buttons to use is really neat. There are giant tablets in the world that have the instructions written on them. Surprisingly, it feels quite natural.

The audio is interesting. The dialogue is in, I think, Japanese but it’s run through an audio filter so it sounds a little like characters are talking underwater. It reminds me of Okami. Of course there’s a lot about this game that reminds me of Okami, which I can only think is a good thing.

I finally got caught out, and discovered that not only do I die in a hit, but the soldiers with swords can use them to fire a wave of light to hit me from range.

After a little more trial and error, I found that once spotted I have a second or two to respond before an enemy either kills me or blows a horn to summon reinforcements.

Story

The character Aragami is a conjured shadow of vengence meant to exact death to the enemies of the princess and to free her from her confinement. One interesting thing about this setup is it completely bypasses the discussion about the morality of killing people. You were summoned to kill the Kaiho, the army of light, and so that is what you’re going to do. The story does go much deeper as you progress, but if I try to describe it then I’ll end up spoiling it.

The reversal of light and dark is also interesting since you are the creature of shadow and your enemies are the army of light. Even the gameplay supports this since shadows are good and light is bad.

Interface

Aragami is a beautiful game, and part of that is the lack of a UI for most of the game. Rather than have a HUD, the designers placed everything the player needs to know on Aragami’s cape, similar to Dead Space. For the most part this works well, though occasionally I had trouble seeing how many special ability charges I had whenever the cape got twisted up.

I wish the camera didn’t auto-rotate to point towards the objective when I push C to have Korasu show me the objectives. Often times I would bring up the indicators so that I could look for ability scrolls, which meant I first had to drag the camera away from the goal marker before I could look around me. They need to add the ability to toggle the auto-rotate off in the options menu.

I like that each of the special abilities has its own charges. This encourages players to make use of the more unique abilities since if they don’t then the charges will simply go to waste.

I found it strange that the game uses (at least on the computer) E for special and F for use. In most other games E is the use key and F is the special key (or melee key in most shooters). A number of times I found myself hitting E to use something, then had to take a moment to remember that F is use. Most of the time I had Kunai equipped so mistakenly hitting E didn’t cost me anything. But I could certainly see people wasting a special ability charge by mistake if they’re used to the keys being reversed. Unfortunately there’s no way to remap the controls.

I wish there was a way to know if I killed all of the guards in a level before I leave since that is one of the optional objectives. I ended one of the levels having missed two guards. I missed those last two guards not because I thought they would be too difficult, but simply because I didn’t know that I had passed by them.

Occasionally you’ll get a checkpoint right before a cutscene (instead of right after it), which is odd. But since you can skip cutscenes, it’s really just a minor annoyance.

Gameplay

Aragami is overpowered. The game goes out of its way to give you some insanely powerful abilities. Not only can you teleport around from shadow to shadow, but you can also create shadows almost anywhere and then teleport to that spot. And then there’s all of the other abilities like the kunai which is a ranged instant kill that never misses. Despite this, you are still going to get killed/spotted. The end result is that whenever you do fail, it absolutely feels like your own fault rather than the game doing something cheap. After all, with such powerful abilities, there should be no reason for you to fail. I feel like this is the real secret to the game that makes the gameplay feel so good.

My one big complaint with the game is that there’s aren’t enough checkpoints in the early levels. Each level is divided up into several areas. In a stealth game such as Aragami, each area is like a puzzle. You keep working at it, learning where enemies are, where they patrol, what areas you have access to, the best places to lure enemies to in order to take them out, until eventually you find the right combination of patience and action to solve the puzzle. The problem is, once you solve a puzzle, it becomes far less interesting having to solve it a second time. You would think that there would be a checkpoint after each area, but often you have to clear through two or even three areas before you reach a checkpoint. This can lead to a situation where you clear the first area, only to fail in the second area and thus have to re-clear the first area. Each time you have to re-clear an area, your enjoyment of that area goes down. The most times I had to clear an area was three times (meaning I died twice in the next area), but after the third time I honestly hated the first area since it took a while to clear and wasn’t interesting at all since I already knew exactly how to solve it. I would like to see the developers be a little more liberal with their checkpoints.

I feel like a lot of stealth games do this and yet every time I see it I cannot help but think it is a mistake. That is, they give the character the ability to go invisible. I feel like granting invisibility to players is a poor design decision because it allows them to go into a state where they no longer have to care about anything. The enemies stop being dangerous, players don’t care if they’re out in the open, and all around it undermines the very foundation of the game itself. Aragami is not the only game to fall into this trap. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided did the same thing, and that too I felt was a bad design decision. I tried out the stealth ability in Aragami and felt that it actually subtracted from the gameplay rather than enhanced it. After my test I decided to continue on as if the invisibility special ability didn’t exist, and I think I enjoyed the game more as a result. I personally would like to see this ability get removed completely. Though the designers would need to double check that each mission can be cleared without killing any enemies (one of the optional objectives) without the use of invisibility.

The ability to disappear corpses should be part of the base kit for Aragami. It’s one of those abilities that has such a massive impact on the game it seems like it’s too important to be considered optional. As for the ability itself, I do like that it doesn’t work on the corpses of enemies that die in direct light. It adds an extra bit of strategy to killing. Though once players gain access to the Shadow Kill special ability, they can use that instead since that ability does work in direct light.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you’re a fan of stealth games. The gameplay is solid, the levels are well laid out, and there’s a constant sense of danger as you go (so long as you play without using the invisibility special ability).

You will not like this game if you aren’t very patient and want a game with a lot of action. You spend a lot of time slinking around in the shadows, and if you get killed then you will have to repeat a bit to get back to where you were.

Aragami is an incredibly well made game. I know I’ve said this already but I can’t say enough about how beautiful the game is. The aesthetics make you want to explore the world, while the solid gameplay will make you truly feel like a master assassin. Aragami is one of those games that takes a core idea, stealth assassin, and successfully narrows down the mechanics to deliver a near perfect game.

Sonic BOOM: Fire & Ice Review

First 15

Fissures open, get powers, supposed to close the fissures, and that’s about the extent of the storyline. Okay, let’s do this.

I head into the first level. I’m taking things kind of slow while I get a feel for Sonic’s movement.

The game teaches me each of Sonic’s moves via hint markers that show a hint in the bottom screen. It seems to work well.

The gameplay seems to flip between slower parts where I’m in control, and full speed almost cutscenes where I have no control over Sonic but I’m getting lots of rings and the screen is whipping past real fast.

I miss a few jumps and get hit by some things. Each time I do, the game warps me back to the last time I stood on solid ground. This can make it hard to pick up my rings that I dropped, but generally if I slow down a bit and don’t rush it I can usually get past whatever I messed up on. Then once I collect some rings I’m safe to go fast again.

I’m starting to realize that every time the game gives me back control on Sonic, I should go to the left instead of forward to the right since going the “wrong” way is inevitably where I’ll find a hidden item.

I beat the first level. Not bad. I thought the level was fun. Onto the next level.

In this level I’m introduced to Amy, who has a giant hammer that I can use to lower pillars. This feels really gimmicky, and waiting for the pillars to lower (and sometimes rise if you need them to lift you up) really slows things down. I’m less of a fan of Amy’s level than I was of the first level just because of all the start/stop. The level takes me about 8 minutes, though some of that is me constantly searching for hidden items.

And fifteen minutes is up. So far I’m having fun. I liked Sonic’s level more than Amy’s, but even Amy’s level had its moments.

Story

As with a number of Sonic games, the story is rather basic. Fissures start opening up all over the place, which causes Sonic and friends to gain the fire and ice powers. And all this happens, and I quote, “because science”.

I know there’s a Sonic BOOM cartoon and the game does come with a DVD containing a few episodes from the show, which I watched for the sake of this review, but truthfully the storyline is really just there to get the player from one level to the next and that’s about it.

One of the things that threw me off is I really don’t like the Sonic BOOM version of Knuckles. The first problem is the way he looks. In all of the past Sonic games I’ve played he usually looks like a red version of Sonic with some exaggerated knuckles. But now he looks like the artists gave him a human skeleton which makes him way taller than Sonic and has some awkwardly long arms and legs. In addition, Knuckles is rather dumb and there’s no rivalry between him and Sonic. This isn’t the developers fault. It’s just the way that the character is written in the Sonic BOOM universe. But as someone who doesn’t watch the show, it was very jarring since I’m used to the old Knuckles.

Interface

One annoyance I had with the game is it kept telling me to go turn in items to characters that I hadn’t unlocked yet. I wasted a bit of time trying to find these characters until eventually I realized I just needed to progress further into the game. I wish the game would only show you turn in messages for characters you can actually access.

Eventually I realized that there are two views for the bottom screen. There’s character view, where you can quickly swap between the different characters, and then there’s map view, where you can see the level in a very zoomed out view. Once I discovered this I kept the game in map view since it made it easier to find hidden areas. The downside to map view is it’s rather annoying switching between characters. In map view you use left and right on the D-pad to change characters. But the first time you hit either direction it just brings up a small selector at the bottom of the screen with each of the characters’ heads. Once that appears, then you can use left and right to navigate to the character you want. Then, once you have the right character highlighted, you have to wait for a second before the game accepts your input and changes characters. This system is extremely clunky and makes switching characters on the fly virtually impossible. Right now the Start and Select buttons both bring up the pause menu. Instead I would like the Select button to pause the game and zoom in on the current character in the top screen, then it would temporarily switch to the character select in the bottom screen. Once players tap on a character, that character is swapped in, the top screen zooms back out, and gameplay resumes. I think this would feel much smoother than trying to navigate using the D-pad.

Maybe one of my biggest gripes about the game is there’s no reward or indicator that shows up when you fully clear all of the levels in a zone. When you clear the time attack and collect all of the items in a level, the node for that level changes from blue to gold. But when you switch to the zone map, there is nothing to indicate that you turned all of the nodes in a zone gold. It feels very unrewarding. I would like to at least see some kind of highlight for that zone, or maybe unlock some unique artwork or even different skins for Sonic (Silver Sonic, Super Sonic, etc.).

Gameplay

The main mechanic for Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice is, shockingly, the fire and ice mechanic. Sonic either has a fire or ice aura that players can switch between quickly by pressing the shoulder buttons. Fire is used to melt ice block so you can pass through them, and ice is used to freeze water blocks so you can walk on them. The mechanic itself isn’t complicated nor is it very original. That said, the developers did a good job working it into the levels. Do it right, and Sonic speeds past obstacles. Mess up, and Sonic either comes to a screeching halt or falls onto some spikes which causes him to get sent back a bit in the level. This probably sounds really simple, because it is. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it actually works quite well within the context of the game and does provide an enjoyable experience.

The bulk of the gameplay is divided up into two sections. The first section involves a lot of platforming which mostly consists of being in fire/ice mode, hitting dash attack, and swing across gaps. These sections are relatively fast in that they require the player to correctly identify the obstacle in the way and figure out how to deal with it in a second or two when Sonic reaches said obstacle. The other section of the game involves the player actually having no control of Sonic at all and instead watching what could almost be called a cutscene of Sonic constantly being propelled along by a series of dash pads and springs. These are interspersed throughout the level and almost always happen almost as a reward for finding hidden areas (in addition to the hidden items players are trying to collect). These uncontrollable parts move extremely fast and help to give the game that sense of speed without putting players in a position where things are coming at them faster than they can react to. I found myself enjoying these segments as I was under no pressure to do anything and could just enjoy the crazy loops and jumps.

Every level has 3 hidden junk parts, 3 hidden hammers, and a doorway to a special challenge where players can earn a card. While this might sound like a lot to find, it’s actually quite easy to locate everything. For starters, most of these secrets are located right after a big uncontrollable portion. The game wants you to go right towards the end, so instead you go left. You can find about 75% of the hidden items in the game using just this method. For the rest, if you run through the level with the bottom screen on map view the secret areas aren’t hard to spot. This might sound bad since these hidden objects really aren’t too hard to find, but truthfully I actually felt that it meshes well with the rest of the game. The game rewards exploration while still maintaining a quick pace.

In each level there are hidden challenge rooms. These rooms are more like advanced platforming areas that require more skill than the normal level. Given that Sonic and friends can’t be killed so long as they are holding at least one ring, the levels are somewhat forgiving provided you don’t fail in the same place more than one. All in all I felt like they were just the right amount of challenging.

Boss fights use both screens and are fairly clever. Each fight has you using Sonic and another character who is swapped in or out automatically. The boss fights themselves are fairly simple once you learn the patterns. They are fairly easy to get past after only a couple of attempts. Players looking for more of a challenge, can clear the optional objective of collecting all of the rings. Collecting all of the rings requires not only perfect execution but also added risk since rings are strategically located in places that require the player to dip into dangerous areas to get them. This really is the perfect system since players not looking for a challenge can take a number of hits so long as they hold onto at least 1 ring while more advanced players can up the ante and try to go for perfection. A lot of games try to make bosses harder by adding more mechanics, but this game pits players against the same boss only now with a much smaller margin for error.

Each zone has a group of levels that aren’t the normal level type. One involves Sonic running down a long tunnel, moving left and right to avoid obstacles. In another players take control of remote control submarine Tails built. Still another has players piloting a raft up a river while dodging icebergs. On their own they’re somewhat simplistic, but they help to change up the gameplay and keep things feeling fresh. My least favorite of them was the submarine levels since the sub has a tendency to respond very sluggishly, which is especially jarring in a game that is all about tightly controlling your character. Also, firing missiles with the sub is very imprecise. Still, I found them a nice distraction that helped keep things interesting.

My favorite type of level was the tunnel levels. They remind me of Sonic Adventure since the camera is now behind Sonic as he runs. You use left and right to change lanes to avoid hazards and to collect rings while racing to the end. You can also boost to make Sonic run faster, which you have to do in order to beat the time attack. Something that I found annoying is you can’t change lanes while boosting. But, you can let go of boost, change lanes, and then instantly start boosting again. The need to constantly stop and start boosting got to be somewhat tedious after a while. But, despite that, I still found the tunnel levels enjoyable.

Conclusion

You will enjoy this game if you are looking for a simple yet fun game to play. The controls are very well laid out and the game definitely has some fun level design.

You will not enjoy this game if you are looking for a hardcore challenge. The game is not overly difficult, though some of the time attacks will require multiple attempts. Also, this game is set in the Sonic BOOM universe, so most of the characters act rather dumb and kiddie. The game is light on story, but if this kind of thing bothers you then it might diminish your enjoyment.

Sonic BOOM: Fire & Ice is not going to win any game of the year awards, nor is it going to show you anything you haven’t seen before. But despite that, the game is quite well designed and I did have a lot of fun playing it. If you’re a fan of Sonic, or even if you’re not, and you’re looking for a fun distraction for a while, then this game is certainly one to consider.

World of Warcraft: Legion Raiding/Mythic+

Introduction

I have spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft as evidenced by my 259 mounts, 684 pets, and over 22,000 achievement points (before Legion). This is the third and final part of my review series on World of Warcraft: Legion and will primarily focus on my guild’s first experience through the newest raid of the Emerald Nightmare in addition to some thoughts and comments on Mythic+ dungeons. I lead the raids as well as main tank for my guild as a Blood Death Knight.

First 15

I send out invites for everyone who accepted the calendar invite and quickly the raid starts to form. It’s been months since we stopped raiding Warlords, so to see the familiar sight of people getting read to raid is invigorating. It takes a little to get everyone summoned to the instance since we keep having to stop and kill the mobs that people end up kiting into us as they run to the stone. It’s a little annoying, but there are tons of people, so things die real fast.

The officers have decided that we want to try to run the raid on Heroic Mode from the start. Once we get everyone summoned we run inside the instance and suddenly the first boss is right there! I kind of expected to have to clear a whole mess of trash mobs before the first boss as we have had to do in past expansions. I really like that we can get right into it.

First I spend some time to do some general housekeeping to welcome the new people to the guild and to lay out the rules. With that done, time to pull trash. Right away things go wrong and we pull 2 of the adds at once. Once they start dealing their AoE damage, people start dying. Fortunately players can resurrect nearby to jump back in. Things are crazy for a bit until the first mob dies. After that things go much smoother.

Our guild has a tradition we call the “no strat pull”. It’s exactly what it sounds like, no strategy, just go. I set up a countdown from 10, and then we pull the boss. It becomes very obvious who watched the strategy videos posted on the guild forums and who did not. Needless to say, we do not defeat the boss on the no strat pull. We wipe up the fight, reset, and now it’s time to explain the fight to those who didn’t watch the videos, and to explain specifically how we will handle the fight.

Story

I really like the story for the Emerald Nightmare. Players have already quested through Val’Sharah and witnessed the devastation of the Nightmare’s influence. They saw Cenarius, now one of the raid bosses, get taken by the Nightmare. Druids players saw the same happen to Ursoc, another raid boss, during their quest to gain the Guardian artifact weapon. Players dove into Darkheart Thicket to defeat the Shade of Xavius. Now they’re ready to cleanse the Emerald Dream and finally put an end to Xavius himself once and for all.

And of course there’s the excitement of wondering what’s going to happen to Ursoc and Cenarius. Will we be able to break the Nightmare’s hold over them? Or will we be forced to kill them as we’ve had to do for others who fell into the darkness? And what consequences will killing Xavius have? In theory it should allow the druids to purify the Emerald Dream and push back the Nightmare, but nothing is ever that simple.

Interface

It’s hard to talk about raiding without talking about the addon Deadly Boss Mods (some people use Big Wigs). Deadly Boss Mods (DBM) is an addon that helps players to keep track of what’s going on. Almost every single player who does any kind of serious raiding has this addon or one just like it. The debate about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is actually a rather contentious one. One the one hand, the addon can trivialize some mechanics, practically telling the player exactly what to do in any given situation. On the other hand it gives Blizzard more leniency when it comes to designing mechanics since the addon can help do things like show players exactly what 8 yards is if players need to spread out. In the end it’s hard to say if it’s good or bad for raiding as a whole, but it’s certainly not going anywhere.

That said, players should be able to clearly pick out what’s going on in a fight without having to rely on the addon. In this regard Blizzard has done a great job so far. Effects on the floor are clearly visible. On the first boss, when the debuff or one of the large bugs deals its area damage the graphic clearly shows how big of an area it is hitting. Some of the adds on the Dragons of Nightmare can be a little hard to see at times, but fortunately their nameplates are clearly visible. Blizzard just did a big improvement pass on nameplates this expansion which appears to be working nicely.

One of the best things to come out of Warlords of Draenor was the boss skip mechanic. Players receive a quest in the dungeon which requires them to reach a certain point in the instance 4 times. Once they do, from then on they can skip directly to that point without having to clear the bosses before it. This mechanic is a godsend to raids like ours who don’t have the time to slog through 6+ bosses we’ve already killed for several weeks in order to access to the bosses we haven’t cleared yet. I’m extremely grateful Blizzard kept this mechanic from the last expansion and hope it’s here to stay.

Gameplay

First Mythic+. The new style of running dungeons is interesting, and reminds me of Diablo III greater rifts. But one of the big differences between the two games comes from the fact that in World of Warcraft players are constantly getting better and better gear all the way up through to the end of the expansion. Likely because of this, Blizzard went a step further in tuning the difficulty of Mythic+ dungeons by adding in keywords. Keywords add an extra mechanic to the dungeon. The first week it was Bolster in which mobs that died would buff all other nearby mobs. This led us to crowd controlling some mobs, then killing the rest as a group so that they all died at about the same time. It certainly made things more interesting, which makes me wonder what’s going to happen when we start having 2 keywords at once (or 3, or 4).

The one issue I have with Mythic+ is depleted keystones. Right now, the keystone depletes the moment you start the run. A depleted keystone means you are no longer eligible for loot using that keystone. This is true even if, for some reason, you were unable to finish the run and never got any loot in the first place. The first Mythic+ I did went off without a hitch. We got to the end, killed the last boss, got our loot, and my keystone upgraded. But in the second dungeon we did, I started having internet troubles and we had to abandon the run before we even got to the first boss. After that, my keystone was worthless. It depleted the moment we started the run, but due to my internet troubles we never got any loot from using it. And now that it was depleted we couldn’t get any loot from it if we tried again. No one is going to want to run on a depleted keystone. In a different run doing Vault of the Wardens, when we fought Ash’golm one of our party members got knocked off the platform. Rather than getting ported back onto the platform or dying she instead got stuck in the pit. She could run around freely but there was no way out. When she tried to use the “Character Stuck” function it ported her not just out of the dungeon but all the way to Suramar. So she had to fly/run back to the instance, all while the countdown clock was going. I doubt we would have started over at that point, but it would have been nice to have the option if something similar had happened near the start. I would like to see the keystones only deplete themselves if the group succeeds in defeating the last boss of the dungeon and receiving loot but does not do so in the time allotted.

This is specific to Vault of the Wardens, but I personally feel like the moving walls Cordana Felsong summons are a bit too random. There were times when the gaps were perfectly spaced and we barely even had to move, and others where we actually had to run back through a wall we’d just run through in order to run through the gap in the second wall and then re-run through the gap in the first wall. This created some wild swings in terms of difficulty that I feel are bit too extreme. I really like the Cordana Felsong fight (it could practically be a raid boss), but I’d just like to see a little less randomness in the walls. Maybe consider having the gap in the wall be at least partially based on where the gap was in the wall before it.

Now onto raiding. My guild, Keine Neuen, only raids Friday night starting at 7:30 and going until sometime a little after 11 server time. We are not a hardcore guild, but rather our guild is a place for people with busy lives who also enjoy raiding. By the end of the first raid night our guild managed to defeat both Nythendra and the Dragons of Nightmare on Heroic Mode and also went back and did Nythendra on Normal Mode.

The first boss, Nythendra, was fairly simple in terms of mechanics. Not a huge surprise given that it is the first boss of the expansion. The Dragons of Nightmare was quite a bit more involved and had a lot of moving parts. At first it really did seem overwhelming. There are adds galore, plants spawning for someone to stand next to, and then the dragon in the air summoning exploding spirits or fearing the entire raid. This is the sign of a good raid encounter. Every encounter should feel overwhelming, should feel like it’s impossible, that is until you start breaking it down. Once you go through the mechanics and players start to learn what to focus on, slowly but surely things start to feel more and more organized. Mechanics that once seemed impossible start to get handled correctly and little by little you get the boss’ health lower and lower until finally on one pull it dies. Dragons of Nightmare felt exactly like that. Over the course of the night, what began as a complicated mess of abilities and adds turned into an organized attempt and eventually a kill. If the rest of the bosses follow the same pattern, then raiding is going to be quite a bit of fun.

Fun, that is, unless you’re a tank. The four worst words in the tanking lexicon: taunt swap on debuff. One of the greatest weaknesses of World of Warcraft raids has always been the tanking mechanics. Occasionally Blizzard will go out of its way to give the tanks something really cool to do, such as the Socrethar fight in Hellfire Citadel where the tank gets to drive a giant mech. But most fights tend to come down to watching a debuff and taunting at the right time. Each expansion Blizzard promises to make tanking more interesting, but if the Emerald Nightmare is anything to go by, then it sounds like Blizzard is just going to give tanks more of the same. The two bosses we did both came down to taunt swapping on a debuff. To be fair, the first boss is fairly simplistic for everyone (not just the tanks) and is meant to be an easy introduction to raids since it is the first boss of the entire expansion. But then we did Dragons of Nightmare, which requires the tanks to move closer, and taunt swap when they get enough stacks of the debuff. And looking at the dungeon journal entries for the other bosses, Il’gynoth has adds with Eye of Corruption (stacking debuff), Ursoc has Overwhelm (stacking debuff), Cenarius has Spear of Nightmares (stacking debuff). Seeing a pattern?

The ultimate problem with stacking debuff mechanics is that tanks never really interact with these debuffs. The tank just holds onto them until their timer expires. During that time, all the debuff does is prevent the tank from doing something. What tanks want, or at least tanks like me, is for the debuff to enable them to do something. The tanking mechanic, whether it be a debuff or not, should be an opportunity for the tank to excel, not a time during which they sit on the sidelines and pretend they are a DPS character (and a bad one at that). If a mechanic puts stacks of a debuff on a tank, then there should be an interesting mechanic for getting rid of those stacks. The better the tank, the more stacks that tank can clear off before they need to pick up the boss again. And if, for instance, clearing stacks has some raid benefit such as each stack cleared gives 5% increased damage, a damage absorption shield to the raid, mana regen for the healers, etc. then that makes the tank’s role both interesting and rewarding. But right now there’s no benefit to being good with debuff mechanics, just a penalty if the tank messes up. We’re still early in the expansion, so there is plenty of time and plenty more raid bosses to come. Maybe we’ll get another Socrethar style fight to shake things up. But past experience has taught tanks to expect a lot of staring at debuffs and pushing the taunt button. Time will tell.

Conclusion

You will enjoy raiding if you like working with a large group towards a common goal. Raids are the places where being part of a guild truly shines. You will enjoy Mythic+ if you enjoy a challenge that only needs a small group of people to tackle.

You will not enjoy raiding if you don’t like relying on other people to overcome a challenge. Raids are truly a group activity and require coordination and communication. You will not enjoy Mythic+ if you don’t like being up against a countdown clock.

The two raid fights our guild did so far were fun. I’ve always enjoyed working with the other members of the guild to defeat a boss. It creates a sense of comradery between the guild members that just can’t be replicated by any other activity in the game. The boss fights look amazing, though I’m not too happy with the over-reliance on stacking debuffs. Mythic+ still has a few bugs to work out, but so far I like the system and plan to run many, many more with my guildmates. All in all Blizzard has done an amazing job with this expansion and I cannot wait to see what else is in store for us down the line.

World of Warcraft: Legion Endgame Review

Introduction

I have spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft as evidenced by my 259 mounts, 684 pets, and over 22,000 achievement points (before Legion). I am no stranger to this game and thus my review will primarily focus on what is new to Legion endgame rather than be a review of the game in its entirety.

Within the game I play as a Death Knight. I have been a Death Knight since I started playing World of Warcraft at the start of Wrath of the Lich King. I raided some in Wrath, and then all through Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor. I will be raiding again in Legion, which will be the subject of another review.

Also, this review is going to be a bit longer than my normal reviews due to a much greater number of features than in most other games. Persistent online games tend to have a much greater range of experiences than single player games which are usually more focused on delivering a specific experience.

Something to keep in mind while reading is that things may have changed since this review was written. Some issues raised may no longer exist. Online games such a World of Warcraft are constantly being patched and updated to fix existing bugs and also to streamline the rough patches.

First 15

Ding! (Yes, I used to play Everquest.)

At last I’m level 110. Through some very rare timings I actually hit max level after my champions returned from a mission which rewarded XP to my character. By this point I’d cleared almost all of the quests available to me, so I was definitely ready to be done leveling and get into the endgame.

Now I’m being told to go see Kadghar. He ends up sending me to Suramar (a max level zone in the Broken Isles) where I’m to meet with the Nightfallen. He also gives me a quest to get friendly with all of the factions (except for the Wardens), one of which is the Nightfallen. I’m already honored with all of the factions except for the Nightfallen from all of the quests I did while leveling. So to Suramar I go.

I meet a dying Night Elf who tells me about the fall of her city during a beautifully done cutscene. Following that she starts giving me quests to help establish a refuge for the Nightfallen.

At this point it all feels like just another quest chain, the same as all of the other ones I did while leveling up. Sometimes I wonder why Blizzard even bothers raising the level cap each expansion (though being able to go back and solo old dungeons/raids is nice). Maybe this will be different somehow.

Story

The story surrounding the Nightfallen is extremely well done. Players must infiltrate Suramar City, eventually through the use of a disguise, in order to help bolster a group of rebels who wish to rise up and expel the demons from their city. The rebels range from true believers to citizens who have simply seen too much death and disregard from the elite to one individual who only helps you because you pay him in Ancient Mana (the special currency of the zone). Each quest helps to paint a darker and darker picture of a once great nation now mostly at the mercy of corrupt leaders and the demons who corrupted them. Sometimes you are sent to take out key leaders, other times to plant false evidence, or even to attack the demons directly at the nearby Felsoul Hold. So far I’ve enjoyed the Nightfallen storyline and look forward to seeing where Blizzard ultimately takes it.

After reaching max level I got to witness the remainder of the Death Knight class storyline, and quite frankly I am very concerned. I won’t spoil it, but there were a lot of things that I felt were simply wrong with the whole thing. In my last review I voiced concerns about the storyline while earning the three artifact weapons, and sadly I feel like those concerns were not only justified but now I have a whole host of new ones. Keep in mind though that this is specific to Death Knights. A lot of my guild mates are enjoying their class storylines, but I feel that the Death Knight storyline is going way off track from what it truly means to be a Death Knight.

Interface

World quests, the new replacement for daily quests, have a very simple UI that works very well. Anywhere at all, including when you’re not on the Broken Isles, players can open their map and check out which world quests are active to see if there are any they care about. My only complaint (and this is a small one) is that the interface doesn’t show exactly how much reputation you will gain with a faction. But other than that, the interface is clean and clear.

In my last review about leveling up I highlighted just how much better the game is now that mobs are shared tag. Having said that, I’m starting to see an increase in incidents where players will simply tag a mob someone else is fighting with some instant cast spell while running by and then, rather than help kill the mob, continue on so that they can tag more mobs that they won’t help kill in order to quickly finish a world quest. Blizzard might want to look into making a few changes to discourage this practice such as possibly requiring players be within casting range of a mob when it dies. That said, it may not be worth the potential frustration to legitimate players when a mob charges out of casting range and then dies just to curtail the actions of a few. The practice of tagging and then running, while certainly frustrating, doesn’t create such a massively negative impact on other players as to require some sort of change. It’s just something I would recommend Blizzard keep an eye on.

Gameplay

World quests are awesome! They are a replacement for the daily quest system from past expansions and are easily one of the best new features for Legion. Essentially what it boils down to is that at any time players can open their map and view a number of “hotspots” where quests are currently active in each zone. Players then navigate to that area where they do a quest which rewards them with gold, Order Hall resources, or even equipment. More importantly though, each quest provides the player with reputation towards a specific faction, usually determined by the zone in which the world quest happened. The nicest thing about them is that players can see the reward for doing each world quest before deciding which quests they wish to pursue. There is also a daily faction cache available for doing any 4 quests from a specific faction. Players earn one new faction quest a day and can hold up to 3 of these. This means players with less time to play can skip a few days if needed without missing out on a cache. Early on I experienced a rather unfortunate bug where some world quests did not show up on the map, but Blizzard seems to have corrected that problem. All in all the world quest system is incredibly smart and just feels so much better than daily quests.

Not content to simply deliver us world quests, Blizzard has gone a step further and added two new items that really help to make world questing even more enjoyable. Since flying is disabled on the Broken Isles, getting from one world quest to another can be a little exhausting. To alleviate this, players are given a whistle with an extremely short cooldown that can almost instantly transport the player to the nearest flight point. The other item is a separate hearthstone that will take players back to Dalaran. Due to its conveniences and plethora of portals for traveling the world, Dalaran is where all players would have set their hearthstone. By giving players an additional hearthstone that already does that, it gives players the freedom to set their hearthstone wherever they feel it will be most relevant to them. These two items do wonders for making world quests more enjoyable and fun even despite the lack of mobility from not being able to fly.

Now, having just expounded upon the glory that is world quests, I want to talk about the one glaring issue with world quests, and that is world quests for professions. World quests for gathering professions (Herbalism/Mining/Skinning) are fine. Once every 3 days max level characters with a particular profession can do a world quest to earn a rare crafting material. This limited supply of materials helps keep them rare and thus makes them much more valuable rather than having their price hit rock bottom almost immediately as it has in the past due to a combination of overzealous gatherers and bots. This affects players leveling crafting professions since now they need to consider the sale cost of the item they make to try to offset the cost of the rare materials. So all in all I like what they’ve done with the gathering professions. It’s the crafting professions that have a problem.

Crafting professions in Legion have 3 ranks for each recipe. The 3 rank system I really like, except for the fact that each level has a different skill range. What I mean by this is that a recipe at rank 1 might go from orange (guaranteed skill up) to yellow (high chance for skill up) at 720. But, the rank 2 version will change from orange to yellow at 730. And the rank 3 version at 740 as an example. For most recipes that create a piece of equipment, the rank 3 version either requires exalted with a faction (which will take weeks if not months to reach) or for a specific world quest to appear. The problem with the world quests is you have no control over when it spawns or which one spawns. And if you should miss a day of playing World of Warcraft, then you could miss it. If all rank 3 did was lower the number of materials required, then I wouldn’t mind. But because it also affects the skill rating of an item, players who enjoy focusing on their professions may find themselves waiting weeks or months for the right world quest to appear so they can continue. Personally, I would like to see all recipes have only a single skill rating regardless of rank. As for those with reputation requirements, that leads me into my next point.

Reputation is fun for your main character. I actually do like slowly but steadily working my way up to exalted, but it absolutely sucks to even just consider my other characters. I know for a fact that I’m simply not going to be able to get some rank 3 recipes on my alts because just the thought of getting that character to exalted is enough to make me want to quit the game altogether. I don’t understand the mindset Blizzard has where they think it would be fun to have to hit exalted again after doing it with one character. Even in Mists of Pandaria when factions offered an item players could buy at Revered that doubled all reputation gains with that faction, it still sucked to grind out reputation on alts. Given that players already have to treat each of the different specializations as an alt (I’ll go into more detail on this below), making players also have to re-earn the exalted rank on another character is simply too much. I would like to see Blizzard implement something like a Writ of Introduction, which is bind on account, that can be bought at Exalted and mailed to an alt. The Writ of Introduction will instantly set that character to exalted with the faction from which the item was purchased.

It turns out the Nightfallen quest line is, as I suspected, handled a bit different and feels similar to Domination Point (Lion’s Landing for the Alliance) back in Mists of Pandaria. Players gain a decent amount of reputation from the quest lines, but then they must also supplement that with reputation earned doing World Quests. At certain reputation checkpoints players are sent off on quests that continue the storyline of the Nightfallen. Eventually, players gain access to two new dungeons that are Mythic difficulty only. I really like this method of handling reputation, except for (as I mentioned above) the idea of having to do all of this again on another character kills any desire I have to try to play more than one character. I’ve already suggested a method to counter such a detrimental feeling, so I will continue with my review.

One part of the Nighfallen questline is the Withered Army Training scenario. Now, the idea behind this scenario is excellent. It’s a clever use of the game’s mechanics to create a unique experience the involves a measure of risk and reward. The problem with it is this scenario practically goes out of its way to highlight exactly how bad World of Warcraft’s pet AI really is. I personally don’t play an Unholy Death Knight because I cannot stand having to deal with pets in this game. (As a counterpoint, I play, and enjoy, a Druid in Guild Wars 2 which does have a pet. So it’s not that I hate pets in general, I just hate them in World of Warcraft.) And the withered are sort of the embodiment of everything that can go wrong. The biggest problem is the withered are constantly aggroing extra mobs, and then when you push the button that increases their attack damage, half of them stop attacking at all. Other times withered will run off just to pull some random mob that you in no way wanted to pull. It just feels like you spend the entire scenario dealing with their idiocy and protecting them from mobs that are easily soloable. Also, the withered only have a normal movement speed, meaning if you use any sort of dash type ability then you run the risk of outranging your withered which causes them to despawn. The main issue here is that the withered need to not attack mobs that aren’t already aggroed to you. Also, the berserker withered have a taunt which I wish I could disable since it practically guarantees that they are dead by the time I reach the end of the scenario. And finally, while you can find upgrades for your withered, sadly an out of combat movement speed boost is not one of them. The Withered Army Training is a very cool idea but some absolutely dreadful AI prevents it from being the enjoyable experience that it could be. Also, since all medium and large treasure chests are one time only, there’s something really unsatisfying about getting to the end and only having the single big chest to open even though you cleared the whole instance. Then again, it’s nice not to have to backtrack at the end to send chests back to be opened (since you should never send back chests until after you’ve cleared everything).

There is a second more minor problem with world quests when it comes specifically to PvP world quests. The rewards for PvP world quests are tied to your honor level. This means that the higher your honor level, the better the rewards. The problem is, there’s nothing special about PvP gear compared to regular gear. So when I go on a normal world quest the rewards are item level 830 to 845. But for a PvP world quest the rewards are all item level 805, which is some rather strong demotivation for wanting to run them. The idea here, I imagine, is to push players who normally only do PvE content towards at least trying out PvP content. But with the rewards always being subpar unless you’ve already done PvP, I feel like it falls well short of its intended goal. The simple fix would be to base the rewards on the player’s current item level and to remove the need for honor level before players are allowed to get gear that might actually matter.

Artifact Power is, in a way, a replacement for leveling once you reach max level. Players gain items that provide Artifact Power for doing just about everything from world quests to dungeons to PvP. The system would work great except for one simple design decision that has a massively detrimental effect on everything. Artifact Power gains can only be applied to one artifact weapon at a time rather than to all of your artifact weapons. I cannot for the life of me understand why this was the decided upon. What this ultimately means is that players are either locked into one particular spec or else they must forfeit any and all Artifact Power they applied to a spec they are switching away from. This is so incredibly punishing to players who might want to try out a different spec that it borders on absurd. In addition, players who wish to run more than one spec, usually a DPS who sometimes will switch to healing if a raid encounter calls for an extra healer, are faced with two equally bad choices. They can either focus primarily on one spec’s artifact weapon so they are excellent at one thing and very subpar at the other. Or they can level both together which makes them decent at both but not as good as they could be if they had focused solely on the artifact weapon they are using for the current encounter. This can make them feel like they are holding back the raid. Again, I cannot stress enough how awful this design is. In essence, Blizzard has created a scenario in which your primary character is also considered your alt. Something that makes it so much harder to then actually have an alt. No matter how I look at it, I just can’t see any upside to this setup. I suspect Blizzard is trying to make sure that players don’t reach a point where they’ve maxed out all of their artifact weapons (and thus make Artifact Power useless), but the resulting situation is so much worse than that eventuality could ever be. Here is what I’d like to see as a solution. First, all Artifact Power is now applied equally to all artifact weapons, even if the player hasn’t collected that weapon yet. Getting all artifact weapons to level 34 (at which point every trait is unlocked except for the hidden one) will take the same amount of Artifact Power as it does currently to get a single artifact weapon to level 34. Then, Blizzard can increase the amount of artifact power needed to gain each level of the hidden trait (which is only visible once all other traits have been unlocked) so that the amount of artifact power required to max out that trait is equal to what it would take to max out all three artifact weapons currently. There is the downside that it will take players far longer to max out their artifact weapon for any one spec then it will currently, but I feel the benefit of being able to swap specs freely will more than make up for this. And if Blizzard feels it is taking players too long to max out their artifact weapons, then they can always reduce the amount of Artifact Power needed to level the hidden trait.

As part of the continued class quest players gain access to the remaining champions for use to send out on missions. For the most part the missions system works well. The missions require some clever combinations of champions and minions and I feel like the rewards make it all worth doing. The addition of the Legion Companion App for iPhone/Android is an excellent addition to the Legion experience. The one major problem I’ve encountered with Order Hall missions is when it comes to upgrading and managing the champions’ item levels. The trick, I now know, is to upgrade all of their item levels together slowly. Unfortunately, I had access to a quest with rewarded a Mythic dungeon quest so I mistakenly upgraded two of my champions quickly in order to do the mission before it disappeared. Not only have I been regretting it ever since, but the reward from doing the quest wasn’t even an upgrade by the time I got it. The reason for my regret is that once you upgrade even just a single champion, the item level requirement of the missions available increases to match. The problem of course is I now only have 2 champions who can do such missions, and the other 3 or 4 are too low item level to do anything. Some missions offer items to upgrade item level, but they tend to always be the item level of your highest champion. On my max level Druid alt, I’ve made sure to not upgrade anyone’s item level and I’m having a much easier time gathering upgrades and completing missions. My Death Knight does have access to an NPC that will build me champion items over time in exchange for Order Hall resources, which should be the perfect solution. The problem with that is I’m constantly getting some rather useless champion equipment rather than the armor sets I need to increase their item level. My suggestion for solving this problem is simply to adjust the algorithm so that quests which reward item level increases are setup so that they can be completed by the champion with the lowest item level (not including inactive champions). This way players won’t trap themselves into a scenario where they don’t have the item level necessary to complete the quests that give them the armor sets they need to increase the item level of their champions.

This is more of a small aside, but I wish you could assign an inactive champion as a combat ally rather than having to use up one of your 5 active slots. I like the extra abilities provided by the combat ally mechanic and it’s a great way to level up your champion at the same time. I just wish it didn’t interfere with doing missions. Again, not a huge complaint, but would be a nice quality of life change.

Conclusion

You will enjoy endgame Legion if you enjoy playing in a world that constantly feels alive where there is always something to do if you’re looking for an adventure. Between world quests, dungeons, and professions there is always some goal to strive for every time you log on.

You will not enjoy endgame Legion if you don’t enjoy grinding at all even if it is given to you in a very neat package. Gear will improve slowly over time, piece by piece, and you are going to need mountains of artifact power to max out your weapon even with the periodic boosts.

All told Legion is a huge step forward in terms of how endgame content should be handled. There are lots of different systems all of which mesh together into a rather impressive whole. That said, things are far from perfect and certainly there are some adjustments that need to be made. But, if Blizzard can tighten up the holes in a few of their designs, then Legion will be a big improvement to World of Warcraft leaving players excited for what comes next.