Recent reviews by Lunaril

Twitch Live Review of SpaceBourne [www.twitch.tv] 5/28/23

SpaceBourne, is an open world, RPG Space Sim, designed to give players the freedom to explore, make their own decisions, and decide how they want to play through the story. SpaceBourne, is the brainchild of indie developer Burak Babak and was released in 2018 to very positive reviews. In SpaceBourne, your initialization of a new game, randomly generates content, events and more, so each playthrough, with the exception of the main storyline, is a new adventure. You can chose to join a faction, or freelance your skills, be a pilot, trader, whatever playstyle you want. Due to the success of SpaceBourne, the developer recently released a sequel in February of this year, SpaceBourne 2, which offers even more unique and diverse content, and even greater freedom to explore, customize your character and ship and more.

During the live review, I covered the various features of the game including patch notes, wiki links, upcoming news, tutorials and more. The game is easy to play, easy to learn, simple controls, and appears to have a wide variety of content, outside the main storyline. The space navigation can be adjusted between manual flight and auto-pilot with the click of a button. Combat in space is fun and simple to learn. I described the game in my review as taking elements from Eve Online, and No Mans Sky and putting them into a really cool game with an interesting story. It's hard to believe this game was created by one person, when a game like Star Citizen with several hundred million in crowdfunding and a whole development team couldn't even deliver on what was promised. The fact this game was done by one person, and was so successful they created a follow up sequel that was even more ambitious, is amazing and though I had some technical issues playing the game in windowed mode, it was so much fun, I would definitely recommend it to others who enjoy space games, RPG's, and open-world games. Total thumbs up and hats off to Burak Babak on their success, well earned!

Lunaril's Live Twitch review on 5/6/23 - https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1813066900

Albion Online, is a free-to-play Medieval Fantasy MMO Developed by Sandbox Interactive in 2017. Albion Online boasts an open-world playstyle, where you write your own destiny. You can change classes by equipping different weapons and armor, all of which are player crafted. The entire economy is player-driven, but third party gold selling seems to be a big problem, despite the games attempts to address it.

In all, the reviews seem favorable, but when you dig deeper are actually more mixed. Gamers who LOVE pvp will generally be more favorable to the game as it caters to that subset of gamers, whereas cooperative or PVE'ers are probably less likely to enjoy the game. The game has many of the same problems that plague other forced-pvp games such as Eve Online and New World, where you are forced to pay for protection or simply get farmed and exploited by ganker squads. Online harassment seems to be a problem as well, due to players paying in-game currency or even real world money for bounties on players they want camped. I noticed with the hour and a half I spent doing the live review that the public chat was full of flaming and ranting over political and other such garbage.

In fairness, I created a character and gave the game a go, just to see for myself what it is about. I did a live review to give you a chance to see the gameplay and community for yourselves, so with all the background aside, let's jump into what I thought about Albion Online.

The character creations seems to be sorely lacking. They have cookie cutter characters you can choose from with pretty limited options. Graphically, the game looks like something that was made in the early 2000's, think World of Warcraft launch graphics. Character movement is standard point and click for PC Players on Keyboard and Mouse.

The game does feature a tutorial to help you get acclimated to the game play and does have a lot of hand-holding, such as mini-map indicators. As a free to play game, they really skimped out on the visuals here, considering the fantastic visuals of Lost Ark, which is also free-to-play. Perhaps they decided to go for function over form, or were just being cheap?

The game has standard point and click mechanics for resource harvesting, but resource refining costs vary depending on where you try to refine materials. The player economy is full pay-to-win, with those willing to spend the most real world money having the resources to control territory, set taxes, setup protection/extortion rackets, et cetera. For gamers who don't want to dip into their wallet to get ahead, this game will not be for you. Many features, events, and game options are only available to those willing to pay for a premium status, basically a subscription, but the buying/selling of gold in-game, and the prevalance of third party sources for buying currency completely destroy any semblance of a fair, player-driven in-game economy.

Combat is basic, point and click with several skills/spells you can weave. I do like the concept of changing roles from tank, deeps, heals, by switching armor and weapons. I didn't bother trying pvp combat, as I only played through the tutorial and looked over some of the features, to give the viewers and idea of what the game offered.

So many of the games features are paywall restricted, and it soured my perception of the game. I found the chat to be tedious trolling on political and controversial issues, as though people were just trying to get attention by being obnoxious, outrageous, or controversial. The economy makes the game lopsided and unplayable for those not willing to burn a hole in their wallet, and for a game that wants people to burn their money, the graphics look 20 years out of date. The story seems basic, uninspiring, and it would seen the pvp fan-base is what is keeping this game going.

If you like pvp, don't care about graphics, don't mind wasting money, this game is probably great for you. For the rest of us, there are way better free-to-play options out there that offer more value for your time without ripping a hole in your bank account. Hard pass for me.

Lunaril's Livestream Review of Infestation: The New Z LIVE 4/9/23 on Twitch[www.twitch.tv]

Infestation: The New Z bills itself a free to play multi-game mode experience with a massive open world. You can play it as a Classic Arcade shooter, Survival game, Battle Royale, and in 5v5 competitive team combat. Released in 2016 on steam to mixed reviews, I was really excited to check this game out. I am a fan of the Zombie genre, having played 7 days to die, State of Decay, Day's Gone, Dead Rising, DayZ, and the Resident Evil series, among countless others. I know what a hit or miss zombie games can be, so I was hoping for a 7 days to die feel from it, based on some of the images I had seen.

While doing the livestream review, I jumped into the game and pretty much gave the same review information above. We attempted to jump into the Survival game mode just to check it out and found the Character creation screen so bugged out, you couldn't create a character. The visuals were behind a panel of presets so the overlap made it impossible to see your character and what they looked like. The settings adjuster for Head, Torso et, cetera, also did not populate information, and after trying to tweak the character creation settings and just trying to create a generic toon, the game would not let it be created.

We tried the character creation on several game modes, as creating a character is a requirement for entering into any of the 4 different modes, and found the same problem on each. The graphics settings were set to a resolution of 1920x1080, which is standard for most monitors, so the glitchy character creation system appears to be a bug with the game. All in all, the game seems to have more bugs than a bait store, so I can't recommend it. From a gamers prospective, if a free to play game requires you to go to forums and get technical support due to problems with getting it to work, they've already failed hard.

I get bugs on games, I've played thousands over the years, and as a fan of Bethesda Games in particular, I'm used to having issues, but very rarely have I come across a game that was seemingly unplayable at all. It was just a disappointment, as I had hoped this game could offer the same level of enjoyment as a 7 Days to Die, but alas it didn't. Sorry folks, if you want to try it anyway I hope it works for you, as for me, I'll stick with less buggy games.

Check out my Livestream review of STALCRAFT at Lunaril's Channel on Twitch
http://www.twitch.tv/videos/1788636069

For those who want the short version, I'll give you the highlights, Pro's and Con's as I saw them.
STALCRAFT is a PVPVE Shooter that combines aspects of Minecraft with the Stalker series storyline. The tutorial is pretty self explanatory, but some of the controls are a little wonky in places. The voice acting is in Russian, as the game takes place in the Chernobyl Exclusionary Zone, and I was not able to locate a way to change the settings for English, but the text and subtitles are in English, making it easy to understand what is happening and being said.

I was unable to change the aspect ratio or graphical settings to resize the window of the game, it appears to only be in full screen mode. The controls are your basic survival settings, W,A,S,D for movement, inventory is E, and looting is F. There are other basic keyboard controls such as accessing your PDF, which contains quest and task information, maps, messages et cetera. Pretty standard stuff.

Much like STALKER, there are bases and checkpoint settlements with merchants, researchers, mechanics and more to upgrade and repair gear, purchase gear, weapons and items, or complete quests for. You can explore and collect anomalies for study, take on Bandits if you are a member of the Stalker faction, or ambush Stalkers as a member of the Bandit faction. It seems that just about everywhere outside of faction areas is fair game for PVP, but the game does allow for a temporary invulnerability when entering or exiting new area's, to help reduce the damage that campers can do.

There seems to be virtually no character customization, other than in game weaponry, gear and tactics of how you want to play, which I found disappointing and there also appears to possibly be a pay to win system when you visit the developers website, as you have the ability to purchase currency with real world money. Aside from these limitations and possible problems, the game looks neat, it's kinda fun, and made me a little nostalgic for the Stalker series as well as minecraft. Unlike Minecraft, you do not appear to be able to build in this game as it is primarily a shooter, but all in all for a free game it doesn't seem that bad.

Check out my Livestream review for actual gameplay through the tutorial and first few quests to get a better understanding of the game. It probably wouldn't be a game I would play again, just because of the Con's I listed, but for anyone who enjoyed Minecraft and is also a fan of the Stalker series, you will probably get a kick out of this game.

**Warning** After posting this review, I was sent a link to the discussion page where fans post about this game. My spouse Daeminos had asked a question in the general discussion about whether PvP was forced in the game, or whether it was optional. They had not seen my review and had only caught wind I was going to be playing it and obviously were interested in finding out more. Since I was busy with the review, editing the video and uploading everything, they went to the forums. The responses they received were completely toxic, with personal attacks, others joining in the pile on, my spouse was accused of trolling the forum, of baiting and so forth. The sheer level of toxic behavior by active fans of the game, made it necessary to write this warning, as it is indicative of the types of players one is likely to encounter when they play STALCRAFT. I stand by my assessment of the game on it's merits and faults, but I urge everyone to evaluate whether this type of toxicity is something they want to put up with before deciding to play this game.

KartRider: Drift - Twitch Livestream Review[www.twitch.tv]

KartRider: Drift is a free to play Kart racing game that can be played on multiple platforms. This little gem is easy to learn, fun to play, has beautiful scenery, cute animations and silly characters. Playing KartRider: Drift, I felt like I was back on the N64 playing Mario Kart. The controls are simple arrow key movements with L-Ctrl and L-Shift for boosts and drifting on the keyboard, but the game is also compatible for players using controllers, and those playing on X-box and Playstation.

KartRider: Drift does have an online store through game, featuring Cosmetic item micro-transactions, making it a rare free to play that is not pay to win. You can choose the look of your avatar and car, even as far as adding custom decals and colors to the various racers. Daily challenges, events and more, make the game re-playable and give you a chance to earn different customization's.

Not the typical genre for me, but playing it, I found I was having a ton of fun and enjoyed streaming my experience with this game. If you want to check out a fun little free game that will bring back memories of Mario Kart, I recommend adding this to your account and giving it a go.

I have been trying to figure out how to write this review for a few years. I first played this game on my PS4, and fell completely in love with it. The story is one of the best for an RPG I've played in a good many years and the worst part of the game was having to see the end, but... with that said, it did leave open the possibility of a sequel, which later was made, so the sadness turned to unbridled joy, until I found out it was going to be a playstation exclusive, when my joy was shattered. I refused to upgrade to a PS5 due to pricing issues and the fact that I was sick of Sony making us pay for the same games we already bought over and over again for newer consoles. Anyway, enough of my sony-bashing, back to the review!

The story starts out with a mystery. The young woman you play is an outcast, with a mysterious origin, you learn through the later story. You play in a world where there are remnants of the modern world, left in ruins, abandoned, and scrapped, with various tribes and sects that seem primitive by modern standards. To top off this weirdness, you encounter, fight, "Tame" and scavenge robotic animals, some that resemble well known creatures, others that seem to be hybrids or plays on well known creatures and you learn what they are for and why they are there.

You can complete trials, collections, and other types of side-quests that give you more powerful weapons and equipment, and scattered throughout the world are fragments of the past that help you understand what happened to the world and why it is the way it is now. The characters are interesting, the story is mind-blowing, and graphically speaking, the game is very visually appealing. I have played this game through to completion a half a dozen times, enjoyed completing all the achievements on the PS4 and have been working on completing them again on the PC.

For an indie company based in the Netherlands, they made a dynamite game, it's just a shame they went Sony Exclusive with the sequel. It was devastating to find this out and made me even more jaded toward Sony, as I feel they robbed millions of the chance to further enjoy this world and the characters we've come to love and care about. Hopefully, if a few years this exclusivity will end and it will eventually have the sequel available for the PC, at which time, I will dust off Horizon Zero Dawn once again and enjoy it all over again, before falling in love with the sequel!

If you love RPG's, don't mind a lack of character creation and limited customization of weapons and armor, more of a Static RPG, but with an amazing story and fun combat, beautiful graphics, and rich, intriguing characters, I think you will love this game and encourage you strongly to give it a chance. If you are put off by the sequel being console exclusive, I feel your pain, but I will say this game by itself is worth getting and playing or replaying again.

Final Fantasy X/X-2.... What can I say about this game you haven't already heard? I first found this game in the early 2000's, when I picked up a PS2 at a pawn shop. I was hooked on the story immediately. I had always been a huge fan of the final fantasy series, with the exception of Final Fantasy IX, which I just couldn't get into due to the weird, cartoonish graphics. Up until I played this game, Final Fantasy XIII was my favorite game, and prior to that, XII was one of my favorites, so I had high hopes for X and later X-2. X did not disappoint, and X-2, while different than X, continued the story in a way I was able to enjoy and immerse myself in once again. When this HD Remastered version came out I purchased it on the PS3 first and played it for hundreds of hours, achieving a perfect ending, then replaying it to see what other endings I could unlock, finally getting all the achievements on the PS3. Later, when the game was released on the PC, I had to have it for my collection, and once again spent weeks playing and replaying it, enjoying it all over again. While the graphics are a little more outdated now, than back in 2003, I still love the game and the Remaster isn't half bad.

If you crave a rich, interesting, engaging story that draws you into caring for the characters, I think you will absolutely love this game. The game play differs from other final fantasy games with the way you level up your characters, using what is known as a sphere grid. This grid allows you to custom tailor your character, picking and choosing how you want to make them stronger or unlock various abilities and spells. It can be a bit of a pain for some, and isn't everyone's cup of tea, but if you can roll with this weirdness and get into the story and characters, I think you'll find these aspects tolerable.

The music is great, the graphics are a little dated, but at the time it came out were amazing and the cut scenes, especially the HD Remastered version are breathtaking and hyper-realistic. This is one of those games where if you like it you freaking LOVE IT, and if you don't, well you'll look for reasons to complain about it, even if the story is amazing. I say if you are into story-rich, RPG's where the characters are interesting and the story makes you care about the characters, give it a chance and it might surprise you. If you are more interested in action, and less in story, you probably will get bored or irritated with the pace and puzzles. In any case, I would recommend this game as it is on my list of all time favorites.

Animation Throwdown: The Quest for Cards, is a deck building game, where you use your deck to play through a story-type mode, various battles and challenges against an AI opponent, as well as PVP against other players and in guild versus guild battles. You level up your cards, research combo's and mix and match your deck to your playstyle with various types of attacks, defenses, features, and abilities, from a variety of Adult Animation franchises such as; American Dad, Family Guy, Futurama, King of the Hill, Bob's Burgers, and so on. The combinations you research can be hilarious, typically a reference to something in one of the shows, and the variety of cards and combination possibilities makes the game fun and challenging.

The game allows pay to win through microtransactions, which I absolutely loathe, but as a funny little distraction for a few minutes a day, it can still be a fun game. If you like deck building games, or enjoy these shows, you might get a kick out of this game, if those things aren't your cup of tea, you probably won't like it as much. I don't typically go for these types of games, but I am a fan of these shows, and have enjoyed finding out what new and raunchy combo's I can unlock.

World of Final Fantasy reminds me of a mashup of Final Fantasy type story and characters from the series, meets Pokemon. Essentially you collect Mirage's(Pokemon) which are creatures and characters from the Final Fantasy world, in prismariums, similar to the way you would collect pokemon in pokeballs. You use these to battle your way through the game, saving kingdom's and villages, as part of the storyline. It's an interesting concept and different from what one expects in a Final Fantasy game, but is still rather enjoyable.

One thing that bothers me is the control system, being keyboard without mouse. I am not used to this setup and it takes a little getting used to. I've also found the game can be a bit wonky in windowed mode, and had to run through various troubleshooting steps just to get the game to load. It could just be my particular setup that causes these issues, but I have seen other discussions on various boards of people who have had similar issues, so that is something you may want to prepare for, before purchasing and playing the game.

The graphics are more in the anime style, rather than hyper-realistic the way more recent Final Fantasy titles have been, but I think the game looks pretty good and the characters are funny and interesting. I've played the game off and on for a little over a year or two and have enjoyed it, so I think if you enjoy the final fantasy franchise and also enjoy playing Pokemon, this game will be right up your alley.

(For the first time ever, I have had to go back and change a review from Yes to NO!)

This game is the biggest disappointment I have ever played. It had so much potential, but squandered it through incompetent development and stewardship. This game is run by a company that has no business being in the gaming industry. I was given a permenent ban for cheating, even though I did no such thing. I was never contacted, I simply could no longer log in. I appealed this, and after a month, I was mysteriously no longer banned, again with no contact letting me know any of this. I log in to the game after losing an entire month of rewards to find my guilds on all my toons, all of which I had personally steered to level 8 with hard work almost entirely by myself, were now transferred to some random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I don't even know. All my gold, all my crystals were gone, even though I had legitimately earned them over months of slaving and grinding. No rhyme or reason, no explanation. Simply gone. The incompetence is so staggering and the lack of respect for the player base so immense, I am disgusted that I wasted so much time on this game. The really sad part of all of it is the story is actually really intriguing and the gameplay was pretty fun. Unfortunately, the management and development of the game is so horrid, I can't imagine spending another moment on this pile of garbage. I urge you, DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME! If you do play, GET OUT BEFORE YOU WASTE MORE OF YOUR LIFE! I get that the story is great, I get that it can be fun, but the headaches, and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ you will endure, not to mention the incompetence of Amazon to not completely ruin your gaming experience ARE NOT WORTH IT!
(Update)
I stand by my original review, in that this game did blow me away, has a great story, can be fun and interesting, and I wish it future success; However, Once I reached end-game content, and especially lately with gold-farmers/sellers and bots infesting the servers, I am forced to retract my Yes vote for this game.

One of the biggest problems this game has right now is management. It is run by a company who seems to know absolutely nothing about video games. They have a problem with bots clogging up servers and zones, and instead of actually addressing that issue and working to fix it, they punish the rest of the player base by restricting or removing gold, gems and other items which can be bought/sold for gold, as a way of claiming to address the issue. The endgame gear leveling is so out of sync with the rest of the game that you can blow through 10's or 100's of thousands of gold just to get a few item level points, but your ability to acquire the requisite gold to do so is so limited, that you are lucky to dredge up enough gold each week to get a single point of item level increase. On top of that building up your stronghold costs gold, and you are completely inundated with gold sellers going as far as to spam you with private message requests.

It used to be just the lower level zones that had a problem with bots flooding the area, but we are now seeing the same thing happen in Tier 2 and even Tier 3 zones, and this influx of bots causes server delays and queue times just to get on the game. As of this writing, I have been waiting to get in for over 1 hour and 15 minutes, having been almost 8000 in queue when I attempted to login. These are not due to other players, but rather bots that swamp the servers.

Customer service is completely impotent, and non-existent in this game, there is no way to submit a ticket in game that I have found. Contacting Amazon customer service get's you nowhere, and going through the playlostark website offers no response as of the last few weeks. They are happy, however, to take you hard earned money and let you boost your character through their ingame store, which really destroys what could have been an amazing game and an amazing MMO experience.

This game is lacking in basics that other MMO's have been using for years, and there seems to be no resolution for the actual issues, other than blunt handed responses that impact the entire userbase, instead of actually addressing the problems. I am therefore very sad about having to warn people away from a game that could have been so amazing in a lot of ways. I hope those who played this game on my recommendation and/or who have felt the frustrations and disappointments I have, will endeavor to forgive me for my optimistic opinion early on.
(Original Analysis)
First of all, for a free to play game, this really blew me away. The story is very interesting and exciting, the sheer amount of content ensures playability for a very long time, and the learning curve is not steep at all, making the game friendly and enjoyable for your average gamer. There is a lot of micro-transaction content, including pay-to-win, but since the overwhelming majority of the content is cooperative, it doesn't really seem to unbalance a typical players gameplay.

The game has a lot of progression gatekeeping, which can be irritating for a power-gamer, but I also see it as kind of a good thing, because it forces you to explore the content and extends the games playability. The game has some bugs, but they seem to be pretty good about monitoring and patching, as well as play balancing and adding new content.

I will say I didn't have a lot of expectations when I tried this game, and pretty quickly found myself playing it every day. It borrows a lot of concepts from some of the best games out there, such as; Final Fantasy, Elder Scrolls, Balder's Gate, Diablo, and more. The game has a lot of references in it to movies, other games, and more, and the story is compelling and interesting, even though it isn't entirely original. I would say for a free to play game it completely blew away my low expectations and I hope it continues to grow and stay active.