Recent reviews by Sinistar

i don't even have the energy to type up the hatred this game brought out of me, path of exiles 2... you've only managed to frustrate and depress me with every update. you are disowned!

7 Humans, up to 3 killers, you do the Math on how unbalanced this ♥♥♥♥ feast is.

One queue when I was paired with humans, we spawned shoulder to shoulder, a Klown came towards us on his own and we managed to use Baseball bats to bludgeon the ♥♥♥♥ to death. So imagine, 5 of us murdering one of the Klowns in about 45 seconds of the start of match.

He was incapacitated and couldn't do ♥♥♥♥. By the way I couldn't mute anybody, muting VOIP on the Sound Settings in-game didn't do ♥♥♥♥ all, so you're left being in a lobby full of spastics that think blurting out random ♥♥♥♥ every second is COOL.

There's a single ability for every class. Feats are lacklustre you have some little rows to unlock every five levels that are the most basic designed passives I've ever seen. There's no information or even flavour text for them. It's as basic as "25% Melee Damage"

There's only cosmetic body armour, and the only loot is your weapons that.. contains stats on them. No cool innovative items to alter how you would play your character.. there's not even multiple special abilities to differentiate from the basic classes. This game will flop in a matter of weeks.

game of the decade.

Pains me to do this, but Torchlight III is just not worth the asking price. I streamed a lot of this game, I started out immediately playing on Ridiculous (hardest difficulty that increases all mob health points and movement speed by 25%) with Permadeath enabled.

If you're not planning to use Hardcore maybe skim through my review instead.

[Balancing issues]

- Monsters can randomly one shot you with certain affixes. Monsters are getting an immense damage increase coming this September 9th patch, increasing their damage potential by 600%. It's really going to be painful now for hardcore aspirants when the developers have no current control with how to balance their game. Over tuning like this means death for you no matter how much defence your character attain.

- Scroll of Mapworks, and areas scattered throughout the different campaign acts with traps will guarantee one shotting your character. No matter how much defence your character has attain. It's a tough lesson learning when you die cause you're standing in fire, but to simply cease existing due to passing by a flame trap really irked me. Act 2 & 3 is notorious for such cruelty.

- Certain Uniques in the game and their properties are not working as intended. Theory crafting becomes pointless when certain builds cannot even get off the starting platform due to either being imbalanced or just straight up not working.

- Experience points yielded from slaying monsters is vastly quicker, easier & most efficient when you realise avoiding all affixed monsters that has spawned in your area to attack the normal creatures. By the time you'd have managed to slay the elite packs in early stages of game play, you could've just kite/ignore those whilst focusing on horde creatures that yields more experience by default, that're easier to AOE down and are simple to defeat. Thus, effectively avoiding the supposed sought after creatures actually gives you beneficial time saving sessions, at least in my experience of game play.

- Monster scaling is really out of whack. Most bosses are tank and spanks, but require you to dish out a continual amount of damage for multiple minutes, sometimes even as long as 5 minutes has elapsed for a 'side boss'. I think Ridiculous should affect the way bosses behave mechanically, rather than turning them into health sponges for us to monotonously kill after lengthy periods of time wasted for typically no loot droppings at all.

- Contracts... what is the point in me slaying elite packs for items when they always drop fame and I can stack loot boxes for days and days, eventually caching in whenever I want. Is that why the loot drops are always so lacklustre? A lot of times I'm lucky to see 2 greens, let alone hopeful for a legendary. 90% of all gear I've found is through your Adventurer contract. I think itemisation along with their drop rates need massive tweaking.

- Classes are horribly imbalanced, skills supposedly healing enemies, other skills just not working as intended, tons of bugs that can one shot any of your character at any moments notice. I'm being hard on the game cause I really like the game, but it needs a lot of improvements. I'll be returning to it after the next patch, Relics are super strong and define classes, where as the class talents themselves are rarely invested into.

And let me explain, by stating the fact I've been watching Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor Martyr since the early stages of it being announced and scouraging around on their website for months just for a taste of any piece of information in regards to a dream-y game come true for me in this dark millennium setting. I was exuberant truely. Until...now.

Before I was unable to play the game at EA launch, but was fully aware of the game going into early access on steam 1st of September 2017. It was wonderful news, finally I was able to pick up the game about a week ago from typing this review, and figured I'd jump straight into multiplayer with my brother. He was also excited to hear another 'a-rpg' come into the fray since the days of that particular genre being competitively driven by games such as Path of Exiles or Diablo 3 I was happy to see they may finally have a true contestant to rival. It was a welcomed addition by concept, only..

This game feels completely unpolished, half baked in an oven, features feeling like they're missing that stems from the core concept of what makes an ARPG great! It's ludicrous to think, when you log into the game, hit co-op to search to actually play the game that it cannot detect any other life forms, as if like this game is completely abandoned both from a development and consumer stand-point. That's seriously bad news for something that should have a robust community to help shape the way the game; as it's centric to have players that can trade, play cooperatively, or even just chat as you play the way you want to whether it be solo or in teams of friends/strangers or being glorious in guilds.

But, the fact this game's population is so low that every guild master and clan member from any roster you search has last logged online over 40+ days ago is foretelling of the flawed game designs from Neocore. And i'll explain exactly why they're flawed, and badly designed to make everything completely difficult intentionally and utterly a waste of your time.

First if you want to play with a friend, forget this title immediately. It actually punishes you for playing with a friend or stranger. Oh, you thought you could actually level up together? Nah, the only person that gets any meaningful progression towards their character IS the host of the party. Yeah, there you go, have fun queueing up only to find you're rewarded with zero experience (which by the way) is already one of the most sluggish grindfeasts I've ever had the unfortunate privilege of enduring. I've done literally tonnes of missions (an exaggeration) but to put it more accurately, HOURS of gametime and my character barely hit level 4. That's the equivalent to me being probably close to character level 30 in POE. To give you further insight, at level 5 just now, each mission only gives me 546 experience, but I'm going to need about another 20,000 experience just to level up to 6. Everything is mission based, clearing entire areas, or just getting the mission completed fast as possible both yield same results.

This isn't a sandbox game. It's extremely linear, and it's disingeuous marketing spin to call this a sandbox. Let alone ARPG.

Not to mention you also have to level up an "account" that shares across all characters regardless which is normal in most multiplayer games you'd come across in this modern age. Problem is that, everything is locked behind your 'progression' with your account. Even the skill branches are all locked until you complete x y z. And completing x y z in this game isn't 'oh, finish Act 1 or hit level 10.' Nope, this game is centric around using a wide array of killing enemies with 'X' pertaining to things like dealing damage, burning, anything evolved around combat. The account level is the only level you'll see your friend progress towards without any deficiency, but their characters that need to allocate crucial points into their talent tree to actually y'know PROGRESS? Yeah nah, they're not allowed unless they play singleplayer. Yeah, sorry about that. It's pathetic! Call it like it is.

The level designs are garbage, the atmosphere is pretty decent on a high-rig computer, but the actual tiles and the prefabs are generic, and you'll eventually hit same-y type of levels throughout what appears to be 3 different prefabs of environments. You have an outdoor area, and then two separate metallic in-door area with one having outside details to a degree that you'll quickly find repetitive. And that's if you survive to play the game longer than an hour. If you play for about 15 minutes, you've seen everything Inquisitor had to offer for 50$, almost not even exaggerating that statement.

Melee combat is trash when playing on your own, you have almost no chance when you have to start pushing campaign / side missions that have a higher power rating than your own. Gear is completely dependent on your success in this game, even more so than POE or Diablo simply because gear works exactly like Guild Wars. They have pre-determined 'skills' it's embarrassing to even call 4 types of auto attacks a skill! (Anyways)... the weapons, and your armour each affect not only your 'rating' to blast/chop your way through hordes of enemies easier, but your skills. I remember choosing a crusader, and going with the tactical guy thinking "Oh cool, this is right up my alley because it spawns turrets. Nice, can't wait till I check out their skill system and see what they have interesting!" WRONG!

The second mission I switched out my default armour and could no longer "spawn those turrets" that separated a crusader tactical from a juggernaut. BECAUSE everything is tuned to work around GEAR. I mean literally EVERYTHING. Skills, your identity, is locked behind your 'equipment', which btw there's ZERO differentations between these 'classes' they all have a different default armour weapon kit in the beginning, but nothing stops you from being a 'Assassin: Sniper' that now functions exactly as the Crusader Juggernaut would from the get-go. It feels like they wanted to attempt a skyrim system with "you can be anything you want, despite what background you've chosen." Take it back to the drawing board, your system doesn't work like it does in Path of Exiles. Bring back the old talent trees!

Everything is terrible, the progression system is interesting, but without any true character progression, the loot all being extremely same-y right aside with the missions, all the obvious palceholders in the storyline with a lot of missions coming up as "MISSION_NONAME, MISSIONDESC" FOR EARLY campaign missions is absolutely unforgivable.

The fact this game is planned to release not too long from this review.. shows that Neocore is a untrustworthy company I'll be dodging in the future if they survive.

Let's get straight into the juicy news of "con"pany cryptozoic, the future looking bleak for hex shards of fate and last but not the very least it's pathetic community and how things are managed. 6/3/2017


This is the third time I've had to iterate a single video-game review over the past 1.5 years the game has been launched on steam, and I'll go into brief details on why that is. It's because one, these shady con-artists from CZE like to silence anything in association with exposing the lawsuit that unfolded involving the very game they've copied 80% of everything you'd currently find in its game. And two, the content is severely lacking in terms of delivery, how much it's polished when it does go live, extremely long intervals between content releases, and the content overall lacking when is released. Their extra shady practices exist as following: rotating sets when they couldn't put things back into control when ridiculous combinations began ruining the game by creating a limitation of only having 5 sets active at any given time therefore rotating out the old set cards, champions, and old gems. Meaning zero value is held, and drops with zero incentive to purchase cards that roll out of rotation.


This game is dwindling with their numbers, and the existing player base only cares more about their "investments" then actually making a great video-game. They treat this like an actual business, despite it being a trading card game.. [GAME] that's a problem in itself. They're gamblers, investing and controlling the economy so free to play users have to rely on being gifted cards by them, or run to the auction house and purchase cards with real currency that's set by the whales themselves. They hope this grooming mentality will help retain new players when in reality all it's doing is showing that without the few whales this game currently has helping keep this boat afloat, they'd already sunk by now. Similar to how AZ2 flopped..

Additionally, cryptozoic attempts to produce 4 sets per year which still hasn't been accomplished in any of the years it's doors have been open. Plus, the Frost Ring Arena experience of the game having zero updates after 3 years, the Campaign - always held back by long overdue patches that only give you a piece of an un-baked cake that's messy at best due to ground breaking bugs ALWAYS existing for many weeks in the game before they get polished enough to be "passable" is really a slap in the face.


You log into the game, only to find the nobles dissing the very game that even paved the way for this cash-in attempt to get as far as it even has now. "At least we're not enacting like we're wearing Wizard hats when playing." Literally an exact statement from a game developer that moderates the chatbox in-game. Mechanics, card designs are extremely similar to MTG, so similar they had to settle things with Wizards of the Coast outside of court and evidently, lost. They had to change total value numbers with Champions, and a few other things needed to be clarified and changed such as literal copy cardboard cards.


They have the worst kind of ass-kissing community I've ever had the unfortunate privilege to participate and work with that I've ever seen in a videogame.. ever. Period. To break things down, the moderators and community manager are literally just players that were "promoted" because cryptozoic are too lazy to actually employ direct professional members to their team, so they'd rather have their "ass kissing community" do all the moderating, and community managing. Now, the problem with that is - Dinotropia is a dumbass, he will place you into warnings from posts you've made months and months ago out of the blue. Eventually, resulting you into getting "punished" or "rewarded" depending on how you look at it so you no longer have a reason to deal with that community.


Moderators from the forums, and the HXE developers themselves never give warnings or attempt to step in to stop their community from belittling anybody that is "attacking their baby." Therefore, if you're an ass-kissing HEX fanboy you literally get free pass to just say as much ♥♥♥♥ as you want, not even joking. They have about 120 people on hex at any given time besides a few occasional peaks, but every fanboy from that forum will argue that their game is growing on the STAND-ALONE client.

They get together in groups from presumably discord and encourage attacks personally on the forums and places outside the forums. They will never rebute anything about what you've actually brought to the table of the problems in the game, but rather focus all their negativity towards you as a person for hating HEX. For instance, you might say that the campaign is weak, boring and has barely any innovation between both AZ1-AZ2. They'll then go on to attack any other CCG/TCG on the market, even call that game's community stupid whilst on the other side of the spectrum "hoping" players from those communities actually jump ship to them.. it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ contradicting so much you don't even know where to START if you get into any type of argument.

Not to mention, they even went as far as to gather information on your youtube videos to dislike your videos, you have other reviews on steam? Great, we'll thumb them down too. They really enjoy personally attacking anybody that speaks the truth about the game, and they'll justify it by pegging you as a hater, or some troll that has little to nothing of value besides "spewing hate all the time" while they're doing all of this back to you and not getting any punishments. It's absolutely great isn't it? It's the funniest ♥♥♥♥ I've ever witnessed. I get mentioned in a post, somebody makes a hateful post, I respond and I get banned for defending myself when I never made any references to those people (from the beginning) but their posts still exist and lay there "all powerful and mighty!" -> https://forums.hextcg.com/index.php?thread/1166-mtgo-vs-hex-vs-hearthstone-vs-eternal-vs-pokemon/&postID=15577#post15577


No double back, No multiplayer, No complete fleshed out campaign, No frost ring arena updates since its launch, No communication from the devs, No frequent updates to retain interest in the game, No raids, No co-operative gameplay at all, No guilds (only guilds outside of the game exist which are all bad anyways seeing as they're the only people playing the game.) No big player base, Equipments and PVE cards are solely for PVE only which is totally useless with it only being active for "singleplayer", Auction House is buggy, poorly optimized same with the card manager they currently have.


"I have come to accept this game was just one big con." Perfect quote to end the review. ♥♥♥♥ you HEX, can't wait to see you crash and burn. Dinotropia is wack as ♥♥♥♥, the entire community is ♥♥♥♥.

really good.

when are you going to fix the update so i can generate a world map and actually play? looks super promising from the trailer and screenshots.. but unfortunately so many players are having trouble with crashes etc.


can't recommend a game i really want to play, that can't be played. wait for more hot fixes before deciding.

Very good game. But you might want to hold onto your 25$ till more episodes come out, 20-25$ for 1hour gameplay atm is not enough for the value.