Recent reviews by Arkage

This is not an armored core game. It's a dark souls game wearing an armored core skin.

Great games but terrible port.

0/10 NPCs with unskippable dialogue won't shut the ♥♥♥♥ up

Amazing game but desperately needs an improvement to the matchmaking system. I'm not referring to the matchups regarding skill, I mean regarding the connection quality. Anyone trying to play berserker vs a lost warrior when they're on McDonald's wifi knows what I'm talking about. If they add a filter so that only people with similar pings would be matched together the game would be improved immensely.

8/10 until that change occurs, then 9/10.

There have always been connection issues, especially when the Peer to Peer system was less polished, but it seems like the game stability has taken a sharp decline. Connection issues are rampant and tech support doesn't listen to you when you tell them you're not running VM software and feeds you back into the support queue in an endless loop. It's a status quo of not fixing any problems.

DFO used to be amazing when it hadn't yet been gutted and sold. Now the game is a cash cow of exploitative addiction mechanics, wheels and flashing lights everywhere, no difficulty in sight as NPCs clutter the battlefield robbing you of any real game experience, leaving you wondering when the gameplay is actually going to begin. Sky tower used to actually provide just a slight bit of difficulty. When I first played years ago, you actually had to fight through the stages to progress. Now you're level 30 within 30 minutes of gameplay -- and that is assuming that you can manage to stay connected to be allowed to navigate the messy GUI which was made even more cluttered by all the inane simultaneously running "events" that trample over each other to try to keep you engaged, because the ruined difficulty and stages and copious amounts of bloat certainly don't.

Look how they massacred my boy...

9/10 would jump and shoot again

I sorely miss Kojima's presence in this game. The writer attempts to emulate Kojima's spirit through the game and while I do like some of the twists that they went with, there's this glaring uncanny valley and some decisions made that just make me cringe. If Kojima's storytelling is what you're after then I can't recommend the game.

That said, if you can accept that Kojima is gone then this game isn't bad at all. Granted it's no full fledged Phantom Pain it's still pretty solid in its own right. I've seen a number of reviews on the game (in particular Angry Joe, Jim Sterling, VideoGameDunkey) and they all seem to portray this paper thin understanding of the game's mechanics and even show cherrypicked clips of video that are downright misleading. Jim Sterling even admits in his review he hadn't played for more than an hour before chucking it aside and reaffirming a preconcieved conclusion.

Now on to the dirty word: Microtransactions. This game does feature microtransactions in a limited capacity, using a premium currency. Each day you play you are awarded with a handful of these coins, approx. 30 daily. If you want an additional character (which shares inventory with other characters on your system) or an extra "Exploration" team (a unit of up to 4 crew members that you can send on 20 minute to 24 hour duration missions to gather resources similar to in the phantom pain) then you'll need to either save up or buy 1000 coins worth. There's plenty of heated debate wether these microtransactions should be included or not, personally I'm 126 hours into the game and I haven't spent a dime nor do I intend to and I've felt no need for it outside of minor convenience.

My suggestion would be to look into some footage of the game of someone experienced with the game, someone who actually was open to play it instead of someone who crapped on the premise of the game before it was even released in order to get a balanced view.

At its core, this is a survival game blended with the Fox engine presented in MGSV: The Phantom Pain. If that's up your alley, then the game will be well worth the pricetag. If you're just not into survival games (which I can completely understand with the saturation of the market) then maybe give it a pass.

Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDN_Yctv2-M&list=PLyAglVrRI36u51l217NPQ2Oro0gahEzGP

You've probably seen Wasted being advertised on Adult Swim recently. If you're like me, you probably hold a stigma against games coming from Adult Swim. I've always had the misconception that the games advertised were shameless cash grabs, but Wasted has turned that assumption of mine upside down.

Everything Wasted does oozes style and humor. On its surface it seems like it's ripping off Fallout's setting, but where it sets itself apart is how it takes any given idea from Fallout and twists, stretches, and bastardizes it to the most absurd satire. Caps have been replaced by toilet paper as the currency of the post-apocalyptic world, reasoning that it's the most valuable commodity since no one wants to wipe their ass with their bare hands after all.

The gameplay feels like the perfect blend of Spelunky and Fallout. You start with only the shirt on your back and a dinky pistol that any card carrying NRA member would be embarrassed to be within the same zip code of. You're shoved into a dungeon, a "cooler", essentially the analogue of the vaults of Fallout. Your goal? Reach the bottom floor. Alternatively you could find some of the radioactive booze in the cooler to chug and receive permanent buffs to your character, though doing so will cause you to black out and wake up back in your hideout.

If you manage to find your way back to town, you can stash any of your belongings and your TP in containers peppered around your home in case you die in the cooler. Death in the cooler results in all of your loot being lost and starting over again with only the items you started with or things remaining in your stash. When in town you also have the opportunity to take your TP to one of the three shops in town. One shop will let you purchase special booze emulating those you would find in the cooler, though you can only have one of these special drinks each run. Another shop will let you purchase random items though they are a bit on the expensive side. Lastly, there is the Courier shop. During your gameplay you're going to run across items whose names are colored purple. These items are not lost on death, but are instead collected by the couriers who place them in a lost and found inventory for you to repurchase, though they are much more expensive than other items.

Inside the dungeon, you're going to want to explore the randomized layouts thoroughly to better equip yourself and earn as much TP as you can, but be warned. You're heavily encouraged not to linger around long, or else some S.O.B., a member of the "Syndicate of Buzzkills", is going to show up at the beginning of the floor and slowly pursue you. S.O.B.s are very dangerous and impractical to fight, sporting over 500 hp and a minigun that will stunlock you until you're Swiss cheese. They are not impossible to defeat but until you acclimate yourself to the game you'll want to avoid them, as killing one involves guerrilla tactics in a circular path, and probably a concrete brick or two.

I've already clocked 14 hours in the game and have just now made it through the first cooler. I plan on many more hours to come. If I had to point out a few flaws with the game, one would be the hit scan nature of the enemies. If an enemy has line of sight to you and is aware of you, you're going to eat a few bullets. A second issue I have is the amount of stun that the enemies can cause. Being hit by most bullets will stagger you. While staggered you're not able to move or return fire. This means there are going to be situations where you round a corner and are immediately held in place while numerous enemies take you out with no opportunity to fight back without being outright killed.

To sum things up, this game is a definite purchase, and at $12.99 (6/21/2016) it's a steal.

As of the writing of this review, this game is an inferior repackaging of Dungeon Defenders 1 with content that has been watered down and split into DLC packs to extort microtransactions from you under the guise of a new game. Characters that used to have the possibility of having creative builds have been reduced to subsets of skills and towers which comparitively have no soul to them. Lastly, the latency is horrible. In no game have I ever seen so much rubber banding and teleporting about.

The only way I could recommend this is if you want to play more dungeon defenders and want to play on new maps, however the first impression on the maps I've seen thus far are uninspired at best.

This game falls short only in one area: length. Otherwise the game is well on the way of being a masterpeice if they can shell out some DLC that extends the gameplay time and increases difficulty a bit.