Recent reviews by [R] Nerva

The game's beautiful. Everything is well-rendered and accurate to the source material in design. The only real visual errors are some ugly model clipping here and there, but usually these issues are small and don't detract from the overall game. It'll make half-modern graphics cards sweat, but it does utilize them well to achieve a good framerate.

There's a wide variety of careers for each character, each a different take on what that character can do. Do you want a Bardin who can stealth and supply ammo to the party? Play Ranger Veteran. Do you want a Bardin that can wear heavy armor and tank hits? Play Ironbreaker.

Within each career, there's an appreciable variety in the weaponry they can equip. With melee weapons especially, there's a lot of variety in attack angles and properties. You're sure to find a combination of character and weapon you like. I can appreciate the focus on melee in this game; many of these first-person horde fighting games - like Left 4 Dead or Killing Field - focus on ranged combat almost exclusively.

I'm not going to beat around the bush, this game's a vehicle for DLC. There's real-cash microtransactions in the game on top of DLCs that unlock careers, weapon types, and other mechanically game-affecting content. Many of the DLC careers and weapons are strictly better than most of the stuff available by default; compare Foot Knight Kruber to Grail Knight Kruber in melee ability, or Warrior-Priest Saltzpyre to any of the other tank Careers, and you'll see what I mean. You can't even do all of your daily/weekly content without all of the DLCs. I am very glad I got the game's DLC on sale due to the Warhammer Skulls event in May 2025 - don't buy unless it's deeply discounted.

There's friendly fire in a co-op game. Admittedly it's only on Champion difficulty and higher, and only applies to explosives and ranged weapons, but friendly fire in a co-op game is UTTERLY STUPID. There's going to be griefers who shoot allies to death for no damned reason, then leave the game while you're bleeding out so the mission fails. Kerillian players are notorious for this, as she has the most - and the strongest - ranged weapons in the game.

You're forced to listen to the mission narration when joining a game, even when joining a match in-progress, which is dumb. Especially because you actually load into the mission and can take damage before you're given control over your character. There's been many times I've joined a mission only to find myself on the verge of death, surrounded by enemies, and the mission's host several rooms away and unable to return to help me even if they were inclined to, because of the way missions are designed, with multiple points of no return that, once crossed, can't be crossed again to backtrack.

Speaking of, speed builds. Many players like to rush ahead of their team, and there's nothing stopping them from doing so, despite the fact that the game just about requires you to stick together. These speed/stealth builds use characters like Ranger Veteran!Bardin, Huntsman!Kruber, and Shade!Kerillian to outrun their team, going invisible to dodge enemies and drop them on their allies. This kind of play isn't fun for anyone who likes to play Saltzpyre or Sienna, and leads to centralization around these three stealth characters and careers.

Speaking of spawning, the spawning of hordes and specials could really stand to be looked at. Often, enemies will spawn in places they physically can't reach, and certain specials - Blightstormers and Globadiers are especially guilty of this - will spawn at extreme ranges, in places they can attack you, but you can't respond to them without a ranged weapon, and not all careers have ranged weapons.

There's also a bad case of 'gang up on the human' when playing with bots. You can watch the plague storms summoned by Blightstormers specifically chase a solitary human player, when there's a cluster of bots that are closer to it. Specials like Packmasters and Gutter Runners will specifically attack human players even against their own best interest, such as a bot being a bigger threat or being separated from the group and thus an easy target. Hordes will specifically rush at a human player, outright ignoring bots that are cutting them down as they run past.

Bots also have a number of other behaviors that make them annoying. They're pinpoint accurate and have aimbot target-acqusition abilities - except when they don't. As a result they'll either prevent you from actually doing anything against interesting enemies, or they'll merrily let you get pounced, leeched, or dragged to death without even making an effort to save you. They will hoover up any items that happen to be nearby before players can do so, and it's impossible to make them drop something for you unless ordered to pick up a replacement.

Kerillian. She has one tone of voice - exasperated condescension. She refuses to learn anyone's name, calling them "mayflies" and "lumberfoots" in a brazen display of casual in-universe racism. She brags about causing tragedy to other races, and when presented with an entire town destroyed by ratmen and Chaos cultists, she cares less about the town and is more glad that one old tree managed to survive amidst the devastation. As far as she cares, any race that doesn't have a lifespan measured in four digits or better doesn't matter. She's irritating to listen to as she constantly complains bitterly about everything, especially her allies. And what's worse, she almost never gets called out on her behavior or put in her place.

Her snobby, hateful, condescending attitude often spreads to her players. Kerillian has exceptionally easy-to-use weapons, with high attack speeds, good properties, and few weaknesses. She also has the widest variety of weapons in the game, as well as the best ranged weapons in the game, and is the only character who will ever have triple-digit ammo for any ammo-using weapon. This often leads to her charging ahead of the rest of the team, killing or dodging everything in her path, and triggering backfield spawns on her allies that she merrily gets to ignore. Thus, Kerillian players think they're hot ♥♥♥♥, when they're actually playing the game on easy mode, and making the game harder for all of their allies in the process. Then, when she finally does get overwhelmed, the player blames the rest of the team for 'not keeping up' and 'not covering her back.' She's also one of the most-played characters in the game because of how well she lends herself to speedrunning strategies and griefing. She's literally the loner elitist in a co-op game, both in character and mechanics.

Because of how singularly odious she is, I enforce a rule of 'no elves' in my lobbies. Anyone who joins on Kerillian gets warned to switch, and gets kicked if they don't. I also leave lobbies where people are playing Kerillian, because I just hate listening to her. Even her banter is just her bragging about how much 'better' she is than every else or being condescending, while everyone else has to put up with her insufferable attitude.

I love this game's sense of humor - you can drink before a mission, and go on a mining run drunk. Some of the booze is questionable, capable of doing things like making you black out, teleport, or spontaneously explode. You are frequently your own worst enemy in the form of unplanned falls or poking at things that explode while too close to them. The dwarves themselves take all this in stride. They're charmingly surly, yet also endearing in the way they care about one another and even their equipment. This game practically drips personality.

It's no slouch in gameplay either; there's a little something for every kind of player. If you like to explore, do Mining missions, and look for secrets like hidden cosmetic stashes or cargo crates with goodies. If you like to have a clear objective that doesn't necessarily have to be combat, do Deep Scan, Refining, or Point Extraction missions. Want to kill big beasties and bots? Elimination and Sabotage are your game modes.

This is a game best enjoyed with friends; while there's public lobbies, the best results would be joining up with a buddy or three and making a mining team out of it. You *can* solo most missions; to compensate for missing allies, they give you the flying remote-control drone Bosco to help you out. If you start a public match solo, you'll have Bosco until at least one player joins, so you're never without at least one ally.

Monetization-wise, there are no microtransactions within the game. DLC and DLC packs are entirely cosmetic, with one tiny exception - the Skullcrusher outfit, when you're wearing it, makes Skullcrusher beer free when it's available in the in the bar. Skullcrusher beer makes your Power Attacks recharge somewhat faster for one mission. Even so, that's a pretty minor boost, extremely situational, and not even always available for every mission.

My only complaints is that the gunner's traversal tool is too limited in it use. He needs either more ammo for it, or the ability to reclaim ziplines that he's no longer using by going to their origin pylon and taking them down.

Carrion is a bloody, gory, reverse-horror metroidvania where you are an amorphous tentacle-festooned fleshbeast, out to escape from a hidden laboratory on a colonized alien world. Along the way, you can find genetic samples the researchers have harvested to expand your capabilities, allowing you access to new parts of the facility. In your way is is a private army of armed human guards, cyborg soldiers, and dastardly automated defenses.

Carrion utilizes lovingly-drawn, well-animated pixel graphics for everything. Some might find that a turn-off, but personally, I find it well-done enough to work excellently. The game runs smoothly even on potato systems, even if you have background tasks running. It does tend to lean hard on your sound card though, so if you've got background tasks running audio, you may hear some distortion or sounds may start to overlap or infinitely cycle. Usually pausing the game and unpausing it will stop it for a while.

Make no mistake, this game is gory. Even just moving around the environment tends to leave bloodstains on surfaces that your fleshbeast brushes against, and fights will paint rooms red with both your blood and the enemy's. These bloodstains persist until the level is reloaded, which means you can use them as a navigation tool to see where you've been. Your most basic attack, which consists of grabbing a victim and dragging them back to your toothy maw to be eaten (or in the case of cyborgs, chewed on until they stop functioning) tends to decapitate, dismember, or split victims in half at the waist. It can be a bit gratuitous, but it's par for the genre and helps to illustrate that you are a predatory monstrosity.

The game controls fairly well; you have free movement in any direction, as your fleshbeast will hurl its body-mass and attach ropy pseudopods to surfaces to drag its bulk in the direction you want to go. There's a bit of fiddliness when you stop moving. Since the fleshbeast is rather amorphous, it can sometimes bunch up in a tight pile or spread out along a surface. Clinging to walls and ceilings is possible, but gravity tends to drag you downward unless you repeatedly press your bulk against a surface to attach as many tendrils as possible. The camera typically follows the fleshbeast's center of mass, but when you reach the largest size, sometimes the direction of the fleshbeast's movement won't match the direction you're trying to go exactly, and it's easy to get unintentionally sucked into one-way vacuum pipes. Usually, you can pull back and wriggle the fleshbeast around to get it where you need it to go, and these moments are fortunately rare and limited to cramped locations where there's no immediate danger to you. They can, however, cause you to take unintended hits - enemies with firearms are very good shots and understand how to aim at parts of the fleshbeast that aren't quite behind cover.

Speaking of cover, you will need to make use of it. Unarmed humans are no threat, but anything with sharp edges, electric barriers, guns, or flamethrowers can quickly kill you. Attempting to saunter into a room without a plan and murder everything there will often wind up with you respawning at your last nest. The game will go much more smoothly if you learn to make hit-and-run attacks: ambushing targets from behind, killing quickly, and then vanishing back into vents and crawlspaces for cover, only to repeat the ambush from another direction. Make full use of your abilities to strike opponents from angles that they can't return fire from. Enemies do not respawn unless generated by spawners in the environment, so it's perfectly feasible to attack, kill a few, retreat to a nest to heal, and then return for the rest. Leaving body parts of slain humans laying around to consume when low on health is also a good idea for the same reason. Sometimes it's better not to fight - often, your abilities will give you alternative ways to dealing with enemies and obstacles, such as finding a switch to disable them, or tricking them into killing each other with friendly fire. Tactical thinking is rewarded in Carrion.

Slaughter's all well and good, but it's only half of what Carrion is about - as a metroidvania, you'll need to puzzle your way through the environments and figure out how to get where you need to go. Each size of fleshbeast has two unique abilities, and you'll need to dynamically change size to access the abilities you need. To do so, you feed on prey or resting in a nest to grow larger, or depositing biomass in tainted water or taking damage to grow smaller. The game world is arranged as a hub area (the Frontier) with nine stages, each focused around a different part of Relith Science's research base. Each stage revolves around finding nests, each of which helps to pry open a final door that you can utilize to breach the area and escape. To reach them all, you'll also need to find biomass samples, which will unlock new abilities. There's also a bonus biomass sample housed in a Containment Chamber in each stage; Containment Chambers are usually puzzle rooms that require you to use your abilities in outside-the-box ways. Fortunately, completing the containment chambers is not mandatory unless you're going for 100% achievements.

Sadly Carrion is a bit short - the game can be 100% completed in six to ten hours of play, even by players who don't figure it out quickly and lack good puzzle solving skills (my first 100% playthrough of the main game took about eight hours, mostly due to faffing around and exploring). There is a secondary bonus mod that picks up where the main game left off, but it doesn't add more than a couple hours of gameplay. There's no new game plus features, nor difficulty modes. This is Carrion's biggest shortcoming, but honestly, I'd prefer it being short and good than being longer and unnecessarily padded.

Overall, if you want a good metroidvania with a fresh premise and enjoy reverse-horror scenarios where you play the monster, this game will be right up your alley. It's worth the price.

OVERALL: ****
Great, but not perfect. Short length, occasionally-fiddly controls, and terse storytelling keep it from a perfect score.

GRAPHICS: ****
Excellently done pixel-art. Nothing groundbreaking in terms of graphical design, but it does what it does well.

PERFOMANCE: ****
Runs great on nearly any computer made in the last decade, but sometimes has sound issues if other hardware-accelerated sound tasks are running in the background.

CONTROLS: ***
Serviceable, works well for the most part, but has flaws, like trying to keep your entire mass behind cover, sometimes moving further than you intended, or unexpectedly falling off walls and ceilings instead of adhering.

GAME LENGTH: **
It's short, and may leave you wanting more. 10 hours for a very casually-paced playthrough makes for a short metroidvania. There are no bonus content or easter eggs for speedrunning or sequence-breaking that would reward replaying the game after the first time, either.

STORY: ***
It's told almost entirely through interactive cutscenes, which is neat, but it is also entirely linear and your interaction cannot change the story in any way. It's also sparse and leaves a lot to interpretation.

DIFFICULTY: ****
Harsh, but fair. Death is nigh-immediate if you don't fight smart, or rush into situations. Die and you go back to the last Nest you used. Thankfully there's almost no unwinnable or unfair situations unless they're your own doing, and no long-term penalty for death.

Design a problem, monetize the solution. That's Spiral Knights in a nutshell. At its core, Spiral Knights is a relatively decent game, particularly after the overhaul of the energy system that removed the necessity of Mist Energy to continue adventuring.

It has, however, simply moved the exploitation of its playerbase elsewhere.

Crafting is essential in this game. Crafting gear with good Unique Variant bonuses is the only way to get ahead of the power curve and maintain an arsenal that can deal with the game's increasing challenges. To craft gear, however, you need Orbs of Alchemy. These orbs are unnecessarily rare. Expect to farm boss maps constantly to accumulate the orbs necessary to craft your stuff. Crafting UV'ed gear is entirely random, so expect several crafts before you can get one with UV bonuses. Each craft takes three orbs of the same rarity as the thing you're making, and getting one orb across 3-6 floors of dungeon is a feat.

This can mean dozens, maybe even hundreds of runs until you get the item you want. Or you can buy Orbs of Alchemy from the cash shop.

Periodically, the game will give you trinkets that provide small resistances to nonstandard damage types and may have other bonuses. These are enormously handy for filling any gaps in your armor & helm's defenses, or stacking additional bonuses onto your gear set.

However, you can't equip these. In order to equip trinkets, you have to buy access to the two trinket slots; 150 energy for 30 days access, each.

Using the right weapon for the job is also a massive part of this game. Failure to bring the right weapons for a fight can lead to you being undergunned or unprepared for the attacks your enemies are capable of. Some maps can have as many as three different enemy families, each with different behaviors and weaknesses that you really need the right weapons to exploit.

There are four weapon slots, giving you the ability to equip what you need. Except that two of them are paywalled: 250 energy for 30 days access, each. This isn't just mere convenience, either; there's a status effect called Curse. Being Cursed causes anywhere from 1-4 of your equipped weapons to cause damage to you when they're used. The more weapon slots you have, the more likely you are to have a weapon that remains usable while you're Cursed.

Let me reiterate this: they've paywalled equipment slots. To have a full complement of weapons and trinkets, Grey Havens expects you to shell out a total of 800 energy every month.

If you like the game's pets, called Battlesprites, then prepare to pony up. If you want an additional Battlesprite aside from the default one you get as part of the early-game's missions, that's going to set you back 2,100 energy. Resetting a Battlesprite's skill points so that you can fix build mistakes costs 2,000 energy. Evolving a Battlesprite costs 125 energy for the first evolution, 250 for the second, and 525 for the Ultimate evolution. The game does give you free samples of Evo Catalysts as you go through the mission system, but only one of each type, so if you get a second Battlesprite, you're SOL unless you pay Energy, because they can't progress past level 14 without catalysts.

Any cosmetic accessories you get are attached to your Helmet or Armor. You cannot freely remove them once attached, however. If you want to retain your unique look and move your accessories to another piece of gear, you must Recover the accessories first.

This costs anywhere from 3,500 to 10,000 energy, depending on which accessory slot the item is attached to. The most expensive accessory recovery can cost nearly $30 USD's worth of energy. Even the least expensive removal is nearly $10. While cosmetic, this is extortionate for something that is merely a reorganization of items you already have.

The accessories themselves are typically obtained from lockboxes, obtained from the random reward wheel at the end of each dungeon floor.

You aren't opening those lockboxes without keys: 750 energy for a silver key, which opens any lockbox once.

Even some dungeon features require energy to interact with. Broken Mechaknights and Auto Turrets require 5 energy to activate, creating a temporary ally that lasts for one dungeon floor or until destroyed, whichever comes first. Danger Rooms require 3 energy, just to fight several waves of monsters for a large amount of otherwise-generic dungeon loot. There's even some loot rooms blocked by energy gates, which also require 3 energy to enter. A Shadow Key, costing 1,800 energy, is required to access a Shadow Lair.

Even something as basic as starting a guild for you and your friends requires 500 energy, plus whatever you spend on furnishing your guild hall.

To put some of the energy prices above into perspective, ~$10 USD gets you 3,500 energy, or you can purchase energy from other players, 100 energy at a time, for a player-determined price, subject to whatever rampant inflation the market will support. Right now it's sitting at ~7,500 crowns per 100 energy. Of course, any energy that's being sold by players had to be purchased with real cash, so no matter what, someone is paying to win.

Note that the smallest energy denomination that they sell is 750, for $2.45 USD. For something as simple as having full equipment slots for a month, you're either spending five bucks instead of two and a half, or you're buying energy on the player market. Either way, you're buying more energy than you need; pay entirely cash, and you're left with 700 energy left over. Pay cash and then crowns, and you have an extra 50. Try to pay entirely in crowns via the energy market, and you're looking at forking over around 61-62k crowns, and that's assuming the price is stable at about 7.5k crowns per 100 energy.

BTW, notice how buying in bulk gets you more energy per dollar spent? Yeah, that's another trick they use to get you to spend more in a single sitting. Admittedly, it's kind of a standard for the industry, so I'm not too miffed about it, but it is yet another form of psychological manipulation that this company uses and that potential players should be aware of.

Now, I'll admit, guilds, lockboxes, and cosmetic accessories aren't necessary to play the game, or even to play the game well. But when you paywall equipment slots, skill resets, even gameplay features and content, you're establishing your game as straight-up pay-to-win. Of course, this is saying nothing about how basic versions of nearly any piece of gear can be purchased from the cash shop outright.

This is inexcusable. Until this changes, I will not be recommending Spiral Knights to anyone. Grey Havens needs to stop paywalling equipment slots and dungeon content, at the very least. If Orbs of Alchemy stop being extortionately rare on top of it, I'd even consider this game worth playing.

Note that it'd merely be worth playing at that point, certainly not worth paying for. Not until they take a long hard look at their pricing. As it stands right now, $10 won't even get you fifteen Eternal Orbs of Alchemy, let you open 5 lockboxes, or even get you into two Shadow Lairs. It's barely enough to pull one accessory off of a piece of gear, if you're lucky and it's occupying one of the least-expensive slots. That's frankly obscene

Oh, and if you care about Steam Trading cards, they're an incentive for purchasing energy with Steam Wallet funds. You don't get card drops unless you pay.

Considering that this game has other problems, like some gear being PVP-exclusive, and outstanding bugs that have existed since launch (like Snarbolax deciding to randomly ignore the bell that makes him vulnerable, or restoring his invincibility in less than a second of being belled, or the Roarmulus Twins AI deciding to just never give you a chance to harm them) Grey Havens is asking a lot.

Can't really recommend this one.

I wanted to like it, but from the word go it rubbed me the wrong way. Only two male characters out of a selection of seven, soon to be eight. Most of its character designs are typical anime tripe. Female characters are either pedophile-bait or typical Moe anime designs with T&A. Its writing is competent but not inspired, and it suffers under some badly-naturalized translation in places. It also has a few issues with rubbing its events and cash shop in your face, although it's not as bad about this as some games I can name.

Where SoulWorker hoses up is in gameplay. In a game where the bulk of characters are dedicated melee combatants, you cannot have enemies that produce nonstop AoEs that force the player out of melee range. When you design enemies, and bosses in particular, you must ask yourself how each character actually goes about fighting and beating them in a reasonable amount of time without getting their ♥♥♥♥ wrecked. This is where SoulWorker fails. Eventually, its bosses become unfun slogs of waiting for a few precious moments to get in some hits, or having to sacrifice a significant portion of your health or even just outright die in order to finish a fight in a reasonable amount of time. Bosses that are unapproachable because they're surrounded by damage patches or spamming AoEs for inordinate periods of time means that only two characters - Erwin and Stella - can safely fight them, since they're the only two characters who can easily fight at a distance.

In particular, Jin suffers a lot because he's a tank in a game that doesn't reward tanking. Even with his higher than normal maximum hit points, huge damage reduction passive, and two defense buffs, it's not unheard of for him to take more than a fifth of his health in damage from a single boss attack. His only tool for mitigating attacks - his Counterattack ability - does not work on all attacks, and which attacks are counterable and which aren't can often be a complete crapshoot. More often than not, a boss's most dangerous attacks aren't counterable, and some bosses completely lack counterable attacks, which makes Jin mostly useless against them. Jin's damage is feeble, short-ranged, and slow when he can't regularly obtain the buff that a successful counter grants to his attacks. Jin cannot reliably hold enemy aggro, either - his only taunt lasts ten seconds and has a twenty-second cooldown, and he doesn't deal enough damage outside of it to keep enemies focused on him if there are other allies in a party. He's a character designed for a role that just doesn't exist in this game, and as I enjoy tanking for allies, that means I have significantly less fun.

Daily quest are screwed. The rewards are meager considering they have very specific requirements, like completing stages with S+ ranks, on specific difficulties, or within a specific time limit. They waste your time and limited energy pool by asking you to go back to stages at the very beginning of the game, and you don't get item drops or money from low-level foes. The more zones you unlock for dailies, the more energy you've gotta waste completing them each day, reducing the amount of actual progress you make. Sure you could ignore them, but that means ignoring one of the best sources of Grutin Gold and Battle Points outside of one-time achievements or PVP. There's also some dailies you just can't complete, because they require you to either befriend three people playing the same character and all be online at once (difficult in a game with a population this low), or team up with a person playing a certain character to complete a specific district. Sometimes, it requires you to team up with someone that has a specific title or even a specific soulweapon equipped. Then there's Guerilla Dailies - time-limited daily quests that are issued at random during the day. The problem? You never know when you're going to get them, you get one per zone per day, and their timers run down whether you accept them or not. They even run when when you're offline, so it's not unusual to actually fail these quests without even logging in. What's even the point?

Then there's the gardening system. You start with one, and can have a maximum of three pots to grow plants in (out of a possible six) without whaling on the cash shop. Plants take hours to grow, up to 24 hours, and you must harvest them within a certain amount of time after they mature or they'll wilt and eventually die, wasting the money you spent buying seeds. They're a waste of both time and money; not only are they weak consumable items on their own, but manufacturing them into slightly-better consumables requires you to do quests for Suspicious Additives and buy a (one-use) Distiller in order to craft them into something that's still seriously underperforming if you're above level 10. Even then it typically takes days of harvesting to make one crafted consumable, since it often takes 7-10 and you get 2-5 per harvest.

Oh and then there's the energy system, which is stupid. I know - it's an effort to prevent poopsocking by obsessive players. But FFS, the energy system is so restrictively limited. You have 200 energy per day, and can stockpile as much as 300 if you go without logging in. Sounds like a lot, right? Well, no - each stage you run can eat anywhere from 6-20 energy, with late-game stuff requiring more. They artificially limit your progress by requiring more and more energy to actually do stuff of your level, leading to the game's 'grind' turning into a 'wait wall' instead. It's a situation where you could progress, if only you were allowed to actually continue playing. Naturally, there are boosters that will restore energy, but the ones available outside of the cash shop are limited in how much you can use them and only restore small amounts of energy - often just barely enough to afford one more stage. Some are energy-over-time: you have to use them, then idle in town doing stupid animations while your energy restores at a rate of 1 point a minute - so you're waiting anyway. Having players idle on your game is not good for either your game's servers (they're still using bandwidth) or the players' enjoyment of it (they're forced to twiddle their thumbs when they could be doing other things with their time). It's a stupid idea and more developers need to stop doing it.

At least the energy system doesn't force you to pay the entire cost up-front. You pay an initial advance on the energy cost when you start a stage, and you pay the rest when you beat the boss and see the results screen. It's still a bit dumb because if you get disconnected or die and are unable (or refuse) to respawn, you still wind up paying energy, even if it happens right after you get inside - and some stages have enemies placed so close to spawn that you can be killed by them while loading in (Hello, Breakout Episode 2). Also, the energy cost being split into two payments is not explained to you anywhere and if a district's daily bonus is "reduced EP consumption" the districts still show the full price, so it's anyone's guess as to whether the EP consumed for that district is actually reduced.

PVP is implemented terribly. There's a free-for-all PVP zone that you have to cross in order to go from one city zone to the next. That's the only PVP in the game. There's fast travel from one city to the next via chopper, but you have to pay in-game currency for that. Otherwise, you have to risk high levels ganking you for no reason. Oh, and the non-player enemies are level 55. The first time you cross District 6? You might be level 15.

There's so many things that SoulWorker must work on. Even its Steam Cards are only obtainable by spending Steam wallet on their cash shop.

And for God's sake, change Chii's idle sounds so she doesn't sound like she's having a mild orgasm every ten seconds.

There's been a lot that's happened with this game in the transition from Nexon to Neople. No less than two full story revisions and the return of pre-Neople Arad as the start of the game. What a ride. Don't mind my Steam hours - I have to play on Neople's own launcher since the Steam version of the game won't allow me to access my primary account. My history with the game dates back to 2013.

For those who aren't familiar with the game, DFO is a side-scrolling, sprite-based anime-themed, fantasy beat-'em-up MMO. I know that's a mouthful, but bear with me. If you're familiar with Golden Axe, and Final Fight, you've got a good idea of what the combat plays like. On top of its, it has the levels, skill-tree-system, and randomly-generated loot of something akin to Diablo 2. Combat is simple to understand but can be very complex to master. Mastering the game's combat means understanding some fighting-game-esque terminology, such as invulnerability frames (animations in which you cannot be hit), super armor (an effect that prevents you from flinching due to being hit), knockdown immunity, juggle combos (knocking an enemy into the air and hitting them repeatedly before they can land and stand up again), grappling (grabbing attacks that defeat Super Armor and interrrupt attacks) and grapple immunity (enemies that due to their size, strength, or being rooted to the ground, cannot be grappled). Most of this will be familiar to anyone who's played an arcade-style beat-'em-up game before or a fighting game, and even if it sounds daunting, it's not that hard to pick up with a little practice. The game gives you a training ground to do that practice in, too, with a wide variety of customizable training dummies with different behaviors to familiarize yourself on.

Thus far, I've been impressed with the additions of the Male Mage, Agent, Knight, Thief, and Demonic Lancer. In particular, I like that Male Mage avoids the class bias that has afflicted other gendered classes, in that none of his subclasses - with one exception - cleanly mirror his female counterpart. As a result, it doesn't invite easy comparison between the two. These easy comparisons are something which has led to long-time stigmas against classes that have clearly-superior versions in one gender or another.

What I've not been impressed with is the fact that these gender biases have never been significantly addressed by Neople. There are a number of classes where you are outright inferior than your counterpart, simply due to choice of gender. Slayer, Fighter, Priest, and particularly Gunner all suffer from this. I really don't want these classes to be homogeneous - that would take away their unique identity. I would like them to become comparably powerful but in unique ways, so that they don't invite such easy comparisons to one another.

Another big gripe I have is with the durability and repair system. If you utilize cube skills heavily, or play a class that has to rapidly spam skills to reach peak effectiveness, your repair bills will be frankly obscene. The entire end-card reward for a dungeon, as well as much of the gold you picked up during the dungeon or obtained by selling dungeon loot, can be eaten by repair bills, even if you haven't died or been hit much. This punishes certain classes more than others, and forces them to deliberately play in subpar fashion just to avoid eating up all of their dungeon rewards with repair bills. If you're on a class that isn't spammy and doesn't rely on cube skills to be effective, you're golden.

If you're a returning player from earlier in Neople's ownership of the game, chances are you're going to have to replay a lot of side quests that have been rolled into the mission system. On the bright side, extra quest rewards, including free Halidom weapons (the replacement of old-school Legacy weapons). On the not so bright side, you might have to retread some ground. The progress of scenario quests has been kinda heavily abridged and reworked; these days, you'll typically spend less than seven runs in any given dungeon. That could be good or bad depending on how you look at it - on one hand, the story suffers a bit from moving so fast, on the other hand, a lot of the early-game grind is flat-out gone.

Speaking of the new storyline, it's probably not important to a lot of people, but aside from its abridging, I like where it goes. The Four Blademasters, the most common APC helpers you're given during the story, aren't the overpowering supercharacters they were previously - you can realistically expect to keep up with them in a fight if you play well. It helps present the image that you stand with them as an equal, instead of just being a bystander while they save the day. The story itself seems to reinforce this a lot too. There's more exploration of the Metastasis and the Mirror World in this version, and they're a lot more clear on what the Metastasis actually is this time around. That said, the writing could use just a bit of polish - or at least a good copy editor. I don't know if it's a problem with translating Korean pronouns or what, but the game frequently mis-genders minor charactes, and is sometimes inconsistent on character's titles or names. It's minor, but a little bit irksome to me.

If you liked old Nexon DFO, but hate that they summarily got rid of old Arad and Hendon Myre, or you played Neople DFO but hated how indecisive they were about the nature of the Metastasis, the Apostles, and the world beyond the Black Nightmare, or you hated the early-game grind of either of the previous versions, you'll probably enjoy the game a lot more now. If you preferred either of the original stories, or hate it when stories are abridged, or you just can't stand games with gender-class bias and janky durability and repair systems, you might want to give this a pass. If you're a fan of side-scrolling beat-'em-ups in general, and would like to explore the idea of one as an MMO, DFO is not a bad choice for your first exposure to it.

Can't really recommend this one in its current state. I've been a Vindictus player, off and on, since 2011, and Nexon just keeps making the same mistakes.

It's too fast and really badly handled. Much of the 1-90 old Vindictus story has been abridged or cut out entirely, and story rewards jacked up by a factor of ten to get you through it all just as fast as possible to the endgame, where progression comes to a screeching, launch-you-through-the-windshield halt. Which is just as well, because attempting to stop and smell the flowers for any length of time, and enjoy the storylines that are left is a lost cause.

Anti-RMT measures designed to prevent players from grinding lower-level missions for money, along with an extortionate durability & repair mechanic that can eat literally four to five times the the reward of any given battle by the time you reach level 50 means that the longer you stay below the level cap, the more you're going to hemorrhage money. The only thing that keeps you afloat in Vindictus are high money rewards for stories, which are in finite supply. This means that every time you attempt to repeat a mission (say, to complete an optional objective you missed the first time), you're essentially screwing yourself over, little by little. It's only once you're at the level cap, and can't outlevel new battles any longer, do you ever manage to make enough money to cope with the ever-inflating repair bills on your gear. As a result, 90% of the game you're in an unsustainable race to get to the endgame before you run out of money, and the other 10%, you're in the endgame and only now are able to sustain yourself.

The storyline itself is full of more holes than swiss cheese. The constant abridgement of the story of any 'non-critical' details has destroyed any ability I had to suspend disbelief. The story follows a mercenary company, the Crimson Blades and, later, the Royal Army of Rocheste. Yet despite this, this story was clearly written by someone who doesn't understand what a military chain-of-command even looks like, let alone understanding how one is supposed to function. As a mercenary, Royal Army officers boss you around like they own you, despite never taking out a contract for your services with your mercenary leader. As a cadet of the Royal Army, you are never informed who your direct superior is, and are bossed around by everyone ranging from other cadets to generals, including a particularly disgusting deputy commander whose authority is so ill-defined that he sneers at characters whose rank should put them so far above him that he should be court-martialed. The story eventually devolves into a stable time loop with every likeable character you've come to enjoy either made irrelevant, possessed by a hostile deity, or killed off, and your achievements constantly being countermanded, belittled, revealed to be mistakes, or just flat out erased from existence. Look, I know some people have a fetish for netorare, but you don't need to write it into your games, thanks.

One of the higher-ish points of the game, but not by much. Characters are either "edgelord" or "T&A" or both, with the sole exceptions being among the most unpopular characters in the game. Customization is extremely limited without paying, with most of the customization revolving around making the female characters (even the clearly-underage Lynn and possibly-jailbait Miri) look like tasteless club dancers or street-corner hookers, and making male characters either look ridiculous, edgy, or like automatons, or some combination of the above.

There are fourteen characters, 8 female and 6 male, which an inversion of the usually-male-dominated casts of these games, but there really is not a lot of physical variety in the female characters. They usually range from cute-and-jailbait, to sensual-and-mature. There's no particularly hefty female characters, no particularly thin ones, and definitely none that aren't gratuitous T&A shows. The game's jiggle physics are on full display with even the flattest characters.

Nexon likes to give you little temporary tastes of the game's customization options with extremely time-limited hair/under-armor/other customization tickets, or on rare occasions time-limited outfitter costumes that are layered over your regular armor (and have their own stats). Often there's just enough to see how good you could look if only you were dumb enough to pay Nexon upwards of $60 for a full set of customization tickets. Their prices are terrible.

This, honestly, is what keeps me coming back to Vindictus, even though it has some serious issues. The core gameplay is well designed and extremely tight, rewarding you for learning patterns and boss timings and carefully placing your dodges and attacks for maximum effect. This is not a game you flail through, even on the heftiest bruisers of characters, and that's something I appreciate. As you pick up skills, your options for attacking expand in new and interesting ways dependent on the character, and there's really no character that's outright bad or even really underpowered. Just about everyone has something to offer and can contribute in a fight. Parties insisting on specific team compositions is rare in this game.

The biggest problems are the boss break systems and the secondary objective systems. In boss fights, certain bosses have parts that, like in Monster Hunter, can be broken off for additional rewards. The problem is that the requirements for achieving these breaks are often difficult, requiring limited-use consumable weaponry or even specific characters just to pull off. A good example is the giant lizard, Thor - you need at least three people to break him the 'intended' way; two to use Chain Hooks (limited use consuamble) on his jaws to pull them apart, and a third to actually hit the break with a Spear or Kai's arrows. You can technically hit breaks with any attack classified as a Smash, but the hitboxes on most boss breaks are so ridiculously precise, and the number of hits required to actually get the break are so high, that the boss will likely be dead before you break them, especially if you're playing solo.

The secondary objective system is particularly onerous. During a battle there's a pre-set laundry list of extra objectives you can fulfill to get extra money at the end of the battle (assuming of course, you're within the level range to even get money from it in the first place). However, often these secondary objectives are ignored by most players. Why? Because there's no guarantee you'll even be given the chance to fulfill them. For instance, an objective to kill a specific mid-boss might not be possible if it doesn't spawn. An objective to get a specific break on a boss can be difficult for reasons I've explained. You're often asked to get a specific item on a mission - it's completely up to RNG if you get it. Often the game combines objective types, such as being asked to get a break off a mid-boss that might not even spawn. Sometimes these objectives are mutually exclusive, like having two objectives to kill the same end-of-mission boss two different ways.

For a completionist like me, this is infuriating. I mean, yeah, sure, the game tracks which objectives you've cleared in the past, but that just gets you meaningless, mission-specific 'achievement points' that do diddly-squat. You still have to complete the optional objectives each time you finish the mission, otherwise you're not rewarded for them. This means getting even less money from your missions, and exacerbates the progression issues I've already pointed out.

Vindictus has a solid core, hampered by nearly ten years of slapdash development and greed.

The only thing of value in this pack is the 15x luck stabilizers. The 1-day costume and 1-day elite status voucher do practically nothing.

It's free, but eh. You'll get similar rewards or better just by playing the game for half a week, so they aren't giving you much.

Closers is a game with potential, but suffers from some very, very big issues with mismanagement. While I recommend giving it a try, there are caveats and you need to be aware of them.

The music is pleasant and energetic, great for a side-scrolling beat-'em-up. The character designs are fairly engaging (although there's a high proportion of minors among the characters, which attracts unsavory pedos to the playerbase), and the combat is flashy, yet deep, yet not so deep as to be mechanically obtuse. There's five available male characters and eight female, which is an inversion of the typically male-dominated cast of most side-scrolling beat-'em-ups.

EDIT 9/20/19: The addition of Bai and Seth brings the balance to 5 male and 10 female, which is a rather skewed towards female. There's only one guy available in each team unless you play Black Lambs.

The game's storyline can be hit-or-miss; the Black Lambs storyline is upbeat yet gritty, the Wolf Dogs storyline is various degrees of depressing, and the Wildhuter storyline is divided in two and... really confusing without the other two storylines for context. Do not play a Wildhuter character as your first; you will be lost. If the game's storylines have a major issue, it's that it commits three of the biggest sins a video game author can make; boss fights that you can win but aren't allowed to, being forced to 'escort' NPCs that don't need it (often because they're better fighters than you are, due to sheer statistical or mechanical superiority) and killing off or memory-wiping sympathetic characters, or revealing them to be traitors. It steals a lot of the thunder out of your hard-won victories, and after it happens again and again, it instills a hopelessness that really clashes with the bright, action-oriented visuals of the game. I don't recommend this game for its storytelling; it tries, but the author should really tone back the amount of diabolus ex machina they use on a regular basis.

The game ranks you at stage completion on a scale from D to SSS, but unlike some other games I can think of that do this, your rewards typically aren't affected by your rank. You're seldom required to play the game to SSS grade, even when you don't entirely by accident. The grading system is super-lenient, which I'm totally okay with.

Unlike a lot of games of the genre (Dungeon Fighter Online comes to mind) there's no repair fees; you don't have most of your money from a mission sucked away by fixing your gear. You also don't have to spend a ton on consumables, provided you fight smart; most characters have a way to self-heal, and if you're playing well you're not getting hit much to begin with. It's refreshing to be allowed to keep most of your profit after a mission in a game like this.

Now, all of this probably sounds really good; and it is. So you might be asking, "where's the mismanagement you were talking about." Well, it comes when you try to play with other people, especially those who are playing characters other than yours. See, each of the three teams - Black Lambs (Seha, Sylvi, J, Yuri, Mysteltainn), Wolf Dogs (Nata, Levia, Harpy, Tina, Violet), and Wildhuter (Wolfgang, Luna, Soma) - have their own storylines, and unfortunately, while those storylines often reference one another, they don't often neatly intersect. This means that playing with other players who have chosen characters in different teams can be difficult or even outright impossible, as you don't share the same missions at the same time or even have completely different lobbies. There's a fair amount of cross-play between Black Lambs and Wolf Dogs, and the two storylines roughly sync up eventually (right around the Lambs Keeper), but Wildhuter is almost completely divorced from the other two.

What's worse, the Wildhuter are even divorced from themselves. Wolfgang has a completely different storyline from Luna and Soma, despite being on the same team. This means that if you play Wolfgang, you cannot play with anyone else except other Wolfgang players until you reach Gangnam District, at which point you can play with other Wildhuter players. You won't be able to play with Black Lambs or Wolf Dogs players until endgame content, such as the Dimensional Gate, Purification Ops, etc.

EDIT 9/20/19: With the addition of Bai, Wolfgang has one other character that shares his storyline. Seth, Luna, and Soma still don't share a storyline with the rest of Wildhuter until Gangnam District.

This is a huge, huge flaw in Closers, and one of its biggest. There is no point to an MMO where you're cut off from playing with large segments of the rest of the playerbase for no mechanically-relevant reason. At least in games that have opposing factions (such as Horde vs. Alliance in World of Warcraft), there's PvP between them to justify the opposition and separation. That's not the case here.

Another big problem this game has is its monetization scheme. There are a lot of things in the cash shop that slap of pay-to-win mechanics (for example, the $150 Rogue Agents DLC package you can see right here in Steam). Moreover, cosmetic items - costumes in particular - have stats attached. As a result, costumes are essentially just another layer of equipment over and above your weapon core, units, and trinkets. On the bright side, you don't really outlevel costumes. On the not-so-bright side, most costumes, particularly main outfit costumes, are cash-shop purchases. You are given some freebies throughout the main story, and a few costume items - mostly accessories - can random-drop from specific missions at their highest difficulty, so it's not entirely pay-to-win, but it is a bit skeevy.

Closers isn't bad if you go in informed, but has a nasty tendency to surprise you with unfortunate mistakes in design if you don't.

Draco has been pretty much exactly what I've been wanting in a 20XX character; a mix of melee and ranged combat, with access to multiple primary weapons. The ability to passively accumulate charged shots and fire them with a single button combination is just a perk to me, and I'm not bothered by the fact that he can only carry one power at a time; I seldom use powers outside of utility anyway!

Draco has access to all non-default Primary weapons belonging to Ace and Nina, and well as his own set. His own weapons are not to be discounted. Gemini has 8-way fire and its charged shots are essentially chain lightning; they chain from enemy to enemy until they fail to kill one. Peacebringer gives you the ability to reflect projectiles. Rapture not only provides an arcing projectile for those hard-to-hit cretins, but also can be charged to create a temporary platform for crossing obstacles. Even your basic weapons, Unstoppable Force and Volt Edge, give you effectively a secondary jump and a stun when charged. And keep in mind - you can wield up to three of these at once, as well as a boss power.

My only complaints with Draco are extremely mild; first, he's big. Now, I have no problem with large characters, but he's got a bigger hitbox than most of the other characters. That's going to take some adjusting to, and it may mean you take a few unintended hits until you make that adjustment. Second, he (like the other DLC and Revenant characters) doesn't have any cutscenes as you progress through the game. This game's not exactly story-heavy, but Draco and Hawk don't get to participate in what little there is.

Still though, Draco's damn fun, and really that's all that matters. Intelligently picking and using your lone power, and making full use of the mobility of his native weaponry and the attack profiles of his borrowed weapons will definitely let Draco live up to his moniker of "The Endless Arsenal."