Recent reviews by Finzy

(Check out my Stormblood expansion/DLC review for more up to date thoughts of what I think)

Realm Reborn is a sequel to the previously released Final Fantasy XIV, which wasn’t received very well, and this is even conveniently explained in the game’s plot: there’s an apocalypse which ravages the whole realm and begins a new era. Personally I hadn’t played the previous game but this sequel is said to offer significant improvements over the original across the board, it's essentially an entirely redesigned game of its own.

The plot is fairly generic save the world kind of stuff: you are an adventurer brought into one of the game’s three big city-states with a special ability to attune to crystals which hold some great ability to hold off evil. You perform tasks for the city-states and eventually rise to become an envoy between them and even serve them. Similar to single-player games, the main plot and many of the other quests are filled with cutscenes, and in the main story’s case, the significant ones are also voiced. It’s all easy to follow and they’ve tried to put a bit of story into everything, for instance all of the game’s class guilds have a storyline of their own that advances as you gain levels and do guild quests.

However this kind of plot is well suited for MMO and something as complex as Final Fantasy XIII’s super messy plot obviously wouldn’t work here. Rising in guild ranks and joining armies feels like an accomplishment, and you get treated to far more heroic stuff like taking on massive primals (think summons from previous Final Fantasy titles) rather fast. The game overall plays much like a singleplayer game story wise: the story is focused on your personal character and many plot advancing quests have certain “duty” sections that can only be completed with your own character, such as taking on a boss battle. This can be reversed too in some cases: some boss battles and dungeons instead put you in a party with others. Most of the game can be soloed if you want, but the option to do stuff in a party is totally there too, you’ll only ever be separated for brief periods at a time.

This focus on your own character is what sets the game apart from other MMOs in my opinion and makes the game more interesting. The cutscenes are also no worse quality than in singleplayer FF titles and the game’s graphics and particularly animation are fantastic. All characters are lively animated and seeing your character pull off all kinds of stuff like stupid faces in cutscenes is really fun and involving. The game is also really well optimized, running on a large variety of systems and even having its own preset settings for laptops for instance that take your specs into account. The user interface in the game is really good too, super easy to use and slick looking, I was never at a loss to find something.

Gameplay is similar to other MMO titles and the difficulty level is really good across the board, you will be challenged at every level and you can always find more dangerous or easier opponents and quests. As a nice twist your character can be literally any class in the game – you can use and level any one class at a time, provided you have joined their guild, and certain class abilities can also be used by other classes. For instance, Gladiators that have leveled Conjurer can cast Cure, which they normally wouldn’t have access to, so cross-classing a bit is encouraged and even required to get Jobs (specialized mid/late-game classes) later on. To swap a class you just swap to a different gear preset, which you can create lists of. At the most basic level you just need to change a weapon to switch to another class.

The game is easy to get into as well, there’s a 15 day free trial that offers leveling of a single character up to level 20, but you can cross-class him/her as much as you like, and it’s definitely enough to get a good look at the game. The free trial is best played with a friend that already owns the game though, because you cannot set up your own parties in it, but other subscribed players can invite you to theirs. Marketplace and trading functions are limited but otherwise there’s no significant restrictions. The game is available as a digital download on the website and on Steam, as well as on PS3 and PS4 on the consoles, the multiplayer is cross-platform, and new buyers of the game automatically get 30 free game days. Steam users will also be happy to know that the monthly subscription can be paid with just Steam wallet money, assuming you also bought the game from Steam.

TL;DR

It's great. Don't compare it to Square Enix's other new FF games. It's a traditional MMO game with Final Fantasy flavor and one well designed one at that. I enjoy it tons more than the recent main series FF games. And I wrote this review originally for something else in mind, if you're wondering why it's so long and detailed. :P Give it a chance, it deserves more PC Steam players. And, it has a ton of content in a large world. I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what it has to offer so far at the moment of writing.

It's an extremely bad port. Locked at 1280x720 resolution, no graphics settings, absolutely gigantic download (60 GB + 120 GB required for install), and badly optimized so framerate jumps all over the place and stutters a lot. The FMV cutscenes and audio are also supposedly lower quality than the PS3 version.

I know it's not right to judge the game entirely technically, but since this is a port of an old game released YEARS AGO and the only selling point was for people to play it on PC with enhanced graphics and all, well...it does not deliver that at all. You might as well play the console version for a better experience.

Thank god there's at least a way to mod higher resolutions in, but really, Square should've fixed that themselves. It's outrageous to release any kind of PC game without offering any graphics options whatsoever and it just shows that they paid no attention whatsoever into this port. Even the instant esc-button closing the game feels super cheap like this was a test build and they couldn't be bothered to create a proper menu for it.

I'm all for more games being ported to PC but this minimum effort kind of release is not the right way to do it at all. I can't support it. I'm only playing it because I missed the PS3 release which I might as well have played instead.

Very brutal and athmospheric RTS. Sounds are beefy and there's nothing like sinking tanks on ice and hearing Soviets scream stuff (the voiceacting is great, and I play Soviets :P). Loads of content too and it's a quality game, just like all of Relic's RTSes. It only has two factions as of now but it doesn't bother me in the slightest since they have very different playstyles and you can play many different roles with all the commanders and units available either way.

Great co-op modes and flawless netcode too, the game doesn't lag one bit when playing with Pan who's from Australia so that's saying something.

With all the unlockable things and achievements in the game you can spend quite a bit of time even just playing comp stomp vs the AI until you learn the game which is great.

Epic timewaster game. Minecraft in space with jetpacks, vehicles, guns, turrets and huge ass spacecraft that you can build/drive around. Mine resources from asteroids and build space stations and defences and stuff and go raid other peoples' ships. LOTS of stuff to learn and see and very fun to play. The worlds are huge too, literally space infinite (well almost). Good physics engine and playable netcode even on distant servers, although the game has quite a few bugs in its current state (but that's a given for an early access title).

At first I thought this was some kind of realistic space "engineering" simulator, but really it's not, it's more along the lines of very high tech Minecraft with gadgets. Can be played singleplayer or multiplayer and the worlds can be saved just like in Minecraft so you can continue from where you left off.

Best substitute for chess ever. It has violence. Orks. Chaos. Dark Elves. Ogres. Playing madden.
It's all turn based and it has the exact same learning curve as the actual board game, but it's a very intelligent game as a result which requires good gambling skills.

The game's a bit aged now but still great fun to play, especially while waiting for the sequel (!) Blood Bowl II to come out. It's still active online too, at least at the moment of writing, and you want to be playing this game online to really learn it properly.

If you're looking for a game that challenges you to think and the idea of online chess where you can kill, foul and injure your opponents sounds interesting to you, give this game a chance. Just note that you need some patience, an average BB game against a human opponent typically lasts at least 1 hour.

METAL...GEAR....ON PC!
Plus, a very therapeutic game for whenever you feel the urge to cut things to 400 pieces.

Very well optimized (disregard the high system requirements; they're actually lower) and fun to play. It isn't an MGS game; it's more like a Devil May Cry esque action game with technical combo moves and stuff and it's very high on action. But you can still hide in a cardboard box so there's that. You can satisfy your irresistable urges to get inside a box and fulfill your destiny. However, you'll be spending much more time slicing everything that moves or doesn't move to pieces.

Now if Konami could just start porting the main MGS series' games to PC since they did such a good job with this one...

Stay away from the PC port of this game, if you're really interested in the game, I'd suggest getting it for PS3/Xbox360 if you have a choice. The netcode lags horrendously even versus EU players, and the online multiplayer hasn't been tested at all.

Trying to invite friends to private matches always crashes (!!) the game for me and everyone else I've played with. The only way I've gotten it to work is through Steam invites, which send you to a bugged character selection screen showing wrong characters and can sometimes kick you out with a session not available message, and if the game miraculously gets past that into the actual game, you'll be dealing with constant disconnection issues and terrible lag.

In addition the multiplayer is region locked (THE HELL?) so you can't see your friends in the public rooms unless they are in the same region as you are.

It's really a shame the PC port is so shoddily done, the gameplay is great fun and I'm sure I'd enjoy this game a lot if I could just properly play it online. As it stands, only get this if you don't mind playing it in singleplayer, or occasional public games against randoms from the same country - I doubt you could play it very well with anyone from far, especially anyone from some other continent...

Ingenious would be the word to describe this game. Makes you think of entirely new ways to play the game with its control scheme (controlling two characters at once is like using another portion of your brain almost), and the art style, soundtrack and sounds would be good enough for an impressive full lenght animated film. Amazing in just all ways and it doesn't get boring, the environments change constantly and it keeps you hooked to the game.

This was the first MMO I was genuinely interested in, being set in a D&D world AND Forgotten Realms AND paying homage to the old Neverwinter Nights series (sort of, though it's obviously different), so I thought I would give it a try. It turned out to be very solid for a free to play game and I've been playing it actively since.

The game's presentation overall is really great. It's extremely easy to learn, menus are easy to use, the graphics look fantastic (with a cool one button "inspect" mode for taking nice screenshots or just looking around) and the soundtrack is really good. There's loads of customization options for character looks and races also. Classes not so much but I'll get to that point later.

Gameplay wise, it plays more like a hack n' slash action RPG than an actual D&D game. I think that's ultimately a good decision because not everybody can be expected to learn the whole ruleset just to play the game. While I would've liked to see way more D&D mechanics like alignments and skills being used, I think the system is fine and I adapted to it fast. Classes' skillsets are pretty limited too and only become more different later on, and the game does not have that many classes yet so you're bound to see lots of people playing typical rangers and rogues, but hopefully more are added later on. Overall the game feels "streamlined" this way so it's easy to pick up without having to worry too much about progression. But the combat at least feels crunchy and satisfying.

The setting is pretty interesting, being set after the Spellplague, the world is very different and there's lots of interesting new stuff going on, especially if you are familiar with any past Forgotten Realms games / books at all (the game also heavily references Salvatore's new books), and it has tons of lore relating to pretty much everything. Places, characters and monsters also look and feel very D&D-like, and I think the game's art style overall is very similar to Neverwinter Nights 2's, just prettier with much better animations and character models.

Then there's the Foundry which allows community created quests (with their own levels and everything) to be played in the game just like normal quests and that's a very interesting feature. I only briefly tried it so far but there's loads of good content available and anyone can make and share their own quests (provided you are at least a certain level). You don't even need to do anything special, you just walk up to a job board ingame, choose a quest, and the game does all the downloading and set up in the background for you. They play like modules for the old Neverwinter Nights games, if you're familiar with those, except they're integrated into the same game world. That at least ought to add replay value to the game.

Lastly it's free to play which to me at least is a huge plus and so far I haven't encountered any content in the game that I would need to pay for which is great. I don't know about high level play yet (lv22 at the moment of writing), but for a casual player like me who isn't all about being super competitive, I think you can get along as a free player just fine. The only real downsides to the game for me are its lack of difficulty sometimes (most of the standard quests can be easily soloed) and limited roleplaying.

So yeah...I would recommend it. :P You have nothing to lose anyway by trying it out, especially if D&D / NWN interests you anyhow.

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TL;DR with plusses and cons:

+ Excellent presentation / quality for a F2P game
+ Very nice graphics
+ Easy to learn
+ Fun combat, practically infinite content thanks to Foundry
+ Good use of lore

- Limited customization for classes
- No actual D&D roleplaying (alignments)
- Lacks D&D mechanics like skills
- A bit too easy, especially if you stick to recommended levels.