Recent reviews by riccal

Kind of a shame what happened to Gwent. Just to preface this, I have probably 1k hours in the mobile and/or GOG version. This **WAS** one of my favorite games in the TCG genre. Until the devs cut support.

The core gameplay of this is very unlike other card games. You draw all of your cards at once (with addtl draws in between rounds) and take turns playing cards until you or your opponent pass. Games follow a best of three round system where typically only cards in-hand are retained between rounds (although there are some units with carryover effects). Cards don't have a mana value during a match, instead the "mana" value is accounted for during deckbuilding by forcing an upper limit of total mana across all cards in the deck. Cards are either units with point totals or are spells which impact other units's point totals in some way. Whoever has the most points on board at the end of a round wins that round. Decks building has 2 simple rules: the deck must have more than x number of cards and the deck must not go over a certain "provision" total (where each card has a provision amount which indicates the card's relative power).

Because of the Bo3 format, there are a lot of interesting strategies that come up. Do you go all in to win in round 1+2? Do you try to get your opponent to waste resources in round 1 and you go for the win in 2+3? Do you win big in round 1 then try to force an over-commitment from your opponent in round 2 so you have an advantage in round 3? There are lots of ways of think about strategy here.

Unfortunately, the devs were too generous with players earning in-game currency, so the game didn't earn enough money. Due to this poor monetization structure, eventually CDPR cut support for the game and now there is no chance of there ever being new cards. Before they dropped support, they did implement a community voting system. This mixes up the meta every month, but the community tends to overreact to over- or under-performing cards, so it feels very chaotic.

In the current state, I can no longer recommend this game, due completely to the fact that there will be no further support for the game.

It's Monster Train, but now its 2. The new clans all create cool new build archetypes, and the old clans are back too. Kind of miss being able to smoosh units together into one, but you can kind of do that now with equipment.

It's like a mix between Age of Empires and They Are Billions. The goal is simple: build a base, build an army, build a bunch of walls, and try to survive.

I'm a few missions into the campaign. This is not an easy game, but it doesn't feel unfair. If you lose, it's usually obvious why. I'm also enjoying the light humor in the campaign.

excellent follow up to PoE1, There are clearly flaws to the game, but its also EA, so we have time to improve.

GrindFest: The Game. "Yo dawg, I heard you like grinding, so i put a grind in your grind, so you can grind while you grind."

Things you'll be grinding in this game:
* EXP
* Money
* Mana (meta-currency)
* getting gear
* going inside your gear to make your gear better
* gear aptitude (how well your characters scale with gear)
* class proficiency
* gear proficiency

Hope you really like playing Martial Training 4, because you'll be seeing it **A LOT**. Then, once you beat the game and unlock carnage world, you get to do all of the missions again, but the enemies are 99999999% stronger. Then you get to go back to MT4, but now its red.

It's a decent souls like. Not the best of the genre, but not the worst. The itemization was interesting. Most weapons in the game can be split up into handle and blade, and you can mix and match as you choose. Want to play big unga bunga strength build, but want to use a dagger handle for quick attacks? Totally up to you.

Story being based off of Pinocchio was interesting at first, but it quickly got way out into crazy territory.

Combat was overall not super interesting. 80% of the game was far easier than Dark Souls, while the bosses that ended up being hard were simply difficult because they didn't telegraph their attacks at all. The game places a lot of emphasis on perfect guarding and parrying, but the late game bosses take absolutely forever to guard break, so it's just not worth trying.

Overall, I'd say its worth it if you like Souls likes, but get it on sale.

It's such a shame that this game had such a terrible launch. What we have now in 2024 is absolutely an amazing game. Everything from sounds, visuals, game-play and story all line up great. With my 2080S and R9-3900X, the game runs fairly well on High settings (cant do ultra/ray-tracing etc), I had a solid 60fps for *most* of the game, with noticeable drops only in the high clutter areas of the DLC zone. Sound quality is great, loved all of the musical choices, with the voice acting work being amazing. I think Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba absolutely killed it in their roles.

Game play is fun and the various skill trees feel diverse enough that each tree feels distinct. I personally did a throwing dagger build for my hard play-through. It was a bit clunky at first, but once I got a few of the perks and decent daggers, it was amazing being able to run around and chain stun and/or one-shot mobs.

I also have to mention that the DLC Phantom Liberty is possibly one of the best DLCs I've played. It doesn't necessarily add much in the way of new game-play content like some DLCs might, but the additional story that you get is fantastic and the final shootout scene was so good.

First impressions is that this is basically Fallout in space. Seems like fun so far.

Edit: Finished the game at ~20 hours. Updating my recommendation from a 'Yes' to a 'No'. Played the game through with a mostly melee build on hard, although I did play a few hours with guns.

* melee weapons: one- vs two- handed weapons has practically zero difference. I can't tell that there is a difference at all, so why do we have two skills?
* guns: there is like 8 guns in the whole game.... slow pistol, burst pistol, semi-auto rifle, LMG, flamethrower, grenade launcher. Thats basically it. Not very exciting
* science weapons: some are fun, then you find the prismatic hammer then you wonder why there are other weapons in the game? Overall, weapon balance is allllll over the place
* story: you wake up and you decide between saving the other people in cryosleep or you look out for yourself and become the evil company man. thats it. everything in this game is just a riff on corps bad.
* graphics are nice, but i didnt really feel one way or the other.
* performance was good, didnt have a single crash or bad fps area, so the older reviews complaining about performance must be outdated.
* character build choices are very low. Lockpicking, dialog, hacking, combat, and thats kinda about it.

Overall, the game is boring and absolutely not worth the full admission price. Maybe if you get the game at a hefty discount its worth it, but even then, you probably won't get much more than 30 hours of game out.

I'd probably rate this a 6/10. The game definitely reminds me of single player Starcraft campaign missions. You control a small group of units as a cohesive single entity. You control your squad of marines to navigate through usually tight and narrow corridors to complete mission objectives, trying to manage unit stress and health, among other resources. Playing through the game unlocks new active abilities that you can cast during missions. There is an outside of the mission xcom style base management system, but it is very barebones, with little strategy to it beyond managing which marines require doctor attention first.

There is a very obvious emphasis on stealth during missions, but there is no real way to actually manage stealth, apart from a castable one-shot one-kill sniper shot cooldown, so missions typically devolve into finding some long corridor or open room to hunker down with turrets, murder everyone, pick the turrets up, then move onto the next murder corridor, so it gets kind of repetitive after a while.

The story is very boring, with practically no redeeming dialogue and character development. There is also a new game plus, but I just don't see any incentive to go back and play the game again.

I see other reviews mentioning game breaking bugs, but I've only had one crash-to-desktop throughout my entire campaign. There are certainly tons of visual bugs (aliens dying in the air, text boxes clearing out, etc) and I did encounter an issue a couple times where one of my marines got yeeted into outer space, but nothing loading an autosave didn't solve.

Overall, I'd suggest picking the game up if you are a fan of the franchise and also a fan of tactical RTS adjacent gameplay.

Jedi Survivor is, at it's core, a good game, but it's marred by poor performance.

For those unfamiliar, this is best described as a Star Wars story meets a Souls-like combat system meets a Metroidvania exploration system. Most combat encounters revolve around parrying enemies' enough to break their stagger meter, with a lot of platforming during zone traversal. Progression through the zones mostly revolves around unlocking new movement abilities to enable the ability to explore more of the world. Skill unlocks functions similarly to Souls-like, but a little more forgiving, in that you can bank full level-ups once you accumulate enough xp to unlock the level up.

Performance for me was never bad enough for it to prevent me from playing the game, but the game was hard-locked at max 60fps. Most of the game stayed between 50-60fps, with some problem areas dropping down to 20. I didn't encounter anything that was game-breaking, with only one crash-to-desktop in my 40 hours of gameplay.