Recent reviews by Gaige

I have been enjoying my time with Blue Protocol, but it is an extremely difficult game to recommend to others. I will continue to play it but I wanted to write a review that reflects some of the issues with the game now, about a month in. Some of the original complaints in negative reviews such as time gating have given way to new issues.

The gear progression is extremely brisk and near constant. Player strength is measured through Ability Score, which is basically the sum of all your stats from gear, equipped skills, and so on. Note that Ability Score does not care if the stats on your gear actually benefit your own class, so it is not a particularly useful metric. Nonetheless, to get into parties to do new content advertising players are constantly raising the required gear score to join, and the majority of these advertisements are for a range out of reach for players that aren't constantly keeping up. Oftentimes the gear scores the parties require are well in excess of what the content actually requires, and it is just an unfortunate mess.

A major problem is that the fastest way to get the new gear is to do the newest content. The game does take some steps to relieve pressure on this system by introducing higher level equipment to older content when it's brought out, but for a party based game finding a decent party to run content with feels like more work than it should be. Many players use external DPS meters and judge based on the data from their meter, oftentimes without fully understanding what that data means.

Additionally, the brisk pace of gear progression also makes it extremely difficult to gear up more than one class on a character, even though they do let you pick an additional class for free. Making a new character is generally considered the viable option for trying other classes. However, due to the fact that characters cannot share anything, making a new character means no cosmetics carry over, and these cosmetics are EXPENSIVE. There are other problems with this too but the cosmetics really bothers me.

Let's talk a bit about the pricing of cosmetics. At launch a series of outfits were discounted, and they introduced halloween cosmetics the week of halloween. This game is less gacha focused overall and has plenty of direct buy outfits, something I've long wishes other gacha games would do. And yet for the halloween cosmetics you're paying $10.00 for a single outfit, and $13 for a single weapon skin, not even for a bundle for all 8 classes. Nope you would have to spend over $100 to get all the halloween cosmetics! Yikes! A guaranteed pity pull of the signature drop from the gacha costs about $150. Outfit bundles, now that the sale has ended, range from about $35 to $45 each. And by bundle I mean a single outfit but all of the parts for that outfit in one bundle, it is more expensive to individually buy parts I believe.

There are of course cosmetics that be obtained f2p, and other reviews go over the numerous currencies this game has. But the reality is, the large majority of the outfits require paid currency and the game does not let you get that *at all* without well... paying. For those that are fine spending there is a lot of outfit variety, for those that cannot spend there is not.

One final thing I would like to touch on is the game's localization. I see some reviews say the English is fine, but it needs to be said that this game's localization is atrocious. It is downright embarrassing that descriptions for effects and items are so poor, and at times even completely incorrect. My favorite example is the description for the Wound debuff: "In a state of reduced Healingiveness." Does this mean the target receives less healing? Do they GIVE less less healing??? What is Healingiveness??????????

Ultimately, I can't touch on every issue in this game in one review, and I know that the developers are aware of the shortcomings with the Ability Score system. In the next seasons they largely replace it with a new metric, whether that's good or not I suppose I will see. I have some hope for the game, and there are plenty of things I DO like about it, I feel like positive reviews have done a good job of talking about the things I like so I won't repeat them all here. But unless they improve item sharing or hit the brakes on the absurd stat scaling and gear progression this game is gonna turn off a lot of players that want to try different classes. And the cosmetics are just too damn expensive.

Coming from Phasmophobia, I'm genuinely surprised this game has so many positive reviews. Before I get into that though, the positive:

This game's visuals are very good, the atmosphere is spooky and some of the unique ghost events that can happen are genuinely scary.

With that out of the way, this game feels like it pulled as much as it could from Phasmophobia whether good or bad and didn't do enough to iterate on the formula.

Evidence is nearly identical to Phasmophobia, and the game suffers for it. Like with earlier Phasmo versions it can take far too long to get the ghost to interact with the various gizmos you leave sitting around their room, all the while they will repeat the same set of scares/interactions. Seeing the ghost move a piece of furniture and make a noise the first time is pretty scary, but when you're standing around waiting for it to draw on an easel and it's the third time it's slid that same grandfather clock forward and then back into place like a Disney attraction? It gets old.

This is worsened by the fact that only one map is available at the start and it will take a handful of visits to get to level 3 to access the second map. Equipment is also extremely expensive and some of the optional objectives require purchasing it. Dying or crashing mid run will cost you your equipment, and a single tool can cost an entire run's earnings early game. The game dangles impossible objectives in the player's face, which is worsened by the fact that the game does a poor job of explaining how anything works.

One of the worst aspects that this game ripped right from Phasmo is the high number of samey ghost types that are impossible to distinguish from one another. In a baffling decision the developers chose to have no information at all for a few ghost types, making it even more of a guessing game than Phasmo. Several times we had a Raiju, which the description suggests is more passive when players are in a pack, and yet while 3 of us were standing in and around the ghost room it was constantly moving things and doing the same scare events. Our takeaway from this is that the description only applies to when the ghost attempts to hunt, but in game descriptions are so vague it's hard to know that.

Typically my expectations with these types of games are low going in, but I still felt pretty disappointed after doing a handful of runs in Demonologist. If you're looking for an alternative to Phasmophobia, look elsewhere. Phasmo has improved in recent updates, making evidence gathering smoother and more consistent and simplifying the tests required to prove some ghost types. This game just feels like a bad trip down memory lane with a shiny coat of paint.

Bloons TD Battles 2 is free, so for fans of the series it's worth giving a try. That being said, it has some balancing issues at the moment that make it drop off pretty fast and pretty hard.

The basic premise is that the player earns money every 10ish seconds rather than from popping bloons. You can spend money on your towers or to send additional bloons at the opponent to overwhelm them. Sending bloons at the opponent increases the amount of money you earn every interval, so it's in the player's interest to spam them even when they are no threat. It's a simple and addictive formula like other bloons games.

This game works as a series of checks more or less. As rounds progress stronger bloons are available to send at the opponent, and eventually modifiers like regrow and camo can be applied at additional costs. Did the opponent bring anything that can pop camo? If not spam camo once it's available and they lose. Did the opponent bring anything that can pop lead? If not spam that. Can't pop lead + camo combined? Spam that. The early game is a rush to plan out strategies that can counter each of these checks.

The problem is that the towers in this game are ported directly from Bloons TD 6 and the player only is allowed to bring 3 of them alongside a hero. This in and of itself invalidates many towers as options, and the towers that can cover camo, lead and especially both are always going to be picked. For players familiar with Bloons TD 6, this means that the Dartling Gunner is easily the best choice and after passing a certain rank every player will bring it. After about 5 hours of play I'd say 4 out of 5 opponents use this tower.

So far my experience has been such that the only way I can win against properly used dartling towers is to survive long enough to spam reinforced MOABs, which can overwhelm them. However, an experienced player could bring something to counter these and so the cycle begins anew.

Honestly, I am unsure what would fix these balance issues. Maybe a way to ban certain towers before a match, but that would just form a meta around choosing the next best thing because players will always ban dartling. Perhaps a system that has separate, weighted ranks for each tower, so that dartling players will rise to higher ranks faster and give other towers a chance to shine. This would also allow for players to use new towers that have no unlocks and not be overwhelmed by an opponent with tier 3 or 4 towers.

Either way, I think the core formula of the game is fun and with some tweaking it would be a lot more enjoyable. I hope to see some updates in the near future that re-balance the game.

Edit 12/10/21: A new update has come out for the game since this review was written, I'll be updating it once I have played enough. For now some parts of the review may be inaccurate.

I love Phasmophobia, I play it with my friends all the time and that's why it's so hard to give it a thumbs down. The reason why this review is a thumbs down is because time and time again the devs refuse to address core issues and instead add content to the game that either dampens the experience or doesn't work properly.

Let me give a tldr first: If you're looking to fool around casually in a ghost game with a group of 3-4 friends, and especially if some of that group has VR, you will get your money's worth out of this game. The lower difficulties are a fine experience but players that are looking for more depth or a greater challenge will be disappointed.

Given that Phasmophobia is early access, I’m not going to touch much on bugs and performance issues in this review. There are a lot of them but I can overlook those as long as the core experience is fun. However, there are currently major problems that keep Phasmophobia from being as fun as it could be.

The sanity system is one major problem with Phasmophobia. As the average sanity of all players drops the ghost will begin to attack. Sanity ranges from 100%-0%, ghosts can start attacking around 50% (plenty of ghosts have exceptions to this rule but I won't spoil them). At 50% attacks can happen somewhat rarely, but by the time sanity hits 0% attacks will be constant. The ghost will finish hunting and start another within 30 seconds. Once this state is reached it is no longer reasonable to access the ghost room and obtain evidence, the team has to either leave or rely on a dead teammate to give them information outside of the game.

There are ways to prevent sanity drain, such as standing in the light or holding a lit candle. Ghost appearances can drain sanity even when in the light. Sanity pills are the only way to restore sanity, and only 4 can be brought per run. Prior to the current update, they restored 40% sanity per use, the recent update made them restore 5% less per difficulty, restoring 40% on the easiest one and 25% on the hardest. When a player is killed, every surviving player loses 15% sanity. The result is that once one player dies, sanity is likely too low to continue investigating and the surviving players have to guess the ghost type and leave.

Certain ghosts are designed in ways that are contradictory. Particularly a new ghost that will normally hunt early around 60% sanity, but having candles nearby will negate this and force it to hunt at 50% as others do. The trouble is that this ghost will frequently attack regardless of sanity whenever a flame is blown out, and players have no way to prevent candles from blowing out. So the counter to this particular ghost is to not attempt to counter the ghost. The same can be said for a new ghost type that gains speed for every active electronic item nearby. The counter to this ghost is to not use the tools the game gives you to locate the ghost. Once the ghost type is discerned the round is largely over so it’s not fun to try to plan around ghosts like these.

Some mechanics in Phasmophobia are misleading and poorly programmed. Take smudge sticks, an item to ward off ghosts, if lit near a ghost then it can't attack for a minute or so. If the ghost is currently attacking it will wander aimlessly for 6 or so seconds, buying players time to escape. The problem is that the smudge sticks will only affect the ghost the moment they are lit and the moment they burn out. For the few seconds they are actively burning they have no effect. This makes them feel inconsistent to use, especially when the animation makes it seem as if they are active the entire time they are burning. There is also no indicator for when smudge sticks take effect. It is very hard to discern if they were used successfully. I frequently die trying to use them to stun a hunting ghost.

This was touched on above, but difficulty in Phasmophobia is poorly implemented. Phasmophobia is a game with a low skill ceiling. There is only so much the player can do to be better at it. Most mechanics are outside of the player’s control. As a result, higher difficulty settings alter and remove central gameplay mechanics because this is the only way the devs feel they can make the game harder. Hiding in closets or lockers is an important means of escaping the ghost and surviving, higher difficulties block off these hiding spots in an attempt to force players to be more creative. Because of this, newer players are punished simply for learning maps and have to relearn them. Sanity drain is higher and pills are less effective on harder difficulties, which means players have less time to figure out what the ghost is before sanity drops to 0 and the ghost constantly attacks.

The result is that high difficulty runs become speedruns to get everything done before sanity is gone. The ghost may not provide its evidence in time. It's completely random and removes most skill from the equation. On higher difficulties the player has to guess without all of the evidence often (On the highest difficulty the ghost only provides 2 of its 3 evidence pieces at all, making it a literal guessing game). Every ghost has a unique trait that could potentially give it away without evidence. Unfortunately, there are 20 ghost types and most of their tells are rarer than evidence. Some unique traits cannot be discerned in game, such as the ghost that is unable to hunt for 120 seconds after being smudged instead of 90.

If the devs manage to fix up the sanity system, reverse some of the problematic difficulty choices, and tweak some of the more frustrating ghost types then I think Phasmophobia will be in a much better spot. As it is now though, I struggle to recommend it to anyone. If you have a group of friends to play with and/or VR, you will have some fun with it. If not, avoid it until it's had more updates.

Side note: I'm putting this after the review as it's about the community and not the game itself. Finding reliable information about this game is difficult, much more difficult than it should be. The developers want to obfuscate as much as they can, and as such are borderline hostile towards the wiki and other outside information sources. The main problem I had and witnessed was that the moderation team refused to provide answers for more specific questions or even offer to have them be answered by the dev team at a later date, and instead told myself and others to figure it out on our own. Phasmophobia is a confusing game, and unnecessarily so sometimes, so I would appreciate if the team would be more supportive of a wiki. Requesting a player spend dozens of hours trying to get the right ghost to appear in the right spot to test something is not reasonable.

I enjoyed Metallic Child quite a bit, but for the price tag it's hard to recommend at the moment. The core formula is fun and the devs have been fixing issues so I hope that in time I can change this review to a thumbs up. Keep that in mind as you read my review, and be sure to give the demo a try too if you're interested!

The game takes inspiration from series such as megaman, where there is a collection of robo baddies to take down and after beating one you gain their abilities to use for yourself. Metallic child has abilities like these, called Metallic Child (MC) Abilities. They vary wildly in how useful they are, I felt many weren't worth using at all. Without upgrades they can only be used 4 times before running out of charge, and items that restore charge are rare. Unlike megman you can only bring two of them along on a run and they share the same charge. I found myself opting not to use them in regular gameplay aside from extra damage on a boss. They are much more useful in the shorter challenge missions.

Most of the game takes place in procedurally generated mazes that are 3 floors long, it took me 30-40 minutes to play through these zones on average. There's a lack of variety in the types of areas, by the end of the game environments from the earlier bosses start to be reused with only subtle differences. Later areas also start to introduce more and more hazards. These can be difficult to avoid due to how attacking works, and enemies in these areas have more aggressive patterns to deal with as well.

Many of the skill attacks that Rona gets are slow, and while most can be interrupted with a roll, block or jump to avoid getting hit during them, it might mean doing so before even landing a single point of damage. This means that oftentimes the safest way to fight is to only use normal attacks. Normal attacks do move Rona around though, this can send her into hazards or away from enemies sometimes.

There are two defensive options that are weapon-specific. Sword and shield gets a block that if pressed at the right time performs a parry, called a just-guard in game. It allows Rona to keep attacking in place and works well against larger enemies. However, some attacks will ignore the guard and, beyond a type the game warns about, it's trial and error to find out which do. The other defensive option is a roll, rolling covers a reasonable distance but has a 1-2 second window afterward where Rona is stuck in place, unless she does a normal attack. Rolls feel very clunky to perform and bad rolls can result in taking damage that feels unfair because Rona is unable to get away. An example is accidentally rolling into a large enemy, which causes Rona to roll in place. I often found myself getting hit after the roll in these situations.

Enemies, chests and shops drop/sell mini-cores, which give various buffs/debuffs but only last a set duration. The timer does not tick down outside of fights, which is good. There are ways to upgrade good ones/remove bad ones which resets the timer and extends the duration of the buffs. There are only 3 slots for active cores and there is no way to discard them aside from picking up a new one, at which point one of your current ones will be replaced. It seems like there's a way the game determines which one to replace but it might as well be random because I could not figure it out.

Mini-cores can also give Rona a drone, which helps in battle. The game treats drones as a fourth mini-core slot, which is problematic. It means that any mini-core pickup could replace your current drone with a random different one whether you want that or not. The random one will not retain the level of your current one, so spending upgrades on drones feels less impactful than it should. Drones in general feel this way, they're nice to have but can't be planned around.

Super cores are a way that Rona levels up every run. She basically gets 10 level ups each run, each one lets her choose from 4 options for a passive buff. I like this system for the most part, but it did sometimes feel like the options I had did not pair with the gear I was using in a run.

That covers most of my issues with the game, you should check out some of the positive reviews to read about the game's positives, such as the visuals and voice acting. The game looks nice and the sound design is good. Some of the songs are shorter loops and wore on me over the course of 30 minute runs though.

I'll stick an exhaustive list of problems I ran into in the comments as well as misc stuff that didn't make it into the review proper. Thanks for reading, and if you feel like you can put up with the problems I talked about here then you should give the game a go!

Into the Breach is a puzzle rougelike that requires thought and planning for each consecutive turn. You are given a squad of three mechs and face off against waves of enemies. You can kill the enemies by attacking them, pushing them off cliffs or into liquids, or by having them attack eachother. Rounds end after a set number of turns, so routing the enemies isn't required. Enemy attacks are shown at the start of your turn so you can anticipate and turn them against eachother.

It's a fun formula, and it's made difficult through cities that you must defend, each hit to city takes away from your global health and if it reaches 0 it's game over. There are a couple of ways to restore that health, some missions offer it as a reward, and at the end of an island you have the option of spending earned renown on more health.

The game is divided between different islands that are similar to the sectors in FTL, there are 4 in all and once they have all been unlocked they can be tackled in any order. After completing 2 islands you can choose to do the final mission rather than do the remaining islands.

Each island has its own theme and mission types that appear. The desert island tends to have missions that involve killing a set number of enemies compared to an ice island where you have to protect/destroy robots that act on their own. The variety between the islands is nice, but 4 islands feels like far too few, after a couple of playthroughs the missions start to get a little repetitive.

Since Into the Breach suffers from a lack of content in regards to scenarios, the replay value comes from trying out different squads. Unfortunately, playing the game a second time with the same squad isn't as appealing as trying again with the same ship in FTL, as the mech's starting kit is generally worth using for the duration of the game.

So in its current state, I do recommend Into the Breach at its modest price of $15, I think it could easily provide 10-20 hours of entertainment and if additional islands are added even more. It also comes with FTL for free, which is an excellent game worth giving a try.

Before I get into the review, I'd like to say that I think Staxel is a fun game with a lot of potential, the reason I'm giving it a thumbs down is so I can talk more about the issues it has here, I'd give it a neutral review if I could. The game has some serious performance issues that make it hard to recommend to everyone as it is now, so I recommend giving it a follow and checking back later on for the time being. Staxel has many good aspects and if you do decide to purchase it after reading what I have to say, that's okay. If you're the type of person that often dips into Early Access titles without regret and has a solid PC then Staxel will deliver.

At its heart, Staxel is a farming game inspired by classics like Harvest Moon and Rune Factory. Similar to Stardew Valley, the player is tasked with growing crops each season to sell so that they can purchase better seeds and expand their farm. Unlike Stardew Valley, Staxel is a 3D, open-world sandbox. Any block can be destroyed and the entire town can be torn down and rebuilt. This allows for a high level of freedom in designing farms and houses, even in this early beta stage, the game has a decent amount of replay value.

Building a house from scratch is fun, but this is where the game's issues start to show. Building kills your performance and causes the framerate to drop significantly, particularly when placing multiple blocks in rapid succession. I have observed this on my hardware (GTX 960, i7 6700k, 16GB RAM). I find that my framerate can drop from a steady 60 to the [3/13] low 40s when building, and while it only lasts for a few seconds, it's very jarring. It also stutters when exploring the world and loading in and out distant terrain. I found that moving the game installation to my SSD reduced the world load stutter.

3/13 Edit: After briefly testing with the current build (1.2.13), I've found that my frame drops from building have improved, dropping into the 40s in the worst of it. A nice improvement, but far from perfect. Feel free to comment if you've noticed improvements (or a lack of) in framerate as well.

The multiplayer, while fun, introduces more performance issues. I spent a bit of time using the steam host as well as hosting an indepedent server from my computer, and had decent results, but I fear lesser hardware would struggle. The performance spikes from building that I mentioned above would cause server lag and delay for my friends connected to my server, and in some cases desync them and force them to reconnect to continue playing. In the end, I lowered all of my settings while hosting and things went much more smoothly.

I think that Staxel is rough around the edges, but nonetheless a charming experience worth looking into once some of the performance issues have been ironed out. If you can either host a server remotely or have a friend with the hardware to do so, then it delivers a multiplayer experience unlike any other game in the genre. Plukit has been responsive to fan feedback and is releasing updates at a steady pace, so I expect things will only improve from here.

If you're interested in hearing more about the game's positives, then you should check out Staxel's website here,[playstaxel.com] the Subreddit and Discord[discordapp.com] are also active and a good way to get a good feel for the game. Thank you for taking the time to read my review, and I hope that if you do decide to buy Staxel you enjoy the game as much as I do.

Maplestory is a fun, but grindy, MMO. It has improved over the years in terms of content, and much of the gameplay has been streamlined. The gameplay boils down to killing large amounts of enemies for a quest. Some quests require you to kill a set number, other quests require you to pick up items dropped by those enemies. There are other types of quests, but the aforementioned two are the bread and butter of the gameplay. In the past there would be a lot of downtime travelling between quest areas. Many quests now teleport the player to target locations so they can get back into the fray more quickly. If this doesn't sound like your cup of tea, then you won't be getting much mileage out of this game.

The key binding is somewhat restrictive, movement is locked to the arrow keys, so control setups must work around this. Joypad support exists, but is pretty poorly implemented, rather than assign skills directly to the joypad buttons, the joypad buttons emulate specific keys. The best option is to use an external program.

The game does not support resolutions above 1366x768, so you have to choose between a small window with text that can be hard to read, or a scaled image. The scaled image looks fine and the game is perfectly playable with it, but it would be nice to have the extra bump up to 1080p.

The microtransactions in this game are bearable, they give little advantage to players and are mostly cosmetic. Pets and exp/drop rate boosts are the exception, and they can be worked around. The main advantage to pets is that they can vacuum up items on the ground for you which saves time. There are also player shops that can be bought with microtransactions, but I have not messed around with this system since picking the game back up. It is irrelevant on the Reboot server.

The Reboot server is a separate server that was created since the last time I played this game. It does away with player trading, forcing players to obtain everything themselves. To compensate for the problems this creates, drop rates are increased alongside other bonuses. It's designed for a solo playstyle, but the party and guild system remains intact. For those who grew tired of the long grinds of previous versions, this server may feel like a breath of fresh air.

The concept here is really cool, Kingsway looks like a traditional RPG combined with rouge-like elements at first glance. The player explores an overworld map with the goal of going east across a continent, a wall of shadows closes in behind, forcing progression. The entire game takes place on a simulated windows 95 era desktop, complete with icons representing bags and player stats. Unfortunately, Kingsway fails to capitalize on this unique element. It actively works against the player by intentionally minimizing windows in combat and by having combat windows moving at all times. I only wish the game had the option to disable this mechanic, but it doesn't.

That very mechanic is what ruined the game for me, and why I cannot recommend it. Kingsway at its core is a barebones RPG game, there's very little depth and I quickly felt like I was retreading the same waters I had in every other RPG over the years. For those who can look past the gimmicky interface, there is fun to be had in Kingsway, but the lack of additional modes and the shallow pool of random encounters ensure that fun will not last.

I had a hard time deciding how to rate Civilization 6, on one hand I really like it. It introduces a nice level of complexity that I felt Civilization 5 was missing, and there are many conceptual improvements. The empire-wide happiness mechanic is gone, which means that settling more than 4 cities is once again a staple.

At the same time, this game was released unfinished. It's clear that it will need many more months of development, maybe even years, to reach the level of polish that Civilization 5 currently has. That's a shame too, they should not have sold the game as a finished product knowing its problems, but here we are. The short of it is, if you aren't a dedicated Civilization player or a fan of the series, go pick up Civilization 5 instead. It's cheaper, has more content, and is decently balanced. This game is not.

The DLC for this game is also pretty underwhelming. Adding additional Civs to play as is nice, charging $5 each is not.