Recent reviews by /Chaos:Phinn/

I'm really only interested in the single player campaign/content and it's been a real blast so far at 6 hours in. Very enjoyable.

I'm a huge Fallout fan, and have been playing the series since the original. But I waited a long, long time to pick this up because the reviews were so bad for so long. The more recent reviews after the 100th content patch are much better, and grabbing it for a few bucks during a sale made it an easy decision. Now it's in pretty good shape (for a Bethesda game, anyway). I've only played a few hours, but it has the same feel as the previous Bethesda entries in the series. If you enjoyed Fallout 3 and 4, you'll like Fallout 76.

A very good hack and slash dungeon crawling game in the vein of Diablo. The pixel art is gorgeous, and the combat is pretty satisfying. There are currently 7 playable characters, each with a unique style of play and abilities. One interesting aspect of the game is that, as you level each character up, you unlock buffs for the entire family.

The major drawback of the game is that, while the levels are somewhat randomly generated, there are only a handful of unique environments. You end up playing the same few levels over and over to level your characters and unlock skills. You also grind for Morv, the in-game currency used to buy additional upgrades.

Overall it's a fun, beautiful game that tends to get a little repetitive. Thankfully, the variety of characters make even playing the same levels repeatedly more interesting.

Moonlighter at first seems like a Zelda-inspired dungeon crawler, but the similarities are mostly visual. The game does not include an overworld map, is limited to only 4 dungeons (a 5th if you grab the DLC), and the equippable items are limited to weapons and armor - you won't find a Hook Shot or Power Bracelet here.

In the Zelda series, the emphasis is on exploration, and finding new gear that unlocks new areas of the map. In Moonlighter, progression is all about upgrading your weapons to hit harder and your armor to boost your health.

Each dungeon has its own unique theme, including a tile set, enemies, and the "artifacts" that drop when enemies are killed or chests are looted. Many of the artifacts can be used to craft gear upgrades. Most you will simply sell in town for gold. Every dungeon includes 3 floors, but the map is randomly generated each time you start a new run. You need to beat the end boss on the 3rd floor to unlock the next dungeon. Unfortunately, you can only defeat each boss once; after that you will just find a bunch of random enemies in the boss room.

The game is fun, don't get me wrong, but the core game play is a repetitive grind. As you start each new dungeon you will find that the enemies are pretty tough. And they get harder on each new floor. If you are knocked out, you lose 75% of the treasure that you've managed to collect, and the dungeon will be reset (forcing you to start over) so there is incentive to play it safe rather than explore deeper. If you play like me, you will run the first 1-2 floors of a dungeon over and over and over again to farm crafting materials and gold so that you can upgrade your gear as much as possible before tackling the third floor and the end boss. And then you'll unlock the next, more difficult dungeon, and repeat the whole process again.

At the start there are a number of mechanics that seem designed to slow down your progress. Your inventory is quite limited and you can't drop or destroy items, so when you bag fills up you have to run back to town. The only way to exit the dungeons is with a pendant, which resets your progress. Selling items requires you to actually run your family shop - placing items on display, setting prices, opening the shop, and watching how customers react to your prices so that you can adjust them. In the beginning you will spend about 50% of your time in dungeons, and 50% in the shop.

As you progress, a lot of the hurdles are removed. Your inventory remains painfully limited, but you get a mirror that lets your destroy items (in exchange for a fraction of the gold that you could sell them for in your shop). You get an item that lets you teleport out of a dungeon and then return (but all of the enemies respawn). You get an assistant in your shop that can sell your items for you (for a 30% cut). You can even bring another merchant to town so that you can buy some of the crafting materials that you need.

In the end, though, you will spend the majority of your time running the same 4 dungeons over and over and over to collect materials and gold to upgrade your gear. And then the game is over. It IS a small but fun game with a solid 10-15 hours of play that gets stretched out to 20-25 because of all the mechanics designed to slow down your progress.

I'm currently working on the DLC, but they somehow managed to make the game even MORE of a grind. There is ONE new dungeon, most of the enemies are rehashed from the original 4, crafting materials seem even more rare than they were in the main game, AND "the catalyst" (the item that lets you teleport out of a dungeon and return where you left off) is disabled. You either have to reset the dungeon every time, or pay a pretty hefty price to an NPC that will create a portal for you. Oof.

By far the most fun VR experience I've had. Superhot is a fun game, but playing in VR is a blast. The only drawback is the very real danger that you'll tear the knees of your jeans ducking for cover.

I've played the WoC D&D board games (like Ravenloft) and this is a really faithful adaptation. It's a hell of a lot of fun and something you can play for 10 minutes at a time or as long as you'd like (being that the levels are randomly generated).

They put a lot of time and effort into making this feel like a board game. The tiles slamming down, the dice rolling. While I enjoy the board games, there are a lot of very complex rules, significant setup time, lots of pieces, cards, dice, and counters to keep track of, and depending on how you explore the dungeons, you need lots of space. Tales of Candlekeep automates all of those rules and makes it a joy to quickly fire up and play. You just need to decide where to move, which actions to take, and which edge of the tile you'd like to explore next. Everything else is handled for you, which is really nice.

The biggest drawback by far is the lack of multiplayer. This game would be about 100 times better if I could play with my family, on the same or different computers. They don't advertise it as a multiplayer game, though, so I don't feel cheated. I'd just really love to be able to play with friends.

It's exactly what it is advertised to be. A "how many words can you make" game with an RPG and timing gimmick. It's very similar to the old Bookworm Adventures game from PopCap, which is not a bad thing.

You're given a set of 10 pseudo-randomly generated tiles that you will use to make words. Your character marches from the left of each level towards the right, stopping whenever he reaches a new enemy. A timer starts at the same time, indicating when the enemy will attack. A good vocabulary and decent typing speed will help you kill enemies before they can attack. The longer your words, the more damage you'll do.

You obviously can't use the same word twice on a level (that would make beating the enemies fairly trivial). Part of the challenge is saving the longer words that you think of for the most powerful enemies on a level so that you don't have to resort to wimpy, 3-letter attacks.

As you progress you'll earn gold and items that you use to buy upgrades to your gear. Each piece of gear has special abilities. One of the early unlocks is a monster guide that you can use to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the enemies on each level, helping you to choose the gear that will do the most damage to the toughest opponents.

If you get stuck (and you probably will) you can replay old levels to earn stars (which unlock more gear), and gold (which you can use to upgrade the gear you have). It can feel a little grindy, especially at the beginning when there aren't many levels to go back and play so you end up playing the same levels 5 or 10 times to grind out gold. The game is pretty good about generating different tile sets, though, so you'll be racing to come up with new words even on replays.

Definitely a fun game.

1.) It's an indie developed by a couple of friends.
2.) It's an interesting idea.
3.) It takes about 10-15 minutes to play through.
4.) It's free.

Why are you reading reviews? Play it.

Atmospheric RPG shooter with horror elements and...just...if you haven't played it, you need to play it. PLAY IT.

I really, really, really wish I could recommend this game. Actually, I kinda do (see the bottom for my update after managing to finish the game).

Let me start by saying that, if all you are looking for from a LEGO game is a chance to play through the story and see Tt's humurous take on The Force Awakens, you won't be disappointed. It's fun, and pretty, and probably the best LEGO game so far as far as mechanics and variety are concerned. It really is pleasure. In particular, the new voice recordings and audio from the cast is a treat to listen to. There are also original adventures featuring ancillary characters and background that was mentioned in the movie but we haven't had a chance to see before now. It's a curious question to wonder "is this canon?" because each of the new stories has a solid foundation in the new canon, but are obviously told in TT games' unique style.

So, if you want to drop $50-60 on a game that you will absolutely have a blast playing for the 4 or 5 hours it takes you to work your way through the main story and perhaps the side adventures, don't hesitate!

If, however, you are like me and you play LEGO games as a completionist and you'd like to get to 100% unlocks, with all red bricks, gold bricks, "True Jedi" on every level, and all character and vehicle unlocks, well, prepare to be frustrated. This game is FULL of bugs. Here are just a few that I have encountered:

* My save game inexplicably reset after the first 6 chapters of story mode, showing 14% completion but forcing me to restart from the beginning and play through the first 6 levels over again.
* Numerous video and sound glitches.
* A Microfighter race on the D'Qar hub that simply will not start, no matter which character or vehicle I use, preventing me from getting the last gold brick on that hub (even across multiple restarts of the game).
* A bug in the "Battle of Takodana" free play level that does not trigger the TIE fighter sequence during the "cover" battle near the start of the level and so your characters remain trapped in cover, unable to advance through the level.
* Tried to interact with a door that could be cut open with a lightsaber only to have the character freeze and become unusable (thankfully the problem fixed itself when I switched to the other character and continued playing).
* Several instances where "multi-build" objects could not be destroyed and I needed to exit and restart the level in order to build the different configurations. This never prevented me from advancing in a level, but did prevent me from obtaining collectibles.

Keep in mind that I finished the main story two days ago, and I've encountered all of these problems in the first few hours after trying to work my way towards 100% completion. One bug I figure I'll give up on and wait for a patch while I work on other stuff, but now I've encountered several that prevent me from collecting minikits and bricks to move forward.

If the game is patched soon to fix these bugs, i wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. It's fun, and by far the most beautiful LEGO game to date. But right now it simply is not worth the $50+ to play a game masquerading as a AAA title that has only a few hours of gameplay before you encounter game stopping bugs.

UPDATE: After letting the game sit in my library for a few days, I decided to fire it back up. I was able to slog through and get 100% completion as well us unlock all of the Steam achievements the game has to offer. As a result, I'm flipping my review from a negative one to a positive one with some caveats.

It's still a buggy mess. This is not helped by the fact that many of the quests for gold bricks that you will find in the hubs offer little or no guidance about how to complete them. Some of them do! You pick up a quest and you'll get a trail of blue studs that lead you to your objective. Others, not so much: you're left standing at the quest giver with no idea where to begin. Some can be completed in the immediate area; others require you to travel a fair distance; others fall everywhere in between.

One particularly annoying "feature" is that you can't view the map while you're on a vehicle, meaning that you need to dismount, open the map to find what you're looking for, and then hop back on. Another map-related bug means that trying to set waypoints only sort of works...there usually isn't an indication on the map of where your waypoint is, but usually when you close the map you'll have a trail of ghost studs to follow. Another is that quest markers will flash back and forth between checked and unchecked as you move the map around. Think you already finished one quest? Nudge the map a bit and it may show up as checked!

The combination of progress-halting bugs and quests without any kind of useful information regarding how to complete them means that I gave up on quests more than once, assuming the game had bugged out, only to return later and find out that I'd just missed something or hadn't looked under the right rock. It's pretty bad when a game is so buggy that it's easier to believe that it is broken than that you're missing something.

But, it is possible to play all the way through. Yes, it still bugs out from time to time. Yes, sometimes you have to try the same level or quest 3, 4, more times before it finally works. Yes, it crashes to desktop without warning. But it's still a fun game, and with enough patience, you can get through it and see everything.

I'd still recommend that most people wait until WB/TT gets around to patching it, but that day may never come. If you have patience and are a LEGO and/or Star Wars fan, it may be worth giving it a shot.