Recent reviews by Mary Choppins

This game makes a group of teenage girls bark orders at each other like a group of drill sergeants and that's great.

I'm still fairly new to Warframe, but I think I know enough of the basics to give a quick overview.

This game's environments are absolutely beautiful in a flying toasters meets HR Geiger sort of way. The gameplay borrows heavily from shooters like Halo: Combat Evolved and looter shooters like Borderlands. The number of environments and waypoint system actually reminds me of ARPGs like Path of Exile. Many times it feels like I'm playing Dynasty Warriors when I pull out my sword and go to hit people with it.

The crafting system is momentarily a bit intimidating when you start. The tutorials are kinda weak, but you pick it up fairly quickly. Everything is centered around a fairly simple card system. The early guns can kinda suck, but the early swords are fun as hell to just run around with. Eventually you can craft much nicer guns that are similar to familiar ones from other shooters. Damage uses a simple to understand elemental system. One of my friends sent me an infographic about what enemy classes are vulnerable to what and I have it on my tablet next to me while playing still.

I have yet to run into monetization as a barrier very hard. I do know you can speed up crafting delays and grinds for certain components with it if you have limited play time. I think that's a much better and friendlier system than many other free2play things of this quality use. I'm a bit worried that I still haven't figured out how they lure in and milk their whales though. There's the possibility I will walk away if I feel like that's oppressive or ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Some criticism: The minimap and navigation system in freeplay areas sucks. Use the M key to bring up a bigger map to navigate. It took a long time for me to find that. You eventually gain access to the ability to fly in free play missions and specific missions that use flying. I'm just unlocking it at 20 hours, Be ready for some annoying long walks. The game experience also does markedly improve when you are playing with friends rather than randos. It took me playing with people I knew on voice to actually figure out where they hid the controls to do missions solo, so that was some unfriendly design. The menus in general feel like something from back when everyone expected players to just poke around till they mastered them.

Overall I'd say this one is well worth a shot if you like any of the games I mentioned earlier or just shooters in general.

This game reminds me of space chem but in a bigger more open world. Similar to factorio but without the "combat". It's a really fun budget game that's huge bang for your buck!

I grew up on 4x games and hadn't touched a "new" one in over a decade (I'm looking at you MoO3). I picked this up on the recommendation of one of my friends, I'm 20+ hours in and I'm hooked. The general form of it reminds me of Ascendancy or Master of Orion 2, but it's deeper and more challenging. I haven't won a war with an AI yet in this thing. It has random references to Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri in it. It's great, much do recommend.