Recent reviews by Codex

This had a chance of being such a good game, but the company just yoinking the rug on people after making a year long roadmap and trying to scam people out of refunds really tells you all you need about the company behind it.

In another world, I think it would have been something beloved by its audience and in fact many people are still in love with the gameplay, story and aesthetic. What a shame.

This game has it's fair share of problems, but the Developers are still working on the game and fixing things. A lot of the game is very modular as well, you can make a server with really low exp rates or high ones. Make it so the humans are stronger or weaker so you can either live out some fantasy of abusing animals with your own hands or by promoting everyone fight with the pals. And a whole lot more. Honestly, I just want them to add a few more alterations to this thing to allow everyone to have all the pal statues already collected for example, not a whole lot of fun doing that multiple times.

There's even been nice little updates where they've added more land and more pals and we can still expect more content to come.

Really all I have to say however, is that this game is so good that Nintendo decided to sue them after all.

I left Smite a while ago and after getting back on I'm reminded why.

By all means it's a fun game when it works out well and when problems occur I try not to let it bother me, but in games like this, you're bound to have one player who will drag down the fun of every match. From a non-existent match making system that still after all these years will take a 20 lose in a row streak and place you against players who are visibly all diamond ranks while one of the people on your team says they just downloaded the game to players who get upset over the littlest thing and will proceed to be incredibly toxic and half the time intentionally runs down lane into tower to piss off their entire team to just outright sitting in fountain or leaving the game entirely; it has all shades of problem players.

Which all games do, but the aforementioned lose streaks aren't just because I'm bad at the game (don't worry I am), but because most every match is like this. This is a long winded way to say the community is incredibly toxic. I could go on, but there are other things to address.

The game is full of ancient and abandoned systems. Clans don't work as intended, in fact they were gutted a while ago. Certain achievements are flat out broken (I'm not talking about the time sensitive event ones). It is quite normal for the game to have broken queues, where you are kicked out of them without alert or even told that errors occur that crash and freeze the game, just from queuing up in a party instead of solo.

The other major thing to address are the skins. I'm not too outright bothered by some of this myself, but many people I play with have expressed their opinions. I do agree that some skins provide outright advantages, where Chaac has a skin that allows him to change on the fly to very different looking appearances that can make it hard to know what's coming at you on a glance. There are also ones like the TMNT skins where four gods have very similar skins and the quick identifier of a bandanna isn't really enough. Fortunately all gods do have their names above their health bar, but some titles can make identifying that in a second a bit harder too. In a complete casual sense, it's whatever, but I can see the issues.

Another thing of the skins is the prices I see on them. I remember a lot of skins only being a few bucks, but just about every single skin I see on sale booting up the game is twenty dollars each. An easy way to go about this is to just not buy the skins, whatever, it's a free game. Plus you can earn the premium currency for free by logging in every day. Still, it seems a bit predatory as a lot of these skins seem to be limited time only 'never to return'. But FOMO is nothing new for games like this.

Mechanically with the actual game itself, my only real gripe is the blind mechanic. A few gods have it. I think a blind is fine. I do not appreciate a burning white screen that causes my actual retinas to hurt. This would be fine if there was some other setting you could set to make blinds a black screen or something less harmful. Speaking of skinvantages, some people note that the limited Chichen Pizza skin changes an ultimate moves skin color to a brick red color that also hurts users eyes.

While I could list a whole lot more of little gripes, it gets more into the realm of minor annoyances.

For the pros of the game
It's free
It can be fun
You can play with your friends

Would I recommend this game to anyone? No, not anymore. But to people who know they like to enjoy games that have their faults but can shine like diamonds, Smite is one of the better ones, so if you are willing to look past these issues, feel free to give it a try.

I stopped playing for about 3 years and here I am back anyways. All the problems from before are still there. It's one of those games.

It's an awesome game with my only extremely demanding caveat being that it's a little too grindy. But then guess what? It's still in early access. Now there's a whole new area. It's not finished and it's already got a ton of stuff to do in it, so the only reason it can feel grindy is you're expected to keep leveling up until the end. On top of that, one of the updates lowered the experience curve of things anyways.

The Dev team also openly encourages the mod scene, so even when this game is finished, there will be more to do. I have hope that this game will become like Terraria in that regard.

Somehow this game is still getting updates after more than a decade later. Even then, the mod scene in this game is amazing. It's only ten dollars and I've spent almost an entire month of my life playing it. By the time I stop playing this game for the last time, who knows, as I can still pick it up and play it again every time and now. That's value.

Not that interesting alone, hilarious fun with friends.

I'd say I gave it a fair shot, but the game is really slow going and as I looked into the community, all I found was contempt for the people who run the game. They automatically ban people if they get too far as some people who have purchased an unhealthy amount of upgrades attest to. There's also no way for me to sync accounts with another device without restarting from scratch and to even do so it seems I need to contact support so they can manually do it. All of this for a game that's incredibly bland. Maybe there's something I'm missing but the entire game seems to be "Do 25 of thing for 50+ maps and then restart the entire adventure again". The dialogue isn't funny or clever and the game design is lazy at best.

Best of all, the game is barely idle and when you do idle you're punished for it. I idled adventure 3 after I failed to kill the zone 50 boss for like 20 hours and found that my characters could only then just barely beat it. I feel like idling 20 hours to just *barely* complete a goal and have to essentially restart on a new adventure this early in the game is ludicrous. Like area 30 is going to have me idling for months at this rate.

I saw other negative reviews and assumed it was just people being upset for no good reason, but this game is horrible.

There's an achievement in this game for not playing it for five years. I took this to heart and didn't play it for seven. After getting that achievement I messed around and got the other silly achievements that people have long since figured out ways to get. Having done this I figured I should leave my thoughts.

The Stanley Parable is a marvelous story of philosophy hidden in the guise of a funny and witty walking simulator. I paid full price for the thing and while I'm sort of on the fence about it now, I still think it was worth my purchase. But, I wouldn't ask my friends to drop 15 dollars on what is more movie than game. That's really the point of the Stanley Parable in a way, but I won't detract your experience should you choose to play this game by telling you what I think it's about. It's a thing best enjoyed first before debate.

I would get this on sale, when it's far far less money. Unless of course you already enjoy the Devs other works and you have 15 spare dollars floating around, in which case, go ahead and support them.

Below was when I gave it a negative score for a minor gripe that I still find unbelievably annoying, nothing is changed about it, I gave it those praises in the original review:

Don't get me wrong, I'm having fun with the game, it's a great throwback to the days of maplestory and unlike Nexon, the dev here isn't a greedy scumbag (at least at the time of writing). There is a cash shop, but the premium currency is earnable by playing the game and they even give you the currency for doing steam achievements.

But for some god forsaken reason, the money falls on the ground at the most random times and if you change maps because it drops at the absolute last second to ♥♥♥♥ you over. It's infuriating and it truly feels like it's intentional. On my 4th character, I thought gems would come my way because I got the achievement. I waited in the starting town for 2 whole minutes with that character. I figured maybe this one wouldn't give me gems so I went to go level up the character. But then I saw the premium currency litter the ground as I changed maps, to be lost forever.

I should just be glad that I can earn the currency other ways and in a way I am, but the amount of frustration I receive from this has prevented me from inviting my friends to play this game. I don't know why the game can't just reward you the gems directly as opposed to letting you watch a dollars worth of gems evaporate, but I suspect it's because Lava Flame 2 enjoys the salt and any completely reasonable claims that it's an early system in a game that's being made completely by one person in a really impressive and inspiring manner is a lie.

If you're some sort of loony who isn't going to be pissed off about watching premium currency just straight up be lost, than by all means play the game, it's great fun with an awesome concept and it takes me back to a more wholesome time where maplestory wasn't greedy as sin, plus I get rewarded for afking, which is pretty much all I did in maplestory in the first place. Until the ♥♥♥♥ I'm complaining about stops (and if you see this LavaFlame2, it wouldn't hurt for me to get my gems I lost, but I'm not expecting it), I can't in good conscious recommend this to people.

It probably is a trivial amount of gems I've lost, but it's just so upsetting, especially when it feels so deliberate.

EDIT: Thanks for the response Lava, it's nice that you recall me being a whiny little nerd from way back when. I've DM'd you a more in depth ramblings since it's more ideas on why I feel like this issue is preventable, but also I understand that this whole thing isn't as important as other issues in the game, blah blah, I gotta stop myself before I rewrite the whole thing again.

EDIT 2: Dev is actively responsive. I seem to be the first person to discuss this with him. Again, I understand that this is not a top priority thing, but the fact that the dev is willing to listen to an individuals issues makes them better than most. I'll be sure to record my eighth character creation should this happen again, just so the dev can have something to work with for this uncommon occurrence.

One of those gems where everything is laid out for you, but continuously becomes more complex and interesting the longer you play.