Recent reviews by rabees

I don't know what happened in development, but somehow the people behind Ultima Underworld, Thief, and System Shock made a really crap game. It tries to bring back some of that open-ended gameplay, but it's dragged down by a god awful physics engine that affects everything from the clunky character movement to buggy ragdoll combat. The art assets vary from maybe kind of pretty to cheap mobile game tier. And even the actual design ideas seem to boil down to them just thinking that stacking box puzzles and lore/hints scribbled over every wall are the pinnacle of creativity.

It's actually a very faithful remake. Classes and major/minor attributes are still there, thank god. Combat isn't really different, but it's visually more impactful. The art style isn't as vibrant, but faces and lip sync look way better than Bethesda ever managed. The price point is good.

I feel bad for the Skyblivion devs though, it seems Bethesda intentionally pushed this out before Skyblivion this year to undercut their work for a quick buck.

Probably one of the most visually creative games ever made. Great music and voice acting as well. Incredibly engaging without making a lick of sense.

This game is just painful, man. I was kind of having fun playing with one archetype (Sky Strikers), but matches are so long and unexciting. You will spend more time looking at your phone waiting for somebody to finish doing their combo than actually being invested in what's happening. Then you'll probably wipe their board on your turn and they'll concede. A lot of this is because the card game is badly designed and bloated with summoning mechanics, but some of it is also Master Duel's fault. I don't know why they let people take ten minute turns, but you only have five rocketblasted seconds to pick going first or second. I also have hundreds of gems stuck in a time-limited gift box that I can't take out because my "inventory is full," whatever that means. Just let me get my gems, man.

I would maybe recommend at $10 or something. It's janky weeaboo Mount & Blade that 100% should still be called Early Access. If you can stomach that, then there are fun things like upgradeable eras like Sid Meier's Civ (mounts and blades to tanks and guns), customizable towns, and an actually kind of interesting background story/characterization that set it apart from vanilla Mount & Blade. It's also fully and competently voiced, somehow, I guess that's the magic of the Japanese indie scene. Story scenes are translated well but menus are atrocious and poorly explained. The anime models are kind of freaky and bug-eyed but you can kind of fix it yourself with the extensive customization.

Pros:
+ Lots of high quality card art for people who played Yu-Gi-Oh and liked the dragons and the Dark Magician Girls
+ Fun campy voice acting that isn't really bad
+ An okay story mode with effort
+ You can craft the cards you want using the cards you don't want

Cons:
- Lots of powerful legendaries that can kill you in one turn or have no practical counterplay except winning before they come out
- Getting a full set of multiple legendaries to make a winnable deck is not really that cheap
- Even in the lowest ranks people are using complete top-tier decks, so you can't really just get your foot in the door with a budget deck and work your way up

Into the Breach can be really fun in the moment, and it does a number of things that differentiate it from other tactical turn based games that I think work well. Telegraphing enemy attacks, needing to defend buildings instead of simply killing everything, the way almost every attack pushes you/a rock/a bug. However, the long game feels a bit more shallow and unsatisfying than I'd like out of a normal SRPG.

You can't really progress your pilots very much, and there isn't a whole lot of changing equipment or changing your team composition throughout a game. There isn't much continuity between playthroughs outside of 1 surviving pilot and some coins to unlock new squads. Other reviewers have called this a puzzle game, and I think I agree with that in the sense of the enjoyment primarily being in solving the problem put in front of you for every battle rather than through a continued investment in your characters.

Overall, buy it cuz it's fun to outwit kaijuu, if nothing else.

I don't think it's hard to say that Resident Evil 7 is one of the best games in the series. The first few hours of the game were an absolute blast for me. The atmosphere and presentation are excellent, and the gameplay and area/puzzle design are pretty solid too. It also manages to be pretty scary without really abusing jump scares or just being gross.

By the end my starry-eyed wonder faded a bit, but I think the slightly disappointing ending bits are mostly only very negative in comparison to the perfect beginning bits. Some irritating enemy types are introduced, the later areas are smaller and more linear than the main house, there's a bigger focus on boss fights and shooting and the Bakers start to lose their scary intrigue and become less of the focus. Also I guess for some reason the beginning led me to believe the story would resolve with some unepected revelation or explanation for everything, but it's really pretty standard Resident Evil stuff in the end.

That said, this game's worst parts are a lesser game's best parts, and I didn't reach the end feeling unsatisfied. I think this game came out a bit like a cross between the best "classic" Resident Evill and the best "modern" one, and that is a good direction to take the series in my opinion. Not just a callback, but not simply carrying on the status quo either.

This game is pretty disappointing. You can play the card game just fine, but the presentation is about as bland as it gets. The backgrounds are really badly modeled, the music is just background noise, and there's no voice acting. A few of the popular monsters have a little model and animation when they attack, but they aren't modeled or animated very well either, and it's kind of annoying for the same animation to play each time you attack.

None of that pizazz should really matter too much for a card game, but the multiplayer is too dead to find much enjoyment in, and there isn't even anything to the single player content besides the story duels, which are entirely luck based if you use the "story deck" and entirely too easy if you use your own deck, and the duelist challenges, which are harder than the story but all based around a very specific deck archetype. You can't just like, set up a random duel with the AI and change some options or something. Also, as others have said, I appreciate that you don't start with every card, but I don't like that they give you no indication whatsoever as to what is in which booster pack. This game isn't much good as anything but a simulator, so having to grope in the dark over where to get the cards you need to build a fancy new deck isn't very accomodating of that.

I guess I'm just let down since Duel Links for free on your phone actually has really good presentation and healthy PvP, and I thought this could fill the single player void, but there's not a lot here besides a working digital version of the full card game. If all you want is a digital simulation of the many Yu-Gi-Oh cards, this will do fine. But if you're looking for a versatile single player video game, or even just random online PvP, I can't recommend it.

8/10 for Yu-Gi-Oh, 4/10 for being a bad video game.

This is usually considered the best Elder Scrolls game. I've played all of them except Arena for at least a while each, but I don't really know which one is my favorite. I consider them all good and bad in their own ways. I'd say so far Morrowind has been a middling experience for me.

The setting is really cool, if maybe not exactly my sort of thing. You get a vague swampy/asian vibe, but there's really a lot more to it and I don't think any other part of Tamriel is quite so unique. It beats a lot of generic fantasy settings in general, for that matter, and it's definitely one of the game's strongest points.

Combat, on the other hand, has never been a strong feature in any TES game, and Morrowind has what I would consider the worst of all of them. There's a pseudo-action combat system in place, like Arena and Daggerfall, but the hit rate of attacks is stupidly low, while damage is high, and there's a huge dissonance between what you see and do and what actually happens and it all just looks and feels utterly silly. The only thing they've done to make the combat not a completely mindless clickfest is requiring you to hold the mouse button down for a second to hit with full strength, and multi-directional attacks that are so pointless that there is an setting in the options menu that makes it so you always choose the best attack automatically. At least in the previous games you got to flail your mouse around like an idiot, and you could usually one-shot a rat without missing 10 times in a row. Winning a fight in this game relies entirely on how much you've raised your primary weapon skill and how lucky you are. That's all there is to it, especially if you aren't a magic user. It's not deep and it's not fun.

Quests in Morrowind are about on par with every other Elder Scrolls game, in my opinion. Most of them are just okay, some of them are pretty great, and a lot of them have you doing the same basic task over and over in a different place. In Skyrim and Daggerfall you get sent to a random dungeon a lot. In Morrowind you get sent to a random town a lot, and have to ask some guy for a thing/information/their life. It's been pretty annoying to me, since my orc character is hardly the most charming fella, so oftentimes I have to resort to either bribery or daylight murder, even for quests from a faction you'd think would be reputable like the Mages Guild or Fighters Guild. I'm only ankle-deep in the main quest, and even though the lore sounds very exciting, the game appears to be more content to have me collect notes about it than actually participate.

The music is great, and the graphics impress me. This is the last game in the series to have some of the cooler weapon types, like spears, halberds, and katanas, although they are little more than swapped models that require a different skill. I like the character creation system, because it sparks my imagination and makes me feel like my character is more unique and has some skills to begin with instead of having apparently been born yesterday, but I miss the advantages/disadvantages you could choose in Daggerfall.

Overall, I would recommend this game, but only if you think you can see past the more frustrating things and have a good time exploring all the interesting stuff the game has to show you. Morrowind is the kind of game that wants you to live in it for awhile, so get in there and use your imagination and have a good time.