Recent reviews by 2EZ

This is Overwatch brought to you by those creepy Nigerian princes that always email you

The Meet Your Match update was toted by Valve to be a complete overhaul of the existing UI and the format by which casual and competitve players select what type of game mode they specifically want. What ultimately happened is:

- You can no longer pick what public server you want
- You're forced to sit in a queue for at least 5 minutes, oftentimes longer if you don't rage quit by the 20 minute mark
- 'Casual' servers have experience but you get penalized if you leave a server early
- Since the update came out, the 'item servers' and 'game coordinator' are barely functional
- If you wanted to play competitive, you better pay the premium!

Valve has tried too hard to consolidate everything. They took away Quickplay, the server browser, and the ability to jump in/out of a game ... because God forbid you have any other commitments in your life. If you can't sit through a whole 30 minute Payload game without the ability to change teams, you better be ready to get dinged for it.

In summary, the post-MYM Team Fortress 2 is oftentimes literally unplayable –– whether you be waiting in purgatory to join a game, or waiting for the 'can't connect with game coordinator' error message to go away. And when its not literally unplayable, it's pretty much unplayable.



P.S. TEAM HEAVY


EDIT: After I wrote this review, I waited 30 minutes in queue without ever joining a game.

StarBreak provides a fun experience for several hours, until you've really boosted a character and then got killed in some cheap way by a fireball and lost all that progress –– forever. It's absurdly hard to progress with the current permadeath system. The only small, glimmering hope you receive from dying is a marginal amount of XP so that you can eventually buy other 'shells' to die with. Ultimately, the fun of platforming with a dozen other people and seeing your screen light up in a cacophony of neon lasers is outweighed by the fact that whatever effort you're putting into it will amount to nothing when your shell is killed.

The visuals are great, but the microtransactions seem pretty meaningless. The items you buy with in-game currency and even microtransaction money are *still* lost when you die, along with all your boosts, stats, and sense of purpose as to why you're playing this game.

Lastly, I didn't enjoy how the grouping of players would be so variable. If you spawned into a dungeon, you'd spawn with a few other people, no matter how far they were through the dungeon. More often than not, I'd somehow find myself alone on the map within a matter of minutes. Being that even the first dungeon's boss is nigh-impossible to kill by yourself as a MKI or MKII, and that the boss's area seems to lock itself when you enter, you pretty much shoot yourself in the foot if you're not with a group of 5-10 people at all times.

For the player looking to try this:
– It's free, so you've got nothing to lose.
– Stay with the group at all times.
– Get a weapon with more range than the starting shotgun.

Ultimately, StarBreak provides several hours of mindless entertainment, but the excitement quickly drops into cataclysmic nothingness. The visuals are fantastic and the game could run with max settings on a broken toaster. I recommend this game solely because it's free, but I would not recommend pouring any real money into the game, because you will lose whatever you buy.

This game takes the concept of grinding far beyond the celestial realm of grinding as you have already known it to exist in other games. It is exceptionally more grindy than it initially leads you to believe; you're lured in with skills that level very, very quickly because of the constant double experience time that freemium players pay for. Seriously, someone just paid for 26 hours of 2x exp - $420 worth. There is a massive plateau from about combat level 50 to combat level 100, at the very least, where the seemingly efficient way to gain any money or combat XP is to farm Efreet spawns. They're high leveled but drop the illustrious Efreet 'pet', which can be sold on the market for about $400k gold. Unfortunately, they have a 0.25% drop rate, like practically everything else in the game.

The creators of RPG-MO are sadistic in their pursuit to make you grind and grind and grind your life away to get that one Efreet pet, or that one Paladin Shield, or that one ____ (any item). In other traditional RPGs, a high level skill like mining or forging should yield a steady income of gold that increases in proportion to the level. RPG-MO works on a leveling system that exponentially makes leveling harder while providing minimal, if even at all, positive gains. Want to be a high level forger and make sapphire weapons? That sounds great! You only need 60 forging, but how are you going to get to the azurite ore if the only two azurite spots in the game are guarded by level 150 mobs? The sad part is – sapphire isn't even high tier weaponry. And if you finally do survive long enough to start smelting azurite bars into sapphire weaponry? Well, the game has such horrid 'success rates' for most forged items that you're probably going to waste most of the bars you just painstakingly made. And if you do manage to make a sapphire sword? You get just about the same XP as if you had made a lower-tier steel sword.

Ultimately, I don't recommend this game until the creators make all the drop rates much, much more tolerable. Once you hit about combat level 60, the game becomes frustratingly hard to make any sort of vertical progress in terms of new gear... unless you farm Efreets. But even if you're farming Efreets, good luck with that 0.25% drop rate!