Far from me wanting to launch uPlay in order to run a steam game - and get performance issues for my trouble - Child of Light is a really good RPG that reminds me of Grandia and other games of that style - one with a time bar where you act after a certain point and can get knocked back and do the same to your enemies - mixed with a stylish 2d adventure where you fly around collecting items and solving puzzles. I'm not a big fan of poetry as the base for video game writing, but the actual game is pretty fun to play.
Much like Ragnarok Online of last week, DFO is a mess from another era, a Korean MMO that got brought back more or less into the future that I've played for quite a while. Unlike RO though, DFO is fun to play and while it's quite obtuse with it's mechanics and systems, the core beat-them-up merged with RPG and the straightforwardness of most quests made it a fun - albeit mindless - experience that I would recommend if you have some time to burn away.
Swap Heroes 2 is a fun little game where you swap heroes on a grid in order to have them attack monsters or use special abilities. It's a bit too simple with very light RPG elements and there is one tune that reminds me of a Super Mario RPG boss fight theme - which is funny. All and all, I've had a few good moments with it, but it didn't last very long, as the core of the game is doing the same thing over and over.
I'm not too sure if it's accurate to say that WoW is videogame crack, or maybe the analogy would be better made with junk food, it's cheap, filling, tastes okay, but after a while you get bored of it. I'm not saying that WoW is empty calories - and even if it were, I'm not saying that's a bad thing - and since I've spent 60 days playing it three hours+ per day I can't say that it's devoid of interest, but WoW is a treadmill that I feel broke down for me in the recent expansions. It's also a bit too dense in some ways - maybe ways that only affect me - but here, let me tell you the story of my characters.
Puzzle Forge 2 is a pretty neat little puzzle game where the goal is to make gear for customers going to your forge. To do so, you place rocks on a grid and then you place molds next to two rocks to craft parts that you need to combine to create weapons, armors and more. Combining rocks makes better materials and the game adds a bit of complexity with gems (and the combining thereof) and magic that you use to power-up the gear you're making. You lose the game when you can't complete customer requests too many times or when the board fills up - the latter happens more often than the former.
I really wish I could give CoE 5/5, it's one of the most interesting and most inspired RPG I've played in ages. It's inspired by Earthbound, for one, but also features deep gameplay mechanics both in battles and outside of them while pushing the player to collect more party members in a colorful world with tons of stuff to do. That being said, in its current state, 4 is the best I can give it, mostly because of technical issues but also because of some design choices that I didn't enjoy.
Where's my Water! is a physics based puzzle game where you have to move water from one point to a drain connected to the shower of an alligator. It's a fun little game that progressively adds new mechanics and concepts and piles on replayability by having you collect things and fill ducks with water as well. I had a good time with it and I suppose it could be considered as a classic of sorts, resembling in spots with many other puzzle games.
Super Time Force Ultra could have been amazing instead of just great if it knew what it wanted to be and focused on one aspect of the game. As it is, it's kind of a mess to play, quite bad with the keyboard and only made a little bit better by the use of a controller - something I try to do as little as possible with PC games - and while there are a few design decisions here and there that I find just weird, I had a great time with it and I think it's a charming game most people should try.
Escape Goat 2 is a delightful puzzle platformer where you play a goat for some reason, and you complete various puzzle rooms with different themes and mechanics in a few themed worlds. To do so, you have headbutt attacks, a double jump and a little mouse companion that you can use to do tricks. I've enjoyed my time with the game although I've found the controls a bit hard to get around, especially in the later puzzles when you're required to do many things in quick succession in order to succeed.
Hack'n'Slash is a really strange mix - on the surface, it might look like a zelda game - with bombs, boomerangs and hearts - but it's actually a programming puzzle game where the hacking refers to actually modifying the source code - programmed in LUA - of the game. At first you can only edit the public values of game objects - like if a door is open or closed - but as the game goes, you get many powers which allow you to completely crash the world if you so desire. The hacking aspect of the game is amazing, the moving around and slashing, not as much.
Framed as really solid gameplay, but that's pretty much it, which is a bit problematic because it felt original and I had a good time playing it, but I was just puzzled as to the lack of meat around the bone, albeit how solid the bone really was. You play the game by moving frames of a comic around and it influences the actions that take place. I have to say that the silhouettes of characters work well until they add eyes to them - they just look weird - and the jazzy music fits the tone of the game quite well. It's got charm.
Sanctum 2 is way better than Sanctum 1 was. I remember vaguely playing the first game, unbalanced weapons and towers against quickly impossible missions, things of the sort. This second game adds much to discover with level-gated weapons, towers and perks to equip to different characters in order to blend the genres of tower defense and first person shooting once again. I'm a big tower defense fan!
EBF4 is a bit overwhelming and it's a bit silly, but it's one of these RPGs that I love - the kind that mostly base all of its strong points on gameplay systems and ditches most of the story and quest dynamic of RPGs you encounter nowadays. EBF4 might look and play like a flash game - the toggle to change the game quality is a good indicator of that - but I'm having fun with it and I'll continue playing it until I beat it.
This is a text-based browser game based on the Dragon Age universe where you have one week to gather resources before an event occurs for which you must be prepared. To do so, you draw cards from a deck and make decisions. Sometimes you'll get different decks (when you're working towards precise objectives) but otherwise, you govern your city as you want, hearing citizens and solving issues. It's a fairly decent game and I enjoyed my time with it.
LLTQ is a choose-your-own-adventure kind of game. It's framed as a princess simulator - where you play a 14 year old kid that is going to become queen after a year passes - and each week you make a few choices to raise certain stats, manage your mood and try to evade dangers that could result in a game over - there are few second chances in this game - but it does certain things right in a way that makes it fun instead of frustrating.
Skullduggery is a fast-paced puzzle game using the advantages of iOS games to help itself rather than work against it. You play it by stretching the brain of a skull in order to propel it around. Think how you stretch the catapult in angry birds, but with more squishy flesh instead. You do so to collect money and defeat enemies, navigate labyrinths while a wall moves to crush you and collect power-ups in order to defeat bosses and get all the objectives in a level.
Borderlands:The Pre-Sequel is a game I'm going to play for another 200 hours, I'm quite sure of that. Like Borderlands 2, the depth of character customization - with the promise of new characters coming as DLC - and the choice of weaponry and defensive apparatuses you can mix and match from combined with shooter RPG grind-and-loot action set against a humorous backdrop of interesting characters will keep me at it for a long while. That being said, B:TPS still has the issues of the second game and some other issues of its own.
Compared to Magic 2015 I looked at a few weeks ago, PTCGO is way better. I had a few technical issues here and there with the game but otherwise it feels like you can do pretty much anything you could do in a real game of the actual card game. Some might argue that the Pokemon cards are simpler - there is no 'instant' in PTCG, everything is played during your turn - but that's just the nature of the rules of one game versus another. It had been a while since I had looked at this and was surprised to see that there are now the equivalent of enchantments - such as giving +30 max HP to a pokemon.
What do you get if you mix Batman, Assassin's Creed and Lord of the Rings? You get ME:SoM. It is incredibly reductive to call it only a by-product of these three things, but since one of the first thing you do is eagle-dive down a tower and then activate your bat/ghost vision to see the bad guys and then you are fighting the uruks from the mind of J.R.R. Tolkien, it's hard not to compare ME:SoM to the sum of its parts. That being said, there are a few very interesting systems in there, notably the nemesis system.
Heroes of the Storm isn't live yet, it's currently in a technical alpha and you can play with all heroes for free and some game modes aren't really locked down, but I like it. It's a strange twist on the LOMA genre made popular by DOTA and League of Legends, but it takes some stuff away, adds new ideas with a cast of characters many will recognize, each with their unique playstyles and a fun talent system to boot.