I have to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of huge fantasy RPGS like the witcher, skyrim, kingdoms of Amalure, and the like. They have huge towns and even bigger maps where tons of people offer you tons of quests and tracking everything is a pain. You have a bunch of items that you pickup everywhere, some you could sell (but hold on to), some that might be used to craft something sometime in the future, you get a couple of skills and powers, some of which help you, some of which aren't enough to have you manage to defeat very strong enemies (that you can go fight right away because the world is so big and some foes are bound to be stronger than you) and you learn through trial and quick-saving what you can and can't do.
Epoch is quite like Infinity Blade. It plays similarly (With simple swipes and touches), has similar mechanics (you level up and buy things to get better) and kinda also looks like it (interface-wise), but I like it all the same! It has some issues that I'm going to get into later on, but is a neat way to spend a few hours getting good stuff and reading about the story.
iOS games are very interesting because they can do microtransactions and try all kinds of business models to get things to the player and get money in return. Slayin is kind of squandering that opportunity even tho it would be very easy to implement hooks here and there so the player has the incentive to spend some money to get things in return. That being said, the gameplay loop is too simple and short as of right now for me.
Cladun X2 is a dungeon crawler game made by Nippon Ichi Software, a company I know for weird games with sometimes interesting concepts, I'm always interested in games with strong meta mechanics and pixel art so I gave it a go and it's a very interesting game, one that I'm not going to finish because of save file loss, but interesting nonetheless.
Path of exile is not a bad action rpg, mechanics-wise and systems-wise, but some flaws in the design philosophy and the overall look and feel of the game won't make me want to play it anymore when it goes into open beta soon. Here are the things it does right and the ones it does wrong and how I would fix them up
Saying that Darksiders 2 is a balance act wouldn't be false, it tries to be so much at the same time, improving in some ways over tried and true staples of the genre but lacking in other parts of it's systems. I haven't played Darksiders 1 but I assume that the sequel is higly iterrative with some ideas from the original. A side effect of me not having played the first one lies within the fact that I was surprised how Zelda-esque it was (A realisation that most people who played DS1 knew all about by then) and how it added so little over the classic formula.
I've waited years for diablo 3. Since they announced it in 2008 I've been following its development with growing interest. I've watched community websites, participated in the beta, even made a few small web tools that were re-used by a few random Russian websites. I bought the Diablo 3 strategy guide three days before the game came out and read it all. I also played a metric ton of Diablo 2. And some Diablo 1 back in the day. I also enjoy Torchlight, Titan Quest, even Darkspore. I'm looking forward to Grim Dawn and Path of Exile. I really love Action RPGS. Make items drop, add numbers when I hit things and give me multiple levels of progressions to look forward to and I'll be hooked. With that in mind...
The original Torchlight took most of its ideas from Blizzard’s Diablo 2 and Torchlight 2 follows the same pattern. It would have been interesting to see where Runic’s title splits apart from the craft of similar games, but barring really neat ideas, some mechanics and systems just don’t cut it to make a deep action RPG. Seeing the promises of mod tools makes me think that it would be possible to tweak Torchlight 2 and see if my ideas hold up.