I helped Grim Dawn back when I was at university, that was a few years ago, then I gave some more money to their kickstarter, because why not. I know the version I'm playing right now isn't final, but there are still a few issues I would like to address in what's playable. These things might be fixed by the time the game goes gold and I still plan to take another look at it when that'll happen, but right now, GD bores me, playing Grim Dawn made me install Titan Quest and play that instead.
Runers is a rogue like twin stick shooter of sorts where you play some kind of spellcaster armed with runes that you can combine to make more powerful spells, it's a bit difficult for my tastes but I feel like it's a pretty good game, even though I've just scratched the surface. There are a few things here and there that could be made to make it easier but otherwise the arcade feel and the enemy variety combined with a great deal of information about your own abilities made me lose a few hours in this fun title.
Path of Exile is always being updated with new stuff but the Forsaken Masters update had me try it again and more content always makes for a better game. I hadn't seen the Vaal Gems - corrupted gems that require enemy kills before you can use them - yet nor the randomly placed random dungeons, so there's a lot of stuff in there to digest for me. That being said, I'm having a blast by playing it again.
Storm Casters is pretty amazing. It's an action RPG on iOS with collectible card mechanics, level-ups and a bunch of different weapons and items to play with. I had a ton of fun during my time with this game because it blends solid gameplay and does not mess too much with the freemium tendrils that could have been stuck in every aspect of the game.
The question is quite simple, did you enjoy The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing? Because there is no greater question about your love for Action RPGs or certain kind of games, TIAoVH2 is a direct sequel in story and actual game engine to the first game, for better or worse. I completed it in a few days, so it wasn’t bad by any stretch, but the problems I’ve found in the first game were still there - sometimes even amplified in some way.
Forge Quest is early access, that means the game is not completed yet. It also means that some of the issues I have with it could be fixed when the final product will be released. I had quite a fun time with this little hack and slash RPG, but it ended in a frustrating dungeon experience, brought by procedural generation of rooms, always an interesting mean to create replayability with the caveat of lacking hand-crafted expériences.
Transistor is an interesting game, going in blind, I thought it was going to be some kind of action-rpg where you could stop time to have an easier time with some enemies. I didn’t know there would be a talking sword, I didn’t know there would be level-up mechanics, I didn’t know much, really. I enjoyed it quite much since I beat the game in three days, playing here and there where I had time. A fantastic little game, flawed in spots, but still pretty good.
Wayward Souls is too difficult for being on iOS. The quick, almost twitchy-like type of control you need for something like this action RPG is impossible to achieve with touch controls and to make matters worse, the upgrades and systems don’t really work in any way that helped me get better after each successive try.
Reaper - Tale of a Pale Swordsman isn’t a very good game, I feel like it was designed as separate things brought together in a confused result, with a good visual style and some interesting RPG mechanics here and there, I only grew frustrated and confused with it
Diablo 3 was pretty okay, but I didn’t play it much before the expansion came out. Now it’s all I play, more or less. In simple terms, the expansion added Loot 2.0, new difficulty levels, act 5, the crusader class and adventure mode. These things work together in unison to make a damn good game that I’ll play a bunch.
The last time I reviewed Marvel Heroes, the Marvel Universe action RPG, I wasn’t impressed. There wasn’t much to hook me to play more and I found a bunch of things that bothered me. There are still a few of these, but 220 hours later, I think I can safely say that I had a great time with this updated version of MH.
There rarely are games where you control obviously French Canadian lumberjacks fighting werewolves, especially with tower defence elements thrown in there for good measure. Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves has a neat concept and some interesting elements surrounding the core gameplay, but the act of actually playing it feels clunky and not very fun, so I couldn’t get very far into it.
I usually try and look at videogames to see their flaws and how I would improve upon them if I myself would have made that same product with all the time and money I would need. Or indeed, having the source code, knowledge of how everything works and all the time in the world to tinker with it. There’s too much of that to be done with Iesabel, it’s a broken mess.
I would love to make an action RPG like this one could be, the classic hp/mana game, maybe with a twist or two. Iesabel has close to no redeeming qualities - much like baby geniuses - besides that it’s a shipped product that you could play if you wanted to. That’s more than much of what I’ve ever done, small personal projects with no outreach nor fans. In any case, all the menus and voice acting in this game are terrible and badly translated.
The gameplay was also pretty bad, difficulty to aim, even basic controls were confusing, enemies killed me way too fast for no reason, menus are assigned to weird hotkeys, stats and skills are poorly explained to irrelevancy, I couldn’t figure what my stamina was, nor why my character was a naked person getting murdered by mosquitoes. Or that giant wooden door in the middle of nowhere, or just the basic movement that didn’t work.
I suppose that showing exactly what stats do is a neat idea, maybe adding a small arrow with the ‘before’ and ‘after’ value would help this particular system work a bit better, but that would be like adding a bandaid on someone cut in half. I think this game is also an Android phone game, working with a touchscreen, it must also be terrible there.
Anyways, I love Action RPGs and I always want to try different ones, but this one… Nah, don’t play Iesabel, even I couldn’t fix it. (Also, what do the orbs in the skill tab mean? I think they represent stats required, why not just name them out?)
It has been a while since I played a metroidvania and Valdis Story: Abyssal City didn't disappoint me for the largest part of the game. It's an amazing game with skills and equipment, and interesting alignment system, crafting recipes, challenging bosses and some nefarious platforming puzzles. I really wish I could've beat it.
While I already wrote some words on Path of Exile a while ago, its recent re-release on Steam had me curious and I went back and tried it. I was supposed to write about Risk of Rain, but I spent most of this week and last week playing PoE. They've added some things, fixed others, and left most of it like it was before. My issue number one with the game - how floaty and unresponsive it felt - isn't a problem anymore...
Hammerwatch has many flaws, it gets boring and repetitive after a while, it's brutally difficult and worse of all, it's not randomly generated. I thought this was going to be a roguelike, based loosely on Gauntlet with deeper RPG elements. I was wrong on the roguelike part, this is more of a hack-and-slash with a tendency for traps and ridiculously high number of enemies.
Quadropus Rampage is a mix of roguelike and hack-and-slash systems with some deep customization options, upgrade paths, random loot and good replay value that ultimately is held down by some unwieldy controls and a few spots of confusion here and there.
Marvel Heroes is a weird mix between archaic action RPG systems and MMORPG sensibilities that blend from mission to mission until you're funneled in a straight line to daily repetitive quests that aren't very fun and might even require you to pay money to play them.
BattleStone is an action-rpg type of game where you move a character around to accomplish quests that often are simply to kill things using swiping motions and special powers that fill up over time. You can rack up combos by keeping away from the enemies's attacks and get gold that way. That being said, a bad camera and aggressive free to play design makes it difficult to get into.
Diablo 3 came with great fanfare, Torchlight 2 had some good marketting, I've read about Path of Exile here and there and the same goes with Grim Dawn, now in alpha. Why am I starting with this? Because I never knew that The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing was an Action RPG. I never knew it was coming out on steam and I looked at it the day it came out only to see what kind of game it was. I didn't think it was going to be incredible, as the title suggests.