Shadowrun Returns isn't perfect, but it's pretty amazing. I describe it as a 'new-old' Role Playing Game, like the games I used to play when I was younger with some modern trappings here and there, but still a core that was enjoyable for the duration of it's short campaign. Oh and you can't save whenever you want, what's up with that?
Puzzle and Dragons is insanely successful, it seems. I've decided to try it out as soon as it went live on the Canadian app store, and my god, it is a load of nonsense. The core mechanic of the game (moving gems on a board) manages to be mostly luck-based and somehow less refined than old match-3 games and/or Tetris Attack and/or puzzle quest managed to do years ago. The monster collection part is also completely nonsensical and random but at the same time, vital to progress through the game.
Swords and Potions 2 is a bit like Recettear, Sim City and a facebook game. You play a shop owner, running his business of making and selling things to adventurers, sending them on quests and upgrading your city. Being a flash game and free to play, premium currencies and timers are rampant, but I still think there's an addictive and interesting side to this little manager game.
I didn't "get" 868-Hack, a popular videogame where you datajack into the cell cubes to decrypt pointfiles while cyberdodging viruses and shooting them with your datagun. This feels like a roguelike, this feels like a small thing with no rhyme or reason. I can't say I've enjoyed 868-Hack much because I've failed miserably to progress past the first few screens and some mechanics are still incomprehensible to me.
League of legends is an interesting twist on the LOMA genre, the base of the game is still as it was invented in the Warcraft 3 days with creep waves and towers and heroes and all that stuff that new players might find intimidating. League of Legends has no denying, you don't lose gold when you die and there are some elements of persistence here and there to hook you in some kind of meta-game much alike achievements do in other genres. It's a nice LOMA, but after playing it for a while, the community is still what makes it a little hard to get in.
Rymdkapsel is a weird real time strategy game where you control a bunch of little white rectangles. You basically don't control them, you only assign what you want them to do (and you can select rooms you'd prefer they build first) but then they do their own thing, leaving you with less to do than watch. Always on a timer of imminent attack with three resource types to jungle, I thought it was an interesting, but not deep enough, little game.
Saints Row IV is a delight, while I find that on one hand, it pulls too much from its predecessor, it goes in new, crazy directions both on the story and gameplay side. Some of its systems are so amazing and useful that they make others feel obsolete and perhaps, unnecessary. The end result is still fun and refreshing and pulled me to try and get every single thing complete between the story missions.
SolForge is a trading card game that would be tough to make in real life. A bit like Scrolls, it uses counters (you increase and decrease stats permanently quite often in this game, compared to Magic: The Gathering where creatures don't keep their life totals dynamic every turn) and a grid-like playing field. There's an interesting level-up system where cards you play can come back as leveled-up versions of themselves after a few turn, making you pick the cards you want to evolve over the ones that are useful right then. Ultimately, I find it light in content and without reasons to play it before future updates.
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.
Here is a nice paragraph. Plants vs Zombies 2 is an incredibly polished, well-made game that builds upon its predecessor with new zombies, new plants, new level types, a map-based progression system that allows you to unlock upgrades in the order you want, power-ups and boosts to help you defeat difficult challenges, endless maps to try and tackle and the same addictive gameplay that made PvZ so good. All of this, and more, if you're willing to stomach tons of f2p Junk.
Tomb Raider is a third person shooter/exploration game with intensely constructed set pieces that bear no impact or gravitas on actual gameplay. A reboot of the playstation hit where you played wisecracking Lara Croft, shooting tigers and raiding tombs, you now play a much somber character that needs to save her friends and escape an island by mowing down a bunch of guys and raiding a tomb here and there. I've never played Uncharted, but I feel that while the gameplay might be similar, the tone isn't.
Dig! is a bad remake of Qix. There's some slightly interesting stuff around the main game (upgrades, hats, collectibles, museum upgrades and things like that) but while you're moving around trying to dodge things and get treasures, the game feels too busy and most of the things you're against are unexplained.
The Secret World is a MMORPG that does somethings differently from the usual model and while overall I feel like it's intriguing and I want to see more of what there is to see in there, some basic parts of the content are frustrating, too difficult, badly designed and seem purposeless. Avoiding these parts of the game is possible, but the overall experience remains diminished.
CastleStorm is a weird mix of Angry Birds and strategy RPG elements. The goal of most levels is the same; to destroy the enemy's castle. To do so, you fire projectiles, spawn units, use magic and try to complete special objectives to gain more money and more stars. The game has some fine ideas but it's a bit unsure of what it wants to be and so it doesn't do anything particularly well.
Beat Sneak Bandit is a rhythm stealth game where you need to tap the screen following a beat to move around environments filled with various devices and traps. The goal of each level is to get a clock with a red flag on top of it, but getting a bunch of optional clocks unlocks additional challenging levels and getting everything in each stage is the biggest difficulty.
Card Hunter is a browser-based board game with CCG and RPG elements. You control a part of three little figurines and work your way through a campaign of battles, defeating monsters, getting loot and experience and doing it all over again. I loved it enough to keep playing for a good while, but frustrating battles, low speed of character progression and strange business models make me doubt I'll play it much longer.
Joe Danger on iOS is really great, it's a combo-based score attack game with plenty of objectives, unlockables and mostly good controls. I've never played the console version and I bet it's really similar, but it works on other devices just as well. The new daily challenges they've added might also give players a good reason to play the game everyday and you can enjoy all of its content without buying any IAP.
Defiance is weird, on one hand, it could be a Borderlands MMO easily if you changed a few things here and there and nobody would notice, on the other hand, this game based on some SyFy channel show needs to rethink it's priorities if it wants to be a little better, and also clean up some clunkiness in the interface and how some systems work. That being said, comparing it to a Borderlands MMO is high praise, since I really like Borderlands, and I really enjoyed Defiance.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world, you play an artifact hunter equipped with a computer device that relays you messages from an AI lady and various characters you might or might not care about. You go around, fighting bandits and mutants, weird ant-like aliens, dudes with shields, aliens and big raid bosses. You're outfitted with a trusty shield (with a capacity, recharge speed and recharge delay), grenades with various effects and an array of different gun types with rarities from grey to purple. Gear can also have elements attached to it, like fire or corrosion. You complete missions and Arkfalls (Like the rifts in Rift), drive around to find challenges and side-quests to gain experience and unlock new passive skills to complement the one active skill you chose at the beginning. If this sounds a bit like Borderlands, it's because it does. Maybe a bit too much? Ark hunters, really? The same stats on the shields? Bandits and ant creatures? They could have changed it up a little.
The shooting feels good. You have an array of various gun types and they all behave slightly differently. You can level gun types as you use them, giving your character more proficiency with these weapons and I guess it's tough to focus on one gun when you always pick up new ones all the time, this solves itself when you've tried most of everything. Besides bonus effects on rarer guns, there's not much of a grind in Defiance, if you pick up a neat pistol at the beginning of the game, it might last you a while. Guns have trade-offs, maybe one shotgun is stronger but less accurate and you need to reload each bullet separately, maybe this machine gun fires in 3-shot bursts, this BMG might not heal yourself as much, this grenade launcher might fire shots you need to remotely detonate... There's plenty of variety in guns, there's a healing/damaging beam gun that recharges its ammo, there's a gun that shoots headcrabs at enemies, homing rockets, snipers (with very precise scopes) explosive shotguns... And you have a bunch of elements too, my favorite one is Syphon, as it deals massive damage and heals your shields/life.
You can upgrade your weapons by attaching things to them and if they don't have slots you can always add slots by using the salvage matrix and this costs some resources, takes some time, and you won't know what slot gets added because it's random (there are four slots, stock, barrel, sight and magazine). It gets a bit boring when you want to break down items for resources because you need to click about 4 times just to destroy one item, let me check all the items I want to destroy then click 'salvage all' or something.
Grenades and skills are on cooldowns and there are a bunch of shields and grenades depending on what you want. I mostly go for the incendiary grenades and the shields with high capacity and low recharge rate (because I recharge them myself with the healing gun)
And here's my biggest annoyance with Defiance; The loadout system. Basically, you can have 5 different 'sets' of weapons, grenades, shields, vehicles and skills. This could be useful if you have multiple weapons you want to use but usually I'll stick to the same two, same thing for shields, grenades and skills, I have one set that I like and I'm not going to carry 5 different grenades for no reasons, but if you have empty slots in a loadout, it's going to be filled by new things you pick up, if you change your gear in your main loadout, it's not going to change the others, and you can't sell/breakdown to resources/upgrade anything equipped, so you need to go to each loadout and manually equip the same thing everywhere before you can do anything. This is really annoying and breaks the action a little, I wish you could just disable them and only have a primary set of gear. Heavens forbid you switch to another loadout to change your equipment and forget to switch back because you won't have any skill equipped and that's also pretty annoying.
After a little tutorial where all skills are more-or-less explained, you have to pick up between automatically reloading your gun and dealing more damage, creating a decoy, moving faster or shielding yourself with invisibility. Then when you get EGO points you can spend them to unlock or improve skills around the ones you have, this gets a bit confusing because you won't know what the skills nearby do before you read all of them, so I took the reload + bonus gun damage skill and the skills around are focused on reloading faster, getting more ammo and bonuses to explosive damage. Maybe I would've took something else if I'd knew beforehand. You can get pretty much anywhere you want, but it'll take a bit of time. The skills change the way you play your character in significant ways, my stowed gun reloads automatically over time, I have more life, I get more gear when I kill enemies with explosions, etc. Unlike other skills, this one makes me go close and personal to enemies and reload automatically to keep killing them.
Whenever you go down, you have a self-revive (on a cooldown) or you can pay some money to be resurrected someplace nearby, I would like for the enemies to show in some way if they're too tough for just my character to handle, so I wouldn't run head-on with killer aliens that I can't really do much against. You can also be revived by other players.
Most of the time, on your map, you'll see Arkfall icons, meaning that you have to take your vehicle (you get one doing the main missions and you can buy better ones over time) and boost your way over there for some random encounter with a bunch of other players against predetermined enemies. Vehicles handle well, you can boost (like in Borderlands) to get to places fast, and they level up the more you use them. Vehicles are very fragile and it's a bit weird, you can kill enemies by running them over but it takes a huge chunk of your (immediately respawnable) car's life, that's weird.
When you get to the Arkfall, there's usually a huge crystal, sometimes you have to destroy it, sometimes it's waves after waves of raiders, mutants, bugs, aliens or what not. It gets challenging and pretty insane with all players running around and shooting things, but there are no 'roles' in Defiance, everyone is a DPS, even if you wield the healing guns. After you've won you get some keys (to open chests full of rare loot), a bunch of experience and you can see how you fared in the leaderboards. Driving around, you'll see a couple of challenge types, having you kill enemies using specific weapons in a specific time period to score points, netting you more stuff if you beat a certain score, they're okay.
There's also a huge list of goals to accomplish and they unlock codex entries and give you more EGO rating, reminds me a bit of badass ranks in Borderlands 2...
My second biggest issue with Defiance is how bland 75% of the content is. You get cutscenes and dialogue for the main questlines but everything else re-uses the same two or three lines of text. I'm pretty bummed to hear 'We need to stockpile the materials' five times in a row when I'm on a fetch quest to gather five things. Or 'The hellbugs have found us!!!' on a protect mission. There are a bunch of non-story specific quests in Defiance and they have no flavor at all, you're not even sure if you already went to the spot in question to do a similar quest beforehand, while story missions bring you in different environments, the most common ones will have you drive 200m, kill five guys, loot a thing, then come back, at least if it had some specific lines of dialogue for what you were doing, it would be more bearable. Even the quest givers always say the same thing, the military dude will talk about how this quest is outside the earth republic's jurisdiction and comment on how ark hunters are ballsy and stupid when you complete them. Mix it up a little, make him tell me how this farm is important because of the wheat it produces, I don't know, don't cheap out on the content that pads most of this game.
I liked Defiance, I still like it! I might play a bunch more of it to see if there's anything resembling an endgame and try weirder, unconventional weapons. I like the one that shoots headcrabs, the damage is pretty unreliable but they run around and hit enemies.
Bad Piggies is a physics-based game similar but not identical to Angry Birds. In this game, you build vehicles and try to get at the end of multiple stages by completing optional objectives to win stars that will allow you to play harder levels and unlock more things to play with in sandbox mode. This game is pretty silly and I enjoyed it a bunch.
When RIFT came out, it was an MMO like World of Warcraft; You bought a box for 60$, you paid 15$ a month to play and everything was open to you without the need to spend more money. The game was fairly grind-heavy but had a few good things going for it compared to WoW. Fast-forward three years, the game is free-to-play and the things that were good and special back in the days are afterthoughts now.