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.
Metal Slug Defense is not entirely hot garbage, but there is better to be found in the realm of defense games where you get resources constantly and build units to push towards an enemy base that you destroy. Two things that annoyed me right up top? Full-screen ads on the mission select screen and full-screen ads right after you've completed a mission. No matter how fun or charming a game can be, having a video ad for some other game block your device is awful.
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.
Click Titans is almost a direct clone of Clicker Heroes, a web game where you buy heroes to kill enemies to make money to buy more heroes to kill more enemies to reset your game with more money in the next one (in order to kill more enemies). I like Clicker Heroes, but CT is just a way worse version. Mired with pop-ups for ads and opportunities to watch videos or pay in exchange for quicker game progression. Since the only point of "idle" game is the progression, it's a bit silly to expect people to pay for it.
Words for Evil is a game where you make words out of tiles to attack enemies and use abilities. My experience with it was quite poor as the controls didn't work properly and some of the core ideas don't work really well for me. Besides that, the character system and the items you can get, the skill and their upgrades and the mechanics the game tosses here and there to help you try and beat it are a good effort and I had some fun with WoE.
Hey there everyone! Here is my top ten for 2014, from all the games that came out and that I've played! It was a really cool year for games and while I continuously give 2s and 3s to the games I review, there also were plenty of fun experiences that I would recommend to people with tastes more or less aligned with mine! Here's the list!
10- Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls
While D3's endgame was a mess when the game came out and I had issues with plenty of its systems - most of my gear came from the auction house, there weren't any fun legendary items, the difficulty was all over the place - they fixed most of it with Reaper of Souls and then with the stuff they added later on. Rifts and the Adventure mode add exponentially more stuff to do, legendaries and set items included in this expansion are pretty awesome, you have gems that give you special abilities that you can level-up and the difficulty is much better tuned this time around. I hope they give us another expansion!
9- Earth Defense Force 2025
Who doesn't like murdering bugs with friends? EDF is a game I hold dearly in my heart and this installment is pretty good. I'm a bit bummed that they didn't make it four player local co-op, but the framerate would've probably tanked to the low 10s if they did so. The four classes are fun and the range of guns you can unlock is still staggering. I hope they next one they bring here is on a console with enough horsepower to do away with loading screens and other issues!
8- Dragon Age Inquisition
I'm not really into open world games and I feel like they're always overwhelming with plenty of dumb content to do, but I made an exception for DA:I since I enjoyed past Dragon Age games in some capacity. With a good cast of characters and decent gameplay systems, I've took the time it needed to beat this game at a steady pace. Some things aren't perfect - the interface, the crafting system, among others - but it would be crazy for me to not say that I've enjoyed this after spending 60 hours+ trying to finish all the quests and talk to everyone while singlehandedly solving all of the world's problems with the backing of my inquisition.
7- Super Smash Brothers for WiiU
The 3DS version of smash felt like it was a thing I played while waiting for the WiiU game and boy is the console version better. There is so much to do in smash brothers, so many things to unlock, so many challenges to complete, and the core gameplay is pretty solid. I'm not really good at smash and I don't have friends to play locally with often so I probably didn't put as much time in this title as I could have, but the fun I had with it the first few days I played was unmistakable. Also not a perfect game - just the fact that you can't restart events and the button combination to quit most things is something ungodly - but it's pretty much the smash game I was waiting for.
6- Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright
This game is what happens when you combine two of my favorite handheld franchises. Both the puzzles from Layton and the awesome courtoom drama from Phoenix Wright are combined in this charming little title where the plot twists hit hard and fast at the end. I found it a bit easier than the other PW games - since you can use Hint Coins during court segments to help - but I just burned through that game non-stop since it was so good. The Layton puzzles are also enjoyable. It's fanservice at its best when both characters interact, amazing fanservice.
5- Tales of Xilia 2
Another game that I've burned through, playing all the times I could in local co-op. I love Tales games, I love playing them because the core battle gameplay is so good. The story of this one is original, I think - the concept that you have this huge debt to pay off by doing side-quests and things like that was interesting to me - and the cast of characters, combined with the amount of secrets and things to discover and make made this an RPG I really enjoyed.
4- Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
I'm a huge Borderlands guy, there's not another game quite like it that combines shooting and RPG mechanics. The Pre-Sequel might take many things from Borderlands 2, it still manages to create new interesting characters, tell an okay story and bring plenty of special abilities and mechanics to the table. If not for a game-stopping bug - a quest that won't progress - I still would be playing it right now, trying to get through the third difficulty, probably.
3- Persona Q
Combining the fun parts of Etrian Odyssey and the amazing cast, humor and mechanics of Persona comes this game that I'm still playing right now. I can think of very little flaws in Persona Q but plenty to love. The cast of characters you have to pick from to make your party, the sheer volume of skills, enemies and items to go through, the fun to navigate a dungeon while mapping it yourself, fighting tough bosses, figuring out puzzles and reading hilarious dialogues about steak and bear puns, Persona Q is an RPG delight that is simply amazing.
2- Mario Kart 8
This might be my favorite Mario Kart ever. It's so well done, the courses are all pretty great and there is so much personality in it. I've played countless hours of it in local co-op and we've never got bored. The DLC is also pretty amazing - adding characters such as Link and whole new courses to the game - and while I never enjoyed messing around with the car parts and the battle mode - everything else is so polished that I'm actually looking forward the next DLC to play more hours of this gem with my friends
1- Hyrule Warriors
Just by time played, this takes the cake. I haven't played a Warriors game since the time of the original XBOX and I bought it mostly to support the WiiU. It was an amazing experience that I've spent countless hours unlocking every single bit I could out of. With a wide range of characters that play differently, tons of challenges in the form of retro 8-bit maps, weapons to collect and upgrades to your characters to buy, I just couldn't stop playing until I had all the weapons and unlocked all the secret outfits and cleared the adventure maps. There's still DLC coming for it, and if you're into Zelda stuff, you'll be pleased by the wide array of characters and familiar items this game offers you. Dropping the Majora's Mask moon on my enemies was a high point, as it always is when you complete difficult challenges while finding the hidden golden skultullas.
It's a wipe! is a really bad game based on a cool concept - being a guild leader and running 'raids' against huge enemies with a bunch of people at your disposal. The interface is clunky and broken in spots, the battles take forever even if nothing is happening, you have close to no control over your characters and it's quite difficult to plan strategies properly so the end result is a depressing little RPG.
I like Peggle, it's a fun little franchise where you shoot balls on pegs to clear levels. You get power-ups to help you beat the levels and the characters are quite funny (I'm looking at you, Pharaoh Cat). Take everything good with Peggle, replace it with terrible odds skewed in favor of the game, add micro-transactions to every single thing you could, slap an energy system on it and give it for "free" on the app store, you got Peggle Blast.
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.
Earn to die 2 is a little "endless runner" type of game where you drive a car around with simple and usable controls for iOS - a bit like Trials with tilting and things like that - and run over zombies, boxes, exploding barrels and make money doing so. You then use that money to upgrade your car in order to progress a little bit further and make more money, in order to - you guessed it - do the same thing, almost forever. There are a few flaws with ETD2, but I mostly had fun with it before it became repetitive and pointless.
I'm not a big adventure game guy, but I love Borderlands, so I just had to try Tales From The Borderlands for myself. The potential for great story telling in that universe is there - with its numerous factions, humor and weird sci-fi tropes - and I had some fun with The Walking Dead. I'm quite happy to have tried TFTB, it's a great adventure game mixed with plenty of Borderlands nods and lore and although the gameplay is a bit on the simple side, I wouldn't ask for more in a game that's all about characters and situations and how you react to them.
Maybe if Terra Battle was a game you'd pay money for and you didn't have to gamble to get new characters, maybe if there were no stamina system, maybe if it didn't use the timed drag-your-characters-around method of control in puzzle games, maybe if it didn't do all these things, I would've liked it better. TB is a RPG where you move your characters around a battlefield to "pincer" enemies in order to attack them. You have a wide cast of skills and abilities that trigger and alter the grid and there is also a wide range of characters to collect. Ultimately, I didn't like it much.
DA:I is a return to form from Bioware, it's a solid game in which I've invested upwards of fifty hours - and I don't play that many games that long, to be frank - and altough I do not find it perfect in all accounts, I posit that it's an amazing game full of content, story and choices to be made that will be a perfect way to spend an absolutely insane number of hours for any RPG fan and especially people who are invested in their Dragon Age universe.
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!
Outcast Odyssey isn't a terrible game even if there is a respawn timer, even if you have to be online, even if it's weirdly balanced and even if the core battle system is a bit flawed. I had fun with it at the beginning, but it deteriorated quickly. OO is a game where you explore maps, fight enemies and fuse cards together to become stronger and potentially fight stronger enemies while they slowly lower your HP until then you have to pay for potions or wait until you get healthy again.
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.
Lost Viking is way too hard. It's a "puzzle" rpg where you slide tiles around to attack enemies, collect gold, unlock chests and do other things. It's way too hard and it's barely a puzzle. The core mechanic is that tiles appear and you slide the whole board - a bit like Threes - but with the tiles being pseudo-random and there being about six type of tiles, sometimes you just can't do anything. The game is also plagued with a bunch of progression-related issues and a few weird technical glitches here and there. But hey, at least there are no microtransactions.