State Connect: Traffic Control, a game that looked like it was about connecting cities, collecting money and buying upgrades and more connections, just served me ads non-stop. I wasn’t going to pay 14 dollars for a game that couldn’t even have -some- gameplay before bombarding me with randomly popping videos. No thank you!
Oh boy 2020, oof. I haven’t even played that many videogames released this year! I barely could come up with ten of them, so I had to get creative near the bottom of my rankings. Even in the current circumstances I’ve had a quite comfortable 2020 so I’m counting my blessings. Even having the luxury to spend some time coming up with a GOTY list is making me grateful of my luck. 2020 gets a 1/5 stars. Without further delay and whining…
2016 wasn't that great, but there were a bunch of real cool videogames that came out this year and this is my column where I write about my top ten in a few lines and try to convey what I enjoyed about them and why I think they're important games. I'm lucky enough to be able to play almost anything that I want - bar buyer's remorse preventing me from getting too many games at once - but you'll notice a small 3DS skew on this list. Man did the 3DS have a good run...
Sonic Runners is trash. I really hated it. And I didn't even play it that much. There was some loading, some menus, some clutter. Maybe if it only had been a sonic endless runner without fifteen layers of free to play stuff layered onto it. I'm sure Big The Cat is in it also. It also ran terribly on my iPad. Oh well.
Leaving behind my fears of moving from opinions to hyperbole, I have to say that FFRK represents one pillar of mobile gaming that is turning this side of my review section into a runaway train of 1/5s and 2/5s. Around the Final Fantasy nostalgia core, around the microtransactions, the energy timers, the roulettes to buy stuff, the fusion and the weird impenetrable systems designed to make money might have been an okay game only if the designers hadn't chosen to make this game excessively reliant on online.
I'm not trying to be hyperbolic here, but SimCity BuildIt is literal garbage, it takes a thing you like, crushes it under the overwhelming machine that free to play casual microtransaction money-stealing barely-games time-wasting represents in today's gaming world and then tries to make you believe that it's a video game where you can do things and that it's worth your time. Preying on nostalgia and presenting production values that at least look like a decent game but otherwise a terrible tragedy for this week.
The Bot Squad is half a puzzle game, half a black hole for your money, it's gameplay mechanics well thought in order to minimize your enjoyment of the game if you're not ready to annoy someone on facebook or to give them cash. It's something that looks like a puzzle game but quickly turns into something else, a primordial paste of energy timers, premium currencies, best values and robots.
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?)
At first it was a mess, game not unlocking for multiple hours, servers down, queues, weird error messages, being unable to play with friends, then they disabled the fastest speed and leaderboards/achievements, then a week passed... And now Sim City is playable, more or less free of server woes and other technical problems that have close to no bearing on core design discussions. Of course one could argue that the fact that Sim City needs to be always online is a core design problem but I think that by itself it wouldn't have been if the servers were on from the start with 0% errors and problems related to the technical issues.