Recent reviews by Kiju

Summarized Verdict: 7 / 10

Deep Rock Galactic is a simple game: You are a dwarf. You're deep within the caverns of an alien planet, looking for valuable minerals to find, mine, and bring back with you. The local wildlife wants to eat you and your fellow dwarfs, but you have guns, flamethrowers, explosives, turrets, pickaxes and more to ensure that that does not happen. There are four classes, each with specialized tools and equipment: Scout, Driller, Heavy-Gunner, and Engineer.

All things considered? It's fairly simplistic.

Get in, find good stuff, mine it, kill some bugs, and get out again.

The only problem is this: Once you reach a certain point in the game, there is almost nothing to do. Sure, you can farm minerals and credits to buy cosmetic things for all of your miners, but that's about it. And there are a *lot* of cosmetics to choose from. But... once you've found a look you like, only completionists will want to unlock the rest of it.

There are weekly assignments that you can do, but that's the problem: They are *weekly* assignments, so in other words you can only do them once a week. And that only takes anywhere from four to five hours if you're playing on the hardest difficulty. What does that mean? It means that once you've done your weekly assignments, you have to wait an ENTIRE week to get another goal to pursue.

I love this game, and I want to play it, but if I've done my weekly assignments, and the Deep Dive, then there is almost no purpose to log on and keep playing tomorrow, or the day after that, until the weeklies reset.

That's why I give this game a 7 / 10. If there was more to do, more goals that I could follow, then I would bump this straight up to 10 / 10. This game is a lot of fun, the dwarfs you play as have SO much character and personality, there are memes and references galore in the dialogue... it's addictive play. But it's like a pay-to-play cellphone game, where you get on, do about an hour's worth of stuff, and then... that's it. You're done.

You can pet a dog in this. He is a very good boy.

10/10

So, here's the thing about Meadow: This isn't a game for everyone. I'm just going to say it up front so that you can probably understand the rest of my review/opinion on this game.

Meadow is a social interaction game as a secondary goal; its primary goal is to be an exploration game, and that is what it is. You explore, you get rewarded for it with advancement in the game, and you're also rewarded for your exploration by finding some beautiful landscapes, amazing visuals, and a wonderful array of music.

However, this is not for everyone. Given that it is 100% passive play, I found that most of my enjoyment from this game stemmed from the fact that I was playing with friendly folks that I've never met before, we were exploring to help others achieve greater standing, while at the same time achieving even more for ourselves. And it's funny just how... friendly the community is when there's no way to speak via text. Everyone I met was friendly and willing to help me, even when I just started out.

My first few hours playing the game were spent as a Badger Pup (as it will be for most people), and maybe I was lucky, but within the first... hour or so, I had gotten "adopted" by a person playing the Adult Badger model, and he/she led me and about three other noobies on an adventure that spanned the whole map. We saw amazing caves, breathtaking vistas, and got to learn how the game worked through gathering the items necessary to earn a new avatar.

Now I've unlocked everything, and I still want to play just so I can spend time with others and help those who are new to the game and wanting a similar experience.

What are its cons? There are two, in my opinion:
Con #1: This game is an obvious cashgrab. You buy it cheap, but find that you have to unlock stuff. You can have "free" cool avatars to play as if you buy their other games, soundtracks, or online books.

Con #2: Learning curve. This game has a bit of a learning curve, in the essence that once you join, you will have zero idea how to play and/or advance. You're going to have to figure it out for yourself, since there's no one who is going to tell you in-game. No text, no words, no questions; only emotes, and you figuring it out for yourself. They'll lead you where you need to go to figure it out, but you need to figure it out for yourself.

But hey, even if Exploration games may not be your cup of tea, at least try this one out? It's three bucks.

Make it so that there are less translation issues, less bugs, less ping and lag issues, and maybe make it so the game doesn't snowball like a damned avalanche, and I'll give this game a good rating.

Until then, I will not recommend it.

And why should I? Why should I recommend an incomplete game that has a variety of bugs and translation problems, and has fights that become (or start out) as horribly one-sided slaughterfests? I am not that great at the game. In fact, I'm actually pretty bad at it, so maybe it's just me, but it seems like 5v5 is too few players to make matches at all entertaining.

And I thought World of Tanks had issues with snowballing. This game has streamlined the process into making battles as one-sided as possible, as quickly as possible.

You know, I've been looking over all these (recent) reviews, critiquing the developers for releasing paid-for DLC on a game that technically isn't even finished. And while I can see the merit in that, I can also look at it as someone who isn't just a gamer.

This is a game that runs entirely off of the purchases that people make towards the game. They don't have a monthly subscription, they don't have an in-game cash shop, they don't have any PtW content at all. All they have is the revenue they generate through people buying the game, or in this case buying their DLC.

I mean... c'mon guys, they're even nice enough to let people release mods to make their game better FREE OF CHARGE. This is like buying tickets fo a football game and then complaining that you have to pay more money to get a soda and a hotdog.

The bottom line about this game is it's unfinished at the moment, it's still needing money in order to finish, and I'm more than happy to support them in this way. The game itself is phenomenal and has been from the start, they haven't left us in the lurch like Stomping Lands did, and that's quite the good deed in my book.

I'll be more than happy to buy their DLC if it's well made and interests me, because I like this game, and I applaud the developers for updating consistently.

Well, given I've only played... what, two hours - give or take, I can't really give a good review. So, what I'll do is just explain this much: does it immediately catch my attention?

Yes and no, it's rather difficult to answer. Suffice to say, I'll give this game a thumbs up. At least try it, it's free after all.

On the one hand the game looks rather nice - the character customization is nothing fantastic, though it's much better than most MMORPGs are; you can be a musclebound brute, or a skinny-dude. Which is nice, since it means you don't have bodybuilders picking up a staff and calling themselves a mage. (Although you can do that if you wanna). The world graphics aren't fantastic, though the lighting effects are actually very impressive, funny enough. The "god rays" are particularly nice to look at while you're on a flying mount. Given that I picked mage, I can safely say that the spell effects are actually rather nice to look at - fire looks like it might actually burn something!

The first few minutes of the game is pure tutorial, learn the controls, learn some basics of combat, learn how to control a mount, and off you go into the public servers. Can't say much about the community, as I only spent two hours in-game, though at least there wasn't BUY X Currency for $19.99, or whatever for spambots. Which is a blessing, let me tell you.

The downsides? Well... there's quite a few horrible bugs. A friend of mine tried taming a mob that was leashing back to its starting position, and wound up glitching it so he had to restart the game. Not to mention the fact that said mob was actually stuck in one spot, unable to leash properly - which didn't help. Not only that but one of the earlier quests has you going into a minidungeon. One that... well, I couldn't enter. It wouldn't let me go in, there was no transition point.

And the most annoying thing is your character shouts some spell nonsense every spell you cast. And with spells that have 0 cooldown, hearing "HEAT. BURN. INCENDIA." every two seconds gets real annoying, real fast.

(Review made as of 4.7 Hours Played / February 21, 2016)

I've seen enough Anime to know where this is going.

Only... I really didn't. Okay, I've seen people play this game on YouTube, and I thought "What the heck, I'll try it." Seems I made the right choice, although I really do hope that there is more to expand upon in later updates.

For right now, what you get for your money is a game that lets you build some corrals within which you get to keep a bunch of little slimes that give you "plorts" that you can exchange for money. Which lets you build more corrals. Which gets you more plorts and... okay, you get the idea.

The graphics as a whole are really simplistic with the whole cellshaded look that seems to be a standard with Steam-based Early Access Games. Not that I'm complaining about this fact; the graphics as a whole are simple but beautiful, setting the mood entirely within the first second that you boot up the game and load into your burgeoning Slime Ranch.

The music is along the same lines as the graphics: simple guitar music, a little bit of a wind section, and then you add in the atmosphere provided by the silly little noises that the slimes make, and you get a really enjoyable and relaxing experience. Sure there's these evil slimes called the Tarr that make the music get all dangerous-sounding, but that's about as dark and gloomy as you will ever get when playing this game. Maybe they will add more enemies in later updates, I'm not sure.

There is some complexity to the game, though I have a feeling that the developers stressed the importance of simplicity and ease of play - making it easy for both "casual" and "hardcore" gamer crowds to pick it up and start playing like a pro as soon as they get through about ten minutes of play. You vacuum up slimes, store them in corrals, and feed them their favorite food. You can upgrade the corrals to let you hold more and keep them all safe and secure, and you can also have corrals in different areas in order to allow for different species of slimes to live contently, but that's as deep as things get.

However, this causes a lack of depth for players that can and will sit and play it for hours. I've almost put in five hours and I've already filled up every single corral with money-making slimes. Sure the exploration is nice, but as of right now there seems to be a very linear path that the developers have set up for us, with little sections cordoned off. Possibly for later updates?

Okay, so as I write this I am currently only at eleven hours of playtime, not a whole lot really. And in the grand scheme of things? I've barely scratched the surface of this game. You're dumped into a solar system, with a few planets and maybe ten-ish? stations to visit and get some random missions from. Cool, great, awesome. Did I mention this is only one solar system out of a galaxy?

Sure it's in space, the game isn't really going to be absolutely teeming with life or a huge population, but whenever you find a landmark there's usually some miners, pirates, the Militia, or some traders that are around, and it's up to you how to interpret who is friend, who is foe, and who is prey.

Can you be a pirate in this? Absolutely. Can you trade and smuggle illegal materials from different stations? Of course, just be careful of Militia patrols - they're in bigger, and meaner ships than you are to start out with, and they tend to shoot first and ask questions later if you're on the wrong side of the law. And of course you can also play the role of a bounty hunter, chasing after Pirate heads to fuel your bank account and taking up odd jobs to buy a few new guns along the way.

You can also be a trader, taking supplies from one station, then going and selling them at another station to make a huge profit. There's a news-feed option in there to let you know what the latest prices are for each station, if you're patient enough. Just look out for the pirates. Or, if you're a wuss, you can just be a miner and shred through astroids with mining lasers, selling the metal ore for profit, and running the hell away from the Pirates who like your cargo, but don't like the work.

As far as the combat goes, there's nothing really all that complex about it. You've got Broadside weapons, Turrets, and Secondaries. Broadsides are pretty self explanitory - they're guns mounted in the port and starboard sides of your ship (Left and Right) that are your main ship-killing weapons. What's neat is you can just spray-and-pray with them if you want, or you can charge them up, take aim, and have a well-timed barrage that leads your target so it lands right into their hull. Although if you're point blank, sometimes the spray-and-pray is better for use as a DPS race.

Then you have turrets. You can have some pretty simple stuff... missile turrets, laser turrets, beam weaponry, and even some flak guns to take down those pesky fighters and bombers swarming around your poopdeck.

And lastly there's Secondaries. Secondaries are essentially up to you, and effect certain places where your craft will be effective. You can put... bigger flak guns, you can put mine launchers, dumb-fire missile launchers, heat-seeker missile launchers, and so on.

As far as the story goes? I haven't really gotten that far into it yet, but from what I can tell it's super simple and not really anything that you're gonna get lost on. Find some alien-tech doohickey and then go on an adventure to find out what the heck it is and what it does.

Bottom line is this: If you like Starpoint Gemini, but thought the combat and world was exceptionally boring (like I found it to be...)? You'll like this. If you like pretending you're piloting Serenity or the Outlaw Star, you'll like this.

You can't take the sky from me.

So, I just feel like this needs to go on record, and to actually say something about it. Now... I like WarThunder. It's probably one of the best online, WWII multiplayer flight-sims out there. American, Russian, British, German, and Japanese aircraft all make an appearance, so you can fly anything from the P-51 Mustang, to a Bf-109, and feel like you're actually in the cockpit. Heck, they've even recently added in tank combat, and are even going to be adding in naval warfare in the near future! That said, this game has gone completely down the toilets within the past several months.

Lemme explain a bit of the history of the game. Awhile ago, there were ten tiers, and you used to have a level with all of the different factions (American, Russian, British, etcetera), that determined what aircraft you could buy, due to their tier. Lets say you managed to get up to tier 4 in American aircraft, right? Well, that means you could buy any aircraft that's from tier one, to tier four, but if you're only tier 2 in Germany, you can only buy up to tier 2 German aircraft. Get the idea? Right, good. Recently, they completely revamped their level up and tier system, making it so there are only five tiers (which condenses it by quite a bit), but instead of unlocking the next tier of aircraft, you could only unlock one aircraft at a time. This isn't really a bad idea... but the problem is, this also nearly quadrupled the amount of time it will take to unlock every aircraft of a certain faction. What's worse, is they lowered (by a *lot*) the amount of experience you earn per assist or kill, forcing you to slow down your leveling even further, and enhancing the amount of free exp you get per match, which just entices you to buy their premium currency so you can use said free experience. It has turned this game into a slog of a grind that makes progression rediculously slow and boring.

The method of experience is by far one of my biggest gripes, I'll admit. It's a sickeningly underhanded method of encouraging players to spend money on the game, to buy the premium currency so you can spend your free experience. I don't usually mind "pay to progress" games, they're usually not too terrible, but this one is rediculous. It makes World of Tanks' progression seem like a breeze.

On to the next hit against this game: balancing. With the aforementioned condensing of the tier system into only five tiers, Gaijin thought it would be clever to introduce a Battle Rating system, to compensate, and to avoid having biplanes going up against end-of-war aircraft. This isn't really so bad, and it probably could have even been a good idea, had they implemented it correctly. You'd expect the Battle Rating system to be based off of the aircraft (or tank's) stats, and understanding that something like say... a P-40 Kittyhawk, or an F6F Hellcat would be a fair match against an A6M3 Zero, as they fought against one another in the actual war. Right? Well... that's a nice thought, but it's not how it works. See, their battle rating system is based entirely on the performance of the aircraft in player hands. The better someone does with an aircraft, the higher its battle rating within its own tier. This is inherently flawed; while someone might do well in an aircraft, that does not necessarily mean that it is able to go against something better than it, and still win. An A6M3 Zero can see fights against aircraft that were built several *years* after their initial development, because their battle ratings are similar. This is horribly wrong, and does not do anything to make a game fun, or balanced.

And, on to the last topic of my complaints. This is actually a rather common one amongst most of the player base, and - while I'm normally not one to base something on unfounded theories and accusations, you'd think that since the majority of WarThunder's player base seems to agree on this fact, it must be true to some degree.

Russian aircraft, and tanks, are given unfair advantages, and handicaps. Bet you thought I was going to say overpowered, huh? Well... I won't, because most of their aircraft did function to the specs given in WarThunder. However. This does not mean that their questionable damage models, unrealistic flight models and characteristics, and their absolutely rediculously favoritism'd battle ratings, are fair. To elaborate: Russian aircraft have damage models that seem to soak up a lot of damage without the plane actually registering said hits (players coin this term as the aircraft being made of "Stalinium"). Russian aircraft also have very... generous climb and turn rates, and this weird ability to dive faster, accelerate faster, and keep their momentum longer, than almost every aircraft, even those that were historically faster and better in a dive, a turn, or a climb (An Ishak monoplane from 1934 diving faster than an F4U Corsair, for example). And lastly, they seem to have this... preferential treatment when it comes to their battle rating (LA-5Fn having a battle rating of 4.0 even though it's a 1944 aircraft, whereas the P-51D-30 Mustang has a battle rating of 4.7, with worse stats, armament, and durability).

Despite all these bad things I said, WarThunder is still fun every now and then. Personally, I think it would be even better if they fixed all of the balancing issues and horribly slooooow progression they have going. It's gone from an interesting and exciting game, to a boring, slogfest of a grind that just isn't fun anymore. But who knows, maybe it's just me? Give it a try for yourself. Its worth the download. Just don't be surprised if it takes you several *weeks* to get out of the starting planes and/or tanks.

So, this game is pretty fun. Don't have much experience in it, but I suppose I can at least tell some new/curious players what the start of the game is like. In the start, you're gonna have just some standard infantry battles. Rifleman versus Rifleman in three-point capture-and-hold maps. Nothing too serious.

Once you reach a certain rank, you'll be given access to the rest of the game (so to speak). This includes the opportunity for larger conflicts that copy straight from Frontlines: Fuel of War's style of point-to-point capture system, while also retaining the ability to have smaller "skirmishes" with just rifleman. Pretty nice selection to choose from, I won't deny that.

Here's the problem, however: If you play as the Americans, you automatically lose. German armor, infantry, and aircraft are all superior at this point in the game's development. In those big matches I talked about? You'll generally be a standard rifleman, wielding an M1 Garand and going up against things like Panzer I's and Panzer 38t's. No anti-tank weapons for you, except for a single panzerfaust that is in the base spawning location. Germans seem to love abusing their armor. They get more of it, more often, and Americans seem to get nothing but infantry.

On top of this, I've noticed that their airforce is pretty sub-par as well. They get the P-38 Lightning, which is a great aircraft... but it was not designed as a fighter-bomber. You can get outflown and outgunned by the BF-109 E-3 model that the Germans currently get, and they'll shoot you down in a matter of seconds. In exchange, the P-38 has one extra bomb to use before it has to reload. Not really worth it, if they can just keep you grounded.

What's worse, is the fact that the American's ground infantry is even worse than the German. The Germans get a Machinepistol early on that can easily shred any infantry it comes across, and their standard rifle (Gewehr 43) seems to have a faster fire-rate and more accuracy than the M1 Garand.

So... yeah. My review for this game? Great idea, horrible balancing, and terribly easy to see that they went for the Pay-to-win moral of "pay us, and we'll unlock weapons for you that give you a huge advantage". Would be an excellent game if they skipped over paying "gold" for better equipment.