Recent reviews by Real-Time Sushi [d20]

Like others have said: Best. This game has a warm, comfy spot in my memory. It's such a lovely little trophy of life here... first non-Valve game, unique game-play, unique world, hilarious, the low-budget vibe of the cut-scenes is amazing... plus also, if you liked LittleBigPlanet, you might recognize the name "Mark Healey" from those credits too.

Like others have said: ignore the very small playtime here. I ripped this up back before Steam tracked that... (those were probably still the days of xFire for logging gameplay hours!)

Yeah... this game, Half-Life 2, and Guild Wars. Those were my three back in the day.

It's one of the biggest games in video game history for a reason.

(You should also check out Black Mesa - it's the same story but revamped for Source by a group of third party modders!)

GW2 is an excellent MMO overall, still. :)

It does all the things an MMO should do, and it does them well. The lore is deep, the content delivers, and the game is built really well. Also, it's F2P and you can get away with not spending a cent if you don't want to while still enjoying tons of the game.

#Lore

Not much to say other than it's deep and well-thought out. Parts aren't great, and parts are. It's pretty typical in that regard, but they do well with it, I think.

#Skill/Builds/Professions

Done well. 5 skills are tied to your type of weapon equipped (great sword attacks, pistol skills, staff attacks, etc), 5 are tied to your character (3x "utility" skills, 1x heal skill, and 1x elite skill), plus another 1-7 tied to your profession (such as Elementalist changing the element of their other skills, etc). You can change your "build" as well, enabling specializations which modify your skills and stats certain ways, which obviously grant many ways to play a character.

This game tries to keep away from "Warrior is always tank, Elementalist is always DPS, Mesmer is always crowd control, cleric is always healer" tropes. There is no specific healer, but every class seems capable of healing/support if you build them that way. There's also flexibility in building your classes. Do you want your Mesmer to be a DPS/glass cannon, or do you want them to be a tank/damage sponge/aggro-puller? You can choose.

Skills feel correctly intricate and complex while also simple and straightforward. I think anyone can pick up this game and jump in on a good build for their playstyle without too much effort, but tons of guides exist out there too to hone in on what works best for you.

Oh, you can save builds as templates, however, you do have a limited number of builds you can save at a time in both character and account storage. This should be fine, but if you get into the game you may find yourself wanting more, which just means you need to spend gems (real-world equivalent currency).

#Gameplay

--Questing!
Quests are made simple and feel great. You don't "pick up" or "turn in" quests... you just get them as you level up or pass through an area. Side quests are awarded and completed by just playing the game in a given area, and main quests are earned as you level up your character and complete the previous chapter. Progression is simple and feels intentional.

--Inventory
Like most games, it takes a minute to understand how to manage your inventory, but from what I can tell it feels good here. You will struggle with how small your space is at first, but just be patient. Eventually you'll work your way up to 18-24 slot bags in each bag slot and you might not even need half of it for a while.
+ Carry salvage kit and break down unwanted armor/weapons whenever to create materials, then drop all materials into your bank no matter where you are.
+ Sell any good armor/weapons on player market for gold, no matter where you are, by sending it to the trading post. (You'll need to find a TP NPC to collect any purchased items, coins earned, or cancelled sales, though, which makes sense.)
+ Carry the rest back to your bank or keep it on your character. :)
+ Some enemies drop junk trophies... you can sell them to a merchant ("sell junk" button).

--Economy
Most of the currencies are shared account-wide, including gold, and are stored in a "wallet" separate from your inventory. Nice!

There's a variety of currencies but most revolve around gold, karma (earned from questing), and then all the end-game stuff. There's also a gem store, which is your real-world currency, HOWEVER, it's possible to accrue enough gold from playing the game to buy gems with in-game gold rather than spend real money... but you'll have to play a while. Current exchange rate is high, and it will probably stay that way.

Note about gems: it's a flat rate. Each tier of gem purchase is exactly the same dollar-per-gem; you're not getting any discount. So, if you choose to buy gems, don't sweat about saving up for the "best deal"... just buy however much you want because it's all the same. In USD, 1 gem = $0.0125. So, something that costs 400 gems is $5 real money.


#Activities

I haven't done a lot yet beyond just leveling my characters (trying to get a few to max level which is 80, and get through the main story, before I branch off much), but there's tons to do and I'm excited to explore more soon. Here's what I know though:

--PVE
Roam world, dungeons, story quests... End-game boss runs and raids and "fractals" and strikes and stuff... racing...

--PVP
Just warp to PvP land and now you're temporarily max level (80)) = get to fight people in matches, whoo!
There's also WvW or "World vs World" which pits server populations against each other in larger-scale PvP matches with objectives such as "capture this base from the opposing team". I have yet to play it myself, but people gush over how well it's done here.


# Community

Generally people are very helpful. In many starter areas, there's often high-level players who purchased a badge that allows them to advertise themselves as mentors, and even beyond that, there's usually someone knowledgeable and helpful in chat somewhere. You should get yourself into one of the many guilds people are recruiting for too... people are a great resource.

That said, sometimes (like with every video game), chat can get toxic and weird... just ignore when it happens. No need to let political conversations get you down. And, for every weird conversation, there's also other people in chat thinking to themselves "ugh can we talk about something less provocative please"... so you're in good company even when weirdos set out. :)


# Cost

Free To Play (F2P) - If you like the game, you'll find yourself wanting the paid upgrade, but content-wise there are no pay walls on the entire original story. F2P cannot access the paid expansions (obviously) which include a new class, mounts, new elite specializations, etc... cannot access the "living world" seasons which are basically seasonal story DLC (which I think are free to paid accounts)... and F2P cannot access map chat (only "say" chat, which is more local). Other restrictions include not being able to go to Lions Arch (LA), the central player city, until like, level 40 or whatever... but a paid account can go as low as level 5. All in all, though, F2P gets quite a lot of freedom, but paid accounts feel worth it, too.

# Suggestions

The default controls are great but I prefer ESDF as opposed to WASD. Fortunately it's easy enough to re-map things, and exporting your controls are easy too, allowing you to experiment with different styles if necessary.

No native controller support, but there's templates available in the community-made section. I am planning on making my own that matches my ESDF keybind layout... with the eventual goal of being able to play Keyb/Mouse, Mouse-only, Gamepad, Gamepad/Mouse. It's great having options, and when I get that control scheme figured out I'll share it on the Steam Community.

I miss this game. I had a lot of fun playing it with friends when it came out.

There's something oddly meditative about playing this game.

* The controls and mechanics are fairly simple, but unique. As intuitive as they feel, you'll likely get frustrated until you begin to master them... however long that takes you.
* The challenges posed by the map traversal are simple in nature, but can be challenging to overcome depending on your experience.
* And, the consequences for mistakes are consistent and expectable... and, you'll potentially lose a lot of progress any given time.

What is this game? It's a QWOP-esque platformer where you play a man in a pot who can only move by swinging his hammer, and you climb an impossibly-floating mountain made of random junk. You take no damage from any source, including fall damage... but there are no checkpoints either, and the climb is fairly vertical.

* You can spend 20 minutes figuring out how to get past the rocks in the first section, twitch your mouse just right to accidentally shoot yourself through to the second area, over-swing while trying to catch a limb to control your landing, miss, bounce, slide past the rock, and plummet all the way back down to the middle of the first part.
* You could be getting good at this, make your way up to, let's call it the seventh area (it just depends on how you mentally define each area)... you can really blow through the first four sections easy-peasy, the fifth and sixth sections go fairly quickly now too, and while you're still nervous inside the sixth area, you at least know it now, so it takes you maybe 30 seconds to 10 minutes to get back to where you were, depending on how timely you chain your moves. Anyway, you are figuring out the seventh area, shoot through, miss your swing, overcorrect when catching the nearest object, and propel yourself twice as far as if you hadn't tried to catch yourself... yep, now you're falling all the way back to part 3, and you reach out to catch... nope, bouncing all the way to part 1 again. Ooof.
* You could be really good at this and speed-run the entire map in 2 minutes. No, seriously, check out the community speed runs.

You could say this game is a test of patience and tenacity. You could call it a meditative zen garden. You can even say it's an anger-management trainer.

It's why your friend just bought a new computer mouse... because he threw his across the room. It's the one game you won't let your kid play (on your computer, anyway). It's the reason you spent way more of your Saturday than you expected to on playing video games.

It's... zen, man. If you can accept your mistakes, and know when to walk away... this is a really cool game, and it's presented in a really fascinating way.

I mean, I like it, anyway.

THE DUNGEON MUST BE PURCHASED SEPARATELY IF BUYING THIS PACK. If you want the dungeon, go buy the Deluxe version. You'll get all the seasonal content and bonus trinkets with it, too, and it's the same price as buying this and the dungeon key separately (another 2000 silver, or $20 USD, for the dungeon key).

This game starts off a little disorienting (it's on Season 18 as of writing) with how to get started, but once you find your stride, there is TONS of content and the gameplay is very fun.

If you liked D1, I think you'll like how much more flexible D2 is, while still retaining the same core gameplay.

And, it's F2P! Expansions are required to do large portions of the game, but there's still plenty of free content to play, too.

An ability-enhanced hack-and-slash shooter looter with strong emphasis on builds. It's a gigantic 3rd Person Shooter MMO, but both does and doesn't feel like one.

There's lots of really cool ways you can play this game, and there's certainly no wrong path to take... but the game doesn't really explain some of the more important things, so take the time to ask questions, read guides, and watch videos to get going. (You can't really make any big mistakes, but you might waste time.)

A few examples of how the game lacks in explanation:
** One quest in particular, [Howl of the Kubrow], directs you to "kill # of enemies", but the actual objective is to smash Kubrow nests (and kill a # of enemies)... I learned this from the internet, not the game.
** The trick to progression initially lies in leveling your Mastery Rank (MR) and clearing the star-map. To clear the maps, you have to read each junction and determine what you need to do to unlock the next planet. As for MR, you have to constantly level up items and Warframes, and this is done by finding blueprints and parts in specific levels (check the wiki if you want a particular one), heading to the market and buying blueprints (with in-game currency), and farming the materials to build. This is not a hassle at all to do, but again, the greatest indicator of this is the game saying "look, the market is available to you now", which is nice to a degree, but also not.


Anyway, all this said, it's fun, especially if you have or make friends who play it. (The community is generally very helpful, so if you have any questions, ask away!)



-------

After playing for an extra 470 hours since leaving this review... I'll add some stuff.

The devs are regularly adding new features, but these new features don't always improve on or supplement old ones... but rather, add some new thing. It's cool, and exciting, and every feature added feels fun! But, when you look at the game as a whole, it's clear they just do this sometimes. Reading patch notes will further show that every so often, they have to gut some old things and rework things into a more cohesive game... which shows that while they really enjoy making fun stuff, they don't seem to have a long-looking roadmap, but are more just a bunch of video game nerds who make a cool video game cooler. Which is fine... it's just a different kind of fun. :)


The story gets more and more cool! Do yourself a favor and avoid spoilers if you can... however, the game drops lots of spoilers anyway without meaning to, if you're observant. Additionally, as time has progressed, certain newer parts of the game assume you've already learned the spoilers from older quests, so... again, observant eyes will notice. However, spoilers do not ruin a good story, they just change how you feel/what you notice when you get there.
The story is really cool once you FINALLY get there. As you get further into the story, it starts to paint some really dark, weird pictures of this universe, which is awesome... until you realize it's not cohesive at all, and the writers are just writing up stuff that sounds cool without a greater vision in mind. It's fine, though, if you view it as an avant-garde art piece, similar to Kingdom Hearts, in that the story is just world flavor and doesn't actually make sense on a grand scale. (Cool cutscenes, however!)

Game missions get really repetitive after a while. Even with all the different kinds of activities and remixes of things, it really is just the same stuff over and over again. Which is okay... just be aware of that.

I definitely recommend taking breaks from this game, especially if you took my advice and found homies. Play other games together too, and let this be your "turn off the brain and just chat" game for playing together.

Squad-based hero battle royale, with more emphasis on gunplay than on hero powers. Superb movement mechanics. Gameplay rewards aim, positioning, game sense, and micro/meta decision-making.

Base mode is Trios, which launches 20 squads of 3 into a large map (again, BR-style), where you have to fight for loot to win fights for first place. It's possible to win without any kills, but generally you'll be getting 1-10, depending on your skill and aggression level, as well as your squad makeup. Ranked exists as well, which sticks to one map for 45 days before switching to another map, and rank resets each time the map switches. (Regular play cycles between several maps. There's currently 2 in rotation, with 3 total. There's lots of variations of the maps (such as Halloween's map, and previous editions as the map changes often), but these only come up once in a blue moon, and usually for specific reasons (like Halloween).)

Lots of little great decisions in gameplay. Just go try it, it's free.

Free-to-play, grind-to-unlock characters (or pay to direct-unlock), and lots of cool cosmetics (character and weapon skins, gun charms, emotes, sprays, quips, banners, etc).

If you liked Titanfall or Titanfall 2, this was made by the same people. It's a little different, but it's the same universe and shares many mechanics.

10/10, this is one of my favorite games of all time.

Older game, but it's SO good! The gameplay resembles a standard platformer, but where this game shines is the story and writing. This game doesn't take itself seriously, as many characters or design choices stem from some corny humor (which I love), but the world is very well fleshed-out and "real" regardless. Level design is often very unique. NPCs and interactive bits throughout the world often "update" with more dialog as the story advances, giving the world some extra flavor for the player who likes to see everything.

Xbox 360 controller compatible out of the box, and I imagine Steam's controller system will let any other controller work as well. Game supports just about any 4:3 or 16:9 screen resolution that I've seen... may support other formats as well, but I wouldn't know. One of the downsides to this being a PS2/Xbox game before it made it to PC is that the pre-rendered cutscenes all display at 800x600, even though you can set the rest of the game to show at your native resolution.

Psychonauts 2 is coming out soon, and I can't wait!