Recent reviews by MythicRocfordson

I have no idea how this game got so much popularity (Actually I do. It's sold using Marvel as the backdrop for some pretty stupid and unnecessary ideas.) For whatever reason these guys felt that a turn based deck builder was a smarter idea than just a regular turn based game with a roster and learned attacks.

On the surface its a bright and colorful Marvel adventure that you just can't help but sink your teeth into. After almost 10 hours Im putting this game down as I've lost my respect for its creation.

As aforementioned, this game uses a deck building component to present its combat. This is ok on paper, but their implementation of it sucks because there is no balance with player cards and availability. Only 3 people can play in each mission, which means you only have 8 cards per person for attacks. For whatever reason the game randomizes these cards, instead of taking a balanced inventory of playable ones. That means its randomizing 24 individual cards for play, and not 2 or 3 from each deck. So it is fully possible and probable that you will draw 5 cards for Deadpool, but no cards for Blade or Dr. Strange on any given turn.

You can't plan around this, as card selection is totally random. On top of this the developers felt it reasonable that the player can only use 3 Play cards (Attack cards), 3 re-roll opportunities and one player move chance per round. Adding a re-roll option, much less 3 chances, proves that the system is broken and only serves to pad out a seriously flawed game-play mechanic. Again this totally guts player agency and the ability to freestyle because I have no idea whats coming or how to stop it.

But wait! There's more!!!

On top of these unnecessary restrictions on the player, the devs have also decided to embolden every single enemy with an uncoordinated supply of reinforcements, buffs, and full on frenzies made to interrupt your turn at any given moment they want.

Interrupting MY turn in a turn based game before I've finished my move. Wouldn't that be a blatant disrespect of the foundational structure of the games supposed deep gameplay mechanics?

You are outnumbered, overrun at all times with hardship after hardship and none of what s in the game helps to alleviate that.

You can only use 3 people per mission, and this kind of ruins the entire point of having a massive marvel team: Why get happy about people I love on my team, when there are so many more I CAN'T bring?

It's story is pretty nice for a comic fan and I've loved meeting all my old favorite marvel heroes. Unfortunately I'm burned out already by the combat and game play so I kinda don't care anymore. It's not my favorite marvel heroes utilized in interesting and innovative ways. It's a 3d modeled Marvel game that uses deck building for its "strategy" and combat.

The Heroism mechanic is what ruins the entire package for me. These guys have locked player ability behind the amount of heroism you have at the beginning of the match. What is heroism? It's a word. Seriously, there's no explanation of this mechanic. If you have enough heroism you can use most of your attacks, but if you have no heroism than the player will not be able to use any cards. They cost heroism. Why lock card usage behind heroism? Why not just allow the player to use the card, independent of heroism constraints? No one ever explained it, because they were too brain dead to bother. More often than not you'll run into a no heroism problem, and there is nothing to do about it except suffer through the games ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

This game is a try-hards wet dream. If you are feeling a hollow nothingness at life, need desperately to validate your strategy endurance to your friends because you have no sense of self confidence or just existential bliss at simply being simple and alive, than this game is for you.

Nothing about it is really fun but it is touted as such because people who love playing X-Com for whatever reason believe suffering through ♥♥♥♥♥♥ circumstances and horrible strategy design made to look impactful is a virtue.

I'm done with bloated experiences

Dear god is this the best Indie game I've ever played.

Vampire Survivors is a rogue lite survival game where the player is tasked with fending off literally thousands of on screen enemies in the span of about 10 to 15 minutes. There's dozens upon dozens of abilities and powers that can be attained and combined to create your own combo of destruction and mayhem, and for the most part the game is designed to leave you constantly on your toes.

At some point it stops being hard and you find your perfect combo. You sit back and watch the screen light up with pretty colors as the sound of exp dings echo into your brain.

Addictive as fiuck and definitely reccomended.

Really great production value

Yeah yeah yeah the campaigns ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome. Lots of shootings. Explosions. Wow.

What really sucks is the horde mode. This time they've only allowed engineers to build turrets and any of the other in depth defense for horde. Did I mention they wont allow more than ONE engineer per squad? "All duplicate characters will be resolved on game load in"-means we're not letting you play this character if someone already claimed it before the match making search. I don't think I need to explain why this is one of the absolute worst decisions for designing horde. It all falls apart with this game and it just doesn't last.

Play Gears 4 for good horde

*Monster Slayed*

Hunter 1: "That's the last of them! Tonight...we celebrate!"

Hunter 2: *sigh* With a hunt?"

Hunter: " Yes.

For tomorrow...

WE HUNT!!!"

This is a really smooth and nostalgic trip for me, as I'm sure it might be for a lot of you too! The game runs smoother than cinnamon butter and the PC graphics options are beyond generous and well designed. Don't really have much to say beyond that, good investment. Bring on the collection

I have nothing but great things to say about Ancient Relics. The aspects of story and lore in this game have been more cohesively brought together to make a narrative that truly makes the galaxy interesting and worth waiting another month to see what happens. These new relics are everywhere. I mean EVERYWHERE. There are relics and hence relic excavation sites around almost every system that you can find it each one is unique and highly interesting.

It starts with a single excavation site that can be overseen by a scientist. Every 90 days, that scientist is rolled on a probability formula as to whether or not they found some clues pertaining to this relic. The value of the dice roll determines if its a single clue or even a double clue event. Now if you send low level scientists at a high level relic they'll either die or lose precious clues that you spent time excavating so you need to pay attention and assign the proper leaders. Depending on the difficulty of the site and skill of the scientist, you may or may not be here for months or even years trying to unlock the next chapter in this relic's saga. The role playing is so damned juicy and interesting I've played this game over 1000 hours and somehow it feels more lively than I've ever seen it.

Now the ancient relics themselves are nice but the nice updates for this DLC release really put the micromanagement of this game on the back burner so you can just enjoy it. Planets no longer need governors and can be auto mated so you can focus on the rest of your galaxy. The utility is back baby.

Ancient Relics is completely worth your money. Get it.

In my opinion this DLC makes the economic management of empires so much smoother. Upon the release of 2.2 resources and planet management was a nightmare because there was un accounted deficits all over the galaxy with different empires because they weren't lucky enough to spawn near a dark matter node or a volatile gases deposit. With the release of Megacorps we now have a galactic stock market that we can use to offset bad deficits we have for years to come until we can get on our feet. If you're using the market correctly, you're already the stock market galactic leader and your home planet is a bastion of trade and commerce.

It also added the ability to have crime syndicate planets which actually works pretty nicely for worlds that cant maintain legal jobs for all. Over population leads to crime and of course this play type accommodates that very well.

You also have the ability to make commerce branch offices in different empires to increase grade and galactic opinion.

It's good in my opinion.

I've clocked 90 hours into the game so far and I feel that I've gained a bit of insight to whats going on with this game and just what in the hell Paradox is thinking with its release. Imperator: Rome plays much like CK2 or EU4 (Though I've never played either of those games thoroughly) set in the antiquity era and the authenticity to the map is really mesmerizing. Unfortunately most of it plays a bit like a historical simulator, and it barely even gets that right. The reason I'm making note of this is because it helps to highlight the feel of Imperator and why playing as any other empire besides the popular ones might not be so fun for you. For example, Rome starts the game with 5 defensive alliances and if you wait about 2 months into the game's clock you will get automatic claims on the surrounding nations and land that is the Italian Peninsula. They have almost instant advantages to conquer their neighbors and there is not much to stop them save for Carthage and Macedon. Compared to a tribal nation like Aksum, Rome experiences the game's content at a steady pace that you would deem fair, albeit a bit slow on the waiting part. I'm talking at least 50 years of waiting just to get to upgrading buildings. This makes Aksum and a goodly number of smaller empires comparatively unplayable but not totally impossible if you know what you're doing.

Now what you do in the game isn't technically all that great either, you essentially manage pops and tend to disloyal politicians in your senate. Loyalty is an interesting feature that basically charges you with managing and worrying at all times about what your empire and senate must think of you, as well as your relative ease of conquest in the outside world. Do not expect to have fast expansion like we did in Total War or Stellaris because the pops are designed specifically to react poorly to rulers who spend more time conquering than they do micromanaging their culture and religion. So literally half the game is supposed to be pointless clicking up and down monotonous columns to get them to like you. There'a toggle with each governor of the province to convert one free pop a year, but that toggle is still completely useless because the really low level of Oratory power that we amass to assimilate pops due to Mana prevents us from solving this issue in a quick fashion. It makes war and expansion a tedious and not fun activity and once you've managed to paint a region you'll see how rigid you've been posturing yourself over the keyboard.

There's tons of text adventure events to iron out your very own role play story in Rome or whatever nation you choose but the outcome is nearly always pointless and doesn't serve any purpose than to give you an illusion of flavor. For example there's this event in Rome where two Senators are fighting over stupid ♥♥♥♥ and they want you to make a decision-the joke being that both of their names are almost exactly the same and you can't really distinquish between the two. Its a truly bad text adventure joke alongside a truly bad text adventure road map that doesn't actually give you anything. These events are identical across all empires by the way.

In Stellaris the L Gate Cluster has at least 5 separate outcomes depending on RNG. That's a single location in the game, each spanning about 20 hours of conflict thereafter depending on what you do. In retrospect Imperator has tons of events and I have no doubt that the player will find a way to enjoy ruling there very own empire. For me the imagination has run dry in lieu of tasteless game play loops and a very dry endgame progression. There really isn't that much strategy here besides building massive legions and marching them to key tiles in the games map. There's also specializing provinces to produce resources at Min/Max rate, which is cool when you think about it but its really all there is adding depth to the game, and there isn't much of it here. Pops are separated between 4 types-Citizens, Freeman, Tribesman and Slaves. Each province needs a healthy combo of these pops or you will have production problems and hence loyalty problems.

Navigation of units feels like chess pieces on a chess board and the initiation of a legion's movement is stunted by the decisions the AI will go through to avoid a conflict that they cannot win. Try to imagine a legion marching past the Alps, and it taking about two month sin game time to fully transport them. The unit moves, but only as much as progress was made in the mean time. This makes wars a very tedious mess of which placement you have to keep changing because the AI is hardwired to avoid defeat. When they project that they will lose, they do their utmost to avoid the battle. This means clicking between the same two tiles for two minutes in an effort to attack a single weaker enemy legion, before realizing that the AI will always try to avoid open conflict unless they are confident. I get that they aren't conditioned to fight losing battles or otherwise there'd be no challenge, but at this stage in wars it just prolongs conflict to unnecessary lengths.

Wars are the one thing they got right about this game but they messed up there as well because there isn't true unit variety other than these icons that we see for elephants or light cavalry. Aside from a lack of flavor it also severely suffers from a lack of innovation or strategy. Like Total War, auto resolve is the main way battles are decided and the game uses an absolutely terrible formula to portray it. The issue revolves around tactics and how they are utilized and applied to existing legions. For example, if you have a 8x8x8 count in your legion and use the philax formation, the heavy infantry will get a 33 percent damage modifier which is very useful but the squad is limited to only 24 cohorts. You can work this ratio out with other smaller squads but the result is that this formation often means more to the outcome of fights than actual composition. Never mind if your numbers are twice the size of the enemy-if they have a formation that is more mathematically pleasing to this shallow formula, you can kiss that 100k legion cohort goodbye. I get that unit cohesion was a very important factor in antiquity but so was having an insane resource stockpile, and I really feel we're being punished for having said stockpiles when we have massive wars like this. We also have to calculate this ridiculous equation on top of the insanely harsh supply limit that is applied on a per city basis instead of a province basis. We are losing far more men to hunger and starvation than actual combat and it makes absolutely no sense, even from a realistic standpoint. Aside form these annoyances, war and combat carry absolutely no flavor. You never actually see the units-just representations of their likeness with icons and numbers. If you have the imagination, it works. There is a sort of paper rock scissors type of schism about which units are more effective about defeating others, and for the most part the game's very deep trade mechanics go hand in hand with the availability of certain units. (IE: Without iron, no heavy infantry-No steppe horses, no bow cavalry)

There's tons of mechanics that go into this game but for the most part its all ruined by a very boring endgame and a very dry game play loop that leaves me more pissed off than satisfied. I really think you should pass on this one because Paradox seem to have gotten it in their heads that its perfectly fine to release half finished concepts that players will drool over until 6 months down the line we have 3 free updates and 5 new DLCs. Looking at the road map of Stellaris, which I followed from day one, Imperator Rome isn't likely to become a finished game by my definition for at least a year or two.

That's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ unacceptable and the consumer means so much more than that. Stick to other Paradox strategy games until this is fleshed out. Until then I'll just go back to Stellaris

Oh boy Oh boy is Skies Unknown a great Ace Combat game! First and foremost this game at the current moment does ntoc come with HOTAS or 21/9 support, but I imagine that they'll add a patch for this eventually. They also limited VR usage for the next year as a deal with Sony which I think is screwed but whatever. I enjoy it just fine with an Xone controller.

The main selling aspect of this go round is weather effects and the ways that influence you as a pilot. Wind currents shift the weight of the plane in jarring directions and thunder storms rock your senses with intense booms of thunder and flashes of lightning that manage to disrupt your radars and give a much more realistic and arcadey experience. Multiple times I crashed into mountains and cliffs because the iwnd took away control in precise moments I wasn't paying attention. Overall I'd say the feeling of a being a badass pilot is really there.

Visuals are above and beyond the best we've had in the series and the boss fights and dogfights I've engaged in have really brought me back to being 12 years old again, staying up all night trying to defeat the Yuktabanians in Unsung War. The story really isn't perfect but its passable as far as Ace Combat and uses the modern tropes of drone warfare to bring out a pretty dramatic campaign.

It makes you feel like a badass too because the AI keeps commenting on how badass I am. Thinking bout getting the Season Pass now lol