Recent reviews by Haarlock

For its cost of 20 bucks, I would recommend this. For anything more, not worth the price.

This game is a classic indie game in the sense that the mechanics are great while the story is not. I can see what they wanted out of the story, and certain high points had my mild approval, but overall it was too stilted and unpolished. There was not enough fleshing out of individual characters, nor enough build-up between the high points of the story to make it feel natural. It feels weird to essentially argue for more filler to stretch out and fill up the story, but there it is.

The mechanics, however, are perhaps the finest Fire-Emblem style strategy I've ever seen - this includes the actual Fire Emblem games I've played. I was not expecting an indie game that honestly did it better than the material used as inspiration.

My core complaint about the Fire Emblem games was that it never actually felt like an army - it was always some variant of shonen hero stuff with single powered characters.

Symphony of War fixes that by literally giving you an army. Each unit is a "squad" of up to 9 units with 1 of them serving as the Leader. Each Leader has an aptly named Leadership characteristic that dictates how many units they can command. These units are then arranged in a formation where they fill the classic roles of tank, DPS, and support. When you attack with a unit, all of the units in a squad attack in sequence after which the other side counterattacks - this is where your formation really shows its worth, because a good formation can last far longer than a bad one of the same units.

Beyond that, the game is fairly intuitive - if you know anything at all about tank, DPS, and support, you'll figure out the basics in no time with no trouble. If you don't know, the tutorial is good enough to get you started.

Just remember - big metal armor up front, little squishy people in back.

I must preface this by saying I think the game is somewhat over-priced as it currently stands. 25 bucks seems more applicable to what it is.

That being said, of the 93 hours I've currently played this game, only 12 of them were in the campaign mode, 4 in the naval academy, and 1 in custom battles.

The rest of it is just me building ships in the custom ship maker and trying to fit MOAR DAKKA on my creations.

9/10 drydock simulator.

It's only barely worth 10 bucks, and don't get it expecting a lot.

*No replayability at all + really bad early game. Most of the good content, especially the actual RTS gameplay, is locked behind 15-20 hours of badly-designed single-character MMO play, like a second rate version of World of Warcraft or Terra Online. Furthermore, the game forces you to do the EXACT SAME 15-20 hours of badly-designed MMO play every time you make & play a new character. For a game that is both billed as and is inheriting a legacy of a very popular RTS franchise, this is Unconscionable with a capital U.

*Limited RTS gameplay + Dynasty Warriors-style single character fighting. Even when you FINALLY get around to controlling units on a tactical level, it becomes blatantly obvious that most of the RTS was sacrificed for animu man-vs-army action. You only get 3 - count them, THREE - small-scale units to control, and your single-player character can kill 5 times that many single-handedly. An army in an RTS is supposed to be an actual ARMY, not a pair of pants that lets you piss in new and interesting patterns.

*Macro-transactions. Most of the end-tier gameplay, units, and items are locked behind onerous 6-player requirements, and dozens of hours of grinding; unless of course you shell out tens or hundreds of dollars to skip that, which they very helpfully remind you of.

*Dead game. It was shut down in Korea in barely 3 years, Russia didn't even make it to 2, and the American servers lost more than half their players in less than 6 months. As it currently stands, both the European and American servers barely manage an average of 20-30 players at any given time, and I'd bet my shoes you'll never see 100 players on at the same time without the devs bribing them with a whole lot of stuff.

I generally ignore accusations of "pay to win". Somehow, people still don't understand the difference between "pay to win" (you literally cannot acquire in-game content unless you pay up) and "pay to advance" (everything can be acquired, paying lets you skip the grind).

Which is why it pisses me off that this game is absolutely p2w. Why?

Because in order to acquire anything that's not basic gear (grey and blue), you need to rent crafting workbenches from the various factions. You cannot rent workbenches without spending coins. How does one get coins?

You buy them. Full stop. There is no in-game option to earn them. It pisses me off that it took me 45 hours to figure this out. And of course, each expenditure of coins only lets you craft a limited number of items before you have to pay up again.

Now, there's plenty of guides for how to f*ck the market and pressure people into paying you coins for various resources you acquire. But if I wanted to spend my free time butt-f*cking "whales" (slang for easy marks), I'd be in politics making real money.

Another excellent game ruined by lazy, greedy microtransaction sh*theads.

A lot of 4x games nowadays (looking at you, GalCiv3) suffer from being a mile wide and an inch deep. Once you get past the front-loaded content, you have to work very hard to get something new out of it.

Star Ruler 2 is the opposite. In the first hour or two of gameplay, things look very simple (and perhaps a little boring) from a card-based diplomacy system to a purely strategic style of combat. You colonize a few planets, upgrade them, maybe build a few orbitals and fleets to deal with the occasional remnants.

Then you start finding your planets annexed by the ai because you were playing double speed waiting for something to happen, and didn't pay attention to the diplomatic events, followed by an immensely vicious political duel with hundreds of votes and half a dozen backroom deals as you try to annex the system to get your planets back. After you finally re-annex the place with a final vote of 394-yes/363-no, the big bad Oko aliens that have been conquering and vassalizing everyone else decide that they don't like you kicking THEIR pet vassal-dog out of YOUR backyard, so they stage a massive 2-prong invasion that takes you a solid 70 minutes to fight off as you rush every fleet you have to the front and frantically try to build more. Then, just as you get ready to counter-invade, they come back for another go: only this time you drive them off easily because 1) You discovered a new diplomacy card that renamed your front-line systems and gave all friendly units there a 20% combat bonus; and 2) You copied a medium size-32 railgun support ship design you found through google and it gutted the enemy fleets like a chainsaw through butter because they were primarily using fancy-pants liquid armor which has no DR. After you smash that attack with ease, you gear up and assault the nearest enemy systems (which is almost everyone at this point because of the aforementioned vassalization) and capture 5 whole systems before they can counter.

So now you're embroiled in a multi-galaxy war where almost everyone is frantically militarizing for all they're worth and playing two separate 3-dimensional chess games; one where they try to hit systems without having to fight through the bulwark systems everyone has built, and another where they try to figure out the next perfect ship design to take advantage of each other's weaknesses.

And all because you though diplomacy was boring, so you jumped to double game speed waiting for something to happen.

INITIAL POST WRITTEN ON 7/12/2016-PART 1 OF 3

Riders of Icarus is yet another solid game that is massively damaged by the publisher.

The storyline is cliched but well written overall, combat is very similar to World of Warcraft, the graphics and character creator are good with the potential to be excellent, and the addition of capturing and taming pretty much EVERYTHING with a surprisingly robust mounted combat system takes a decent game and makes it quite good.

None of that matters, because Nexon is a ♥♥♥♥ company, has been a ♥♥♥♥ company for years, and has ruined several prior games that were much better than RoI-so far, it seems to be set on ruining RoI as well. It's like the EA of online gaming, with no pretense of honesty or care for the players.

The next section comes in two parts: the biggest failures of RoI (only the most notable of many), and some historical context.

The two most notable problems are as follows;

1) Horrendous graphics optimization:
High-tier graphics are good but are occasionally laggy, and certain rare high-load circumstances can cause actual screen freezing if not outright game freezing as the game slows down and tries to un♥♥♥♥ itself. Low-tier graphics are monstrously bad, with characters being tolerable, terrain looking clunky and unfinished, and special effects like shadows and special ability particles looking like the deformed bastard child of an 8-bit game and a drunken Disney animation. Add on very slow rendering, with obvious screen tearing and other signs of failure, and you have a game that is actually painful to try playing on anything less than medium-high settings with a purpose-built gaming computer.

2) Terrible game stability:
In the first 48 hours after the game "open beta" release, Nexon was forced to announce and implement 2 unscheduled server maintanence sessions, which they used to try to sneak in several hotfixes which they hoped players would not notice. The sheer scale and severity of problems that players have suffered trying to maintain a connection with this game's servers is so far beyond what is acceptable for an "open beta" designation that it's not entirely unreasonable to claim that calling RoI an "open beta" at this time is a form of fraud.

For this next part, the easiest way for me to provide historical context is to describe the mangled cadaver that used to be Vindictus. Vindictus was one of the singular best hack-and-slash MMO's ever created. It had an excellent story with several slowly-but-well-developed key characters, and the combat system is (was) one of the best ever made; equal or superior to industry-defining titles like Dynasty Warriors, Street Fighter, Warframe, Mortal Kombat, etc, etc, etc.

At the time I stopped playing Vindictus a couple of years ago, player count (by an admittedly unscientific method) had declined by more than 50% since I measured it 7 months prior. If you thought the gold screamers in RoI were bad, multiply it by five for Vindictus. Additionally, many players suffered account breaches, hacks, and thefts because Nexon had a completely ♥♥♥♥ security system. Customer service was effectively non-existent. Anyone who actually criticised Nexon in specific and/or strident terms on their forums was permabanned from the forums, and one fellow of my acquaintance actually had his game account destroyed in what appeared to be a punitive measure after he took to Reddit to continue discussing how his account had suffered a breach that deleted both of his max-level characters.

Aaaanyways, that's my beef with RoI. I'm quite glad that Nexon has no jurisdiction over Steam-I'd probably get permabanned for writing this review.

UPDATE WRITTEN ON 7/13/2016-PART 2 OF 3

I've decided to make this a multi-part, ongoing review as I put more time into the game. So far, the only difference between this one and my previous one is I've found a way to balance my graphics so the special effects look vaguely tolerable. Increasing the SFX to medium while dropping character textures has resulted in somewhat better-looking abilities.

EDIT: Extended playing has resulted in constant lag and an overheating computer. Have cracked open and checked inner workings for dust/debris, found a now-barbecued spider with webbing inside. Cleaned and will try RoI later.

UPDATE WRITTEN ON 7/15/2016-PART 3 OF 3

This game is basically worthless-6 hours of scheduled maintanence, followed by an hour-ish of unscheduled maintanence, on a computer that plays Warframe on medium and Mechwarrior Online on minimal with absolutely no problems. Try to play RoI on minimal on the same computer, and by the time I've logged in, selected my character, and entered the game world, it lags like an asthmatic snail, my computer is already approaching red-hot temperatures, and both my built-in fan and my attached secondary fan sound like plane engines.

It is a truly impressive waste of...well, pretty much anything when an MMO performs so relentlessly worse than many other MMOs with better graphics and faster playstyles.