Recent reviews by Bashfluff

Dungeon Defenders II is a more casual version of Dungeon Defenders. Stat-building and careful resource management have been replaced with a more action-y and streamlined gameplay experience--for better and for worse.

Dungeon Defenders demanded that you make smart choices when it came to leveling your characters. Choosing what stats to allocate your points into felt like a meaningful process because of how it changed your playstyle. If you're deficient in any stat, it's something that you can feel working against you and made you approach the game based almost entirely on your build.. For example, a character with no speed can barely move at all. That character would likely want to be a defense-heavy character and place those defenses closer to the objective. They'd be completely unable to dash across the map to shore up any problem areas or clear out waves of enemies.

It placed an emphasis on figuring out tactics to beat levels and then optimizing them for tackling them on harder difficulties to get better equipment. The game demanded a high level of skill if you wanted the best stuff.

It's hard to play Dungeon Defenders II and not think that something has gone wrong when you start the game with the movespeed that would come close to matching a maxed Dungeon Defenders character and you have all of your traps unlocked for whatever character you've chosen after maybe an hour. Maining Squire, I was able to nail down a pattern that worked for everthing I've come across in 20 hours.

Lay a blockcade on a chokepoint at each enemy spawn location and then lay down a couple of cannonball towers at each one. Keep adding more towers at each location and then upgrade them after you run out of space. As long as you're making sure to check for blindspots, it starts out as a walk in the park and then turns into a nap in the park after two waves.

I've been playing on the hardest mode I can and no matter what map I play, the strategy works out fine. Nothing about these maps demand the same type of care and attention to detail that Dungeon Defenders 1 asked from its players, and I don't know why these maps would be designed to be able to be completed in such a boring and repetitive way. Why they'd almost always be wide with lots of building space wherever you need it is beyond me.

Things are more optimized in Dungeon Defenders II! Being able to switch between characters on the fly and having all of your characters be the same level fixed almost every problem I had with the original game, especially soloing it as anything other than a Squire/Other combo. Automatically equipping the best gear, auto-looting, getting gems at the beginning of each wave instead of scrounging for chests...these are little things, but really help streamline the moment to moment play to have much better pacing than the original did.

And it's not as though the game has no depth. There's a number of little things that you can do to specialize your character in certain ways. It's just that you rarely will need to until much later on, because

1. Stats seem much less important this time around.

2. You get enough gear just casually playing through the campaign to almost never struggle getting through it. And it's not until level 50 that you're able to unlock many of the build options.

Racing towards end game is not my idea of a good time. Tower defense games live and die on their level design and on the experience they provide in small pieces, which is something Dungeon Defenders I was excellent at. There was always a little something that you could be doing to give you the edge that you needed to proceed, from learning the map to altering your build. This game does not feel like that at all.

Decent enough to run through with a friend, but if you want a timesink, just play the original.

Quake Champions is not an Overwatch clone.

Any elements that make it similar to the trendy modern hero shooters aren't drastic enough to change the core gameplay from its high-stakes twitchy shoot-a-thon roots. They're more additive than transformative other than the ultimate abilities, and so can ultimately be more or less ignored.

If you like Quake or games that have taken inspiration from it, that may be enough for you.

... but that's my problem with it.

Shooters have been evolving over the past thirty years and Quake Champions wants to take us back almost as far to strip away the complexities to get back to basics. This is the wrong decision unless you are a die-hard purist. It makes the game feel archaic than more than leaving the impression of something 'simple but addictive'.

Why not pick a distinct gameplay style that suits my prefrences by choosing characters with distinct weapons and abilities at the start of the game? Dashing around the map to find a weapon that I don't suck with and trying to figure out what tiny, tiny advantages each character offers will work best for a map isn't fun. It's not fun to wander around this maze to try to pick off people one by one instead of having some sort of objective where most players will be that I'll have to think about tackling in some way other than pointing and shooting. Having abilities that rely on other skills than twitch shooting just makes everything more dynamic and tactical in every situation, really. Having only twitch shooting makes matches feel like a bit of a mindless reflex test.

Yes, Quake Champions may be distilled down into the best form of the arena shooter, but it's so stuck in its old ways that it will never be something that can compete with something as polished and refined as Overwatch is because Overwatch is not padded with fluff, but with meat, and Quake takes all that away without anything to replace it.

Every single Quake game before now built on what came before to deliver and experience that felt fresh, fun, and modern. This doesn't.

Developers, you need to do the same thing by figuring out how to make your game competeitive in this modern market beyond releasing a nostalgic cash grab that was dated ten years ago.

This game is awful.

Never before has playing an FPS felt so repetitive and lifeless. There's always real effort from developers to make sure that their games don't feel like pop-up shooting galleries where the targets shoot back at you. Weapons are tools to solve problems and missions are the game's way of presenting them. Maps force you to keep your surroundings in mind to help give you an advantage.

Far Cry 5 is nothing like that.

Weapons are distinct but don't feel that they have any particular purpose when any would do. Enemies are just placed onto a too-large map where they can be picked off without much care or thought or planning. Point your gun and the stuff falls down. No matter how you do it it won't be much trouble at all, and as a result you don't need to think either.. The story is boring and says nothing interesting no matter how many times it insists on interrupting gameplay, and the game stretches out its content to absolute breaking point and beyond. I'm having trouble thinking of any game that fails quite like it

It doesn't have enough spectacle to be compared to Just Cause 3 and it doesn't have the mission variety of something like Call of Duty. The gameplay isn't varied enough to mistake it for something like Titanfall or Doom and it certainly doesn't have the feel of Metro 2033. It isn't even a game that does everything just okay and manages to overwhelm with variety, like Far Cry 3.

I have to compare it to other lackluster shooters and make them all worse just to come close. It's Borderlands without any skills. It's Destiny 2 without any upgrades or attempts to make things feel fresh. It's Bioshock Infinite without the decent story and twenty more hours of agonizing, dull shooting.

Whatever you call it, just don't call it a good game.

This game didn't run well when I bought it. After spending hours trying to troubleshoot it, I left it alone for a few years. Today, I heard the game left Early Access, and I was eager to try it out.

Still ran like ♥♥♥♥.

Of course, Valve doesn't allow refunds past 2 weeks of ownership. Thanks, Valve. Thanks, Studio Wildcard. This is a fantastic reminder of why I don't buy Early Access games anymore. Even the most popular games can wind up to be utterly awful and broken, and there's nothing you can do about it.

You need a dedicated playerbase to form a competitive scene that will hold up over time. Breaking your promises and pursuing a microtranction system worse than Overwatch's before your game is even stable is a wonderful way to take every shred of goodwill and consumer interest and crush it.

Will you still make money? Yes. But it's always a downhill climb once you've alienated your audience, and your big plans are going to try up. Reverse this while you can.

There's a real art to coming up with puzzles like this, where you feel like the game has handed you all the tools you need to intuit the answers to the puzzle in front of you. None of the other games in this series ticked that box for me. It always felt like I was left guessing or that I was missing some method of solving a puzzle that was never so much as hinted at.

That doesn't mean the puzzles are simple, but they are simple to understand, which is always a plus. Every new rule makes sense instantly, and I feel like the knowledge of how quickly a player could grasp them made for stronger puzzle design. There are only 50 puzzles, but new elements are introduced regularly and I felt like it took complete advantage of the overall concept.

Worth a few bucks if you've bored yourself to death playing the more standard logic puzzles, even if it only lasts a few hours.

Variety without structure feels dull after a while, you know? There are always things to craft, things to upgrade, things to invest in...but it's all so linear and pointless that you'll stop after a few hours. An addictive early game leads to a mid-game that doesn't so much have an intrest curve with a steep decline as much as a total drop of any inclination to play further.

Skip it.

XCOM 2 isn't a bad sequel.

XCOM 2 is a clumsy sequel.

Enemy Unknown showed us that this team could capture the original spirit of XCOM and refine it to appeal to the palette of XCOM fans and the world at large. This has showed us that there's a significant challenge to be faced when the systems that make up XCOM are expanded. It's unfortunate that on the surface that it looks like not much has been changed. What's even more unfortunate is those changes are what cause the game to fail hardest.

No, this isn't about timers. Okay, it's partially about timers, but it's more about a direction, a tone almost, to how the new XCOM 2 plays out. To steal a phrase, "I knew something was very wrong, just by the way it started." XCOM 2 starts with an intro that kills two squadmates one after another. Which felt a little odd, because that doesn't attach us to the characters--something XCOM is known for. The only other game that focuses this much on customization is The Sims, after all.

No, this is for the purpose of detachment. I'm convinced this scene is there to set the stage for you to feel less about the NPC's you personalize than ever before. Your squad will die, and it won't be your fault. You won't even be able to make decisions to prevent it from happening. The game will roll a die, ruin your squad, and you won't be able to stop it from happening. Again. And again. And again. This isn't due to the core of the XCOM experience, but due to the changes that they've made to it.

For whatever reason, it seems like they want to make the XCOM experience more active. Ambushes aren't something that you have time to prepare 99% of the time. They seem to be there for the purpose of adding more movement to the maps. The new class, Ranger, is entirely close-ranged. Sharpshooters have been re-tooled with a separate pistol tree as opposed to an alternative tree for alternative sniper skills. The specialist has to be in fairly close range to make the shots that it needs to, and the grenadier has this same problem to a far greater extent. Timers make it so that you're almost always on the move and not setting up and enacting a strategy. You're more reacting. You do what you need to do--move everyone as fast as you can to one particular spot--and you deal with the rest as best you can, as you go. You can see how this makes the game feel clumsy.

You were never meant to rush forward in XCOM, because you're meant to be afraid of uncovering enemies without enough actions to counter the fortified positions that they'd instantly slip into. XCOM is about thinking about who to move, where to move them, and when. Advancing in a particular direction had to be planned carefully to avoid hanging part of your squad out to dry, spreading them too thin to take down oncoming enemies, or clumping them together so that they could be grenaded or get in each other's way. So what winds up happening is that you are forced to do what other XCOM games painfully beat into you to avoid doing: charging forward and hoping there aren't any enemies there at worst, or at best, be far more reckless than tactical.

Not only is the XCOM combat system as a whole not geared for this, but the classes aren't either, other than the Ranger. A more close-quarters combat focus on the whole is still dragged down by the traditions of each class's role that the game strives to fulfill on top of that, and each near always feels like the worst sort of hybrid--too inept to fulfill either potential option you could try to make it into. Sharpshooters fare the worst. The pistol tree was clearly them recognizing that you needed to be more mobile in the sequel and allowing players to mix in some skills to make the class have more utility. In practice, it only just keeps them from becoming dead weight, with little real value when compared to other classes.

Granted, this seems to be a function of the randomly generated maps when combined with the timers, as plenty of missions gave me more than enough time to feel things out without making me feel the pressure of the clock. Others, however, did seem next to impossible, if not actually unwinnable with a squad that was well-geared and leveled for the stage of the game I was in. They were rarely as bad as that, and certainly in the minority, but the distribution leaves much to be desired. Even for XCOM, some parts of the game should have a sense of structure and clear progression.

It does make me feel a little better to think that while these are substantial problems, the mods to fix them will likely only need to change little. I'm not sure that adding more turns onto each timer is the right solution, as becoming too easy is as much of a problem as being too difficult, but it'd not take much to simply activate the timer only at a certain point in the mission. Skill trees can be changes and rebalanced, with new trees added or the old ones simply rebalanced. I just wish they weren't seemingly mandatory to fix some structural flaws that should have been evident early in development.

There are some improvements. This isn't a bad game, or necessarily a worse game than XCOM Enemy Unknown.

The only way XCOM could have had a less intuitive interface would be if Randy Pitchford came over to work at Firaxis, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate what it does, so to see it revamped is satisfying. It no longer feels like diving into the depths of an inky-black ocean and feeling around for whatever is inside. It's fairly simple and straightforward. Much of that is due to clearing out the clutter of resources and the amount of things to research and build. As a result, I never felt lost or unsure of what I was doing or why. Unlike the original, I felt like I had a solid understanding of the choices I was making in advancing my tech, and I could even keep track of how to move it in a certain direction.

Research was the most impenetrable and unenjoyable part of the original XCOM to me until I played it enough to know what to do by memory, and there's a part of me that wants to give the game a gold star for fixing that alone. There's nothing quite like feeling that you can explore the game without a guide, that you'll be able to catch on and not feel like a total moron for the first three playthroughs. It's simple to plan, to take actions to bring that plan to fruition, and to adapt to changes in the situation, and all without losing much of anything other than needless complexity. That could never be said about XCOM before. Although I suppose some would say XCOM is nothing without needless complexity, I don't miss it.

Whoever was in charge of sound design on this game should win an award, as I didn't know it was possible to feel so satisfied by the way something sounds in a game. It was something I found myself continually drawn to as I babbled to my friends while playing without noticing. There's something innately right about the weight that they lend to the combat that demands to be appreciated. It's not often you can say that something as mundane as how something sounds. You could say the same thing about the animations and the voice acting to a lesser degree. The sense of style to each never fail to make me smile with the repetitive, but always fun, odd moments of badassery by one of my squad members.

It feels like things have been streamlined and made more stylish and grandiose for the sequel, but a few missteps bring down the whole experience. This is a game that aims to expand upon its predecessor, but it all-too-often feels like the ideas that that original game was based on are still miles ahead of where the developers are trying to lead it. All the same, it isn't an bad experience, and with a few tweaks, it'll go from a 'good' experience bordering on 'great', to a 'great' experience borderling on the excellent. It's just a shame that the original XCOM will still overshadow it. Ah well. Better luck with XCOM 3, guys.

This game is about waiting. And more waiting. Enemies will be placed on ledges just above you so that you have to shoot them to continue, or directly in your path just off of the path you're on. Or worse, invincible enemies will be placed in front of you that temporarily block your path. They don't shoot at you, by the way. They don't do anything but be an obstruction, and they take several shots to take down, so it's neither a fun run n gun about accuracy or a Megaman Style platformer.

Collectibles are the worst example, with simple coins requiring you to get to the top of a series of platforms, jump down in a direction, and then climb back up. Or instead of putting a pit of spikes for failing an obstacle, they just put a few spaced out platforms covered with coins, with heights that go up the father you get, so you are virtually guaranteed never to get all of them. Moving platforms are just stacked with these things so that you have to line up your jump AND stay on each one a few times.

It's painful difficulty padding that the game never gets past. It's all that it seems to be ABOUT.

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More than that, the level design is simple and never involves you doing anything other than waiting and shooting, only being in danger if you get impatient and deciding to take the hits. There's rarely an option to dodge enemies or run and jump around them to speedrun. It's a game that makes you play at its pace, and that pace is not determined by your skill. It's just...WAITING.

Don't play this. Please do not ever play this. It's awful.

When you charge money for something, you should deliver what it is that you're selling. Namco seems to have forgotten this by releasing a bare bones DLC pack that skimps on content and can be mostly be completed in a few minutes. The only thing that gives me hope is that this says GT Pack 1, which makes me think that they're going for small batches of content to be released frequently. Still, there's no guarantee of that, so I'm going to review this as if this is one of the three DLC packs we're going to get, because it very well may be.

So, let me put this into context. In the main game, there are over fifty side quests that essentially consist of one fight. How many of those did they add in the DLC? Two. Only one of them is related to the actual story of GT. I know that people gave GT lackluster reviews, but if you're going to add content based on a theme, you shouldn't shy away from doing just that.

Related to that is the two Masters, Tien and Yamcha. They exist, and that's all I can say about them. They're not related to GT and people weren't exactly clamoring for them. However, they are the meatiest bit of content that we get, so I can't complain THAT much about them.

What is related to GT, then? Well, we have three new characters and a few special moves. They're genuinely fun to play as and feel like they had a bit of work put into them. The special moves are a combination of outstanding and lackluster, but that's always been the case and I'm not sore about it at all. But here's the thing: they're GT Trunks, GT Goku, and GT Pan. That's the bare minimum, isn't it? If we paid a few for this DLC pack alone, the characters would have justified it.

As it stands, this is 25 bucks for three DLC packs, packs that I assume are this similar a size. If that's true, you could combine all three of them into one and it would be worth maybe ten bucks. So instead of being excited about this, I can't recommend it. There's next to nothing in the pack that I could even argue tries to be worth the price.

If that changes, I'll be back to edit this. As it stands, don't grab it.