Recent reviews by chi

Runescape is my favorite game and I love it to bits, which is why I'm giving it a thumbs up. I won't pretend it's a perfect game though, and it's certainly not for everyone. It appeals very strongly to a specific type of gamer. I'll try to break this behemoth of a game down into chunks and give a detailed yet concise rundown of each one.

• Skilling/Account progression: 10/10

Runescape is known for its grind. And yes, it is a grindy game. You'll spend hours upon hours clicking on interactable objects, items, and NPCs, and watching your character do mundane activities such as mining ore, fishing for food, planting crops, crafting items, excavating treasure, slaying monsters, and more. And it's all worth doing. This is actually one of the biggest things that separates it from other MMOs. Other MMOs focus mainly on combat and most everything else is a side feature. But in Runescape, the side features are given as much thought and importance as the combat. Runescape is a game about reaching goals, and since every skill is worth training, there is no shortage of them. In other words, no matter what you're doing, you're making tangible progress that will never go away. Accounts never get reset and your progress never becomes pointless; it's a game that you can quit and come back to 5 years later and all the progress you made is still relevant.

• Quests/Story/Lore: 9/10

In other MMOs, you get a main story quest, maybe some side quests too, and other than that you've just got generic time-killing fetch and kill quests. Runescape isn't like that. At present, Runescape has 227 quests and every single one is carefuly written with unique dialogue and characters, story, humor, puzzles, bosses, riddles, and lore. They come in every length and difficulty and offer all manner of unique rewards, and many of them are connected in a complex web of overarching storylines and narratives. Some of them are light-hearted and humorous, and some of them tell grand legends of gods, monsters, and heroes. In one quest you may be helping a dwarf confess his love to a human woman, In another quest you may be helping strange creatures on another world discover the lost magic of their ancestors, and in another you may witness the death of a god. Runescape is a massive and immersive world filled to the brim with adventures and stories.

• PvE core combat mechanics: 7/10

I have a love-hate relationship with Runescape's combat. In a phrase, Runescape's combat system is the "Smash Bros. Melee" of MMO combat. On the surface it's a somewhat typical "action bars and global cooldown" ability bar combat system, and it does stay pretty simple all through the earlygame and midgame. But once you get to a high level, it changes. Runescape has a bewilderingly high skill ceiling and you're given unparalleled freedom. You're never locked into any sort of class or role restrictions which is pretty awesome. But the thing is that it's also really janky. like REALLY janky at a high level, because it's built on this 20 year old 0.6s tick system and grid-locked movement. High tier players exploit every trick and quirk of the system in order to complete amazing feats. This type of gameplay strongly appeals to many, but not all.

• PvE boss encounters: 9/10

Runescape has a veritable menagerie of bosses to fight and features some of the most unique PvE encounters on the MMO market. It has team bosses, solo bosses, and team bosses that can be solo'd if you're good enough. Since all players have the same freeform kit of abilities and tools to play with, the developers have the freedom of making some bosses absolutely brutally challenging. High level bosses have unique and robust mechanics which will push your skills and creativity as a player to the extreme and beyond. If you manage to master these bosses you will be rewarded very, very generously. Many high level players spend most of their time in this game slaying bosses, chasing that next big boss drop that will fill their pockets with cash.

• PvP: 2/10

In my opinion, this is Runescape's weakest link. If you're looking for a PvP game, you might as well turn around because Runescape PvP is extremely unpopular. It has a freakishly high barrier to entry, it's riddle with bugs and exploits and poor balance, and almost nobody actually does PvP in the first place. It's essentially been abandoned by the developers. They won't touch it with a 10-foot pole and there hasn't been an effort to revitalize PvP content since 2016. There is a small community of diehard PvP players who actively participate in it but that's it.

• Microtransactions: 5/10

I do not like the amount of microtransactions in this game. I think it's monetized on too many fronts. But I'd like to establish some facts because other reviews may blow it out of proportion:

• Bonds. A bond is an item that you can pay $6 of real money for and it is added to your account. Bonds can be sold to other players for in-game gold, and as such is a way for you to essentially buy in-game wealth. The players who buy the bond from you can then redeem that bond for anything that can also be bought for real money: membership (the game's pay-to-play subscription), treasure hunter keys (which are used to gain XP in skills), cosmetics from the cash shop, and certain paywall-locked quality-of-life features (I'll talk more about these in the next point). Bonds are sort of a give-and-take feature. You can use them to buy in-game wealth, which is sort of pay-to-win. But a lot of players appreciate them because they can be used in the other way around; you can use in-game wealth to pay for membership and cosmetics and such.

• There are a couple of core "quality of life" features that are locked behind a paywall. In my opinion, this is the most egregious microtransaction feature in Runescape. Specifically 3 things are locked unless you either pay money or save up in-game wealth to buy bonds to pay for them, ordered in importance:
1. Bank presets. There are 10 slots in total and you start with 5 which are given to you for free, and this is fine for early game. But past that it becomes very annoying. 5 is simply not enough for a high level player and many people even want jagex to add more than 10. If you play this game for a long time, you'll probably end up buying extra preset slots.
2. Extra bank space, which is your item storage in the game. This doesn't become a problem until you've played the game quite a lot, and you can actually get by even as a high level player without any bank space upgrades, so long as you're smart and don't put too much junk in your bank. But it WILL be an annoyance.
3. You can pay an additional small subscription for "Runemetrics pro" which is a system that automatically tracks data for you, including XP you've gained, enemies you've killed, drops you've received, and more. This is only useful if you care enough about your progress to log it for analysis and sharing, so most players don't care about this one.

• Treasure Hunter. You can pay to skip some of the grinding; essentially you can buy XP to level up your skills faster. But the important thing to know is that buying XP is not designed to appeal to the average player. It's expensive to buy XP, so much so that it costs hundreds of dollars to actually skip a significant portion of the grind. Most players don't actually consider buying XP worth it; and so it's essentially a system that caters to "whale" players who have poor self control and will dump in thousands of dollars to max out their levels. I feel this is morally indefensible as Jagex is essentially preying on these players in the same way that mobile gacha games so often do. If you know yourself to fall victim to this type of microtransaction then I recommend you stay FAR away from Runescape.

Destiny is everything an MMOFPS should be. Best-in-class core gameplay, tons of activities, challenging PvE, solid PvP and PvPvE, raids, tons of goals to work towards, tons of items to collect, fantastic art and lore, character custumizability, it has pretty much everything.

yes yes, buy and go much fast, very good, pretty too PLEASE BUY THIS GAME ITS FUN AND NEEDS MORE PEOPLE ON THE LEADERBOARDS :'( LOOK AT HOW MANY HOURS I PUT IN IT ITS WORTH THE MONEY

Cloudbuilt by itself is quite a difficult game -- one of the most difficult and most skill-based games that I've played, for sure. It will take you plenty hours of trial, error, and skill-building just to complete. By the time I had gotten S rank on every normal level, I'd thought I was a master of this game and would be able to tackle any DLC that came out for it with confidence. I could just breeze through even the hardest normal levels, right?

...Then Defiance happened... It took me dozens upon dozens of resets to complete each level, to say the least.

If you're up for a truly hardcore gaming experience, buy this DLC. It's well, well worth the money.