Leif Johnson's Reviews
Murkmire may look bland in comparison to a wonderland like Summerset, but that's only when you're drinking in the big picture.
By God, it's delicious.
MTG: Duels of the Planeswalkers at last adds customization, but ruins it with microtransactions and grindy gameplay.
There's a hint of a good game in 7 Days to Die's mix of zombie attack preparedness and crafting and cooperative stands against zombies, and it has valuable ideas to contribute to the genre. In fact, you can almost hear them screaming to escape from beneath terrible graphics, barely useable menu controls, and shoddy console optimization. This is an apocalypse amongst apocalypses.
Warhammer 40K: Eternal Crusade's big multiplayer battles create some fun combat that captures the feel of the Warhammer 40K universe enough, but it currently doesn't offer the amount of content I'd expect from a $50 game. Balance and optimization issues also complicate the fun, as do missing elements in the shop and unfinished features that all suggest Eternal Crusade was released a bit too soon.
There's a decent science-fiction story holding all of Divide's pieces together, but it's not quite strong enough to outweigh the disappointments of excessive backtracking through repetitious metallic levels that barely look different from the last. A great musical score and a moderately interesting combat help keep it interesting, but bugs and repetitive encounters made the campaign feel much longer than it needed to be.
Poor creation tools and an aversion to genuine, interesting decision-making keep Sword Coast Legends from succeeding.
The combat of Overgrowth is exhilaratingly fun with everything's working as it should, but that's not very often. You also have to get used to the wonky and weird way it interprets both combat strikes and landings. It's a shame that everything else about Overgrowth, whether it's the story, the level design, or even the physics system, feels undercooked. It's not hard to find some fun here, but it's fun you'll soon forget.
Firefall's quests and world design have some appeal, but humdrum travel and repetition spoil the fun.
Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness is an RPG that merely fulfills its obligations. It's not awful thanks to a cast of likeable characters and an interesting premise, but an abundance of clichés, uneven polish, and messy combat and AI make it less than memorable. And as its main story only provides around 20 hours of playtime instead of the 60 or more the series usually delivers, some of those obligations aren’t met in full. As for me, I can't say I regret my time with Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness, but 20 hours was enough.
Blade & Soul's phenomenal combat isn't enough to make up for its dated quests.
Traverser boasts a fun presentation, but the gameplay doesn't always follow suit.
Dungeons 2 is a decent mashup of Dungeon Keeper and real-time strategy conventions, but oversimplification keeps it from being a keeper.
Consortium is a fun story-driven sci-fi role-playing game with some first-person shooter elements, but bugs and glitches mar the experience.
Despite its problems, DC Universe Online still has a lot going for it. It's hard to be overly critical of an MMO that tries so hard to be different and which succeeds in many ways. Even the most casual comic book fans will drool over the lavishly illustrated cutscenes that round off single-player instances and major quest lines, and the accessible combat system embraces many players who would normally avoid the genre. The world is consistently beautiful, and the familiar characters and locations make DCUO uncommonly inviting.
The Elder Scrolls Online: Greymoor offers a nostalgic return to the northwestern corner of Skyrim, but its formulaic story isn't as compelling.
Valkyria Revolution tells a decent tale of war, but the strength of that story is dulled by overlong, boring, and poorly animated cutscenes. It sacrifices the unique historical setting and art style of the Valkyria Chronicles series proper in favor of generic JRPG elements that fail to leave a strong impression, and its hack-and-slash combat offers little in the way of strategy and ruins its own flow with an poorly matched magic system.
There are some good ideas in Has Been Heroes, such as the way it uses multi-lane battlefields to make us use strategies that involve switching between the strengths of three different heroes to achieve victory. It's a recipe for fun that manages to last for a while. Eventually, though, the heavy emphasis on the luck of level generation, the frustrations of enemy repetition, the poor tutorial, and the tendency to overrun you with tough enemies spoil the whole. Hard games are great, but there are limits.
Bland and unambitious save for its combat, Lost Sphear draws so heavily from the traditions of past JPRGs that it fails to build a personality of its own.
Played in long sessions, Trove can quickly grow mind-numbingly dull and repetitive, and its performance issues can sometimes be a pain. But played in short sessions, it's a decently fun way to pass the time, either by building structures, battling bad guys, or experimenting with new classes.