Garrick D. Raley
If you’re a fan of quick, matchmade hero shooters and long for a spiritual successor to Evolve, then maybe Vicious Circle is for you. For most gamers however, I probably wouldn’t recommend this game. At least not right now.
It’s fun for nostalgia’s sake to go back and reexamine the past, but Aion Classic doesn’t seem so much like a “revisiting the past” as it does a “let’s hop on the ‘Classic’ bandwagon” that World of Warcraft started. As evident by the absolutely insane pricing for the Daeva Pass, Aion Classic comes across more like a cheap cash-grab than as a service to the fans. For my money, I wouldn’t recommend wasting your time in Aion Classic.
Although a lot of the Kafkaesque story beats, like the father-son relationship and the surreal, absurdist scenarios the boy found himself in, were unique and initially interesting; SELF just didn’t have the metamorphosis it needed to turn into something greater.
Rehydrated doesn’t offer up more than a few hours-worth of content to distract from the doldrum. It took me roughly 8 hours to beat the story, but it would probably take up to 12 to collect everything. If you’re looking for a new game to play in quarantine, this isn’t it. Despite the nostalgia, I honestly can’t recommend this game to anyone except for families with small children. There’s no penalty for dying, except for having to backtrack through areas, and the combat is simplistic enough that any kid will be able to pick it up easily.
I wanted to love Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance so badly. I grew up reading R.A. Salvatore’s novels about Drizzt and his companions. Baldur’s Gate was my first CRPG that I ever played. The original Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and Dark Alliance II are probably my favorite games from the PS2 era. But sadly, Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance just misses the mark in so many categories. It was a slog to get through, and there is almost no reason for me to ever pick it up again.
Mortal Online 2 is not a complete game. This feels like an early access title in disguise, just waiting to start charging its players a $15 monthly subscription fee in order to keep development on track. The fact that its first two and a half weeks after launch was unplayable by the majority of the playerbase is the most telling of all, but in tandem with too many missing systems and features it’s not hard to think of it as an unfinished product.