Look at Darksiders 2

Saying that Darksiders 2 is a balance act wouldn't be false, it tries to be so much at the same time, improving in some ways over tried and true staples of the genre but lacking in other parts of it's systems. I haven't played Darksiders 1 but I assume that the sequel is higly iterrative with some ideas from the original. A side effect of me not having played the first one lies within the fact that I was surprised how Zelda-esque it was (A realisation that most people who played DS1 knew all about by then) and how it added so little over the classic formula.

This game is so much like Zelda, N64 Zelda even
I'm really surprised how derivative some elements are. You could be making a checklist of everything that zelda and DS2 have in common and it would be quite long. It's not a bad thing by itself but as I was playing it, I tried to figure out how I liked it, was it old-school gameplay in a modern packaging or where they only reusing core concepts and leaving more modern ideas inside the control and feel of the game. You need to find keys to open locked doors or activate switches (even with the a little jingle), you have the equivalent of a bow and arrows, bomb flowers are there as-is, you collect tome pages instead of skultulas, each dungeon or so you find a new piece of equipment that lets you explore different parts of the world and there is also a great tree (of life).

Setting-wise, this is nothing like Zelda but in many other ways, it's painfully similar. For people that never played the Zelda games, this might be something new and interesting and there might be some enjoyment out of the nostalgia, but I can't help but feel this is a cheap way out. There's even a navi-alike in the form of a raven that points where you should go next.

How I would fix this
Change some items and systems in place so they behave a little bit differently, bomb flowers for instance didn't need to be literally bombs growing in specific spots that regrow after you threw them. At least they made the bow and arrow a gun. Also they made "statue" puzzles be rolling rocks instead, makes it more easy to move them around.

Some improvements are made.
Of course, I'm not saying that DS2 is only a cheap Zelda knockoff, many things that bothered me in Ocarina of Time are fixed here like the horse being instantly summonable and dismissible, there's more traversal stuff and it feels more natural than the clunky movement of Zelda games, you can easily parkour around the environment to find hidden things and proceed to the next areas, combat is much more interesting and there are more options with skill trees and loot systems. You gain quests to add more content to the game, you can fast travel really easily between maps and various other system are improved.

As a action adventure game, DS2 would be perfect - even tho maybe a little thin in content - because it does most of the same thing as old games of that genre, but it does them better. The setting is interesting, the characters are too, the gameplay feels good and the puzzles are fairly challenging at times.

But then it tries to be another game
Most of the RPG elements in Darksiders 2 should go away or be modified enough to make the game flow better. An annoying thing in the Zeldas of time past was to go into your inventory to equip/unequip certain items (Such as the iron boots in the water temple), it stays true here that it's annoying to keep going to the same subscreen to compare items you just picked up with ones you have equipped. The fact that they give a lot of items as DLC also ruins the game in some capacity because it trivializes battle content.

Fixing this first thing
Why not just display the stats while you're picking up the item? Also letting you loot + equip at the same time, that would help a lot. Also, giving better items is fine as DLC as long as it doesn't make the game as easy as regeneration did in DS2. No need for potions anymore when you get to full life just standing around.

The skill tree is interesting even tho I wished the skills lasted longer, I took the summoning/spells tree and having to recast my ghouls every six seconds is kind of annoying, especially playing on the PC. That reminds of of another problem this game has, there are so many buttons mapped to individual specific things. All the number keys are used for something and most of the right side of my keyboard also.

Fixing this second thing
You simply need to add wheels or quickslots or something. You move between your spells using a key, you cast your selected spells using another, no need to hit the 7 key too summon ghouls or the 6 key for a magical shield, you just select it then cast it. Mapping things to the middle mouse button is not the most elegant solution for the gun, especially because it's quite a fun weapon to use.

Darksiders 2 didn't need to be an action RPG with tons and tons of different inventory slots and stats and skill trees, it would've been a neat zelda clone instead (Probably like Darksiders 1 was). I understand that it's not possible to make AAA 'zelda clones' and that people always want more, but in DS2's case, what they added upon the formula didn't do much good.

Look at 2012!

Hey let's look at 2012 also don't mind the parts where I mispronounce things and/or say dumb stuff!!! Happy christmolidays everyone!

Look at Terraria

Terraria isn't just a 2d version of minecraft, it's much more than that. In some ways, I could say that Terraria is a metroid-vania with minecraft elements sprinkled here and there, there are similitude between the two games but ultimately, the progression and sense of discovery in terraria make me prefer this over Minecraft. This is not going to be a Terraria versus Minecraft review, but if I find apt comparisons, I will certainly make them.

Humble beginnings

There is a progression in Terraria, goals to work towards
I suspect that most games of Terraria will go like this: Make a small house, mine, dig, explore, find some decent equipment, fight the skeleton boss, explore the dungeon, find a black key, dig more, explore more, find hell, open chests, get better equipment, fight the wall of flesh, break orbs, break altars, get better and better equipment, craft awesome chainsaws, grind in the corruption and the hallow, fight bosses, win the game. This might sound like a bad thing, but it's not. Of course, the actual process of doing these things won't be as straightforward, you'll want to mess around with your world between each of these steps and sometimes some steps will take longer than others.

Friendly NPCs

Randomized loot is a big part of this and it's great that you'll find items that enable new abilities and powers as the game goes on. You get tiers of armors, some with set bonuses, some without, you can have random modifiers on your items to make them better or worse. The loot game is interesting but not core to the Terraria experience, what is core is the metroidvania part of it, the way you do certain actions then come back to do other stuff that you couldn't do before. The world evolves as you beat certain bosses so items that weren't there once will appear. Floating islands will be populated, enemies will become tougher and you'll add powerful ores to the grounds of your world. Always working towards a better upgrade is a good way to keep the player interested.

Discovery

That being said, the frustrating part is the randomness of the requirements for some of the next steps. Ore that appears randomly on the map in tiny chunks makes the player search for a needle in the haystack and if you need one more bit of adamantite but can't find it, you're going to use a map viewer or something to find yourself some of it. Trying to find certain items is also frustrating and again makes an argument for using external programs.

How I would fix it
Add some in-game items that serve as dowsing rods that you can tune to find certain items. Maybe a treasure hunter NPC that tells you where some items are in a vague way? That would help a lot, especially in huge maps because you would know where to go.

The game doesn't know what it's trying to be
Terraria is full of hands-on, stat boosting items, things that make you double-jump, guns that shoot 33% less ammo, spells that launch fireballs and crystal shards, armors, horseshoes with special immunities, etc. etc. You gather materials to create crafting stations to create better items to defeat more enemies. Yet you still can craft bowls, chairs, lamps, decorative items with no purpose other than decorate. I get why Minecraft does it, because you want to build the most gigantic goomba out of dirt you can or a crazy pyramid made of diamonds for no reason, because you can do just that, but terraria is full of goals and places to explore and enemies to defeat, why is the game also trying to be a sandbox where you jump around, trying to make the prettiest decorations ever?

It gets unfriendly at night, even for the NPCs.

To make matters worse, enemies are legion in Terraria, zombies and slimes at first, then werewolves and unicorns and floating balloons that shoot lasers, then invading goblin legions and ghosts and other undesirables. Sometimes they'll sneak in your houses, fall on your head, generally be nuisances. At least there are no monsters such as the creeper from Minecraft, but why so much decorative stuff? The list of items I can craft is pretty long but I'll never want to make some candles or a statue nor will I make gold and silver bricks. The sense of scale is also different in 2d, you can't really run far away and look at your creations in all their glory.

When the fight is on, it's on, you'll get to hell and immediately you're attacked by teleporting fire imps and massive bone serpents and the first boss will kill you instantly if you don't defeat him by sunrise. Status effects are many and the enemies have annoying patterns, warping around, flying, swimming, always homing like a missile on your location. Fall damage can be brutal at first, lava is always deadly and you can drown pretty easily if you're not careful.

I think I'm not well equipped for Hell yet.

How I would fix this
Either split creative mode with adventure mode or make the 'decorative' items crafted using different stations. That way you still allow all that stuff but split it well enough that you won't be hindered by one or the other category. In creative mode there would be no monsters

The biggest problem with Terraria is how closed it is
Minecraft and Terraria are comparable to a point, there are tons of things to do in both of them, exploring dungeons, jungles, oceans, hell and the like, but when you're done with the original content, Minecraft is far from being over, there are tons of mods that add incredible content such as machines, magic and everything in-between. Terraria's modding scene is less impressive and it must be because the game was released without much support a long time ago. Minecraft is still evolving with new things coming out every so often while Terraria is "done". A console version was announced with new content so that might fix some of my issues, but I really wish the game was more open to modding, then I would see the crazy Industrialcrafts and Thaumacraft of this world. The systems and settings behind Terraria are perfect for such mods.

Discovery, again.

Otherwise Terraria is great, there's so much to do, so much to explore and so many enemies to kill, after a while you really feel like you've got somewhere and that's always great to convey through gameplay.

How I would fix this
Well, I would probably make some mods if I could, all of my issues with the game (Including some I haven't touched because they are quite small such as how you travel in the world and things like that) could be fixed by some mod or another.

Look at Hotline Miami

Does Hotline Miami really need to be that gory and messed up in a graphical and auditive sense? Not really, I'm quite sure it would've worked as any other kind of game with different aesthetics and another theme but the weirdness of it mixed with great gameplay systems, customization and an interesting story that reminds me of the Killer 7 and the No More Heroes of this world; A story weird enough you want to know more,  enough to play through any bad gameplay there could be. Luckily for HM, there's not much bad in here.

It's difficult and can feel unfair

And it's not my first try either.

The game loop of HM is quite simple. You enter a level, try and get a good idea of your environment, kill some enemies either by doing melee attacks or shooting them, then you die, either because you weren't precise enough with your melee swings, or someone came out of nowhere and killed you, or you were careless. You respawn, try the same thing, make it to the next room, get killed by something or another, restart. You respawn, try yet again the same path, maybe you get further, maybe you die for some reason in a room you've been twelve times so far. It can get frustrating when you clear out some floor flawlessly but get shot by some random person at the end, but that's how Hotline Miami rolls.

Not a fan of this guy, I've seen him maybe 20 times

After a while you get the hang of things and you can beat any level if you put your heart to it and retry enough times, it's a bit like Super Meat Boy, it's brutal and unforgiving but you snap into the action so fast that it doesn't matter - except when a three second cutscene starts the level, in that case you're going to hate seeing it over and over. Of course, I'm not to say that the feel of the game is perfect because it feels unfair when you attack but still die or when you get killed without warning and then it's time to redo the level. The checkpointing is fairly good between floors but otherwise the puzzle action is there every time.



How I would fix it
Either add manual checkpointing during levels - to balance it out it should have an impact on your score when you use it - that way you can save when you're in a room you've cleared and can continue on with the story. That's the thing with games like that, you play it to see what the hell is going to happen next. Another thing that could be done would be to make this less frustrating is a way to see all the map at the beginning or see when enemies are coming into a certain range. Maybe a mask that does this?

You can mostly play this game how you want

I used this mask for a good bit

The great thing in Hotline Miami is that there are multiple ways to play most of the game, at the beginning of each stage you get to pick a mask that confers you various passive abilities such as having more guns in the level, not being attacked by guard dogs or surviving bullets. It's interesting because the way you want to play the game can probably be done. All melee? Sure, maybe not easily but it's certainly doable, all guns? That's how I usually rolled, there are drawbacks to everything, having silent gunshots is a godsend for the way I played Hotline Miami but it made "aggroing" enemies harder because they weren't alerted when I shot on purpose.

However, some parts can't be played your way and they aren't the best parts of the game. A sneaking mission where your movement is impaired and everything is out to spot you gets really frustrating when you just get caught over and over. These missions aren't optional either, you do them to progress through the game or you don't. Some people might be turned off by these missions and stop playing what would otherwise be a very fine product. The end-game also features a completely different set of missions where you don't have any guns and can't use the masks you're used to, they didn't feel that great to me, but they were important to the story, I suppose.

Sneaking missions with binary fail states are not fun, Hotline Miami is no exception.

I killed these guys with a machete because I didn't have a choice.

How I would fix this
The sneaking mission could be fixed by letting you kill everyone if you get spotted, that's a way games make sneaking tolerable - by giving you an out instead of having you redo the whole level if you get caught. Maybe in Hotline Miami's case, I would also have made the sneaking level start off with something else than a cutscene because it gets frustrating to have to wait 2 or 3 seconds each time.

The segment with the different character would've been fine if you could have used guns, or maybe have different masks with similar abilities than the old ones, anything to make the gameplay feel as similar as it did in the rest of the game. It's not a bad thing to introduce change, but doing so that late in the game isn't the most elegant way to do it.

Some of it can be confusing
Two things confuse me in HM, the boss battles and the scoring system. There are a few number of boss battles (3 maybe) and they aren't simple shootouts, you need to do very specific things in order to beat them. In all of them you are stripped away of your weapons and need to use items in the room and figure out how they're supposed to be used. After five times this gets annoying and after ten you might be tempted to check on the Internet what you were supposed to do.

The scoring system is how you unlock new weapons and some masks in the game, on the surface it's well presented and explained but I can't help but feel like I'm not getting any idea of how to improve my playing style. I get points for killings, boldness probably refers to how much risks you take, combos is easy to understand, time bonus also, flexibility and mobility are two ratings that I don't get and it's not explained in game. On most stages I got B minuses even tho I was sure I did alright, what could I have done to get a better ranking?

How to fix this
This is easy, surface a little more information in-game. After dying ten times in the boss fights, maybe more hints would be a good way to get the player to progress, explaining somewhere what the criteria for good ranks are would be another great addition to an already very interesting game.

26550/17500 might sound like a lot 

But I still got a B-

Look at Dungeons of Dredmor

Dungeons of Dredmor is a roguelike with a good sense of humor and tons of customization options to give you incentives to try again over and over. While I feel the items are overwhelming and the maps are too full with stuff, I think it's one of the best dungeon crawlers I've played.

You start with many skill branches, perhaps too much.

The skill branches you can start with

Whenever you start a game of Dungeons of Dredmor, you choose 7 skill branches out of 35. Skill branches range from weapon mastery, passive-type abilities, magic schools and crafting abilities. Each skill branch comes with about 5 to 7 skills you can gain when leveling-up in the game. Some of these skills are passive, some grand a chance to do something when you attack, some modify completely how your character works (Such as vampirism, making you stop regen health naturally but instead by killing enemies), all and all because this is a roguelike you probably won't max out a single tree during your playthrough (Because you will probably die) So I'm left wondering, why can you pick up that many skill trees if you're not going to get far most of the time? 

Plenty of skills to choose from

I'm playing a melee character so I decide to focus in swords. I take sword fighting, dual wielding, dodge, berserker rage, perception, assassination and armor mastery. All of these things improve melee fighting capacities in their own way and if I die and want to try melee again, odds are that I won't have seen everything in those branches so I'll be compelled to pick the same ones again (Maybe I'll switch the weapon type or add shields) but chances are, I'll still go with these. It's not a great thing to have that many choices if you have too much of them to make and you won't see the result of these choices.

How I would fix this
I have two ideas in mind, either you allow a smaller number of skills to be chosen from (Like 4 or 5) or you separate it into categories. You can select one weapon skill, two passive skills, one magic branch skill and one crafting skill. That way you'd see a bit of everything!

Everything feels so overwhelming

STATS

The sheer number of stats in Dungeons of Dredmor is staggering. You have your basic levels (Fighter, Rogue, Mage) and then six main stats, 18 sub stats, resistances, damage types, it's hard to keep track of what's useful and what isn't. Then again, this is a roguelike, it's normal that things always seem out of hand, that being said, I'm not too critical of the stat system, they are well explained and well represented.

Maybe it's with the items I have more issues, you get tons of items in Dungeons of Dredmor and they have various impacts on your stats. Most of the time they increase some of them but they also can decrease them dramatically (Having 0 mana regen instead of 1 makes a lot of difference). It's never clear why things are going some ways, are you getting killed because of that item? Are the enemies doing special types of damages that you're weak against? What stats are affected by your skills and what should you focus on?

So many items!

There are different item types, crafting items, food, wands, equipment, accessories, bolts, misc items... It's all very confusing. Food regenerates your health (or mana) over time, potions have various random effects such as killing you or making you do fire damage when you attack.

How I would fix it
The game already knows how you're playing your character (With your Warrior/Wizard/Rogue levels) so it wouldn't be impossible to show red borders around items you can equip but that aren't as good as the ones you have and green borders on better items. Maybe better split the items by categories or add more ways to get rid of useless item. 

Such as the crafting system

Alright, let's make potions

Also the crafting system is too much for me, you have lists of all your recipes and what they do, and you have eight different branches crafting, from alchemy to smelting to wand smiting. There's so much to craft and since there are so many items, it's difficult to only carry what you need for the recipes you want to make. Also you find hidden recipes in bookcases through the game. Some of your stats and skills influence crafting in some way, although I'm not sure how (Beside you needing a high skill rating to craft high level items).

I proceeded to never craft anything because you find items everywhere and it's hard enough to know what to keep already, I'm not going to bog myself down trying to make every little thing in the game as it might or might not be useful. You might die from a trap in five seconds, what's really the point of a deep crafting system? It's well realized and you can go at it for long if you want, but I didn't regret not crafting anything when I just explored the dungeon, getting items from the ground.

You find new recipes along the way.

How I would fix this
Any way to make the whole process quicker and more streamlined would help, having more simpler recipes where two items will only mix together to create a third item would help (So you just see if you can do that one recipe with any given item) or even add a separate inventory for your crafting items so you know what's used for crafting and what's just random junk. 

And all the roguelikeness of it.
But that's not a complaint, DoD is a great roguelike and it gets crazy at times, there are traps, random monsters everywhere, shrines, pools of acid you can drink, locked chests, eyeball altars, the whole roguelike nine yards.

Maybe I wish you could see more of what's happening

Combats are fast-paced and confusing sometimes, you're not sure what's hurting you and why, is that a poisonous gas cloud? Did it come from a trap or an enemy? Can you run away? Where? When you see a bunch of text explode on screen (Overhand! Haywire! Critical! Block!) you're not always sure if you're being dealt damage or if you're killing the enemy faster.

What's going on in this monster zoo

The humor is funny, the maps are well designed and there's variety in the location and enemy types, you also have quests where you need to kill specific enemies or destroy certain items. They add to the progression of your character and I would recommend doing them before going to later floors where enemies get tougher.

Dungeons of Dredmore is the roguelike I play when I want to play roguelikes even tho I feel there's too much I can't get to see.

I really love maps like these

I died

Some housekeeping

Hey there guys. Sadly, my look at the whole Mass Effect trilogy isn't going well because I can't play Mass Effect 2 at all right now (Technical issues, mostly) and I don't want to just jump into 3.

To make matters worse, my backlog is going dry. I'm not sure I can talk about X-Com because I can't see anything 'bad' to say about it and I don't want to go to very old games because all of my suggestions would be probably translated into changes already made to more recent games. Maybe this week I'll look at the Path of Exile beta, maybe I'll look at some game on my steam library, I'm not sure. I really wanna fix the Mass Effect 2 issue because I feel like reviewing the whole thing is an interesting idea.

Oh well.