Sadface

No review this week for I am sick and unable to write anything more than this.

Look at Maple Story

Maple Story is a shameful cash grab with some unique features
I'm not going to be too hard on Maple Story, its roots date from 2006 or something that old and the game truly evolved through the years. Everything about it got better over time, from how classes started out - at first you had to roll randomly your stats and then fight for 10 levels with a really weak and boring character, while now you just need your core stats and you can skip the tutorial - to the distribution of quests by levels, to the 'balance' of skills to the amount of bugs and random stuff broken here and there. It's not really a good game even tho the concept of MMO platformer is pretty unique but I've spent way much time that I would've with this game during many years.

The first years were kind of insane

You can buy anything in the cash shop
But spoilers, there's not gonna be that much money in there.

The first years of Maple Story where when I spent money on the game (To buy Double Exp cards, for instance, or pets that would loot items for me, a tiresome task) because it was the only way to move forward in a timely manner. There were no quests to do, pretty much all you could do was grind, but I grinded and grinded and did little events here and there to level up, playing with my wife. They added some quests where you had to kill thousands of monsters or anything equally ridiculous so after a long while, I stopped playing. I might have spent more than 100$ in Maple Story, but there's still stuff I could pay for if I really wanted to, which brings me to my first problem.

Maple Story is pay-to-win...

I wasn't kidding

The cash shop is full of items you would need to be #1 in MS since everything is skewed against you. Travelling takes forever, but you can buy teleportation rocks. You can get your skills up to some level, then you need to find an in-game book with a random chance of working or just buy it for real money. You need scrolls to upgrade your items but they have a chance to not work and a chance to destroy your items forever so you can buy scrolls to give them a better chance to work or to protect your items in case they break. You can even buy things that will let you equip certain items you can't yet. You can buy exp, money, pets that will loot for you and heal you when your health dips too low, you can also buy tons of cosmetic stuff too, but it's not really the focus. AP (stats) rests, SP (skill) resets, name changes, additional character slots...

The problem is that there's always more of it, you can always want to buy more stuff, it's the bread and butter of free to play games, but there's just too much stuff they want you to pay for. Stuff that might make the game actually fun. Being able to teleport wherever you want, having a way to loot automatically items, having more inventory space, leveling up faster... Seeing this locked behind a money gate is frustrating. Oh, and did I mention you lose experience when you die? I think there's a cash shop item that prevents that!

How I would fix this
I know this isn't a very popular idea, but just sell a 40$ copy of the game. Call it the deluxe edition, throw in pretty much everything a Maple Story player would want and offer everything else at a discount, being able to play with all of the bells and whistles unlocked from the start, that way you may have players buying this and enjoying the game more because now they have more options.

...but there's nothing to win.

Dex, dex, dex, dex...

MS isn't "balanced" in any way. When they release a new character, the new character is always better than the old ones - otherwise who would want to play as them? - and they have nice event quests and rewards and bonuses that you wouldn't get with the old classes if you played them. The enemies follow a quite linear curve of difficulty, you'll get hit for about the same percentage of your overall health whatever you're fighting if you stick to monsters your level. The stats systems are largely useless, there's strength, dexterity, luck and intelligence, the only purpose of these stats is to increase your damage. Why have them at all? Why not grey everything out except your main stat? Because you get gear and items that increase the other stats and sometimes you might be able to transfer them to your main stat, of course.

The in-game economy is full of inflation but it's not that hard to grind for money. Of course, everything is a money sink so having tons of money isn't anything to be proud of, you can also buy some more with real cash. There's also close to no end-game. A while ago, you needed level 120 to promote to your fourth class advancement and get your best skills with some incredible effects and that was a challenge because after level 50 onwards there were close to no quests. Nowadays you get your fourth class at level 100 and then can unlock all of your best skills, furthermore there are no quests after level 110 or so. You need books to get more levels of your skills and they drop randomly, work half the time or less, and only raise the max levels by 10. Ok, the 4th class skills are cool but level 1 exploding arrows will be the same as level 30, only the numerical values will increase.

I need a skill book to level up this one skill...

And I have a few, but they're not for the right skill.

Besides skills, you can get better gear by doing party quests which involve playing with other people. I'm not sure what's wrong with the audience in free to play games but MS is no exception. So there's nothing to do past a certain level and you can only grind to increase your stats which allow you to deal a little bit more of damage so you can grind stronger monsters...

How I would fix this
As I'm sure Nexon cannot create content faster than people consume it, I'm not going to suggest building higher level content. Adding new classes is a temporary stopgap at best; people will try them out and either outlevel their other characters - because of the added content for that class - or just stop caring altogether. My idea involves restarting your character over when you're at a level where there is nothing left to do. You get to level 120 (or 130, or 140, whatever) and you can restart your character to level 1, gaining something that way. Maybe your skills max levels get increased by 1 automatically? Maybe you start with a few more stats? I know I would've done it.

There are so many character classes, but only the newest ones are overpowered right now.

At least they're trying to get your money
So many events are happening at once in MS, there's always some little thing or another. Right now you can play a board game with dice you gain each ten minutes and depending on the squares you land on you either get new quests or bonuses. There's also an event where if you play 30 minutes you get one special coin. Also another even that nets you a coin for each 200 monsters you kill. Another event going on is that each 3rd monster you kill nets you bonus experience. There's an in-game event calendar for a reason, obviously, and to say that Nexon isn't taking care of MS is not true.

Most of the quests involve grinding tons of monsters tho.

I find it ironic that they tell players "Hey! Don't play too much it can be hazardous to your health!" and then say "Play five hours straight to get 30% bonus experience!" Of course they want you to play too much, because then, maybe you'll spend some money. Some quests even need you to spend money to be able to complete them... And let's not forget the double exp and double drop hours where they just give everyone a taste of what it's like to level up almost decently fast.

All and all, MS is a cash grab bundled around a weird little game. Nexon came a long way with it, no questions asked, compared to what it was six years ago, this is a better value proposition. I don't plan to play it anymore, maybe when they completely fill the 1-200 progression with better goals and quests and content to discover, maybe.

This screenshot perfectly shows why I love this game.

Look at Path of Exile

Path of exile is not a bad action rpg, mechanics-wise and systems-wise, but some flaws in the design philosophy and the overall look and feel of the game won't make me want to play it anymore when it goes into open beta soon. Here are the things it does right and the ones it does wrong and how I would fix them up.

My biggest problem with the game is responsiveness

Everything is floaty in path of exile, your inventory items seem to float around for a few seconds when you try to move them, same thing for other menus, of course this isn't game breaking but as you often find loot to equip often, it gets annoying to mess around with all these items, and boy are there tons of random items in Path of Exile. There's no money to be found but instead you trade usable items with various functions that can be as basic as identifying items or as complex as re-rolling numerical values on the modifiers your magical items have.

No money in Path of Exile but you can still trade item for/with usable commodities

The biggest problem with this floatiness tho, is in the combat, the combat is really vague, imprecise and seems completely off half of the time. Opening containers weirdly where your character will move on top of the barrel or the rock then step on it in an awkward way, and you'll have to be exactly on top of it. Melee combat is the same, your moves seem to have no reach and you never know when you're hitting your enemies, you'll just stay there and slash at air and they take damage. Your melee special moves aren't better, they create animations that might hit enemies but there's no sense of anything connecting like in Diablo 3 or Torchlight or Titan Quest.

Magic spells and ranged attacks might be slightly better because you can see if your arrows hit your target and if the fireballs fall on the enemies but they still weirdly feel off, you don't get cool effects on enemies hit, they don't stagger much and they certainly don't fly away when they die.

Fighting as a melee character is the worst for any action rpgs I've played in PoE

How I would fix this

First of all, fix the interface floatiness, the game isn't that impressive graphically and shouldn't be too system intensive so tightening up how that feels would help part of it.

For the combat part of thing, having a wider range on melee attacks and more responsive animations would help greatly. Anything to show that your hits connected like damage numbers would also help me know if I'm hitting my targets or missing (because of the accuracy stat) or plainly missing (because I'm too far away)

The game doesn't feel ready yet

PoE tries many things to keep itself different from other games in the genre, first and foremost, you get a huge passive skill tree where you unlock nodes at each levels and they rank from passive stat bonuses to different abilities to ways that modify how your character works such as using life to cast spells instead of mana or applying your rechargeable shield to your minions instead of you. It's fairly overwhelming and it's not really a good way to present information since you have to find where you want to go and you don't know for sure where you want to go. It doesn't add anything except novelty.

This might seem overwhelming but it's just trying to show something simple.

How to fix this

Make it a talent tree of some kind, you probably have all these skills connected in similar ways but you would know what kind of path you needed to go down in.

The gem system is interesting, you find gems that make up all your abilities and they are divided into three kinds, strength, dexterity and intelligence gems. Some gems boost up other gems with various attributes (such as increased fire damage, splitting projectiles or raising the health of minions summoned). You get gems from quests and they can also drop from enemies. Also, the gems level up as you do and when they reach a certain amount of experience, you need to respect certain requirements such as level or stats to be able to increase their powers. It's an interesting idea, of course, but it goes wrong in my actual experience.

Either I'll never get any interesting gems (and it's the only way to get any skills) so I can't know in which direction to spec, or my equipment won't allow me to mix-and-match the gems like I want, nor link the support gems with the stuff I use, maybe I won't be able to level up my gems because of the requirements that sometimes won't follow how I'm making my character or the upgrades just won't matter. Corpse explosion, for instance, deals 20% of the health the monster had. +2-4 at first level, +2-5 at second level, etc. Auras such as Anger add 15% to your cold damage but slightly increase in aura radius as the skill gains in power. So you can't level them up sometimes and when you manage to, it's kinda disappointing.

Support gems aren't always great either, finding something nice you can't use because of item slots, because of level requirements or because of not having any attacks that can use it. Finding a 'Fork' gem is useless if you're fighting melee or using some spells that don't shoot projectiles, being unable to apply support gems to your basic attack is kinda annoying too because having a gem adding "Monsters hits have a chance to flee" on only one of your attacks that you might not use because of mana issues is disappointing (Also, gems add mana costs)

How I would fix this

Give more gems as quest rewards, give more options to mix and match support gems with what you're using,  and finally make the gems have bigger impacts.

I don't like melee gems but cleave is okay because I suppose if the big red arc hits enemies you can see it clearly.

Unique items are uniquely designed, to be sure, some of them have downsizes, it's too bad that it's all I've gotten so far. I suppose there are tons of better stuff so I'm not taking it against the game.

I was pretty happy until I saw the last line.

All and all, it lacks charm

I'm not sure I want to continue playing path of exile and it's because of the first reason more than the second one, but if I had to find another problem with the game is the relative style of everything, everything is brown or dark or very low-colors. I'm not too sure what it's trying to inspire or recreate but all and all, I find it depressing to look at and I always hope they're going to change the style by the next patch. Of course, if the game was amazing otherwise I wouldn't care much, but the fact that everything feels slow or unresponsive doesn't help my view of the game and the style surely doesn't help.

I know it's a question of taste, but brighter effects and clearer graphics would've helped the otherwise glue-like gameplay.

What a merry bunch of jokers!

Sorry to reuse that quote from the Path of Exile dev team that I used in my diablo 3 review but "We're sick of the recent trend towards bright, cartoony RPGs." You sure are.

Look at Far Cry 3

I had no prior opinions about the Far Cry franchise as I don't like First Person Shooters, the hook of the open world aspects and crafting elements of Far Cry 3 drew me in and I'm surprised to find it a very enjoyable game experience with some flaws here and there but mostly amazing gameplay systems. Tons of content to explore and a lot of organic open-world goodness here and there, crazy vehicles and some customisation, FC3 is a good shooter.

The gathering / crafting systems are interesting but not perfect
You can carry a limited number of pretty much everything in FC3, healing items, ammo, grenades, loot, crafting materials, money, you name it. You are required to craft all of the upgrades to carry more stuff - and also to craft various buff items and healing syringes - using plants you harvest and animals you kill and then skin. This is very interesting because you have to hunt a bit even as you go from event to event, gathering plants take seconds and killing animals is an event by itself, stalking your prey, getting your shotgun / light machine gun / bow ready then a random patrol of pirates stumbles upon you, scaring your prey and shooting at you. Or the other way around, you stalk some guy you have to kill, then a tiger comes out of nowhere and chews on you.

Problems start to rise after you've played a bit - not necessarily with the story - and realize that you have about 4-5 items of each categories. The small syringe case might carry 5, the medium might carry 7, the large might carry 9 and the extended one might carry 12, but if you manage to craft them all in two hours, there's not much to look forward, syringe case-wise. Of course, there are dozens of items to craft, but I feel like they missed the boat with that concept. You need 2 skins of one animal for the first rank, 2 of another for the second rank and for the final rank you need special skins gained by doing quests that might not unlock for a while.

I can't feel excited about having completed all of these 4 items.

After a while most skins become useless and they are still flagged as 'crafting items' which prevents you from selling them quickly and easily, in fact you don't even know they aren't useful anymore and you can collect them and be told that they should be used for "crafting" so they take inventory space and you're never sure what to do with them,

The game thinks this is for crafting but no, it isn't anymore.

How I would fix that
First and foremost, increase a little bit the number of skins required to craft things, second, have more tiered items that might require skins from two different animals, have more than 4-5 items per category (I could see a syringe belt that holds fewer but automatically uses them when you're low on life, or something) and finally flag useless crafting materials as such so they would get sold with the 'Quicksell' feature.

Same thing with the skill system
I love talent trees, starting somewhere then moving towards a skill I really want to see, placing points after points each level until I finally get there, having to pick some useless skills of course, but mostly going in a straight line to the upgrades I want. FC3 has some of that, you have three skill trees split into different categories of skills and each tree has about twenty skills. Skills range from reduced reload times to increased resources when gathering things and more health. In theory all of this is perfectly fine, however you can only unlock these skills after doing a certain number of story missions and while you're not at this point you won't be able to spend them where you want. So you just wait with your points.

All of the good skills are locked...

And the skills aren't all useful for your gameplay style so you might want to place all of your points as you get them but they're not all going to be of much use. I didn't do much in terms of takedowns while I played FC3 so much of the skills were of no use to me. Your mileage might vary!

...but I don't want to go on with the story, I want to do everything here!

How I would fix this
Make the skills unlocked by levels instead of story missions, I didn't want to do the story missions too fast, I wanted to do everything around, all of the hunting and the radio tower stuff. Forcing me to wait for a long while before I could spend my points (At one point I had 10 unspent skill points) is not fun gameplay.

Also the story is pretty bad! It would've been great, but nope! Sorry.

And the radio tower system has also a little flaw.
You unlock parts of the map by climbing radio towers and disarming some scrambling system attached to them. First you locate the tower, then you have to climb it - usually it involves finding spots you can jump and ladders - then you get the map revealed and also you have a few free weapons. The problem is most of the time, I already have bought the weapon, so I don't get anything, and money can be a bit scarce if you're not looting/selling everything.

Fixing radio towers gives you free weapons...

...too bad I already owned that one.

How to fix this
Just explaining somewhere the next items you'll unlock from the radio towers would help a lot, there are many things that could be better surfaced in FC3 and for the amount of content this game has it's kind of baffling it's not done a little better.

That being said, I really love Far Cry 3
Everything related to the open-worldness of the game is awesome, things happen organically and you'll get some interesting stories out of randomly doing side content. Maybe you won't rave about the ending or some of the 'twists' this game throws your way, but that weird mixture of good shooting, good stealth and random jungle madness is really great. The vehicle stuff is kinda weird and crazy because you stay first person so you go in crazy directions and it's pretty hard to steer and not bump everywhere, but I haven't been frustrated with it.

The glider is a very fun way to go places (Then you have to jump into water or you die)

Speaking of the stealth, even tho I wasn't a fan of using takedowns and sneaking around, being able to mark almost everything by zooming with your camera (or sniper rifle, as I did) so you know where enemies are at all times, is really useful. Same thing for the various syringes that would let you see enemies through walls, it's a godsend to be able to quickly find your targets, especially if you're hunting a specific kind of animal in the jungle.

Mission accomplished