I look at The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

Diablo 3 came with great fanfare, Torchlight 2 had some good marketting, I've read about Path of Exile here and there and the same goes with Grim Dawn, now in alpha. Why am I starting with this? Because I never knew that The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing was an Action RPG. I never knew it was coming out on steam and I looked at it the day it came out only to see what kind of game it was. I didn't think it was going to be incredible, as the title suggests.

Here I am, in the gloom swamps of dread, near a crashed blimp.

Monster Hunting
You don't pick up a class when you start TIAoVH, Val Helsing is able to do everything, through skill trees and equipment, you select what kind of skills your character will use. Van Helsing can shoot guns, use magic, slice enemies up with his swords and specialize in any of these things. While ranged characters lack proper melee options and melee fighters need to get close to their distance-focused enemies in other games, here it's only a push of the R key away. You switch between melee and ranged very easily, and it's great to shoot a couple of rounds at charging werewolves and then switch to swords to finish them off when they are too close. You could theoritically stand there and shoot everything, but the parry bonus you get while holding swords is not negligible and makes switching strategically worth it. Fire guns, switch to swords, switch to guns again, the action is dynamic and fluid, you have plenty of options.

I once fought about a billion rats

You'll rarely encounter a few enemies, they often come in big packs, numbers and monster chunks start raining everywhere, building a resource called rage each time you kill an enemy. You can use rage to activate secondary power of your abilities (each ability has 3) in the form of 'combos'. For instance, the explosive gun attack I used the most has increased blast radius, increased damage and 20% mana recovery. You could have 3 times the mana recovery (for 60%) or 2 times recovery and 1 time increased damage, etc.  You can either use the spacebar to trigger these rage combos or set them to be used automatically. Rage drains pretty fast so you need to manage it a little if you plan to use combos with all your skills, but otherwise you just kill a few monsters and unleash some big attacks.

You gain new auras and tricks along the way

By speaking to certain NPCs, you can buy 'auras' and 'tricks' that you can use in addition to your usual skills,  the auras are passive abilities (such as increased gun damage when no enemies are nearby, life leech, added gold find, bonus damage at max Rage) and tricks are active skills (like healing yourself, having a mana shield effect, a blink ability, a temporary damage buff) that don't cost any mana but they have a small cooldown. You need to spend skill points to level them up, and that means you're going to reset them when you learn ones you like better, which is a bit annoying, luckily you can reset your skills almost anytime.

Perky!

The perk system is really nice, you get 'reputation' by killing rare/champion enemies and when you have enough reputation, you can choose a perk. Some of them are one-time bonuses like 5 skill points but most of them are weird bonuses like having an extra inventory page, having more strength/higher selling price for your items, making your potions heal you better, saving you from death each 3 minutes... And the best thing about these perks is that they appear based on what you did and how you built your character. The perk that gives you an extra inventory page is based on you using the 'sort' function to replace your items in your bag, the perk that increases your skill points is based on you having skills in multiple trees, you start with a few of them, but the list grows as you play. Only thing I dislike about the perks is how there's no easy way to see how much reputation you have, there's a bar for EXP on the UI, but no bar for reputation, you need to go in the menu.

Stats and skills

I'm not a fan of stat systems where you can allocate points yourself, but TIAoVH fixes this by making the stats plainly explained in the tooltip. Because there is no character class, the only archetype you can follow is yours to build, I'm specializing in guns so I have loads of dexterity and luck (bonus magic find, woo), I don't have to ask myself if this is a right build because everything is useful to every Van Helsing. You get 3 skill points per level and you have a few choices. Active skills, passive skills, tricks, auras, upgrades for your active skills. Skills take more points as they go up in level and for each 10 points you put in a tree, you get a neat little passive bonus. You can reset both your stats and skills for a small fee, so if you take a skill and don't like it, it's no big deal.

Programmable companions ahoy!

Ghost Whispering
You also have a ghost companion that serves both for funny dialogue purposes and for fighting enemies/looting their corpses/going back to town to sell everything and buy you potions if you want. She's a very useful ally and you can decide whether she's fighting with claws or magical projectiles. You assign her stats and skills (most of her skills are passive upgrades to Van Helsing in addition to some of her own such as paralyzing enemies) select what kind of enemies she attacks, when she heals herself, what kind of items she loots on the ground and you can equip weapons and armor to her. Her AI isn't perfect, she will willingly walk into puddles of poison, die there and then take a minute or so to respawn. If you play ranged, you can have her go close to the enemies and tank them while healing you and getting all of the items.

More lines to tell me what I can do with that ring than about what it does.

You can equip her rings, which is too complicated for no reason. All the command keys on my keyboard can be used with this ring! Why doesn't she have some special ghost-only items instead of rings? It would make sense that a ghost can equip mythical things such as souls, I don't know. This just creates a situation where I pick up a good item, equip it on Van Helsing and then equip my old item to Katarina because it was my previous better one. This isn't a big problem, but giving her gear is somewhat inconsequential.

I think this game company created some Arthurian games before.

All the loot all of the time
Besides the normal line of normal/magical/set/rare/unique items, you have epic items that will gain in power when you accomplish certain things. The excalibur sword for instance, gets bonus fire damage when you kill 300 enemies, bonus ice damage after 500 and bonus lightning damage after 800. It also gets +1 in the Bash Skill when you've dealt 15000 damage wielding it. There are plenty of these items and it's not just based on enemy kills/damage dealt, it can be critical hits done, skill usage, times you've dodged, etc. Even if they're not better than the items I have, I always want to use these items to see if they'll get better. They often do.

Gems! Oh wait, no.

Instead of gems, you have essences. They all have a 'cost' and some of your items have a 'capacity', it's a bit different of the gem/socket system because gems have different costs and you can get magic items with capacities. Essences are fused with items and you can fuse any kind of essences together, adding a bunch of effects on your gear. You can also strengthen essences, increasing their effects but also their cost or mix essences together to create a random one.

There's a pretty forgiving enchanting system - but it's currently bugged, although I've managed to use it yesterday - when you pay gold and get random magics on your items, that you can then pay to remove if you want to try again. You can gamble by buying unidentified items, you can also forge 4 items together to create a new one of the same rarity. There are plenty of ways to spend gold in this game and you also get plenty from killing stuff. The biggest gold sink is the respawn system.

I died only to show this I swear.

The game can get tough in spots, I've died my fair share to bombs, tornadoes and lightning, the cost of death is pretty low, when you die you are faced with three options, spend 10% of your gold to just respawn right there, spend 5% of your gold to restart at a checkpoint that can be very close or at the beginning of the map, checkpoints aren't well defined, or just respawn in town. Respawning in town would be fine because there are portals in most of the maps, but the two loading screens (from death to town, from town to portal) break the action too much for me, and paying the 10% fee to just respawn feels a bit cheap, all and all it helps to keep the action fast because you can just retry right there, maybe this time you won't die. 10% is a sizable enough sum to make you think about it.

Enemies come from the red gates at the bottom and leave at the top.

Tower Defending
There's also a tower defense-like minigame where you place traps on your lair and kill enemies as they walk around to try and get out. Spiked floors, flame throwers, lightning traps, blades, werewolves, walls that crush enemies, there is variety to your options and you can research/upgrade new ones as the game goes on and you buy the plans from merchants.

You can upgrade many systems, adding an extra slot for items in the forge, for instance.

You also can upgrade your generator which gives you more trap capacity and various other upgrades to other systems such as the essence enchanting one. Van Helsing can also help defend his lair by killing enemies as they go. A good combination of traps on one half of the maze and you killing everything on the other will clear all waves. I wished it would tell how far you are in the wave tho, they last a bit too long and you never know when they're done.

The world map/loading screen is very stylish

All and all, I'm really happy to have played this
I am not saying that only popular games can be good, but this surprised me greatly and I'm very happy about it. There is a ton of charm in this game, the action feels good for an rpg, the story is interesting, the characters are funny and there are jokes here and there that made me chuckle. This reminds me of titan quest, or dungeon siege 2, an interesting Action RPG that does a few things differently and the rest of them really well so that it's an overall great game.

Watch out for the 

Look at Sleeping Dogs

There is a great balance act when you're building an open world game; You need to have a main storyline compelling enough to have the player want to go forward with it and at the same time you need to have enough side activities to justify having the game being open world. A big open world without stuff to do in it only feels like a reason to run around (or drive) only to get to the next story beat. Sleeping Dogs succeeds at being a fun open world game with a few weird mechanics here and there but mostly interesting stuff to show.

But I just started up the game!

After being a bit disappointed by some broken scripting at the beginning of the game, I was thrown into an interesting narrative that I wanted to know more about. You start the game with a very small amount of side activities that you can do but they are diverse enough to change things up between story missions. The map is full of small icons to tell you where shops and parkings are, and you're free to go choose if you want to do police missions or triad missions. Of course, there's a link between these two, you can't only do police missions forever, you'll need to mix it up if you want to unlock more of them as the story will go forward by doing these. You also have other things to do such as driving around the city to find lockboxes or statues or shrines, beat up random thugs and buy clothes.

Nothing but the best for freshly out on the streets Wei

I like that you can get set bonuses for equipping clothes that match together. You also need a Face rating to be able to equip some of it, so it's metered that way. There are a bunch of clothing stores in Hong Kong and you'll need to remember where you can buy something when your Face is leveled enough. The concept of Face is interesting, I think I've seen it before in other games based in Asia, it basically represents your presence. You level it up by beating thugs and completing certain missions. You also have a face meter that goes up during fights and when it gets full you regenerate health and intimidate your enemies, I can't say that the intimidation seems that useful, maybe it should be more obvious what the effects are.

Five different things to upgrade, they all go up in different ways.

The game feels schizophrenic in some ways, you are asked to do missions to infiltrate the triads such as driving fast and crashing rival cars on buildings, shooting guns at random things, placing bugs, breaking into places and beating up thugs but you also lose cop experience whenever you fail to jump over railings or when you bump your car into city property while driving around. I understand that the main character is a cop but having me lose exp because I've hit some crates on the sidewalk while trying to escape three criminals is kinda silly. It would've been better to dock Cop Experience when you hit civilians or when you fail certain objectives that are more significant than 'jumping over fences for fun'.

Oh no while doing this very dangerous and illegal street race I have crumpled some papers

You get triad experience by being creative while you fight. I really like the combat system even though some parts of it are too tough for me. While the cop experience starts at 3 and drains, the triad exp starts at 0 and goes up while you execute heavy attacks, defeat enemies and slam people into dumpsters. I don't feel like I have enough experience with the game yet to obtain 100% experience for triad missions, but it's pretty fun to do environmental attacks where you ram people into speakers, electrical boxes and through aquariums (maybe killing them? Isn't Wei a cop?).

That's alot of thugs!

Basic melee attacks are executed with the left mouse buttons, strong attacks are done by holding that button, some enemies will block and you can grab them with the F key, enemies will (sometimes) glow red before they attack, then you press the right mouse button to counterattack. That's all pretty good and I've managed to beat up normal enemies easily. The problem comes with tougher foes that will grapple you and then unleash strong attacks unless you press a specific key in time. I always fail these because I'm mashing left and right mouse buttons to attack and counter, so when a guy grabs me and the F prompt appears, I almost automatically fail and get hit for a third of my life. Maybe a little more time to input the keys required to get out of these devastating attacks? These tougher enemies are my bane in this game. Guns are okay too, there's a small bullet time mechanic and you can take cover, the usual.

This also was a nice story beat

Otherwise you find statues to unlock new melee moves and shrines to increase your maximum life. You can drink Dragon Punch to increase the damage you deal, get massages to get 'face' faster and drink tea to have more defense. There are a bunch of places on the map where you can buy these things so it's no big deal that you can't carry them. 

At no fault of its own, SD does something that I hate in open world games, and it might be a pet peeve of mine, but I'm not a fan of densely populated cities where people yell at you or gasp every time you run by them and otherwise act as obstacles when you're trying to get from point A to point B. I know that running might be a bit bizarre, but no need for every single person to point at me and go 'hey this guy is running, how weird!' This is annoying more than anything else. Driving is okay if you don't mind dodging the traffic and you can always take the taxi.

Hacking vents while singing karaoke!

Otherwise, Sleeping Dogs surprised me with the variety of things you can do in it, I never expected to sing karaoke or to hack things with a little mastermind-like minigame (which is a bit too easy, maybe they should've put it on a timer or gave you less chances) or to do various things in story missions that are more than simply pressing the action button near them, like unscrewing and screwing back on vents.

I like sleeping dogs, and I'll try to see the story through.

Look at Neverwinter

I really love Neverwinter, I've had the most fun with it than with any other MMO in the last four years. After my /played is over fifty hours, I really want to play it some more instead of writing this, that can't be a bad thing. The game isn't perfect of course, and some of the F2P systems are quite annoying me, but it's got neat mechanics and plenty of stuff to do, so I'm going to write this and then go play it some more. I'm also trying a new format for my ideas that I will be spreading here and there in bold instead of making separate paragraphs about them. Tell me what you think!

Unconvincing beginnings
I have to say that starting the game didn't warm me up to it instantly, I knew it was based on D&D fourth edition and that it was free to play, but that pretty much was it, so I created my character and chose a race. They all had passive effects and I really couldn't tell what was better than others so I ran with the one I found the silliest, ability-wise. Maybe they should've let the player chose a class before a race, so you know what stats you need?

I love gold find and critical hits!

Then I chose a class, and the classes are a little weird because you have Defender Fighter and Trickster Rogue and Controller Mage. Why not just Fighter, Rogue and Mage? I wanted to make a ranged damage dealer and according to the descriptions, none of the classes were like that, the mage was the closest thing (even if he was supposedly crowd control). All classes can wear certain type of gear and they also can 'open' certain type of chests (arcane, dungeoneering, lockpicking, religion, nature) without the use of consumable items. They all have different skills and talents and class features (The mage has one ability slot that empowers your skill placed in it).

The sixth class is 'coming soon!'

Then it took a weird turn because it asked me to roll for stats. This is pretty crazy for multiple reasons. Either stats are very important in this game (and in that case, you need the highest stats possible to be on the same playing field as the other players and need to roll until you get everything) or they are not important at all (in that case, why roll for them? It doesn't matter anyways) and after a while, trying to get 18 in multiple stats, I realized that you can't, you don't even roll randomly, it goes through sets of stats. This system should be scrapped, give the player 10 in the three 'useless' stats, give him 18 in his mainstat and 14 in his two secondary stats, then he can use his racial stat bonus to increase one to 16. Just don't have fake dice rolls

If it truly was random I would sit here and roll until I get all 18s

Then I got into the game, shipwrecked somewhere, the game ready to tutorialize everything, from movement to combat, without forgetting picking up loot, dodging (each class can do a special defensive move by pressing SHIFT, in the mage's case, it's teleporting away) and the like. After doing all of this, you'll be in the main city, ready to start questing. At the beginning, I thought it was going to be a very classic MMO, and the tutorial helps differentiate how it's not entirely true, it should've started right in the middle of the action instead of having you walk around and right click on containers to loot them.

I thought I knew everything about Neverwinter just by looking at this.

Mechanics!
You start off most of your adventures by talking to a military guy in the city and he will send you to one of the other maps of the game to talk to someone. You'll end up in a quest hub with two or three quests, work your way in the zone until you can do a 5-player dungeon or move on to the next map. All maps have a different theme, being undeads, lizards, bandits, wolves, barbarians, etc. In each map, you can gather tokens by killing enemies and then exchange these tokens for good items later on, it takes a bit of grinding to get anywhere good, so you also can spend a few tokens for a random equipment piece. Most of the quests involve killing things or getting items, so this is not the most original part of this game.

In this map, I was fighting orcs.

The basic battle mechanics are interesting, you have two at-will powers that you can use all the time, three or more encounter powers (that are misnamed because sometimes you'll get to use them more than once each encounter) and two daily powers (that you can use when a bar fills up). I know that they were named like that because of D&D but it's a little misleading to think that you're going to be able to cast that spell only once a day. 

Each power has three ranks and you'll get to level most of them by the end of your level 60

You hit enemies by targeting them and shooting your spells at them, there is no automatic lock-on like in other MMOs and you can move from one enemy to the next pretty quickly. I also like the dodging mechanics, metered by stamina that regenerates slowly. You can dodge most attacks if you get out of the way and bosses/strong enemies will show red areas on the ground where it's not safe to be. Bosses have large health bars and are often immune to stuns and deal tons of damage so you need to be quick with the dodges. 

Ths boss wasn't immune to freezing so I cold beamed him to death.

You also can drink potions to heal yourself and the cooldown is very short, so short that I haven't died yet. Maybe the cooldown should be longer, this game is a bit easy. Then again, death is pretty frustrating so nerfing the potions should come with less penalties when you die. Currently you need 'real money' items to resurrect if you die, or you can call for help if you're with other people. Otherwise you 'release' to the beginning of the dungeon while suffering one injury (giving you debuffs).

I died when someone rang the doorbell, I swear.

Speaking of 'real money' this game is bathing in free to play system. You get purple boxes that could contain awesome items such as mounts and companions and enchantments, but you need keys to open them, and the keys are 1.25$ each. I have about fifty of these boxes in my inventory, it's not too frustrating, but I really wish that you could find keys randomly sometimes. It might even incentivize people to buy more keys to see what you get in the other boxes.

Everyone is doing the free-chest-but-costly-key!

I wanted to spend a few bucks in-game because I've really enjoyed it, more than some games that I've paid 60$ to. However, I think the prices are too high. You could spend 40$ on a single companion or mount, on a weapon or on additional storage, buying everything I would've wanted in this game would've cost me about 200$, and that's pretty crazy. I'm not sure how to fix this, on one hand, it's a valid business model, on the other, I'm sure there are people like me who would like to buy a few things in-game but don't want to spend that much. 

1000 ZEN = 10$. Heavy Worg indeed.

You also can buy 'Zen' using in-game currency, the astral diamonds. These diamonds can be acquired by praying (once an hour at campfires scattered across the game) or by doing certain crafting missions you unlock after a while. It's an interesting idea, but the exchange rate is very low (understandable). After all that time I've played, I've converted all of my astral diamonds into Zen, and I have 25. Another hundred and I'll be able to get one key. That's fine, it's ran by players and the prices are set by supply and demand.

It kinds of reminds me of eve online, a little.

The crafting system is fantastic, I think. It's basically like farmville. You have nine spots to craft with, and they all start locked but one. You unlock them by leveling your professions, leveling your character and completing specific requirements. Then you can use your crafters (tailor, blacksmith, soldier, etc.) to craft different things, and it takes time to craft certain things. Gathering wool scraps takes 10 minutes, creating pants take 20 minutes, getting astral diamonds takes two hours. You level your professions like that and you craft things while questing or being offline (somethings like getting new crafters take up to 18 hours). The only things that I would improve with that system is that it's not good at telling you what you could craft but lack materials, also there should be a way out of the game to manage your crafting since the timers are so long and you could continue 'playing' while being out of the game.

'Protect Caravan' gives you astral diamonds and I just unlocked it, two hours is a bit much.

Right now there are only one paragon paths per classes, which is kind of weird because you have to make a 'choice' at level 40, and there is no choice to make. Maybe they should've waited before releasing this feature. The feats are pretty standard except that you're not locked into one tree. They have pretty impactful effects on the way you fight and you can mix and match them to make a character you really like. I'm all for the life leech and regenerating faster so I can just continue fighting, myself.

First you take 20 points of regular feats, then it's up to paragon feats!

The companion system isn't really great, tho. Your companions are only there to help you fight and when they gain enough experience, you send them away until they train and come back. They can equip runes and some gear, but you're never sure what's better for them, they should scrap that system entirely and have items specific to companions that increase some of their stats or skills. They also have maximum levels where it's confusing to me because some of their gear slots unlock at level 25 and they have a maximum level of 15. Should I get better companions now that they're maxed out? How? I've noticed that they die way more often now, how can I make them better if their levels are impossible to raise further? They should address some of that confusion.

Level 25 out of 15 is what you're saying?

I'm a bit annoyed by the runes because there are so many of them and they take so much space in your inventory. You fuse them in batches of 4 to upgrade them to the a higher tier and they have a chance to break (you can buy things with Zen to prevent them from breaking) and they act like gems (you can socket them in your gear) and equipment for your companions. The game was nice enough to provide you with an extra bag for crafting materials, it should've done the same with runes. Also I might be crazy, but these 95% to succeed rolls have failed more often than they should've, if it's not the real percentage, they should show it.

I've started throwing away my Rank 1 runes because  I lack space.

Conclusions
All and all, Neverwinter is a pretty good MMORPG, even if I never played with anyone else, there were no incentives to do random dungeons with people, I might try that later, but still. You still kill things and get loot, but the setting and systems in it are different enough to keep you interested. It's pretty hard to die with the amount of potions you can drink and the strength of your skills against your enemies, but that just makes seeing all of the content easier. The crafting and companions systems are interesting, the amount of customizing you can do to your character is enough to let you play the way you want, and if you really grind for it, you won't need to spend any real money to buy these Zen-locked items.

Gelatinous cube, I've missed you. (Also that star symbol next to the HP bar means that it's immune to crowd control)

I look at The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings!

I have to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of huge fantasy RPGS like the witcher, skyrim, kingdoms of Amalure, and the like. They have huge towns and even bigger maps where tons of people offer you tons of quests and tracking everything is a pain. You have a bunch of items that you pickup everywhere, some you could sell (but hold on to), some that might be used to craft something sometime in the future, you get a couple of skills and powers, some of which help you, some of which aren't enough to have you manage to defeat very strong enemies (that you can go fight right away because the world is so big and some foes are bound to be stronger than you) and you learn through trial and quick-saving what you can and can't do.

The Witcher 2 does a bunch of right things
I love skill trees, even when some of the skills you NEED to take aren't really interesting, W2 has four skill trees (one you need to invest in until you're level 7) and then three main trees, swordsmanship, magic and alchemy. Most of the upgrades are passive bonuses to your existing stats and spells and some of them are stronger attacks or basic mechanics (such as being able to parry in all directions) that you need to spend some points on. Even more interesting are the mutagens that you can allow to certain skills, granting you passive bonuses to whatever they boost (increasing spell range, maximum hit points, etc.) so you have skills and items to upgrade your character in a passive way. That being said, the mutagens are dropped randomly and can be used as crafting materials, so you might want to hang on to some of them.

This is neat, that said if it was me, I wouldn't have so many 'required' passive abilities.

The game is also very good at telling you what effects are on your character at all times. The character sheet tells you everything there is to know about all your stat changes so it's easy to see how you've built your Witcher. You also see the passive skills you've unlocked through the way you play (if you use fire magic a bunch, you'll get bonuses, if you intimidate people in conversations, you'll get better at it) and passive bonuses you get against certain enemy types that you're learned enough about. I wasn't able to find any books related to that but killing a bunch of enemies will also grant you some knowledge.

Everything you need to know and more!

The game flow is also pretty good, you run around swinging your sword at things, dodging around, casting magic and dodging around some more, I liked the combat in W2 even if sometimes I felt like my spells didn't connect even tho they would've.

The interface and loot system is kinda bad
Not being able to switch between your different interfaces while you're in them is a pain, you have to quit out of the inventory to open the character sheet and all. The inventory is cluttered with a huge amount of sub-categories for your items, traps, bombs, throwing weapons, armor, junk, quest items, recipes, crafting materials, enhancement items, the list goes on. You also find items in every container, felt, thread, cloth, ores, dusts. All of this can be used for something, but you're not sure what, and picking everything is what people do so this is no exception. You also find money and equipment sometimes (but you start with some neat epic armor that will be good for a chunk of the first chapters) and the amount of flowers and mushrooms and herbs you can pick to craft potions is also pretty large, they're everywhere.

So you can extract components from random loot items, okay

You can't drag poisons in your quick-use bar and you can't even drink potions from your inventory and the quick menu you can get in-game is mostly useless. I know that Geralt needs to meditate before you can drink potions, but that means I'm never going to use them. You can't meditate in combat and you can't know what kind of enemies you're going to face beforehand.

Why even have the crafting diagrams be items? You learn them, you don't need them anymore, done.

Facing ghosts, I wanted to apply ghost oil to my blade and had to do that in a menu, why not leave the oils in a quick-access wheel, available when you pause the game? The fight when horribly wrong and I wished that I could have more life regeneration, but it was too late, you can't drink potions in combat, and so I died, having to reload a save made half an hour ago. I never used the quick pause menu because I mostly used the fire spell and everything else wasn't useful in life-or-death situations.

Quick menus are supposed to be shortcuts.

How I would fix this
The whole meditation aspect is really neat setting-wise but on a matter of gameplay, I'm not a fan of it. I think it would be more fun if you could coal your weapon with poisons on the fly, it would be more fun if you could quaff potions whenever you need to (and maybe some potions should have more instantaneous effects instead of slowly regenerating your health but that's another story entirely). The inventory should be easier to navigate, some items could be in the same category and they should've calmed down with the crafting/alchemy/loot system.

No need to be able to get a thousand different items (some enemies will drop their fangs, claws, hides, brains, blood, etc.) that you can break down to alchemical components or sell when it's unclear if you're going to use them. They should've lessened the number of components and added more junk loot (only usable to get money) and the components could've broke down automatically (or maybe after a trip to some store, but that adds some hassle). So if you loot a monster that dropped its legs, beak and wings, maybe the wings are worth some money and nothing else, maybe the legs and beak break down into whatever alchemical components they're usually going to be. You'd then carry 'components' instead of 'a billion of different items with no apparent value'. That would streamline this and make it easier to understand.

Quests?
I'm always overwhelmed by the quest systems in this kind of game but I really like how flavor text for the quest (or directions) get updated as you progress through them. They should've gone a bit further with some of it tho, I was doing a very simple quest to destroy monster nests and nowhere did it tell me that I actually needed a specific kind of bomb to do it. My character refused to do anything to the nests before I read online what I needed to do.

A nonspecific map is no better than no map at all.

Some quests are also very vague about where you need to go to complete them. No manner of arrows nor directions (I would've loved at least a zone where I could've completed my objective in) for a quest requesting me to kill two spider queens. If the items I needed were static and didn't move, why not show me where they were? Finding them in that forest was more annoying than fun. One last thing about quests; I find it annoying when games switch the active quest because a new one appears, if I'm tracking a quest that I want to do, don't switch it up.

I haven't got far, I'll admit.

How I would fix this
Be more straightforward with the quests explanations, don't just shrug off and say "I have to destroy these nests" if bombs are the missing element. Show general directions of things to do if you don't want to pinpoint them exactly for the player because while exploration is fun, it should grow naturally out of player choice, not because you need to find one spider egg and have no clue of where it could be.

This game is interesting, but too difficult for me
Even on easy, I couldn't defeat some ghosts without dying and losing a bunch of progress. Frustrations related to being unable to heal at all during that fight and uncertainty as to why I was overwhelmed such by these opponents made me not want to play this anymore. It got charm and content for hours, I'm sure, but being terrible at the hack-and-slash-dodge made progress really difficult.

Look at EVE Online

I've heard stories about EVE Online, stories about crazy schemes and wars and how you could do anything, be anything, as long as you invested the time (and sometimes money) in it. This is all very interesting, of course, but trying the game myself was something I needed to do and I understand some of it after a weekend of playing it, but it's not for me, it's quite boring, to be frank, full of seemingly useless systems and confusing progression. Is EVE an MMO? Probably, but not a World of Warcraft style MMO. I'd rather play one of these, they have less freedom in them, but everything you might be able to do is easily understood.

Here's my character, Poik Doubleoseven, I didn't know you COULD have characters!

This is a bit confusing...
I'm quite surprised that the tutorials in EVE are functional as they are. They explain most of the basic stuff, warping around, shooting down enemies, using the UI, then quests will teach you how to mine, manufacture, scavenge, use your skills, hack, analyze, scan (using drones and a weird scanning mini-game where you place orbs in space to track specific things) and refine ores into materials. This is all fine and good and I've understood how to outfit my mining ship with a few lasers, drones, expanded cargo hold capacity and go asteroid hunting in 0.6 space to try and find things to sell.

I wish I could add 6 mining lasers on this baby

But that's it. I've made about 10 million ISKs in a few hours and that's not too bad (if you need about 500 000 000 to buy a 30-days game pass) but I have absolutely zero idea of what to do now. There is no comprehensible guide to professions that would be direly needed. What should I spend my money on right now? What's my next goal? Do I need to wait until I can afford a better mining laser? Mine away until one of my skills is at level 4? Get ship X, Y or Z? Should I sell my ore as-is or refine it to something else and then build things to sell them? I didn't have any kind of info like that, left to ask other players or browse the internet. For the sake of my own look at this game, I've decided not to.

All these windows are confusing

How I would fix this
Add more tutorials. I know that CCP wants this game to be a breathing, living, evolving game with player-ran economies and things like that, but better surfacing progression would help tons. Having a little box with recommended build paths for certain professions (even adding estimated money required to do it and the money you can make by using the suggested gear) would've helped me want to keep playing, because as of right now, I just didn't know what would be better, how much of an upgrade it would be, and what my end-game was.

...but very interesting
I have nothing against EVE, it's really an interesting game that exists since forever and I'm sure that being part of a large corporation working towards some goals (At this point I don't know what corporations can do in this game) and fighting in massive space battles can be amazing. I'm a solo player and I don't like fighting others, so these things maybe aren't for me and being a space miner/trucker sounded like a plan for me. Exploration was too risky and scouting would've been useless by myself. The skill system is well realized, with skills continuing to level even when you're offline (even tho I wish they would be more upfront with the uses of the skills) but without a clear goal in mind, I can't continue playing it.

Warp 10!

Travel is kind of a chore because you need to use jumpgates and warp everywhere and using autopilot kinda slows things down. I'm sure you can get faster ships (the little 327m/s I had was too slow for sub-warp travel) and upgrade your autopilot,, but for the part I've played, it was quite difficult to get from point A to B. Also the game is very annoying about containers and the things you put in them. You have to drag and drop your ore from your ship to the station before you can refine/use it even tho you're right there. Same thing with quest items and rewards, you need to put them into your ship because they're given to you in the station. The number of times I had to warp back somewhere because I forgot an item (because they gave it to me in the 'station' container, not in my ship). That could be done a little better, at least on the manufacturing/refining side of things.

All and all, EVE Online is not for everyone, it's very much a spreadsheet in space (even if the graphics are okay) and what you want to do in it determines how much time you'll have to spend. It is probably also a better game to play socially with help from pros and tutorials open left and right. That being said, it's not for me. Looking at MMOs can be too much sometimes and I don't have suggestions for many of the points I'm raising and that's because too much of this game hangs on so many systems that it becomes too much for me.

Space is pretty

Look at Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm

I didn't review Starcraft 2 for two reasons, one is because I wasn't writing this blog when it came out and two because the review would have went like this: Starcraft 2 is an almost exact copy of the first starcraft game with better graphics (expected), a dumber story (expected) and almost no change at all because the game needs to be playable competitively by people who played Starcraft 1 for ages (also expected), I wouldn't have much more to say, you build SCVs, you gather minerals, you spawn marines and you shoot guys. Or you make zerglings, or you spawn more pylons. What about this new expansion then?

I think Blizzard is creatively bankrupt
And that's not true for 100% of the game but I have a really bad opinion on some parts of this RTS juggernaut. I won't comment on the story or on the scientist that's obviously a Mordin Solus ripoff, or on how predictable the story is, nor can I comment on the multiplayer, which I assume is almost identical to the original Starcraft 2, neither will I talk about how the story is cliched and ridiculous.

Nothing but the best

This is kinda Warcraft 3
Kerrigan is a Hero from Warcraft 3, she gets stat bonuses while leveling up, is stronger than most units, gets special abilities and you need her to accomplish most of the objectives when she's present. Maybe she's a bit too powerful, because there are a few missions here and there that I've beaten by defending my base with normal units and just destroying the opposition with Kerrigan alone. This breaks a little the RTS aspect of the game because then it plays like some bad action rpg and you get a message telling you that your base is under attack. My base was never defended well enough or built enough because all I needed was kerrigan and a handful of units.

Some of the upgrades had me raising an eyebrow too, most of Kerrigan's skills were classic tropes of the genre, attacks that hit multiple targets, having more HP and regeneration, being able to heal, jump on enemies, stun then... Then you get the weird base boosting skills, like Overlords spawning instantaneously and drones spawning in pairs, improved vespene extractors and the like... What does that have to do with Kerrigan? There's a whole section about upgrading your units, why not put these options there? Did they run out of ideas of things to add to Kerrigan?

It's like if Thrall had an ability to make Peons chop wood faster...

How I would fix this
Make Kerrigan either stronger or weaker. Making her weaker would mean that she's a unit (Like Jim Raynor often was) with better stats and some abilities, but not a skill tree and levels and things like that. Maybe you could keep everything and just lower her stats so she's better than everything you have, but not by a large margin and couldn't win in a 1v5 situation. Making her stronger would mean adding abilities that strenghten her instead of your base/army. Life draining on hit would work, being able to resist more damage would also be a nice ability, anything to improve her survivability a little would make her even more usable. That would change the way the game works even more, pushing more focus on how you use Kerrigan.

This is too much Diablo 3
Some parts of the game are just weird and toothgrindingly bad. I really don't want boss fights in my RTSes, and I want boss fights where you have to manually move your units around so they dodge attacks even less. Early on, there's a dropship boss that fires bombs in a line, then you fight three zerg bosses, one of which charges into walls (and there's a line to tell you where to dodge!) another boss breathes fire...

If I'm talking about a boss in a blizzard game that takes place in a huge C-shaped arena with the boss in the concave section of the C, that the boss has two main modes of attack, one of which is to slam his arms on the field with warning signs to help you dodge and that his other attack is a breath that he sweeps across the area, what does that make you think about?

Good guess.

Nope! It's some kind of zerg boss thing! You even get the life bar and the different attack patterns for the smash attack as the fight goes on! It's pretty terrible. At this point, I was ready to stop playing Heart of the Swarm because this is the same exact thing.

I wonder if there's a World of Warcraft boss like this

How I would fix this
Remove all of this boss fight nonsense. Bosses in Starcraft games have higher HP and attack and armor and maybe you have to defeat them on a timer and they might be able to bring reinforcements in or move around checkpoints and things like that but they're not dodge-based nor they should stay there, only showing warnings of where they're going to attack before slowly restarting their attack pattern. That's an action RPG thing, not a RTS thing, and it's lazy to use one in the other.

The actual real time strategy is okay even if it repeats too much
Otherwise, the changes they've made over the original Starcraft 2 are interesting. You get three choices of upgrade for your units with minor changes, such as attack speed, range, armor, and the like which you can always change between missions if you don't like what you've picked.

These upgrades are noticeable but in a minor way.

You also get maps where you experiment with two types of units (let's say, two kinds of zerglings) both of them with very different abilities, such as jumping around, slowing enemies on hit, splitting into two after exploding, burrowing and firing heavy attacks and other things like that. After you've completed the mission, you choose which evolution you take and the other is discarded.

The other kind of upgrade, makes a big difference but you can't roll them back.

And otherwise the gameplay is very similar to the old Starcraft 2 game and that's perfectly fine. However, I felt that this time around, there are way more missions with timers on them. You get new units almost each level but you don't have time to try them out because there's always something happening in five minutes that you have to stop and you just lose if it happens, one mission it's about doors closing, then gas, then nukes, then kerrigan dying for no good reason. I don't mind one or two missions with timers here and there, but not more than that, I don't like timers in my games in general.

Oh no Kerrigan is gonna die in 4 minutes or something!

How I would fix this

Well, remove some of the timed elements, add them to the optional parts of the levels or to achievements, but don't rush me, I want to build my base as big as I want and make 200 worth of mutalisks and then obliterate the enemies. Maybe removing some of the random attacks on your base, also (There's a strike squad coming to attack the hive cluster!!!) because if you give me a powerful unit to micromanage, I'm not going to care much about building defenses and spawning more overlords.