There’s a very small part of me that wants to go easy on the makers of Loot Heroes on the grounds that I only spent 2.99 on it, and really, what did I expect? Well for starters, I expected a game that was fun and relatively glitch free. Given the videos and reviews I saw, I expected something like the NES version of Gauntlet. What I got was a lazy, shitty little turd that I wish I hadn’t wasted my money on. I can only think of one thing to compliment in this game, and that’s the music. The music is nice and catchy, but everything else is awful.

Where to begin? Well first, there’s the shitty graphics, with just the barest minimum of effort put into the design of the dungeons and the enemies. There’s the boss monsters, who have the ability to deal damage through walls because their “hit box” is ridiculously huge. There’s the recycled sound effects, meaning it’s damn near impossible to tell if that one sound was my rune spell, an approaching boss monster, or a trap just outside of my hazy area of view. There’s the cheap tactic of opening a dungeon with 20 fucking enemies and two boss monsters already in my ass so that I’m dead before I can even look for a way to escape. There’s the monsters stacked all on top of each other so that it’s impossible to tell if the monster around the corner has one friend with him or ten. There’s the fucking glitches, where I could walk down an empty hall with no enemies or traps and still take damage.

How about those awful controls? This is supposedly a twin-stick shooter, but the aiming on the right stick is shit and will send 99% of your shots into a wall. When almost all of the game is tight corridors, that’s not the least bit helpful. One would think using the face buttons to fire in a straight line might help, but NO. Why? Because no matter which face button you press, it still only fires in an “auto aim” manner, usually at the wrong enemy. Additionally, auto-aim only works for a short distance, and then the face buttons fire in whatever direction the character is facing. Absolutely fucking useless.

“Zoe, maybe you didn’t play it long enough to give it a fair chance,” you say. Nope. I played long enough to unlock the barbarian by fighting my way through to dungeon 30, and I unlocked 61% of all the trophies. I played as every class multiple times, for all the good that did, and I played long enough to collect enough class specific items so that three of my classes started at levels 2 and 3 instead of 1. In all that time playing, I went from a merely apathetic verdict of “meh” to full on hate for this piece of shit. The longer I played, the more I wanted to ask for a refund.

I give Loot Heroes 2 stars. I WANT so badly to give it 1, but I reserve that score for something so broken it’s unplayable. This is playable, but I can’t think of a single reason why I’d want to. Can’t delete this fast enough from my Vita to make room for something better.

Wait, what? A review for a PSP game? What year is this?! Well Mega Man X: Maverick Hunter is part of Sony’s October sale, and even if it wasn’t 3 euros, I would have picked it up. I’ve been craving a Mega Man game that I can play on my Vita, and this is an updated remake of a game I played but never managed to beat. See, way back in the SNES days, I didn’t buy a whole lot of games. I had to rent them, and this is one that I rented a few times without ever making any progress against any of the robot masters. Eventually I moved on to other stuff, and this slid off my radar. But now I stand (well, sit really) before you a proud veteran of BOTH game modes, waving the mighty banner of victory. Yes, I’m still a lousy gamer, but now I’m a lousy gamer who finally beat Mega Man X. Huzzah!

And you know what? I really love this game. There’s only a few minor things to complain about, and for the most part this is 2D platforming fun at its finest. The graphics are a bit dated, sure, but they’re still colorful and pop bright and pretty on the Vita screen. The music is great, and the controls are absolutely perfect. I’m normally a huge klutz who dies over and over because “wrong button stupid” but this is a game that just feels right soon after I started playing it. I think part of that is being able to play with the analog stick or the D-pad, but another part is that I really only need the four face buttons. No complex combos to remember, just pure button mashing platforming joy.

In this game there’s no Dr. Light or Dr. Wily because X was sealed away in a chamber by Dr. Light for future generations to discover. The scientist who does so, Dr. Cain, develops a whole range of robots around X’s design, but none of them have quite the range of emotions that he does. As Dr. Cain believes his emotions are the key to robotic evolution, his underling Sigma takes it upon himself to push X into evolving by going maverick. It’s admittedly a pretty convoluted story premise, but you don’t really need any of it to play the game. Continue reading

My time in Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt can be summed up as vast chunks of time spent skipping through the woods picking flowers and admiring the countryside and clouds, intermittently interrupted by occasional bouts of what-the-fuckery. Sometimes, these bouts were events one should expect in a fantasy game, such as accidentally kicking over a ghoul’s nest or tripping on a griffin, but I often came across glitches or outright crashes that gave me pause. Other times, I had troubles with the controls, or with the sometimes dumb rules of the crafting system. None of these are really deal breakers that make this a bad game, but they will be brought up in my review. So if you’re looking for a totally glowing review, this won’t be it. No, I’m here to get nitpicky and anal, even as I admit this here is a pretty game. Oh so very, very pretty.

Before I get started, I will admit this is sort of my first foray into the Witcher world. I say sort of because hubby has played the previous two games, and I sometimes watched over his shoulder. I can’t say much about those games because what little I saw didn’t pull me in and make me want to play them. But I do distinctly recall the moment that I saw one of the early game play trailers for Witcher 3 and watched a pack of wolves moving together to cut off Geralt’s escape, and I thought, “Well if that’s in the actual game, it’ll be brilliant.”

And it is, to a certain degree. (Even if that trailer completely lied and wolves never do what they did in the trailer.) Enemies of all types feel like they have actual intelligence, working together and planning attacks to flank and back stab in a way that makes every fight feel tense and challenging. So I rather like that, and I feel I should bring it up right away. It’s a shame this does not carry over to allies, but I’ll get to that later. This praise also doesn’t apply to enemies that suddenly glitch and become derpy, which happens frequently enough that it should be mentioned. The combat controls too will deserve their own separate rant. This is a long review, is what I’m saying. Continue reading

What? TWO game reviews in ONE post? Yeah, this may not always be the case for phone game reviews, but in these two cases, the games are just so simple that there’s not much reason to devote a full post to each of them. One I liked, and the other did nothing for me. I didn’t dislike it, but I also don’t find myself wanting to play it any more.

First, let’s cover Puzzle Quest 2, which is definitely my kind of game. The Puzzle Quest brand is turning into a big licensed property franchise, and a Kotaku review of the latest version sporting Marvel characters felt it was weak, and stated that the best in the series was the second game. I grabbed my phone, hoping that maybe, just maybe, there would be a Win Phone version. (Game makers, please don’t say a game is coming out on all mobile platforms when you mean just Android and iPhone. It gets my hopes up and then crushes them cruelly.) There was, and so I bought it and spent a long, LONG time playing it. I might still be playing through the story quest now, but after level 50, the game just erased my character and dumped me back to the beginning. I think eventually, I’ll start it over because I love puzzle games, but that loss of progress was more than a little hard to take.

What Puzzle Quest 2 is, is a match 3 tile puzzle with some context added to the turns-based struggles with AI opponents. They could have just made the game without the fantasy story and it would have worked just fine for me. But the idea is that each opponent is a different monster with different spells and defenses. As you progress down through this dungeon, you come across bigger and badder enemies, and each time you have to revise your playing style to counter theirs. You fire off your own spells by collecting gems of various colors, but you can also collect little fists to gather action points for using a weapon, or you can match skulls to do damage directly. And that’s pretty much it. Continue reading

I got Invisible, Inc. pretty soon after it came out of Steam’s early access based on glowing praise from Angry Joe. I was a little wary of it because it’s from Klei, and Mark of the Ninja didn’t impress me. But I figured I’d give this a chance because it’s got a very different game play method and seems to be better at allowing players to make it through the whole game without killing anyone. This can be a compelling selling point for me all by itself, so that was my main reason for picking this up.

The thing is, I played maybe three missions before realizing I’d made a tactical error early on and couldn’t continue my current game. I deleted the save file, and for several months I procrastinated getting back in for another attempt. I knew I should just push through because it is a pretty short game, and yet, I always found something else to distract myself with. But at long last, I’ve sat down with the game and given it a full spin. Was it worth it? Uh…well, yes and no. Mostly yes, and I admit I enjoyed this quite a bit more than Mark of the Ninja. But that ending…

I’m getting ahead of myself. Allow me to digress. Continue reading

Let me begin this review with a bit of full disclosure: I do not like Bethesda games. I’ve given almost all of them a try because my husband buys them, usually even multiple copies so he can have one for his computer and one for our console. So yes, I give their games a trial run, and each time, what amazes me most of all is how very little effort they put into anything they do, and how very rabid the fan base responds to their games. “Game of the year!” they cry, despite the fact that a dozen other candidates come out with better graphics, game play, writing, stability… *takes deep breath*

So anyway, hubby found an app called Bluestacks that allowed him to download and play Fallout Shelter on his computer, and after playing it a few days, he said I should check it out. I watched him play, and because I’d been standing behind him for nearly an hour, he said, “It’s kind of hypnotic, isn’t it?” And it is, so I decided to download it and give it a try. What I found is a game that I simultaneously like and loathe at the same time. All the reasons I hate it can be summed up in the same way, that it’s a Bethesda game, and like all their games, they put just enough effort into it to make sure it didn’t crash constantly. But beyond that? Beyond that, it’s a wonky piece of shit.

I have a long, LONG list of complaints about this game, but I should get out of the way the things I liked, which were strong enough to keep me playing until I finally unlocked the Nuka-Cola plant, the last room you can build in your vault. For starters, I like the basic premise of building your own vault and either luring in dwellers or convincing your people to mate and make new dwellers. I like the gathering of resources, and as my hubby says, it becomes hypnotic to just click on items as they become available, or to ding through the various objectives assigned for the rewards of bottle caps (the game’s currency) or lunchboxes (the random loot crate that can be won for free or purchased for real money. More on that later, and on why you should NEVER give money for these boxes.)

I like the graphics, from the cute designs of the dwellers and their enemies to the rooms in their three levels of production quality. I like how detailed everything is when you zoom in close, and I like how the rooms have a kind of depth and perspective that changes as you move around the screen. I like the goofy conversations the dwellers have with each other and how the same questions or comments often have multiple responses to keep conversations from getting stale too quickly. If all the game involved was gathering resources and watching dwellers interact with each other, this would probably be the first Bethesda game that I grudgingly called good. Continue reading