Elden Ring Review

 Good game but it's waaaay to long. I loved DS2 but people complained about that because to many bosses and this game just keeping it going. I hate bosses they have more than one phase and if any boss has a split from one to another and if you die you have to do the entire thing again. Any boss that has a dumb easy first phase will 100% have a second one that is way more hard but you have to do the boring part every single time and it's terrible. Boss design in DS1 and DS2 was better overall. **Have a good solid boss design and not a boring first part**

The endings are fucking terrible. I had an ending with my favorite character and it was literally nothing. I looked up another ending and the was the same exact thing but one word was changed, this sucks and ruins a lot of it.

Overall game is good but it should not have been 100+ hours long with only about maaaybe 5 cool dungeons. Stormveil castle was the only real part of the game that feels like old school DS. Other parts are neat but a lot of stuff that is just meh.

Open world is cool but clearly they are treating items and NPCs similar to earlier DS games and the issue with that is you can find an item after you have explored an area so you will never see the character that needs the items unless you look it up or retrace every single grace/area again and again. The "quest" design is based on older DS games but does not really fit with the open world.

The game is a solid 3/5 and that's it. It's good but a lot of issues that hopefully they fix in the next one.

Edit: Changing to negative review. I've had more time to think about the game and it's as follows.

1. They took covenants out of the game and to me that is a core pillar of the series. Nothing added replaces them and it's noticeably missing.

2. The quest design was not updated to account for an open world game. If you can never find core NPCs needed because you explored first is not okay. It's possible to never find the faith trainer because you explored first and just don't come across him. He may tell you where he is going but it's poor design to not have a log or something in game.

*before people try to say that would ruin it....people...I had the tutorial in my inventory the ENTIRE game, they could do NPC logs or something. I should not have to go out of the game to find the main guy for me*

3. Bosses are fuckers in this game. Maybe just for faith build but they require a "cheese" weapon to beat or you chip tiny health away very slowly. Game more so than the others encourage str/endurance or OP magic spells (as seen in all the videos)

4. Boss design overall. Almost every late game major boss has a dead easy first phase and then a shit you second phase. Redoing these fights are boring and honestly leads to boring design. It was cool the first few times seeing them change (Godrick) but after a while I just knew any time the boss just walks to me all slow and I can destroy them they will have a second phase. I would rather better boss flow and design.

5. The open world is neat and gives a ton of very pretty framed shots but it does nothing for the game at a whole. I am sure they will do better next time and maybe learn some things from Zelda BOTW on how to design an open world but this was not it.

6. The game should not be 100+ hours long. People made fun of EA for what the UI would look like if they made it.....but the open world is almost straight out of an EA game. It's mostly pointless and could have been streamlined a lot.

7. Spells, there are just to many. Most of the spells feel pointless and like they are fluff just to check off a number that could say more than 1k builds...etc. A lot of late-game faith spells feel pointless and MAYBE they are pvp but honestly thats just not fun and poor design.

Overall Elden Ring is a good game but it is by far the worst game that From had made....again. The game is good as all From games are but it is the bottom of the pile.

*Ending Spoiler...sort of*

8. The ending fucking suck ass. I did the ending with Fia as she was the best character and the ending was literally nothing. I sit in a throne and nothing happens and Fia was basically all but forgotten....nothing....NOTHING? I checked another ending out and it's the same thing just a different word is spoken for that specific ending...that some Mass Effect changing color bullshit.

I expected more as they spoke on story more but also the game was marketed as working with the GOT guy and I assumed that meant something. Why have any story at all if there is literally no payoff that matters with the story you went with? Garbage.

Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance

Should you play Dark Alliance?

Positives

• Playable characters that you may love from the lore
• Co-op can be fun and game can be played as a chatroom experience
• The cinematics look good and are fun to watch

Negatives 

• Game difficulty is all over the place and is extremely inconsistent
• Why are all the cinematics done in the theme of playing music?
• co-op is janky and you will often get hit without seeing it
• Solo is a boring and tedious chore
• Not enough character customization

Verdict: Play using gamepass or wait for a deep sale if playing solo. If you have a group of friends that wants to play this together it can be fun despite the co-op issues so at most buy the game and see if it's up to your standards before the return policy. 

Quick Look: Archeage

Quick Look: Awesomenauts

Review: ArcheAge

MMOs have been in a weird spot for a while now. It's not that there haven't been any good ones, plenty of releases in the last few years have had good ideas, but none of them had the longevity an MMO requires, at least not for me or anyone I know. That's where ArcheAge shines. It's a classic sandbox, mixed with a themepark, using the Crytek engine, with some great production value to boot.

The game's setting is a classic fantasy setting, with some twists. It starts as any MMO does. You get your bearings, you kill 5 of this and 10 of that, and you move on. But soon you're getting quests with jetpacks, bouncing from enemy to enemy; then you're raising your mount from a cub to a full grown adult. A lot of this is compressed to keep you moving, it's a great pace and you're never in any single area for very long before moving to the next zone. This is one of the games greatest strengths. There is so much to see that the game constantly has you pushing into new areas, fighting new enemies, and giving you new things to try.

You get your mount early into the game along with a neat, albeit corny, little mini-game-ish thing. You're also given a glider, which is probably one of the freshist, most notable items in the game. The glider really does set the game apart and makes you feel like you can go anywhere. You see the game from an entirely new perspective and it feels amazing. Some of the areas are absolutely gorgeous, most notably the water areas (thanks to the crytek engine), and gliding through them is awe-inspiring. There's a section early on where you fight your way to the top of a mining quarry and fly down on your glider, it's easiest one of the coolest moments I've had in an MMO in years. There are also no load times in the game, you can walk from one end to the other, hitting only small "chuck loads" at certain break points, which makes travel (especially by glider) feel extremely fluid.

The classes and skills work similar to Trion's (though, in this case, Trion is the publisher) other game Rift.I'm sure other games have done this before, but it's not something that has clicked for me, not even in Rift. You chose a class at the start of the game, but that is only a base, a building block, to your own specialized class. As you level up you pick a new skill tree, up to three. As you pick each tree, it names your class something new and you can change your class sets at any time by going to a healer.

The combinations are pretty wild and none of them seem like you can go wrong. In one PVP match a "warrior", for lack of a better term, used a leap ability to close in on me. Being a healer (and severely under-geared), I didn't stand a chance. After he cleaned me up, he back-flipped away with one of his abilities, then, at the height of his back-flip, he used a teleport to get even further away. He was able to close the gap and get out of the fight all within about 10 seconds. Even though I had died, I really respected his skill and the diverse class trees he had to take to get that set of skills to work in harmony. It actually caused me to start looking into other trees and it's been a lot of fun to experiment with.

The quest design is often, but not always, the same quests you've seen in everyone MMO for years. The is one of the few cons I have with the game. At the start you're blasting through areas so quickly you likely won't have issues with any "kill x amount of enemies" quests. The areas and design of the architecture help alleviate this to a pretty large degree, but there's no getting away from the fact that it's sometimes a grind. One of the best features of help with the quest fatigue is the ability to turn in quests early, for slightly less experience or subsequent reward, or you can "overachieve" the quests by doing more than the required. It's a small nuance, but it really does help when you're getting bored of an area. It's something I haven't seen in an MMO before, but I have to imagine it existed somewhere else previously.

That leads to one of the nicer parts of the game, the little things. MMOs are, by design, massive beasts that have to be all things to all people. This often leads to big design choices while skipping over the smaller things. The game handles the small things superbly and the production really shines in these areas. It's often silly things that most wouldn't notice, like your character continuing their "/dance" animation when you start walking, and the animation actually changing, making you look like someone out of the Thriller music video. The spells you cast have real flare to them, sparks come off the fire, the ice breaks away on an ice bolt, it looks fantastic. There's lots of small things like this and they all add real personality to the game making it feel like much more believable.

This is all to say nothing of the housing, boating, farming, and trade-pack running (the act of delivering trade goods between city-states or even continents). Housing is in real-time, no loading. The houses are located in pre-set areas and can be built any place you find free space within that area, no parking lot building here. Larger houses have their own "neighborhoods" and aim to keep areas looking similar in scope. Farms work the same way, while they are only allowed in the "small" house areas.

Boats in Arche Age are a beast all their own. Some have harpoons, some cannons (or 20), and some are two-story luxury boats with no defense but instead have a sweet jukebox playing music to dance to (this would be the appropriate time for the walking dance animation). You are given a small rowboat for free to experience the water, but this boat is not meant for the open sea and soon you'll be looking to upgrade and start fighting sea creatures and/or becoming a pirate and attacking other vessels. On one occasion a group of friends and I were carrying cargo across the ocean only to be attacked, killed, and our packs stolen from us. We spawned back a few miles away at the healer, jumped on our boat and were out for vengeance, killing every enemy ship we saw, jumping on gliders and acting as human UAVs. It was really something else and I had an absolute blast.

All of this adds up to some massive fun and a very tangible feeling that things you're doing have influence and feel rewarding. Not everyone wants another MMO these days, and for good reason, the past 10 years have been about chasing the giant that was WoW.

Arche Age is a game that adds enough of its own ideas and personality to carry it very far and leads to a solid MMO experience unlike anything I've played in a very long time. If you've got the time, given it an honest try, it won't let you down... did I mention it's free?

Written by: Xeirus (my brother)

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