Recent reviews by Atok

Play the game if you want to have a bit of fun and enjoy of the art, music and the story.

But if you look to have 100% be ready to deal with some BS difficulty.

Hard difficulty is not hard, is absurd, to the point is more about relying on RNG because of the amount of things you have to keep your attention on.
One thing is a "bullet hell" but even in those game there are patterns once you discover then with practices you can deal with. Here that is not the case, it reaches the point all you can do is depend on a good RNG (have the easy materials used to fix, the generators fail close to each other, etc).
Hard difficulty is not challenging and is not fun as its current version. IF they made it so some enemy attacks or bullets flew a bit slower, make some material patterns not so RNG dependent then hard difficulty would be fairly challenging.

Edit: After finishing the game with a 100% on hard difficulty, my opinion has not changed.
There are some levels which are very difficult and is very RNG depended to the success to pass them.

This game is highly recommend to all families.

Anyone can enjoy this game as it has so much content which has been added since its original release.

Not hard, not complicated, just relaxing and entertaining fun!

The game is very friendly with free-to-play players.

Is not really needed to pay for get the best characters. The story is very interesting if you are following up the setting from the previous games as more is explored and explained.

Short exposition about influence of media.

Definitely a remarkable community made remake!

Not only they managed to make the flow of the game run smoother, but also made the story more understandable and easier to understand and follow.

A must play if you are a follower of the franchise!

No need explanation, game is not fun as in its current state.

With the few amount of people left, most of them just keep playing the same strong decks with the most OP cards and characters and even after knowing the state of the game which is dead, while winning at turn 3 they will taunt you with "gg ez".

Is Artifact a bad game? No, the core gameplay mechanics and ideas are good and make Artifact a potentially good game, in its current situation with bad rng, bad card balance, bad tempo, bad optimization, bad monetization, etc, is just NOT FUN.

If Valve does work on a "2.0" version, I might change my opinion depending on it.

So far is a good game, does have potential, as long as Valve keeps the balance optimal and keeps adding quality of life fixes.

Edit 1:

Well just as Artifact the game was abandoned by Valve.

Although the game is still functional and surprisingly there is still a good amount of players daily.

This game has awesome developers, which did a lot to see this game have what it has now.

Even if in multiplayer is hard to find matches or the matches found are against experienced players, the single player content is very good and this has one of the best tutorials to get into a fighting game!

Update:
Even after all these years, after many adversities, this game keep going with constant balance updates, fixes, new content such as... NEW CHARACTERS!

Definitely a must have for both veterans and new players of the Fighting Game Community

Update:
As the self-censorship update was released, I am changing my review to negative as I do not agree with the decision.

I understand the reason behind censoring some of the "sex appeal" from the game, while I don't agree with the reason that decision is respectable.
But there are other changes which I find my self asking why is it they are being made:

"Nazi" representation:
I don't agree. The "Egreets" is the elite military group who work under one of the main characters; this one being the princess of a country, meaning a monarchy and not a dictatorship. Just because their armbands are colored red, black and white doesn't relate this fantasy group to the "other" group in our reality-history.

Police Violence Representation on a black character:
Just why? The story of Big Band character is one that was influenced a lot by the movie of Robocop; cop gets brutally maimed but is saved by having a new artificial body. This game was already NOT child friendly because of the sex appeal and violence topics but is this the only censorship regarding violence? Because brutality is shown being done to a "black" character? Why not then remove and/or change the reference a to why Squigly lacks an eye!? (Oh yeah a child being killed brutally in a game).

Sex appeal:
As I did mention before, while I don't agree this is one I would respect and would not be bothered with.
Removing some panty shots does not erase the completely the fan service of the game. The problem I have with some of the changes is just that it goes a bit more than just panty shots.
Some scenes even look "worse" in a more fetish way: Some Double story scenes where all other female characters are captured by it... adding more tentacles to "censor" these scenes actually makes those pictures more sexually suggestive than the mild versions that were before.

Announcers or voice lines and combo labels:
Removing some these lines because the jokes are a bit raunchy? Really? This is why there is a good amount of people feeling this censorship update was made to appease a very small group of sensible people.
Also removing the "Russian" Announcer without giving an alternative is just removing content.

This is what I can say without still getting into the topic of the Art Book.
This game had a lot of controversy, but it stayed living thanks to a very dedicated fan base, without those people this game would have been buried 10 years ago, what a way to backstab them.

I was invited by some friends, this games seemed fun since I already have some experience with MOBAS.

The situation comes that this game has A LOT of problems, glitches, bugs etc and if one of those problem brakes the store, making you lose gems(money) when buying a skin cause of a faulty/buggy/gloitched patch, well good luck having a refund!

Because they won't try to help you confirm you lost currency because of their faulty game, even if you write a support ticket.

This is my experience, Hirez "support" did not help at all and went with a horrible excuse to avoid making a refund.

If you are not going to spend money in cosmetics, then still the game has many problems. It is being told this game code is a mess and the developers instead of fixing it, they are just pushing out more skins and characters for people to spend money on.

Hence I really don't recommend it.

As of Early Access there are a lot of things that need to be fixed, looks promising.

Edit 1:

Games has been updated and balanced since I wrote my last review.

There is a lot of effort being put and is paying off, I recommend it in it's current state!

Edit 2:

The game is more complete and polish, but there are still some balance problems with some of the DLC characters.
But the reason I am now changing to a thumbs down is because the game is done, dev team was lay off so there will be no fixes or balance patches.
For a single player experience it is entertaining, and there might still be people playing in lobbies for PvP, but other than that there no more to wait for.