Recent reviews by K̳̳̳a̳̳̳o̳̳̳s̳̳̳

I think I will always prefer Civ 5 as it has that perfect level of surface level simplicity and great depth beneath it, but Civ 6 is a lot broader in scope. There's a lot of different, arguably strange changes to the game, but the Districts system embodies perhaps the biggest advantage and disadvantages to playing 6 over 5 (or other titles.) It's a completely different beast, and it's got a greater need for foresight and logic than 5 seems to, as districts and disasters require a lot of foresight and risk management. The chaos in it with varied natural disasters and the DLC's climate change can break up monotony, but could feel very unfair after a while, especially if your luck is bad. Terrain generation and starting areas feel a bit feast-or-famine.

All in all, it's still Civ, with a massively different identity to the others in the series.

TL;DR:
I have spent 217 days of my life logged into my main account, ~35 days on the Fresh Start World earning an inverted quest cape, ~70 days on my Ironman, and I've had several pure and skiller accounts I've lost over the years. I can comfortably say I spent about a year of my life logged into this game and that it was worth it. Right now, however, it's not.

THIS IS NO LONGER THE SAME GAME, and hasn't been for a long time.

Here's why I love it:

→The music and atmosphere are fantastic.
→The worlds feel lived in with thousands if not close to ten thousand NPCs populating the space.
→The art design is great. Everything's easy to identify and see, and there's tons of little details.
→There's always something to do, and you can do it at your own pace. You don't need a roving horde of cats. You don't need to log in at 7:49 PM to do a weekly boss rush to earn basic gear for the next stage of the game.
→There's a literal year of content and I haven't seen it all yet.
→You can play the game even on your phone to do boring, repetitive tasks while you're sitting around waiting to do something.
→The lore of the game is expansive, there's plenty of humor to be found, and there's very few areas where there's nothing.


I hate MMOs. FF14 feels empty and soulless, the writing poor, bland, dry, and involving 2 dimensional characters with no soul or attention. WoW was just tiresome, soul sucking, time monopolizing, and an empty grinding that Curse add-ons basically played for you. Dozens of others failed to catch my attention, largely due to MTX, but Runescape is different.

I literally used to just boot on the game, talk to friends from school in private message, and listen to the music while doing something else with my hands, like homework, or later on in life, signing checks, paying bills, etc.
Sometimes I'd just walk around and enjoy looking at things.
The community and the music alone made this game a best of all time in the MMO genre. However, that community is fading away due to practices that pushed them out in favor of aggressive monetization policies and exploiting the psychology of gambling addicts.

THE PROBLEMS:
→The servers used to be so packed there were dozens out of the hundreds of servers that couldn't be accessed. Now, no world hits its population cap.
→The game world feels very empty of players. It feels like a single player experience with a forced online component for the economy to sync between player's games. Most of them are condensed into a small number of activities.
→PVP hasn't been relevant for ~8 years.
→Holiday events are gone.
→Limited time events are rare, and poorly managed.
→Community events are lacking and poorly managed.
→Official forums are somehow worse than the Reddit, and neither really provide you with useful information; there's no secondary avenues of discussion anymore, just an extraordinarily well maintained wiki.
→Minigames are all dead content. People sit in them on spotlight days to farm for rare outfits that are just for collector's purposes. Achievements that involve them are almost permanently disabled. Some of these are used for game progression.
→Most bosses are dead content. What they dropped at the time was fantastic, but they've been outpaced by easier to kill things that provide more of the same drops.
→Most resources are worthless to collect, as most people have capped out on their skills, or have come close already. Many monsters drop the items faster than you can harvest them.
→The quest lines continually butcher, re-write, or destroy beloved characters' personalities and appearance.
→Many plot lines have been unresolved for a decade or longer.
→Too many people enter and leave the company, leaving their ideas unfinished, or unprotected from other people who think they know better.
→Support is lacking. Tickets take 2 weeks to resolve in many situations.
→You literally have to fight with these people for them to take your money for a subscription if you don't pay directly through them. Even then, I've been double charged.
→Security measures (like logging in with an old account name that you've long changed) are about to be traded out for lacking two-factor authentication that is primarily used to lock people out of accounts they rightfully own.
→If you're hacked, it's your fault. However, their access to metrics on you, your IP, your machine, your habits, and who you are are so extensive that this is a complete and utter failing on their behalf.
→Jagex accounts are locking people out of their accounts they've created ~15 years ago.
→Community backlash doesn't mean anything to the developers.
→Developers are emotionally fragile, increasingly political, inflexible to critique, and tone deaf to their audience.
→The economy is completely destroyed by Microtransactions and poor design choices.
→THEY TOOK AWAY DAILY REWARDS that took less than 5 minutes, in favor of a half-baked system that nobody in the community asked for, again. It also begs for your money and attention, flashing notifications of progress for it, sending lines of text popping up and down on your screen like a pack of Jack Russel ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Terriers with separation anxiety.

§§§§§§§§ MICROTRANSACTION CANCER §§§§§§§§
→Pointless, obnoxious events called Yak Tracks and now their replacement, Hero Pass, are just there to spam you with low-quality rewards and encourage continued microtransaction purchases.
→There's grind. This is an expectation for an MMO. However, you can just pay to get around it, so it doesn't matter.
→By taking a shift at your local McDonalds earning the lowest minimum wage out of any state in the United States or any EU member country, you can earn more money than actually interacting with the game and purchase literally every piece of end-game content in a single combat style or skill, or the second/third best in literally everything.
→You can spend this money instead to completely skip the progression of a skill, and most of the content that would be appropriate to you at that level.
→"You don't NEED to buy MTX to be competitive" is false. You need to buy special packs that give special one-off benefits, or they might never come again. These are things that you MIGHT be able to earn through ~50 hours of in-game grinding some point in the future, if you want.
→The system in place gives you a ton of free keys, sure; This sounds nice at first, but, the Fresh Start Worlds showed me just how bad it was. This isn't just lowering the grind on skills you don't like. To put it simply, you can cap out a skill without ever interacting with it at any stage of the game, including the tutorials for those skills that some NPCs give you. I spent no additional cash on the game and maxed out several skills, having worked for about ~2% of the experience needed to reach the end game.
→Avoiding MTX is possible by creating an Ironman account, but you also lose the ability to trade between players and do most things with them. They are a second thought at best by the developers. Multiple humble bundle codes took weeks to redeem for zero reason. Scratch-off codes that used to exist don't anymore due to fraud, and even when they did, they didn't work well for Ironman accounts. Unimportant, low experience content is completely gated from the accounts 'for balance.'
→Removal of the daily tasks has prevented advantages given to normal accounts from ever reaching the hands of an Ironman. There are some exceptions, but obtaining these things in another manner is just too difficult and costly, and presents an opportunity cost that other accounts don't have. Continued grinding of bosses, for instance, can be so expensive and time consuming to an Ironman, but at the same time they let you earn several million GP by just participating in a short, skill-less, scheduled event, so it's immediately obvious they don't know what they want to do with the accounts.

RUN, ESCAPE.

One of the best beat-em-ups I've played in the past 10 years, and better yet, it's a MADNESS game. Iconic characters, great music, extremely atmospheric, this is everything old Newgrounds embodied but brought to the modern day. I love this game.

Simple, but pretty fun. Runs well, very stable, no glitches, and requires a lot of foresight and planning to play well.

The genre isn't really for me. If you like this type of game, it's better than Overwatch.

It's really funny when this has been better than both Overwatches in pretty much every aspect.

It's a decent practice tool for people who play a wide breadth of FPS games, but it doesn't match actually warming up in that specific game as it doesn't simulate the weapons as well. I also get conflicting analytics.
But, hey, that's just me; it's free, so give it a try.

Zombie Oregon Trail.

There are two massively different experiences that you can get from this game, and I reccomend both.

Single player is desolate, bleak, tense, borderline hopeless even if you know what you're doing. You're racing the clock, and that clock is your own biology, and attention span. One small mistake is game over. The atmosphere of this is incredible, 11/10.

Multiplayer is a different beast. With larger groups of players, the goal shifts, and overall experience. With mods tailored to add more of the military equipment you would expect to be in the setting, and new vehicles to discover, you constantly have motivation to raid. The real difference comes from how your server works, and how your friend group wants to operate.
Will you scatter, every man for himself? Will you turn against one another, or just desperately try to find some hidden spot away from danger to have a small commune? How big will your base grow? How much attention will it draw? Where will you go to get new munitions to defend it? How will you deal with the insane, constantly mounting hordes with limited resources on the map?
If you're on a public server, how are you going to deal with another faction or rogue player who wants to interfere in your plans and claim the rewards of all your hard work? Will you become that person in the end?

There really is no other game like Project Zomboid, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I can't classify this game too well, but a rogue-lite isometric adventure game just about sums it up. The environments are beautiful, everything has value and purpose, and there's even some end-game gear grinding potential for you MMO players.
Not a huge fan of the PVP, as it's sort of just social engineering on a server or positioning correctly until one idiot gets caught out, but if it's happening early on in the game's progression and a server's lifespan, you can screw over the progression of other people and become a dominant server faction, so, there's a lot of motivation and consideration for it in early stages of the game.
If they could find more ways to diversify that phase of the game with different abilities, or alternative gear, this would be a near perfect game.

There is an insane level of detail necessary for these vehicles you build to function properly. Making electronic throttles, gear boxes, and hybrid vehicles for people who aren't used to LUA coding (like me) can be a difficult mental exercise that can easily take up a hundred hours of your time as you try to battle a puzzle of your own making.

You see, you start with the idea of a ship, and as you try to figure out how to design it, you come across more and more hurdles and opportunities for growth that cause a slow evolution of what you once designed. What starts out as a simple one-engine speedboat that handles tough waves may turn into a much larger boat than you intended. Now that it has tons of engine and fuel space, you are tempted to add more power, then balance the craft to make up for the changes in how it sits in the water, then fix its handling.

A modest project can get really out of control, but when you're done, it's so satisfying to actually use it for its intended purpose and see it succeed. Especially if you're in a career mode where if you crash and explode the thing you lose all the money that went into it. 10/10.