Senaste recensioner av Psojed

Lost Ark is an iso-3D ARPG game. I have reached ilvl 1370 and seen most of the content the current version has to offer. I bought the cheapest Founder's Pack (to get the 3 day early access), otherwise I did a completely free-to-play playthrough.
I would recommend playing Lost Ark and quit at the first signs of boredom.

Pros:
- Beautiful graphics
- The combat feels really good
- Bunch of content to explore
- Can be played SOLO, despite being marketed as an MMO
- Many different collectibles and ingame achievements if you're into that kind of thing

Cons:
- Content is gated to artificially keep you playing for longer
- The Main Story is forgettable
- At Tier 3, it becomes a grindy game
- Not really an MMO
- Avoid PvP if you don't like being stuck in CC forever
- Spam and cheaters
- Translation issues

There's most definitely a P2W option. You can buy premium currency (Royal Crystals), then exchange that for ingame currency (Gold), which is used basically for everything. Luckily, a P2W player cannot meaningfully affect your gameplay, except for open-world PvP islands, which I avoided on purpose.

There are many classes with various gameplay styles. I enjoyed my time playing my first character, less so on a second character (which is also in Tier 3) and I even started a third. But over time, the game became less fun and more "do the daily grind".

The endgame dungeons were the most fun, but those are "once a week" kind of activity, and you start outgearing them very quickly. Sadly, many of their mechanics can simply be ignored as you raise your item level, to the point where you can kill the bosses before their mechanics even happen. And some of the mechanics that previously couldn't be ignored - so called "wipe" mechanics - were already nerfed with a patch. A very hardcore type of endgame raiding content is yet to come to the game though.

Now let's talk some Cons.

There are still tons of gold seller bots spamming Area channels with ads. Every few hours you're forced to block 2-3 new spammers so that you can actually read something normal.
You can teleport back to Luterra and go mining in Lakebar or woodcutting in Bilbrin Forest, you'll spot a speedhacker in no time, running through faster than a mounted player would. At least I never met cheaters in a dungeon.
It doesn't affect your gameplay, but it is very annoying.

English Subtitles in cutscenes often don't match what the English voiceover says. For example the word "Mayhem" often changes to "Madness". Important item names are mistranslated too. Key of Harmony being called Key of Balance, or some Adventurer's Tome loot having completely different names in the book and on auction house.
Skills can have a "Counter: Yes" label, but other skills have no such label, and their long description will instead say "Counterattack".

Story Quests, Story Dungeons, Chaos Dungeons, Guardian Raids, Adventure Islands, Timed Islands, "CO-OP Sailing" are all soloable. Chaos Gates, Field Bosses and Ghost Ships would easily be soloable content too, but they "fixed" it by adding dozens of HP bars and Berserk Timers on the bosses, so now you require more DPS than a single player can muster to kill them in time.

Most of these activities take X amount of players and place them into an instanced area. There is usually no interaction between players and zero cooperation is actually required to win. Their idea of MMO content is that you mindlessly repeat one task you're expected to do - usually attacking the boss while avoiding telegraphed attacks, or by pressing a keybind to perform a "sailing" task - and all other players just happen to be in the same area, doing the same thing. The only cooperation aspects are when people manually form a party of four and use their class buffs/heals, which happens only sometimes.

But it is often the players themselves who ignore the multiplayer aspect, mainly communication. This is most detrimental on the Guardian Raids where a bad player dies repeatedly, eating up all your limited revives, or on Field Bosses like Proxima (where people often heal the boss and don't listen to others telling them to stop) or Moake (where attempts to kill regularly fail due to players reseting the boss). Finally, there is no variety. The bosses and tasks are always the same, so after a while you'll probably find them boring.

For Abyss Dungeons and Abyss Raids, the maximum amount of players is 4-8, which isn't much different from your average multiplayer mode in many games. I'm pretty sure you could solo many of the Abyss Dungeons, if only the game let you join as a solo player.

To summarize, most of the game doesn't require multiplayer, the parts that require multiplayer can be good if you find decent people, but they can easily turn into a bad experience with randoms. I think this game was meant to be a solo experience, and they decided to add multiplayer later on.

There are three types of gating.

1) Quest gating.
The game will prevent you from doing stuff until you complete certain quests. This makes sense for progressing the storyline, but it makes zero sense that you cannot physically land on a continent and explore until you complete the previous one. Similarly, you cannot enter Dungeons on a continent until you complete the Main storyline. You also cannot sail through half of the ocean until you unlock it with a questline.
You are forced to complete the main storyline on every single character. There is an option to autocomplete a continent's main storyline by spending Gold via "Knowledge Transfer". Unfortunately, doing this for all continents requires thousands of Gold for a single character, and you will also miss out on the quest rewards - consumables like Flares and Potions or Cards for your Card Collection.

2) Item Level gating.
Dungeons, guardians, abyss, compass activities, most islands, some daily activities and also the continents Rohendel, Yorn, Feiton and Punika are all gated by ilvl. Trading gear on the auction house and buying honing materials from NPCs is also gated. Basically, after you finish the story on a continent, you cannot go and continue the story further, and you cannot enter a tougher dungeon with your friends who had more time to play than you did. The worst part is that this can happen from pure bad luck, because upgrading ilvl is chance-based, with chances of success dropping as low as 10% in Tier 3 (I'm told success chances above ilvl 1370 are as low as 1%.).
The progression rate is kept decent during Tier 1 and Tier 2 thanks to other sources of honing materials - the Towers and various Islands. But Tier 3 has no Tower, the smallest amount of islands. Worst case scenario, you can spend weeks in frustration from being unable to raise your item level to progress in the game.

3) Virtue gating
Through the Rapport system, you unlock more story with certain characters from the world of Lost Ark, often including important storyline characters (for example Nineveh). To learn more about the characters, you need to raise their "love meter" - by playing music, using emotes on them. There's a daily limit for these actions, so it could take several weeks to raise Rapport with a single NPC.
But at certain friendship levels, you need to have enough of the four Virtues - Kindness, Courage, Charisma and Wisdom - to be able to progress the next quest. These stats have no actual gameplay impact, but obtaining enough of these stats is no simple feat. They come from various sources, like beating world bosses, completing quests, finding secrets and hidden quests/stories. They also come from virtue potions, some of which are also locked behind Rapport with another NPC. This is also the one time where owning skins is mandatory, because skins raise your Virtue stats.

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If you can live with these issues, then give Lost Ark a try.

TL,DR: I haven't played the original board game. I finished the campaign playing all missions on the highest difficulty on my first playthrough, although I didn't complete all side missions, only like 70% of them. One side mission is currently bugged and apparently has been bugged for over a year with no fix in sight. Check forums. The game starts decent, but becomes boring/repetitive very fast and I wouldn't recommend it.

Long version:
It boils down to each Mission ("Quest") where you select 1-5 of the predetermined heroes to send on the mission. You can only select the abilities that you get to use, most of them are 1 use only unless you find a way to recharge them. Hero(es) always start on a fixed puzzle map. Map consists of puzzle-like pieces that get added one you step to the edge of a piece. Each time a map piece is added, a monster might spawn there. If it does, it gets a turn and attacks you for free. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mechanic #1. There's the constant rolling of dice effect, which becomes super annoying - half of your game time you're basically watching your screen with a spinning dice.

The variety of map pieces, monsters, items and "quests" is very low. Quests are always "find X" or "kill X", be it multiple items/monsters or one specific boss, be it main missions or side missions. When you uncover a boss monster, he takes a turn every single time one of your heroes takes their turn. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mechanic #2. Think of XCOM 2's rulers. Except in XCOM 2, rulers can't instakill your whole team. Here, some bosses can, at least on the highest difficulty (also hello Meteor Swarm). The two exceptions were a big stone machine, where I was supposed to run and survive, however I just killed the machine boss from a distance (duh), and the "sudden death" side mission, which is bugged and you get instant "mission failed" from random events - killing a monster, discovering a map tile, using an ability, etc. Oh, and the "Survive for 20 turns" mission where you just press Space to end turn 20 times and you the mission, because there's zero threats to your party. Amazing game design.

Crafting is nonexistent - you're unlocking items from a preset and it costs gold. And you're always low on gold. The crafting materials are just a filler awarded through chests, which contain stuff absolutely randomly, and you get them after each mission. There's no merit in performing good on a mission, and the "reward" is completely forgettable. Especially if you own the DLCs, which give you a ton of these useless materials by default. Feels like some stupid mobile game with microtransactions, except they didn't put in the microtransactions, instead they made the game characters into DLCs that you have to purchase (no you don't, because Artus is overpowered and can solo win the campaign). They should've omitted the "opening of chests" animation altogether, it just wastes time, I just spamclicked through it most of the time.

The game mechanics are not very complex, you can easily learn them from trial and error. Armor vs. character's to hit bonus plus dice rolls for attacks. Line of sight for ranged attacks and spells. Basically if there's a square you can't stand on, it can prevent you from using ranged abilities. There's a huge difference between "tiles" (aka. map pieces, the puzzle pieces that get added once one of your heroes touches the edge) and "squares" (each puzzle piece has its own squares where units can stand, traps, chests, etc. are placed..) which the game doesn't explain properly. The actual puzzles - map pieces with chest behind an obstacle and a bunch of buttons on the floor - are also very trivial (don't forget to rotate your camera). The pool of items that can drop for your heroes is very small, and once you have an item in your inventory, it will never drop again until you use/sell the item. There are exceptions that keep dropping, like healing potions.

Once you unlock certain gear pieces (by "crafting" it), the game gets trivialized to the point where you can instakill or 2-hit kill every monster with your normal attacks, along with a very high chance to hit. The only dangers then are the bosses who can instakill 3 or more party members and make you fail the mission (or the spellwarded skeletons, who can do the same thing when they die (use line of sight!)). If you wish to squeeze more time out of this game, self-imposed rules against using the good gear are a must. But I'm afraid your time would be better spent elsewhere...

Antihero is a nice turn-based strategy board game. Perfect for people who want to chill out from other complex or action-heavy games.

You control your hero - a thief - and summon other NPCs in order to capture points of interest on the map and fight one opponent for set amount of victory points. There are multiple ways of achieving victory and some maps add special objectives for a twist. Each turn you manage your resources - gold and lanterns - by entering house squares, placing NPCs into buildings and attacking neutral/enemy NPCs on the map. Your hero also has a talent tree, where you can choose between learning a new skill or earning free gold/lanterns. Maps for each game are randomized - buildings of interest spawn at different squares and NPC movements are also random, which is a plus.

This game has three game modes:
- Campaign (also doubles as a Tutorial)
- Skirmish, where you can play against AI or against another player at your PC
- Multiplayer, where you can play against other people online through Steam

I finished the campaign on hard difficulty under 6 hours of game time, so it felt rather short. However, if you enjoy the game during the short campaign, skirmishes and online play can last you for a while. The game is quite easy to learn and offers enough depth to keep you invested. Finally, the graphics, animations, sounds and music are great and they perfectly match the theme of the game.

If you like board games and you want to play this game against other players online, get it. If you're not interested in online play, the price tag 14,99€ feels a little too high for the play time this game offers, so you're better off waiting for a discount.

Yesterday the "final PC version" has been released and 7 Mages left the EA on Steam. I am very disappointed with the PC release.

The game never left Android! It's still wrapped in a clunky emulating software, it still looks like a mobile game and it still controls like a mobile game. The added support for keyboard isn't worth much, because the menu is still made for mobile phone. In terms of gameplay, you're actually better off controlling everything with your mouse, because it's faster and gives you an advantage vs. monsters. And I'm not mentioning bugs from using keyboard controls..

Installed size grew from about 200 MB to nearly 5 GB. The new shadows are nice, the sun reflections and heat effects are nice aswell - in your youtube video that is. But in reality, I cannot enjoy these new effects, because the game runs at crappy 10 FPS on a "Recommended" PC specs! Even if I lower the graphic settings, I still cannot reach 60 FPS and the game is choppy when you move or fight. So no thanks, keep ur shadows and give me back the mobile port with fluid gameplay.


---------- Early Access Review below ----------


Some Czech players will surely recognize the story and setting from an old DOS title called Gates of Skeldal from the same authors. This game definitely takes a thing or two from its older brother and improves the features for the current gaming community. This includes, but is not limited to:

+ Wonderful graphics
+ Combat system
+ Interaction with the environment
+ Thoughtful puzzles
+ Character progression
+ Great soundtrack (instruments required!)

While you only get to create your own avatar and the remaining 6 party members come with pre-defined statistics, there are options to remodel them to a different path in a timely fashion. For example, you can make your 7 Mages into Strength-heavy armored melee-only group and actually make it work. Or a no-weapon only caster group. And either path can complete the game.

You can equip your characters with actual instruments and use them at any point during your gameplay to gain various benefits like healing or mana regeneration, useful buffs like speed or extra XP gain and the game even lets you manipulate your enemies, for example there's a song that will make enemies afraid to walk into melee range, another song will make you always go first in the turn-based combat.
Combined with the different elemental spells and weapons, it brings lots of variation and offers the player a multitude of choices on how to play the game, as well as providing great grounds for replayability with self-imposed rules for hardcore players
Also the music that your characters actually play is really nice and the more instruments you put into a song, the better it sounds.

There are buttons, levers, trapdoors, teleports but also not so general stuff like making a temporary bridge out of lily pads to cross a swamp or redirecting the flow of the wind with statues to prevent it pushing you down from a mountain ledge. There is also a lot of interaction between stuff, like using a shield to redirect a beam of light or shooting a cannon to remove a thunderstorm. If you get stuck, there's a spell that gives you hints. I got stuck only twice on puzzles during my playthrough, first time I missed a teleport hidden inside a destroyable tree and second time I kept going in circles inside a teleport labyrinth, but after I drew a map I was able to make it work. And if you really get stuck after the hints, there's always the option to ask others for help.

Now for some negatives.

Don't get me wrong, the story is decent, but compared to Gates of Skeldal, the dialogues are very straightforward, there is usually no choice in a story-related dialogue. Also there are no out-of-story moments, no sidequests and no ability to chat with random NPCs or between party members. For example, Gates of Skeldal had the option to talk with the Librarian or the Priest in town to gain some insight into the game lore and even these unimportant NPC conversations had dialogue options with consequences (angering the Priest by insulting his gods). You also had option to refuse party members as you go, which is not possible here. Considering that the 7 Mages are random people who grouped together for a common goal, some witty or sharp-tongued dialogues between them could be fun and I would definitely welcome those. I believe that's a missed opportunity in 7 Mages.

..well, if you consider the emoticon of a Fireball between sentences weird. Smilies are also included in the main storyline dialogues and to top it off, some lines didn't even make much sense and you have to consult your Log book to make more sense of it. I played the game in Czech as well as switching into English and it seems the translation is not at fault. Luckily, these will only affect your immersion, but not the actual gameplay.

The difficulty of combat is rather easy (I played the highest difficulty, mind you). I often ran into situations where the enemy couldn't deal a single point of damage to me. The game gives you a sort-of combat check in the form of a Troll quite early on (can be seen in the video on Steam store). If you can deal with the Troll without looking at guides, you will probably be able to handle any combat situation in the game. Luckily, the change of pace between combat and puzzles alleviates this issue.

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A final note about the controls - it might feel a little clunky due to the fact that Early Access version is a mobile port, therefore some actions require you to hold your mouse button pushed and involve some portrait juggling for party management, but those issues will be gone when a full PC version comes out.

All in all, I will definitely recommend the game to anyone who likes dungeon crawling, puzzles or turn-based combat. Buy it and enjoy it, it's worth the money. Plus, you get a full fledged PC version later when it comes out.

Please upvote this review so all the potential buyers can see.

This game is an exact copy of the original DOS game, wrapped in another application which only enables it to run on Windows. Sadly, the author shows no signs of ever fixing the bugs in this version even after being contacted by email directly. The issues in this version are:

- FPS locked at 24
- Mouse and joystick/controller issues
- Mouse controls have different speed than keyboard
- Original Raptor soundtrack was replaced by different, pretty crappy soundtrack
- Achievements don't register properly
- Save file issues
and more.

Simply said, get the original DOS game, which is also available on Steam and has none of the issues listed above:

http://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/358360/

Ten out of Ten, would download again.

I got a 90% off coupon, so this game cost me 0,10€.

Features:
+ Play as badass hunter that uses a twohanded hunting rifle with a single shot using only one of his hands.
+ Unravel the mysterious Prologue, where the game explains how the hunter got attacked by three master assasins, got ambushed and shot to the knee, and AFTER all that, he managed to shoot all three assasins with his single shot gun and miraculously did not die. Yes, I know, Badass right?!
+ What? You say not enough cowbell? Well, then how about a fully functional third hand, ha?! While holding your lantern in your left, your gun in your right, aim at any small enough object and hold right mouse button to pick it up with your middle hand. I'm starting to see why he lives alone :P

Now for real.
+ Cheapest game ever bought on Steam.
+ The soundtrack is good and 0,10€ is a fair price for the music.
+ This counts towards your total games count, so buy it if you want to raise your steam level with the badge or just your total game count.

If you ever get a coupon, go get it.

I finished the game with all achievements, turned up every nook and cranny in the game, it took under 7 hours of gameplay. I literally went around clicking every box, rock, etc. to see if there's an item, I talked with all the NPCs.

What do you get:
+ An RPG maker styled game. See pictures for how it looks like.
+ If you like this type of games, the game will keep you entertained while it lasts.
+ You won't get lost. The game will stop you from advancing until you fill your party or explore areas you're supposed to explore.
+ At some points, the dialogues made me laugh.

What you shouldn't expect:
- Game replayability. You can't choose a different character or another story.
- Epic storyline. Main character leaves his home weak and emptyhanded in order to beat a witch, who singlehandedly transformed him into another gender. The conclusion of this story is rather cliched.
- Basic character levelup system and equip management. No party choices, no spells learning.
- Some characters/NPCs were just weird and didn't fit into the story at all. Some characters/NPCs and their motives and/or courses of action were not explained.

Even with the named shortcomings, I will recommend playing the game, but I will not recommend buying it.
Ask yourself: Do you want to spend 3,- € for just 7 hours of gameplay? I think there are much better choices of games. I got it in a bundle, so If you can get it free, go ahead.