Recent reviews by Crocmon

If you've not already started playing this game, don't start on Arena. Buy a precon, meet some friends at a game store. Best of One matches ("Bo1") encourage some of the most braindead decks that will solitaire wins out and will not allow you to learn anything, and Best of Three matches ("Bo3" - the normal for competitive and Friday Night Magic play) can take genuine ages, unless it's an aggro deck, in which case nothing you do will stop it from just killing you unless you have multiple removal spells for every single creature, as most in the game nowadays resolve several effects on entering the battlefield; REALLY good creatures have an effect trigger when cast, when attacking, or when they die, or sometimes all of the above. Removal spells, which are meant to check decks that just play creatures, have very specific conditions (Examples: "Destroy target non-Outlaw creature," "Destroy target non-artifact creature," just to name a few).

If you aren't already addicted to this card game, don't start here.

Mod the ever-loving crap out of it, because a large majority of the game's base story falls apart under any critical scrutiny.

I'm constantly surprised by how much there is in this game, story and gameplay wise. It's a great time, even if you're running solo!

There was a rumor floating around that the lead writer for Witch Queen was in charge of Lightfall. I can absolutely tell you either they produced a complete fluke with Witch Queen's fantastic story, or they were not actually allowed to make decisions for Lightfall and are in their position purely as a marketing gimmick.

This story introduces a bunch of concepts and never explains any of them, while Bungie says in blogposts that we're going to get explanations over the next year. Every season starts with the same amount of content as one quest in FFXIV, and adds another bit of that every week. It's a terrible model, one that Bungie will pretend they're better at then drop an entire expac with the same story formula. If you don't play Destiny, don't start now. Witch Queen was a great time, and in hindsight it was because you got to see the Destiny 2 that COULD be. Lightfall is Destiny 2 at a glance: it's all the INGREDIENTS of a good story, but in the wrong portions so when you try to put it all together it comes out an oozing mess that occasionally tastes good.

I ran the benchmark, and adjusted my settings to its suggestions. Every new scene was accompanied by tons and tons of slowdown, texture pop, and at times complete crashes to desktop. Sprinkle in the strange decision to write and style Peter Quill closer to Adam Conover than what he is in the comics (I swore he was voiced by the guy until I looked it up and saw Jon McLaren credited as Star Lord's VA), and it's an experience that I'd rate maybe 7/10 if it were able to get anywhere in the story without it crashing or slowing down to single-digit FPS because a fight started, or the scene needed to change.

Took a quest to shelter some folks from another settlement in my colony for a while. These folks were mostly okay, except for the abrasive, raging alcoholic who was absolutely furious we had no alcohol. She started a fight, lost it, then when her near-murder was met with being arrested, she had a psychotic break and tried to ignite a gas generator that would have killed everyone. She was stopped, responded by fighting the person arresting her until she broke her leg kicking at their power armor, and limped to the barn to try and venting her frustrations on a barn full of animals that detonate like a hand grenade when they die. We put her in the hospital, and she insulted the doctor the entire time before getting up (with the broken leg) and leaving the colony. A week later she sent us a radio transmission complaining she'd been abducted by pirates. We turned the radio off.

10/10 best game ever

The campaign is cool, but you can't co-op it. The "base-building" aspect you touch upon with the campaign is not even enough of a puddle to wet the bottom of your shoes but I guess it's cool. You can't replay missions after you've done them once without entirely restarting a whole new campaign, which kinda sucks if you want to 100% the game.

If you don't like multiplayer, don't get this. The devs behind Infinite released a campaign that is serviceable that you can only play by yourself. The multiplayer though has the ability to add cat-ears to your SPARTAN, as well as the perk of being the exclusive focus of the devs. That's cool I guess.

Preface: If you play Mass Effect through to the end of ME3, you consider that ending Casey Hudson's bad fanfic at best and write whatever the Hell you want for the finale in a fanfic somewhere, then put duct-tape over your mouth. This review comes from somebody who played the franchise when it was new, and has the hindsight necessary to judge the three games in full.

Continued preface: do not play Mass Effect 3 if you have recently laid a loved one to rest. Do not play Mass Effect 3 if you've ever had to put a dog down. Do not play Mass Effect 3 if you have any remotely tragic moment in your life. Why? Because it'll kick you in your stomach, shout "remember when that puppy you liked a lot got scooped off the yard by a hawk? remember when Me-maw's plug had to get pulled? now do that to your favorite alien boyfriend, because THIS IS ART!" and punch you in the head while you cry.

Mass Effect as a franchise is a fascinating case study in changing development teams, and how to take a franchise out behind a shed and shoot it. You can really see the love and joy that went into creating Mass Effect slowly get drained into something that, while passable, definitely isn't NEARLY as good as what they started with. Legendary Edition lets you see this happen in perpetuity, because you can literally move between games to feel the jarring changes between installments over a weekend! I'm sure someone can math out the scaling for that.

Mass Effect (the first one) is an example of a franchise starting, fumbling around, but knowing it has potential and running with it. It comes from people who made KOTOR and understand how RPG mechanics work, even if they don't hit every mark they aim for. Storytelling is top notch, gameplay gets a little clunky, abilities fall behind gunplay, it's something rough but it's a great RPG in itself.

Mass Effect 2, well, that's where you're going to feel the sickeningly cold fingers of EA get into a franchise. Historically speaking, EA was at maximum greaseball when ME2 came out. Zaeed Hassani was originally a day1 DLC for a fairly powerful companion, there were smaller DLCs for the BFG-like weapons you'd get, it's a righteous mess but it was the kinda mess you could put up with. Combat got faster, non-Tech abilities got insanely strong, guns got a weird nerf, and so on.

Mass Effect 3, gameplay-wise, was a perfection of the things ME2 did but also took odd directions. Guns still sucked like they did in ME2, but there were more of them to suck. Story started to feel weird, but you are hooked by this point so you pretended it didn't get weird. Like when your significant other gets really quiet after you say something nice, and you know they're gonna dump you. And then the finale hits.

Once ME3 ends, you will feel as if the game took all the attention you sank into it and threw it in the dirt. You will come to loathe the term "artistic integrity," and you'll cry. You will cry a lot. Because Mass Effect 3 makes the game go from "come and save this great setting we built! :D" to "guess what kid, your dad really did leave for cigarettes, but then he got hit by a bus, and nobody cared enough to tell your mom. Also, your dog didn't run away, I painted the side of your house with his brains and my shotgun, then fed you his liver that same day. Choke on it."

I recommend this game because getting Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 for $60 is hard to argue against, value wise. Mass Effect 3 is where a good franchise dies, and Bioware pretends their scifi franchise has room for a fourth installment after genuinely destroying the entire basis of the setting in a hilariously terrible choice of colors.

This game doesn't nail the 'horror' part of 'survival-horror,' and you can opt into harder 'survival' options, but it doesn't exactly manage to hit all the buttons it offers you initially. Think of it more of as a spooky FPS, with survival-horror elements. It's an FPS, that sorta pretends to be scary. It might get you a few scares, and there's moments where it will help to be conservative with resources, but the real shining point here is the game's story.

It's more eldritch horror than anything else, and the game doesn't exactly play on that with mechanics, though. It's all about the story, and the things it's doing to fill that out. It doesn't figure out how much it wants to scare you, but it does figure out how to get into your head.

Mooncrash has none of that and is a jury-rigged time-trial experience. Don't buy Mooncrash.

REVISION: Game still blows. There's new features that should have been in there from the get-go, but the core experience is damn near Sisyphean. Play Instant Action, as the core gameplay for Campaign and Career take the fun out of this game and its setting and gives you the content-equivalent of nutrient paste. Early on, you can have every part of your starter mechs get blown off and then have to scramble to replace them. Even with mods, you can get stuck in a death-spiral after one bad attack from a stubborn Urbanmech cored your best Mech.

So I'm going to tell you straight up. This game's campaign is absolutely mediocre, on top of this being a typical product of Piranha Games. The story is bland, the basis of the plot is incredibly small-time at the get-go, incredibly short-sighted, and it feels like it's an attempt to emulate Grayson Carlyle's origin story, without giving you characters to interact with at any point. You're just expected to care for a character who gave you a tutorial, called you a great kid, and got pasted. Unless things change later on in the campaign, this appears to be the gist of it. You don't have some sweeping reason to care, no great cause to pull you in, nothing. If you want that? Go pick up Harebrained Studios' BattleTech. You lose the ability to personally pilot the mechs, of course, but that's just the line Pirahna decided to draw here, which is a real shame, because HBS may very well have lent a writer for a bit of dosh investment. You don't even get little events between your hired pilots, they just sort of exist in a vacuum and give you one-liners about how they're doing in combat (which, early on, is almost always complaining a part got blown off).

Considering this game had a really long beta on Epic Games Store, however (you cannot convince me anyone fully releases games on that god-awful platform, full-stop), it appears that the story just won't get updated. Modders might do something later on in the future, but you can't give that to the game. If anything, that takes AWAY from the game. But, the marketing didn't base itself on a cool story. Its slogan was "Step Inside," and well, that's what this game lets you do.

You're here for big, stompy robots. You can't make them punch one another, which blows, but if you want MWO without all the problems MWO has with its networking, balance changes, players borderline cheesing everything they can, etc, you get into this. You won't get Clan mechs, you won't get Solaris VII, but whatever. You have a virtual sandbox to bring your friends in for insane Mech shenanigans.

Co-op is another thing, though. Effectively, your friends join your single-player saves and take the controls of one of the pilot mercenaries you've hired for your company. Since you can't name pilots without mods (kind of a bummer, honestly, because this extends to your display name being your Steam handle), it kind of doesn't encourage players to personalize pilots. Hell, they probably can take charge of a new pilot if one gets pasted in a fight? Haven't really had many friends too into this game.

If you got friends to play GTFO, Payday 2, and these friends wanna follow you into MechWarrior, this is the game. If you want a great story, a reason to sink hours grinding for a narrative payoff, and something to (remotely) matter in the scope that BattleTech's setting could allow things to matter, this ain't your game.

Heroes of the Inner Sphere is almost necessary, as it adds a layer of depth the base game straight-up doesn't have. Which is to say, it adds little side-contracts to get you extra cash. Most of these are "collect a mech" or "shoot [x number] of [y thing]." Early on, these end up being way more trouble than they're worth, as getting specific mechs to spawn requires you to basically see spawn tables on the Starmap and just pray there's enough contracts for you to farm. God help you if you BOUGHT the 'Mech that one guy wanted for his weird collection, you're just burning money for random upgrades to your own 'Mechs.

I have to make an amendment. I do not recommend this game. Played hours of it, only to find out that at complete random my game had corrupted my save and I could not progress in the main campaign. Utter waste of my time, and while I might be possessed to play this out of a sense of stubborn resolve to see it through, I am reminded that this great IP has found its way into the hands of a company that can't even QA-test alternate keybinds. This game plus its DLC make it a notable price-point, considering the DLC is basically necessary for a major addition to the core gameplay loop, it's abysmal. Don't be caught holding this bag.