Recent reviews by Frost Aegis

I want to like this game, there's a lot positive going for it, but being unable to save during campaign missions is ridiculous in this day and age. I have more patience than most, and even I need to step away from this game for a while. Without this functionality I simply can not recommend this to anyone.

This review will be aimed at people like myself who would be playing this for the first time. To better understand the place I come from when making this review, let me give a brief overview of myself and gaming experience. I am 30 years old at this time, and I have spent 95% of my life playing video games (and tabletop RPGs). I am not new to crusty graphics, janky mechanics, or complex UI elements. I play a lot of RPGs with a lot of dialogue and/or downtime as well as a lot of unforgiving games. I have more patience than most people. I have pushed through many segments of games I didn't like or found tedious because the game itself interested me.

Within the context of when it came out, it was an ambitious game. This review is aimed at people who might be looking to try this for the first time, and likely with less patience than myself. My feelings are more nuanced than can be easily conveyed via a 'Pro' and 'Con' list, so I shall go into details about the primary aspects of the game. Disclosure: I used the Morrowind Code Patch and many visual mods. I made zero efforts to alter the base gameplay beyond default options checked in the MCP.

The base visuals of the game have a good, clear art direction. They are definitely aged. The overwhelming amount of mods available can make the game look very nice. Visuals are usually not something to judge a game negatively for unless the art style itself is distracting or otherwise not well done.

In terms of audio the game is fine. Audio quality on what few voices there are is good, and the sound effects do their job. The music will get repetitive very quickly. What music there is in the game is most certainly good. Not playlist-worthy, but it's good. With how repetitive it got I ended up playing my own music for large portions of the game.

Lore. Important in games, infinitely so for RPGs. Morrowind has a lot. Tons of dialogue to read, and countless books. For those interested in TES's world this is definitely an area that does not disappoint. The presentation leaves a lot to be desired. I am no stranger to reading. I do prefer voices NPCs and a voiceless PC in games, but I was not turned off by the lack of the games voice acting. I was put off by how a lot of the lore is conveyed. The dialogue system is cumbersome: You can choose from an ever-growing list of keywords to discuss with NPCs who will then give you information and more keywords. There are many cases where you can ask NPCs about topics that result in no new information at best, or weird character breaks at worst. The dialogue system makes it tedious to go through topics and makes conversations feel disjointed/unnatural. More importantly, for people that like important story elements conveyed in a more straightforward or condensed manner, and leaving the superfluous elements for books and the like, the lore will definitely be harder to digest. It is definitely something that can be dealt with, but the journey for lore tended to be tedious to the point I spent more time reading wiki entries than shuffling through various NPCs and books.

Gameplay. This is where the game aged the most. Melee/ranged is dice rolls based on stats. Even if you shoot an arrow at the enemy, and see it physically intersect with the character model, the dice determine if it hits or misses. At low levels you will miss most all attacks. By the end game for me, I missed rarely. In games like Xcom and Pathfinder it works for me. Here? It's jarring. and it detracted from the game. In Pathfinder (and Xcom and similar things such as positioning matter greatly in combat. You can use the terrain and abilities to supplement hit %. In Morrowind, other than potions/spells, there is no way to mitigate low %. Mid-end game melee and ranged combat is you standing in front of your enemy and left clicking until they're dead. Dodging isn't a thing. End game for me was taking every opportunity I could to skip enemies and having zero issue fighting anything I couldn't.

Magic combat is possibly better, but as someone that wanted to play melee with magic as a supplement I found it to also fall short. You can fail to cast a spell if your skill isn't high enough, and you rest to get back magicka. There was a MCP option to enable magicka regen and, while I wanted a mostly vanilla feel for my playthrough, I regret that choice and would highly encourage using it even if you make no other changes. Even at the endgame with 100 in every stat I could cast so few spells that I never used magic. Potions are a thing, but carry weight is something I struggled with through the entire game. For the magic I wanted to use, no regen was awful. From a combat standpoint I have to assume it's better if you have a high chance to cast the spell, but at the end of the day the offensive spell variety is not great either. The supplementary spell variety is a lot better, but it feels like you must be built for it from the start.

You level up when you achieve 10 increases in your chosen Major or Minor skills. Based on how many times you leveled up in a Major, Minor, or Miscellaneous skill, you can apply three stat bonuses ranging from 1 to 5 to your primary stats that the skills are affected by. Leveling a skill(s) that only affects one or two stats means inefficient levelling, which means weaker character, and it simply becomes a very tedious, chore-like experience to improve your character.

Travel takes a long time. The world is big and you move very slow. There are cities which have fast travel services to other specific locations, but you will do a lot of travelling in between. Nothing interesting ever happens when do travel, too. NPCs don't have routines or scripting. They stay in the same spot forever until you kill them, they are used in an escort quest, or they are moved for a main quest very rarely. Once you've walked a path once that path is the same every time other than far, far too many enemies (especially the flying Cliff Racers which are more plentiful than stars in the sky).

So many quests in this game amount to travelling to a location, grabbing something, and then coming back. You can break a lot of games down to such simple terms, but games usually have engaging gameplay to make quests worth doing. Or fast travel to mitigate tedium. The fact that Morrowind has none of that turns a cool aspect into a slog: No quest markers. NPCs tell you directions. Sometimes, these directions take you far away. Despite the dialogue system implying the idea that you may be able to ask locals about the nearby cave, you can't. Morrowind is huge. A lot of terrain is very same-y. NPCs don't give good directions and for some quests you might even get no directions. An idea that I would love in a game where I loved the combat or could travel quickly. An idea I have actually enjoyed in other games. In Morrowind? By the second half of my playthrough I dreaded any quest that didn't explicitly tell me where to go. Worse when most places don't matter. Is it realistic to find a cave that only has a bandit and some boxes of dirt and bread in it? Sure. Is it fun? Not particularly. Especially not after the twentieth time. Most places have nothing of actual value or interest inside at all. It just wasn't worth it for me to explore halfway through. The magic system lets you create all sorts of cool items, but you will rarely find such items in the plethora of caves and ruins that pepper the landscape.

All in all, I enjoyed Morrowind enough that I finished it, but that is where my appreciation for it ended. I saw what it tried to do, and inspired, and I respect it greatly for that. But in this day and age, especially as an adult, I don't find the poor implementations and tedious nature of it's systems to warrant a playthrough for people with far less patience and time than myself. I agree it was a wonderful game for the time. Not so much for 2022.

I have never played a more RNG heavy game. As some have already said in reviews, the enemy always seems to have the most ideal cards to ruin your day. Then, if you do brute force your way through RNG to eventually beat the game, the ending is pretty mediocre to boot. Definitely not worth.

I don't think I can say anything that hasn't already been said. What I can say is that this game filled and exceeded the void left when I quit WoW.

This is another case where a 'Maybe' option would serve better than 'Yes' and 'No'. Between the two, however, I am leaning towards no for a few reasons, but largely due to a similar issue that the original Corruption of Champions had. The original had a lot of planned content that was left unfinished which resulted in characters or plots that felt really bland (Ember being a big example of this, and other characters by the same writer). Certain mods fix this, but CoC2 in its current state leaves open the question of whether it will be left in an unsatisfying state at some point as well.

As far as writing quality, well, that issue with certain characters being bland or flat does exist. A notable example for me being Cait. She is a very one-note character at best, and I feel she doesn't make a very compelling companion. I think it's worth mentioning that her, and a large part of the game, is written by the same person who left much of CoC1 in an unsatisfying state. I say that more as a general indicator of the overall writing quality and as an early access warning because there are no guarantees for the game to be finished outside mods as history has shown. That said, content from other writers is of a much better quality and has entertained me enough that I am cautiously optimistic about this game's progress.

All in all, this is a game to keep on your radar. For now, however, if you want a true CoC experience I would highly recommend playing the first game with the hgg mod for now, as it is the best way to experience a complete feeling in the CoC universe with -all- content being addressed and finished.

I used to dislike arena shooters for the longest time, not finding them particularly engaging or exciting. Doom 2016 changed that, and Doom Eternal cemented that change into a love of this genre of shooter. It's fast, furious, and fun beyond what I thought this type of game could be.

This review comes from the perspective of someone who has too many games and not enough time and so desires to allocate my time across games more carefully. I only dedicated large amounts of hours to multiplayer games that I see being fun over a long term which, as a new player coming to this game, I feel is not the case, and I will be reviewing it as such.

So about the game: Dead by Daylight is a 4 v 1 asymmetrical multiplayer game where 4 survivors attempt to escape the map while 1 killer attempts to catch the survivors. The survivors have to activate 5 generators and then the switch on the door and leave. There are totems to cleanse, but their value was never communicated to me as a player. For the killer, its as simple as using your abilities and attacks to injure a survivor, then another hit to bring them to the 'dying' state, then you carry them to a hook on which you hang them. The survivor can attempt to struggle off while you carry them and, if they succeed, they will be back to only injured and also have a few seconds to get pretty far away from you (for reference, the killer can not run, though when the survivors run they leave 'tracks' that are ambiguously helpful). Survivors can also sabotage most of the hooks or rescue others from the hooks (the hooks have three stages, with the third being death; being put on the hook multiple times starts you at the next stage). That's about it as far as what's important for this review.

My opinion on survivor gameplay: My first concern is the lack of objectives. As said, there's the generators, then the escape door, and the totems. For the time that I played cleansing the totems never benefited me. I believe they remove certain perks from the killer if they have them. If. There is also an escape hatch you can use if you have a key or are the last survivor alive, but that doesn't change the fact that every match felt the same as the survivors. There are a bunch of different characters and, more importantly, perks. As a new player however, I never got anything that made the game feel different, and I shouldn't have to grind for hours to make it fun again, so that was a strike against enjoying the survivor side.

The next major complaint about will likely be subjective to some people, but the thematics/immersion of the game were just lost on me as time went on. Dead by Daylight presents itself as a tense horror game. And it was, for the first two matches. The matches where I had no idea what I was doing and neither did my teammates or the killer (generally speaking). Then you understand how things work, understand how limited the killer can be which lowers how 'scary' he is and then it feels like a generic team based game with a shoddy layer of 'horror' paint thrown on it. You very quickly learn how little the difference between walking, running, and 'stealthily crouching' matters without the killer being right on top of you. You quickly see, via visual queues given to you when an ally is downed, that you are safe repairing that generator for a good 20 seconds or so. You finally come to the conclusion: This game is far too fast paced to succeed at the horror theme, and that made playing as survivors completely unfun for me. There are some other issues, but they are far more pronounced on the killer side, so I'll go over them there.

My opinion on Killer gameplay: I found killed far more fun to play for the time that it was fun, but then, well, a lot of issues became more and more prevalent. I've already mentioned the game feeling far too fast paced so I won't touch on that again. What I will say, is that while the idea of perks for survivors and killers is great, for a new player its crippling to enjoyment. For my very first match as killer, and 80% of the rest, I noticed something odd. You see, DBD has a ranking system to show player skill level. 20 is the lowest, 1 is the highest. So, I obviously was a rank 20 killer. In the match, the survivors were organized beyond anything I had experienced by playing a survivor, and 2 generators were completed in no time at all. That set the tone for the rest of the match, as I was able to get maybe, 1 hook in throughout the rest. After the match, we see a rank 1 survivor, a rank 5, a rank 7, and a rank 10. None of which should be present considering I had never played as a killer before. Suffice to say, they had max perks (you can have up to 3 at a time and you start with only being able to choose 1), items, basically every advantage they could have whereas I had... One perk. The fast pace of the game is exacerbated when multiple survivors have perks and items that speed up the repairing of generators to a point where there is 0 chance of countering it as a fresh killer. Or even any killer, based on my observations.

There's a currency in game you can spend to get perks and the like for each individual survivor and killer. I spent all of them in the killer I liked most and it... Helped. But what you get is random. Your Bloodweb, the tree you spend the currency to get stuff from, is 'randomly generated', and there are perks of different qualities, as with everything else. So its very real you can end up with garbage early on, and it felt that way. I did manage three games where I killed every survivor, but that felt when the matchmaking was actually appropriate by giving me rank 20s through 18s. Which would be fine, except at that point I had played enough that I was actually good at the killer I was playing and they completed either 0 or 1 generator across the games. So the victories were anything but satisfying.

Survivors can climb through windows faster than the killer and there are pallets they can throw to slow or stun the killer. Some maps are designed in such a way where a skilled survivor can effectively loop the killer for the whole match if the killer continued to pursue them. You would think not to do that, except these locations are right by a generator so you effectively have to give the survivor the generator. These loops are often close enough to other generators that coordinated survivors can abuse that to the point that, well, there is very little to be done about it. In a game with all bonuses survivors can get to fixing generators, this seems like an oversight. And I believe it is, as on the forums I heard they were removing such loops when updating maps. Problem is people seem to say that the rate at which they update suggests the maps might be better in a few years. So, yeah.

It is very apparent, from the balancing of perks, lack of inclusion of voice chat, etc. that this game is most decidedly not balanced around a premade group of survivors and rather around solo play. This is a very bad decision because, obviously, people want to play with friends. So when four people do queue up together it upsets the balance. What do killers get in such matches to compensate? Nothing. There are more generators on the map than needed, there are healing items and perks, the repair perks, items to sabotage hooks, etc. All things a coordinated team can use to crippling effect. And I was facing all of this on my first day playing the game. It got to the point where I either had matches that weren't fun because all the survivors were new/too easy to beat, or where there was no point to playing because I had nothing to even remotely counter a team of four who perfectly knew the map and had the best perks/items/etc. The killer has their signature ability, their own perks, etc, but not anything that a new player needs when matched against teams and/or high ranked survivors.

Conclusion: Dead By Daylight is a game that could be fun if you were playing it consistently since launch and/or have a high tolerance for extremely poor balancing that can only be resolved with a lot of grinding. Neither applies to me, so I am going to have to say this game is not for me.

I backed this game on Kickstarter so I did not pay full price/had been following its development for some time. This review will be primarily spoiler free.

So, Children of the Zodiarcs. A card and dice based, turn-based tactics-lite game. For relevant info on my background in order to weigh my review, I am generally a player that prefers RPGs, SRPGs, any sort of Tactics/Strategy games. I've played and enjoyed games such as Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre (at least the PSP version), Fire Emblem, the modern Xcoms, and similar games. I generally don't enjoy games that possess overt asian character design or gameplay tropes, though there are exceptions. Take that info for what you will while judging/considering this review.

My experience with the game was initially mixed, but grew progessively more towards negative as I played. I'll break up my criticisms into four categories; Gameplay, Story, Visuals, and Audio. I will list any positives I can think of as well, but at the current moment none come to mind.

The card and dice system, while advertised as a way to rely less on RNG, does quite the opposite I've found. Some attacks are far superior to others, and through the grace of RNG, it is possible to get nothing but the worst of one's abilities at critical points in the battle. Early game this is not as noticeable nor impactful, but mid to late game it becomes infuriating. Doubly so when one considers there are often abilities in play that can cause your cards to be discarded.

Dice add to the RNG, positively and negatively. Dice can add damage, heal you, cause you to draw another card, get a special effect, or even get another turn. This applies to enemies as well. Players and enemies (more notably enemies as in every battle you will have three units against many, many more enemies) have the ability to cast debuffs on units. These debuffs add cursed dice which, you guessed it, can take away things dice normally give. You can reroll one or two dice each time you use a card but this is just more RNG. If you roll the dice manually, rather than using the auto-roll option, the dice you are rerolling can bounce into other dice and flip them over. I would never adise anyone to roll dice manually because of this.

Despite the vastly increased RNG over other tactics games, the AI is highly abusable. Most units on a map will not approach until you come into range/a certian point in the level, making dealing with them more of a puzzle than a tactical battle. In practice, this means the only difficulty of the games comes from battling the card and dice RNG.

Level variety/enemy variety is nonexistant. Height and walls are the only things that add to the terrain, and enemies are really only made unique by their animations (which is even debateable in of itself). There are no status effects/abilities unique to any enemy.

Children of the Zodiarcs is a short game. There are twenty main missions. In these twenty missions it fails to engage the player with the world or the characters. The story follows the idea of living in the slums and theiving from the rich while getting involved in the gang violence in between. Cutscenese are really only a couple of minutes of character dialogue and do little to expand upon the world. Speaking of characters...

The characters in this game appear very much one dimensional at the beginning of the game. They stay that way throughout. The main character, in particular, managed to make me dislike her from the first mission and never redeemed herself or underwent any character development at any point. There were opportunities for her to develop, or for the story to become more in depth/interesting than a story that was 99% bland "Garr, rich people bad, gang violence everywhere", but these opportunities were subverted with more asinine dialogue and behaviour from the main character that left me wishing for her death (normally I detest any plot that has the main character die at the end, but this was a strong exception).

Even the one character I 'liked' was very much one dimensional as well. She simply had a design/art I liked and I thought her cards, which were all magic based, were entertaining enough to distract from how little combat variety there was, though I recognize she had literally no development either.

The artstyle of the characters and the world is actually pretty decent. Not exceptional by any means, but definitely appealing. That said, very little is worth mentioning, either. Two characters stood out as having pretty interesting design. They would be the very first character you control (kinda the tutorial character), and the mage character you acquire very shortly into the game. Beyond that there is not much to say for the visual side of things. There are better looking games out there, and there are far, far worse looking games as well.

I love video game music. I literally listen to nothing else. I have soundtracks to countless games on my computer. Sadly, the music of this game will not make that cut. The music is not bad by any stretch of the imagination. It isn't overt, over the top, or irritating. It also isn't at all memorable. I just finished the game and I can't recall a single piece of music. There's very little to say other than that really.

It is unfortunate to leave a negative review for a game I both was anticipating and kickstarted, but alas, my luck with loving everything I backed was bound to run out eventually. This game perhaps could have faired better as a mobile game. The simplistic gameplay could serve as a timewaster, and no one would miss anything else by not paying attention to anything else, though I'd rather see the team take all they learned from this game and try again. There is a lot of potential, but the two most glaring issue, which is to say the gameplay and bland characters, should be a focus point for their next project.

Any game that offers paid DLC while it is still in early access is garbage and not worth your time.

Any developers that make paid DLC instead of finishing their game deserve neither money nor a job in this industry.