Recent reviews by ilkhani

One step forward and two steps back.

These days, with the existence of incels and toxic masculinity, it is generally difficult to pivot criticism against something without being labeled as a cohort or a detractor. So it seems that every review, every opinion, every criticism has to be accompanied with forewords and caveats.
The criticism against Veilguard has nothing to do with "woke", DEI or other nonsense allegations pushed by the usual right-wing politics. It is a good game with clear faults and that means complexity is required to understand it, rather than tribalism and agendas.

This is the best Dragon Age game in terms of combat and general gameplay. The production value is through the roof, as is the performance. The art direction, while subjective, is very well done and it stands unique and when the big quests play out, it reminds you of that Bioware magic that we have come to know across Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Inventory management and gear upgrading has been simplified, some of it for the better, some for the worse.

While the game pushes past its prequels on all these areas, it also takes a step or two back when it comes to perhaps the most important element of Bioware games, choices and consequences, otherwise known as the RPG element. You rarely have meaningful choices and you won't feel the impact of most of your choices with dialogue trees serving as a slightly more convoluted continue button.
There is also a constant sense, in conversations and your replies to people, that the game is tonally playing it very safe and indeed too safe.

I will still recommend the game despite these big flaws, because its genre does not have that many franchises in existence and if you are a fan of Bioware games, you can look past the negatives to enjoy the positives, even if only for the story. If you are unsure about getting it, wait for a discount.

It just seems impossible to get a company to make a great looter-shooter in this day and age.

If Destiny has the best quality gameplay (combat, weapon feel), but suffers from poor content, lack of RPG elements, depth and bad practices of content being cut from the game, while Warframe has steady flow of content and depth but lacks quality in both gameplay and purpose, The First Descendant falls flat in the middle of the two in having better gunplay than Warframe and more RPG than Destiny, but worse than both of them generally in every other regard.

It steal pretty much everything from them, which is fine if you can make it work, but manages to not have its own identity, which is not a surprise for a cash-grab game.

What you end up with is a game that feels unrewarding of your time put in it and it just leaves you thinking that no game is going to fill this particular void. Add on top the grotesque levels of micro-transaction that are designed in such a way that the game artificially pushes you towards them, not to mention the questionable drop-rates, by which Nexon has already been sued for once before in a previous game, and you start realizing that perhaps this is not worth your time.

I'm not even going to say much about the overly sexualized characters, the pointless story, bad audio design, mediocre movement. Eveything feels cheap. The only reason anyone would give a game like The First Descendant a chance, is because both Warframe and especially Destiny 2 have not fulfilled the void. The search continues.

The gameplay is rough around the edges, but it is a great foundation for a promising studio.

Positives
Adorable.
Great looking visuals.
Fun gameplay.
New Game+ and Trials.
Doesn't overstay its welcome.

Negatives
Rough around the edges.
Some audio sync issues.

Conclusion
Get it, enjoy it, support the studio.

Yet another game with a very promising premise and lots of potential that misses the mark.
I really wanted to like this game, but very poor game design choices and balancing makes it a hard pass, at least for the time being and until the developer, if the developer, patches things up. Yet, I fear that even with some balancing correction, the underlying issue cannot be resolved.

First the good.
Art direction, simplicity of UI and cohesive layout, not to mention the sound design and story are top notch. There is a minor annoyance of camera blur that does not seem to turn off even if you turn off motion blur, but it is a minor thing. It is also great at conveying information to you in regards to how things are going, be it your factories output production rate or events in the world. The sensation of having a proper pipeline from mining from space to your stockholds to your factories and people, is a rewarding feeling and the game's greatest accomplishment.

Now the bad and oh boy this is going to be comprehensive. Balancing is terrible and that is after the developer fixed the accident balancing. This is unfortunately a game similar to mobile games, where poor game design choices artificially push you to scale things or change things to counter world events. I say this is artificial, because as they occur, nothing makes sense as to why they occur, it is very obvious that a developer sat and said "right, let's decrease the amount of this and increase the amount of that to push the player". This sense of constantly being pushed is worsened by timers, such as bad weather phenomenons and lack of a particular resource occurring.

On top of the poor game design choices and bad balancing, you have yet another big issue. All ingame events are pre-fixed, meaning they will always appear the same with the same outcome depending of course on your choices with them.
If you add the aforementioned issue with poor game design choices and balancing with pre-fixed events, you end up with a management game that is very linear, meaning that it has the illusion of being open-world with freedom and creativity to go your way, but in actuality, it is a linear dictated path that is so narrow, that you will probably not play it a second time, because the only difference in a second playthrough will be your anticipation of fixed events to come and minor efficiency in meeting them head-on. Nothing else will change.

I was expecting the developer to be more open-minded and allow for the player to experiment and set things up how they want, but that is not the case with this game. It is a linear, survival game with artificial timers and pushes, rather than a open-world management game that welcomes creativity and adaption. As such, despite the promise and potential, I cannot recommend a mobile-like game design for a PC audience that has come to expect more.

Review will change if the product changes.