Recent reviews by MarioVX

10/10, we gave birth to our firstborn child to this.

This game is superb. Tricky puzzles, beautiful landscapes, interesting characters who disagree with each other but all have good points, deep philosophy. A sequel that has done everything right and far exceeded all expectations already so high after a really strong part 1. Bravo!

The game is great. Seriously. The controversial PvP mode has been removed, it's a pure OMD game now, and a really good one on top of that.
We went from 1 to 2 to 19 playable heroes through OMD1 2 and U, and they all have special abilities and passives on top of their signature weapons and sometimes special interactions with a specific trap. Some are a bit stereotypical in their voice lines, but in terms of gameplay they're all well done and somehow unique.
There's 36 different maps who look visually amazing. Most of them are designed to give two or three players (the new maximum team size) something to do and reward good coordination, which makes them super fun for such teams but somewhat stressful for solo players (though it's not impossible, just needs some time to get used to).
There's a huge system of trap upgrading and modification with additional parts in place, on top of gear, guardians and traits to give plenty of options to customize your strategy.
The F2P model is completely fair. The only things only available through Gold (premium currency you get from paying real money and a bit from log-in rewards) are cosmetics, everything that has any effect on the game can be earned by simply playing. You can spend money to bypass the farming but you're in no way pressured to do so.
There's a variety of five different game modes (Survival, Endless, Sabotage, Chaos Trials, Weekly Challenge) that ensure a broad diversity of gameplay experience, so the game feels as little monotonous as possible even when farming skulls.
However, unfortunately the playerbase has mostly disappeared. A few people are always on, but often you have to use the global chat to find people to play with, if you don't have friends who play the game with you.

So all in all, fully recommend this one, it's got me super hooked. Try to bring friends as well, the game is even better with coop partners, but still enjoyable even solo.
You can even add me if you want.
Just try it out, it's free.

UPDATE - there's been a patch relevant to one of the points I'm laying out here. I'll adress this at the bottom.
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Game-mechanically mostly a really good incremental game for Minecraft fans with several interesting elements. Starts off a bit slow but then picks up to get pretty fun honestly.

However, I cannot recommend this game, because the monetization hidden in here is the most DISGUSTING one I've encountered in any game ever. Seriously. This is so shady and wicked that once you've seen behind it it makes you want to spit the developers in the face and go and hug EA people because they're really nice dudes in comparison.

Player progress is structured here through prestiges, your soft reset mechanic in this game, that you do quite soon and quite often, but only up to a maximum of 1000 times. It gets slowly harder and slower to prestige further. So far so good. When you prestige, you get Ender Pearls which allow you to get upgrades for permanent progress. Now the thing is, they introduced Mythical Machines, one of which gives more Ender Pearly on each subsequent prestige. You can get one of each Mythical Machine level per prestige. There are microscopic amounts of the materials needed to craft them in free chests, effectively the only way to get them regularly is to spend lots of $$$ to get super duper chests with some random mythical materials in them. You need to spend on average ~120€ per prestige to upgrade that particular mythical machine one level. Per prestige. Every time you prestige without having maxed your mythical machine before, you are effectively losing that Ender Pearl worth of permanent progress, and it will be IMPOSSIBLE to EVER get it back, because they designed it so there is a max level. In other words, in this game, you don't just pay to accelerate progress, you pay to be even able to reach that progress anyhow in the first place, and it is impossible to ever catch that up for a free player no matter how dedicated he plays. But it's alright, ~120€ per prestige, prestige 1000 times, 120,000€ is a reasonable amount to spend to complete a clicker game, right? Support the devs, the poor lads!

Another aspect where this greed comes to light is special pickaxes. From time to time, you'll find rare, special pickaxes in ordinary chests, or pay cash for extra chests which also contain special pickaxes. So far so good. Now, the thing with the prestige system is, "enemy" blocks also prestige, and so your pickaxes have to prestige as well to stay able to break them. And guess what you need to upgrade those special pickaxes, for which in some cases you already spent money to get them in the first place? That's right, the resource bought with even more real money (runic)! So you pay upfront or are lucky to find them, but if you want to keep using them, you need to keep spending more money on it. Now, you mostly want to use those special pickaxes for their special abilities, and there are ways to trigger those even when they're not properly upgraded to be on par with the current prestige, but these ways demand an ability slot and are highly inconvenient... it's basically just a huge middlefinger to the players. If you don't want to go through this and spend a couple of runic (per pickaxe... per prestige) to be able to use them comfortably, how much will that cost you? well, 15 runic per upgrade, 1000 prestiges, 35+ special pickaxes that are getting upgraded with runic only... 525,000+ runic just to complete that collection. You get 4,800 runic for 99.99$, so that's just 10,936.41 $ - really cheap, get it while you can!

I was willing to put the effort in to theorycraft ways to play this game efficiently without spending money to scratch together the mythical resources just from free chests and take however long necessary for each prestige so I can still build one each time. I've used abilities to trigger underleveled special pickaxes, I've maxed the skill that gives a chance to instantly open free chests by all means possible in this game. Guess what, without mentioning it, that skill has diminishing returns on higher levels, because **** you, you're not scratching these mythicals together faster than like once per three months of super actively opening every chest on cooldown, dedicated gameplay right there. Why not buy some chests for hundred dollars instead, maybe you're lucky and get the mythical resources for that machine? Oh no, what's that, you got other mythical resources? Why not spend another 100$, you don't want your first to have been for nothing, do you? You got 10, yay! Now you just need 15 more and you can level up that machine once, prestige once, then see you again for the next hundreds of your bucks! Thanks for playing our game, idiot! <3

So... the thing is... the game looks so good on the surface, and mechanically it kind of is, for the most part. But hidden beneath that is a really vicious pickpocketing machinery deprived of any ethical concern, tailored to prey on addictive / completionist personality types and drain them for thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, whatever they can scratch together. They won't realize upfront they're being robbed, and by the time it's dawning on them in the back of their heads, they've invested so much that attachment phenomenon kicks in and makes them rationalize this investment by themselves.

This is just evil business practices, screw them. You can play the game free for a couple of days if you like, it starts off funny enough, you can keep going as long as it's enjoyable, but think twice before spending money on it, we gamers have a strong interest in not allowing this thing to be a model for financial success.


----- Regarding the update ----
There's been a patch that has adressed one of the issues I pointed out earlier: As of now, the premium pickaxes do not longer have to be upgraded with Runic (premium currency) anymore, they can be upgraded with normal picks instead at a fair price. This is a big step into the right direction that I acknowledge and appreciate.

However, pickaxe upgrading was the smaller issue here. The elephant in the room is still the Legendary Contraption of the End and the problem revolving around it. There is no way to get it once in a prestige within any acceptable amount of time (as laid out earlier, not in less than multiple months of actively opening free chests on time - the few skills that help in theory have some unexplained diminishing returns built into them) without pouring in big cash (several hundred bucks) every prestige. Don't get me wrong, you can choose not to do this and eventually finish the game (reach max prestige) without this, but if you do that you will have only a fraction of the maximum Ender Pearls, and hence a fraction of the skill points paying users would have, without any chance ever to get them. It's still not just pay to progress faster, but pay to progress *further* than anybody else who isn't paying as much. Which is a design I still strongly object.

So as of now, in light of the update being a step in the right direction, I kind of wish I could give a neutral review for now, but being forced to either recommend it or not, I have to say I don't think it's quite there yet. You can try it out, as I said it's not a bad game, but save your wallet and don't get taken advantage of, this is stil shady.

We will see what future updates bring. Thinking about it, they could fix this problem entirely by making Legendary Contraptions of the End grant Ender Pearls retroactively for past prestiges upon completion. That way paying users would still benefit as the Contraptions are no easier to obtain, but free users aren't hard-capped, just much slower. Just an idea, there are probably other ways to fix this, just the best I can think of from the top of my head preserving there economic goals. We will see whether they care and if so, what they come up with. I will update my review accordingly.

Die Puzzles sind teilweise wirklich knackig, das ist wohl was Gutes, obwohl es mir gelegentlich dadurch anstrengend und abschreckend vorkam. Sie sind an sich nicht so spaßig wie in Portal oder Antichamber.

Was ich an dem Spiel am besten finde sind die philosophischen Unterhaltungen mit dem Computerterminal, den man versucht davon zu überzeugen einem Administratorrechte zu gewähren und dafür beweisen muss, dass man eine Person ist.

Die Hintergrundgeschichte ist auch sehr gut und hat mich sehr bewegt. Man erfährt sie immer nur bruchstückweise und erst gegen Ende setzt sich alles zu einem tragischen Ganzen zusammen. Man kann sich dadurch auch mit dem Protagonisten gut identifizieren.

Mein Wahrnehmungsverlauf war: ganz ok am Anfang, zieht sich dann mit den Puzzles, aber man arbeitet sich durch um sich weiter mit dem Terminal unterhalten zu können und herauszufinden was das alles soll, was passiert ist, was man tun kann. Das mündet letztendlich in eine superstarke Finalphase.

Das Spiel nimmt einen mit, gibt einem Stoff zum Nachdenken noch lange nachdem man es durchgespielt hat, insbesondere darum eine kräftige Empfehlung von mir.

This game is an outstanding work of art, one that will be remembered for its cultural legacy for centuries.

Whether singleplayer or with a group of friends, the old classic action rpg "Sacred Gold" is still lots of fun to play and still one of the best games of its genre.

A huge vivid open world with lots of secrets to discover encourages traveling around and exploring, the character development is highly customizable with Combat Arts, self-selected Skills and Attributes. Apart from usual randomly generated loot, there are uniques and set items which encourages collecting, and equipment in general has so many different possible modifiers that you can highly customize your character in so many different ways.
There are five difficulties, you unlock the next higher one by beating the game on the previous. Each difficulty makes enemies deal a lot more damage and become tougher, but also improves the loot you can get from them. The game gets extremely hard on the highest difficulties.
I don't have this game in Steam for long, played it many houndreds of hours before (probably far more than 1000 hours over the years, actually), it's just awesome.

I'd say it's even worth the standard 10€ price but this is debatable, at a sale though I can only fully recommend it.

I love LOTR and almost all LOTR-themed games, but this is just bad.

From a game-mechanics point of view, this is the worst MOBA I've ever played. It's just no fun and the developers don't care about it either, last update was January 2014.

If you like MOBAs, don't get this game.
If you like LOTR, don't get this game.
Don't get this game.

Warframe is a huge thing. It is so rich of content and keeps evolving through frequent large updates. The gameplay (i.e. combat system) is a tremendous amount of fun.

The game is NOT "pay2win". You may want to spend some money on it to buy warframe and weapon slots or cosmetics if you like the latter, but there is no point in buying anything of platin (the currency bought from real money) that you can farm as well. And you can earn platin by farming rare stuff and selling it to other players. But honestly, after having houndreds of hours of fun with that game for completely free, it just feels right to give the developers something back, but that's my personal opinion.

Warframe is not a casual game. You will have to spend hours and hours of time to get what you want sometimes, and that makes it feel so rewarding when you finally get it. Spending these hours isn't a pain though, since it's just fun to do so.

Basically, the game sucks you in and makes you become a Tenno forever.

EDIT: Years later and it just keeps getting better and better.

This game is unique in its gameplay and just totally awesome, a lot of fun with friends, and even with random teammates thanks to the nice community and the easy to use voice chat function.