Recent reviews by Xaelon

Blaster Master Zero 3 is another fun entry in the series. If you enjoyed the first two games you'll enjoy this one too.

If you don’t know what Blaster Master games are like, here’s a short explanation.

The Blaster Master series are 2D retro inspired action adventure games with some metroidvania elements. You drive a transforming all-terrain tank across a large map with many connected areas, pausing every so often to exit your tank and explore dungeons in top-down shooter mode. Dungeons include bosses and/or upgrades for you or your tank. The games are also reasonably challenging, encouraging you to make full use of your inventory as the various enemies and bosses are weak to different weapons.

If you don't know which of the three games to start with I recommend starting with Blaster Master Zero. It's very close to the original NES game, and will give you a good idea of what the series is like. It’s also the starting point for the light story that was added when Blaster Master was updated into Blaster Master Zero.


BMZ3 builds on the mechanics established in the first two games but also adds the brand new VRV system which allows you to pick between two different types of levels for the game’s top down sections. One kind is your standard Blaster Master “shoot everything that moves” type dungeon. The other type is more above solving simple puzzles and avoiding the enemies. You won’t miss out on anything by choosing one type or the other, so you’re free to play whatever type you like more. The two dungeon styles are different enough that I’m considering doing another playthrough to see the other layouts I skipped.

I hope the developers will make more games for this series. I really enjoyed all three of them and there’s no other games that play quite like Blaster Master.

This game is fun for about 50 hours. By then you've seen everything this game has to offer. The community's nickname of "Warfarm" is well deserved, because that's all there is to this game. Farm, farm and farm until your eyes bleed. Want to play Dynasty Warriors with guns and space magic? Warframe's got you covered. The combat is genuinely fun but the enemies are pathetic braindead sacks of meat.

I've been waiting ages for the developers to actually add compelling difficult content, but all they do is add thicker bullet sponges and more timegated grinds for whatever the shiny new toy is. The second part is the reason why after 400+ hours I don't play this game anymore. You cannot access anything new without grinding for untold hours. I was going to come back and play New War only to find out it requires that I grind through multiple layers of BS I didn't want to deal with when it first came out. For some features you can't even sit down and power through them in a few days because you can only gain so many whatever points per week/day forcing you to log in over and over if you want to play with that shiny new toy.

That's fine DE I can take the hint. Your repeated insistence on forcing me to farm timegated content I don't want to play has made it pretty clear you don't want my business or my time anymore.

Similar to Borderlands but with cute animals and rogue-lite elements. Enemies and bosses are dangerous and interesting to fight. Guns run from traditional stuff like shotguns or assault rifles to a few weird things like a black hole launcher, exploding throwing knives or a ray gun that shoots a homing beam. Weapons can also roll their own random perks which can greatly effect the performance of a weapon.

Solid progression in and out of runs. Gunfire captures that "one more run" feeling rather well.

The game also isn't afraid to let you snowball out of control into an unstoppable killing machine. RNG depending of course.

Overall very fun if you enjoy solid FPS shooting and on the fly buildcrafting. Gunfire is well worth the price, on sale or otherwise.

Do you enjoy playing a healer in MMORPGs like WoW or FFXIV but wish you could just ditch the "MMO" part of those games? Then this game is for you.

This game accurately replicates what it's like to heal boss fights in a traditional MMORPG. So if you're looking for a single-player version of that style of gameplay you should buy this game.

The developer even added positional mechanics at some point so it's now possible to drop an AoE in the middle of your party and kill everyone. But hey, in this game no one screams at you when you wipe and you don't have to run back to the boss either. Just hit the restart button and away you go.

This game also has a HUGE amount of character customization. There are 4 talent trees stuffed full of interesting passive abilities. Items can be leveled up and tweaked with a bunch of passive stats. There are also unique items. Some of them have special gameplay changing effects. I'm talking effects like disabling mana-regen in exchange for powerful stats or causing the tank to spend HP in exchange for burning nearby enemies. The game also has gear with more traditional effects like increasing the rank or damage/healing of specific skills. Makes for a lot of interesting gear choices.

Here's an example of what you can do with the customization in this game:
One night I found a fight that punished overhealing. This countered my current HoT based build. So I respec'd myself into a shield focused healer. Of course now some of the items I had weren't useful for my new build. Good thing there's an in-game guide to tell me where to find some replacement stuff. One boss I was farming even dropped a unique I hadn't seen before that made a heal I wasn't using shield the target instead. I added this to my build and tweaked my talents to take advantage of it. The new build cleared the fight no problem.

Mini Healer is a niche game, but what it does it does very well.

Similar to Pokemon on a base level, but with considerably more depth. Every monster can equip multiple pieces of equipment and has a skill tree of 40+ active and passive skills. They also come with varying combinations of resistances and vulnerabilities. This game does have a heavy emphasis on team building, so if you're not a fan of reading ability descriptions and adjusting your team members to take advantage of the enemy's vulnerabilities you may not enjoy this game. Additionally, the level design is on the weaker side. It's passable, but the strongest feature of this game is definitely the combat.

That said, if you do enjoy theorycrafting you will probably find a lot to like here, because there is a lot of team synergy to play with in this game. There are a lot of buffs and debuffs and some monsters get passives that let you apply more of these than you normally can. There are even some passives that will let you trigger those effects with a critical hit or when you heal allied monsters. It's also not difficult to raise new monsters in this game either. Any new monsters you hatch start only a few levels below whatever level your highest monster is. Skill Resets and this game's "rare candy" (ie "increase monster level by 1" item) are also readily available for a few gold from various vendors. The game would not be nearly as enjoyable if you had to waste time leveling every new monster you want to try because this game heavily encourages you to experiment and adjust your team's members.

The overall difficulty felt pretty good to me. Keeper and champion(ie boss monsters) battles are tough if you go in unprepared, but it feels really good to come up with a team that allows you to trounce whatever's giving you trouble. There's also no penalty for failing a fight either.

If you're like me and tired of waiting for Pokemon to add some difficulty and actual mechanical depth. Buy this game, it's got that same "collect 'em all" feel with combat that will actually make you think. It's really, really good.

Every time I give this game another shot it reminds me exactly why I quit in the first place. WHY does Bungie LOVE sticking HUGE amounts of pointless grinding between you and anything you want? Can we PLEASE just get rid of power level already?! IT exists for NO other reason than to waste the time of your players. JUST GET RID OF IT.

I cannot recommend this game anymore.

Bungie has made a business decision I do not agree with and will not support financially. The developer's decision to sell dungeons separately has me very worried about the precedence it sets. Maybe it's just just be dungeons now, but what's going to be sold separately next? Raids? Strikes? New PvP maps?

For anyone unaware to get the full Destiny 2 experience you already have to purchase multiple expansions and a season pass every 3 months. You cannot access any real content in this game without spending money multiple times. The game also sells cosmetic microtransactions.

Once the game's next expansion releases either you buy the deluxe edition or you buy the standard edition, multiple season passes AND dungeon access. The quality of seasonal content in this game is so inconsistent $10 may be asking too much for how little you get sometimes. So either you fork out $80 or more and hope it's good or you wait and see, ending up paying more in the long run.

I fully expect the standard edition of Lightfall to offer nothing but a campaign for $60. How many other purchases will be required to access the entire game once that expansion comes out? I don't know but anyone who purchases Witch Queen is encouraging Bungie to sell it in as many pieces as possible.

I've only played this game for a few days and I can already tell that this one's as exceptional as everyone says it is. This is one of those games that you start playing and the next time you check the time hours have gone by.

The building system is a little tricky, but works wonderfully after you play with it for a bit. The combat is good. It’s easy to learn but hard to master with an emphasis on managing your stamina. This game even manages to make normally annoying survival mechanics like gear durability and hunger important but not annoying to manage.

Valheim doesn’t bring anything new to the genre but it takes the standard survival formula, sands off the rough edges and polishes it into one smooth package that’s a joy to play. This game reminds me of Terraria (one of my favorite games) and that makes me excited to see where the developers take things from here.

An excellent manufacturing and logistics simulator in the vein of Factorio, but in 3D and without the base defense aspect. An extremely open-ended game that starts out simple but quickly grows in complexity. Explore an EXTREMELY large map to track down whatever resource you need and then somehow return it (or whatever it makes) back to your base.

The game’s main set of objectives are centered around delivering large amounts of special materials to a specific building called the space elevator and then launching them. The ‘project parts’ your space elevator desires are rather complex and act as the final test for the current tier. There are also easier objectives that unlock new things to build, more equipment or give upgrades that do things like increase your inventory space.

At time of review, I have finished all available tiers of the space elevator but did not do anything involving nuclear power. I encountered no errors or crashes. Overall performance is excellent even on my 15 year old computer. The only buggy feature I noticed was the somewhat janky physics involving the truck getting stuck or being launched into the air. Considering you can deconstruct and immediately reconstruct your vehicle without losing anything this is essentially a non-issue. I did have a good laugh when I high centered my truck on a railway, got out to flip it over and then had a train come by and steal the truck from me before I could get back in. I was very surprised the truck didn’t get dumped into the water or off a nearby cliff.

If you're considering trying this game, don't. Sega's recent decision to put the ability to Automatically Sell items behind SG/paid subscription confirms precedent that any and all QoL features moving forward will be monetized. Do you REALLY want to play a game that's going to charge you time or money to temporarily access what should be basic features?

To be clear, you can earn SG just by playing the game BUT, this game has SO many important things locked behind SG that it's borderline unplayable without spending SG. In hindsight only tolerated the amount of features locked behind SG because I had a large amount of SG saved up from the days before NGS launched. There's no way to permanently unlock these features either. You have to stay subscribed or constantly pay SG to make this game somewhat playable.

It would be one thing if Sega was doing a good job fixing problems and improving the game but that hasn't been the case. That's the reason why putting a feature like Autosell behind SG has made me so mad. The game has been passable at best lately with around 6 months between any major content updates yet Sega still decides to put the only QoL feature they've ever announced for the game behind a semi-paywall.

The other reason why what they're doing with Autosell has made me particularly angry because it's something I've wanted the game to have since launch. Why have I wanted the feature since launch? Because it would improve this game's mindless grind significantly. I wouldn't have to open my bag every 5-10 minutes to get rid of the garbage. Yep, that's right. This game shoves SO much worthless garbage into your bag that it requires constant management or else you risk being unable to loot something you actually want. They could have added Autosell as a basic feature (as it is in MOST other games) to address one of the game's main pain points but instead they decide to sell access to it instead.

Of course Autosell wouldn't be needed if 99.9% of the "loot" wasn't garbage. That's the other big problem with NGS. You spend hours and hours grinding and nothing you get matters. You have better odds to win the lottery than you do to get any worthwhile drops.

The combat is the only part of this game that's worthwhile. Outside of that NGS is a boring game that drops nothing but worthless loot, treats its F2P players like garbage and is run by a company so greedy they decide to put the only major QoL feature behind a semi-paywall. So, ask yourself does that REALLY sound like something you want to spend your time on?

This is a case where I wish I could give the game a rating between "Yes and "No".

This game is a pretty simple turn-based "Mystery Dungeon" style rogue-lite. You explore corridors and chambers collecting loot and fighting monsters. Sometimes there's little sections of one-sided dialogue between Drahn and his Fairy between dungeons. There is a simple death penalty where you lose everything you've looted on a given run. This was more punishing before stamina was removed, because you lost stamina too.

There's few things that make this game interesting. Any monster you kill has a chance to drop as a 'Fang' allowing you to equip the monster to one of your three slots, improving your stats and giving you an additional attack or skill to use. Some fangs have melee or ranged attacks, others buff/heal you and the last type causes status effects. Fangs also have a passive effect which range from status resistances to increasing damage or critical chance.

Drahn's equipment is limited to a sword and a shield. Equipment has simple properties that seem to be limited to buffing the damage or defense of fangs based on element or creature type or causing/resisting status effects.

I enjoyed the starting levels but now that I'm about 30 hours in I'm starting to hit a grind wall. This would have been trouble earlier in the game's life, but now with recent removal of stamina, it's just a matter of time and some luck. The game pretty regularly drops fangs for you to use as fodder, but you need so many of them to level something past 20. I hope the devs will remedy this in the future by offering regular event dungeons offering more metal blobs (these are fangs offering MUCH higher amounts of EXP).

In regards to the microtransations:
Your first single pull gives you an SR+ to start with (I think everyone gets one). Tenpulls cost 50 premium currency and guarantee you an SR fang or higher. After 30 hours, I have only gotten around 30 emeralds through normal play plus two or three "emerald stars" that function as single pull tickets. Currently it doesn't feel like I need the higher rarity fangs to progress. The R+ and SR/SR+ fangs are definately more powerful, but are offset by having a higher equip cost. Whether or not R+/SR/SR+ fangs are available outside of the gatcha remains to be seen. The devs have also announced something called "friend summons" which functions appears to be another source of free pulls, there isn't any detailed information as of yet.

The iffiest thing I have seen with the microtransations is with the devs selling a limited number of packs that give an instant boost your cost limit. Your cost limit does naturally increase as your home level increases so it's not as if the packs are the only way to increase your cost. I don't know if being able to buy more cost is more than an early game boost. Your Fang Cost Limit is what restricts what and how many fangs can be equipped to a single loadout.

If you like Mystery Dungeon style games, it's worth a shot now that the stamina system is gone.