Recent reviews by Stroh

Population dwindling? Easy, just don't release any new content for over 6 months because of your "big announcement" coming, delay that announcement, and then announce your porting the game to console instead of fixing any issues.

At least they figured out how to add swimming though, it only took their senior nepo-baby game designers a few years to find the right Youtube-tutorial I suppose.

The vision of Zeal, from my perspective, is that of the ultimate MMO-lite. Ditching the RPG mechanics of leveling, questing, and the mundane run-up to "end-game", and focusing on the activities players actually want.

As of right now, in its very early state, that boils down to Arenas. In the future, it's planned to have more PvE content, PvPvE content, and a larger variety of PvP content. That's a large part of why I recommend the game; the future it may have.

The biggest problem however is there have been many attempts at a MMO-lite, and most begin the exact same way using arena PvP as an entry point. The problem is you won't find many that lasted more than a year, let alone still running today.

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Right now, Zeal is fun though. You can hop in, choose a class, set-up your action bar with skills, and hop into a match against other players or against bots. The combat feels like the beginnings of a good game, with a mixture of aim/freestyle skills and targeted abilities. It feels a bit like a World of Warcraft/Guild Wars hybrid, which is hard not to compare to Forge.

My biggest complain currently is the clunkiness. Movement speed feels slow, which makes the aimed abilities feel less rewarding to hit. Some skills already force you to stand still to use, either for casting or channeling, so it's a bit underwhelming that when you're not making that tough decision you're still very easy to hit.

Now, the best thing though is how active the developer is in making changes, polling the community, and in general on Discord. That's what gives me hope that this may end up somewhere other than the bottom of my "recent" Steam library sorting.

While not perfect, Paladins positions itself as a game which focuses on fun, rather than polish.

The ranked system isn't great, the cards aren't all balanced, characters can be OP, and you'll certainly encounter a bug or two. However, they keep introducing new content, have a fair monetization scheme, and the game is just genuinely fun.

Wildstar is an incredible game for some, and for others just another stepping-stone while trying to find your next MMO home. Now let me be clear, no one should go into Wildstar expecting to settle down. Even ignoring the potential for the game to shutdown at any time they desire, it's just not an enriched world you'll want to spend your every moment in. It's a barren wasteland with friendly faces and incredible content spread out.

That's how you should approach Wildstar. In it's current iteration it takes about 8 hours for a new player to reach max level, and it's not the most fun journey. However once you get there, join a guild and the potential of the game is unlocked. Raids are incredible enough to warrant the other crap you'll have to put up with so long as you like the combat style (it's not for everyone).

Treat it like a singleplayer game (unless you go in with friends) until max level, and then find a guild with raid times that match your schedule. Once you get to that point, you're probably not going to play much outside of those raid hours ... but that's fine, because the raiding experience is so enjoyable.

Don't let the low population get you down - Wildstar is a really great experience, it's just not your traditional MMO where you'll log in every day for hours and hours with thousands of people around you to interact with. But that's fine, just know it going in, and experience it before its gone.

tl;dr - If you like raiding try the game for ~30 minutes. Try a few classes, and if you enjoy the combat then keep playing. Find a guild based on raid times, and treat it like a game that only exists during those hours (once you hit max level obviously). Then realize that's it, there's nothing left, but it was fun while it lasted.

A true emotional rollercoaster. First confusion, then sorrow, then regret. Maybe there's happiness at the end.

Probably not.

Game would actually be a hit, and a very fair limited free title, if they would give free players access to a server browser. Restrictions are fine, but removing the ability to get into a game barring a lot of luck on the matchmaking, not letting you play with friends, forcing you into a random game mode - that's just spitting on the playerbase they need to give their paying customers any sort of community outside of the 50 active players they had prior to the free trial stunt.

Brawlhalla is an incredible fighting game which provides high intensity gameplay across a unique cast of characters - each slightly different, but mostly balanced properly. Think Smash Brothers, with less-clear percent damages, and less in-depth mechanics (which is arguably not necessarily worse).

The biggest issue the game faces currently is the online play. First, online play is unable to be done with friends. If you join a friends game (which is a hassle in itself) then you cannot go online to play against others. Not as a free-for-all, and not as teams. Second, the online play mode is pretty horrendous, and there's no ability to change it. It's set default to free-for-all, items on, and random map selection.

You get +2 points for getting the final hit regardless of whether you did anything else meaningful, -1 points for being killed, and -3 points for a suicide. This basically means most online players will run away doing nothing productive until they see a player reach red health, then they will go in for a powerful final hit to steal the kill. Most score lines end up being something similar to 20-5-0-(-10).

Perhaps highly casual players enjoy the game mode more, but it's off-putting to not even have the choice to change it, or at the very least suffer through the mode with friends helping to make it enjoyable.


Online play with friends in a controlled game is much more enjoyable though, with all the classic options you'd be used to (stock matches, hooray).


Hopefully full release comes with fixes to these problems, along with more new features since characters will be put behind a payment system similar to any online brawler/MOBA.

Plays exactly like you would expect - highly similar to every other Magic game released. Except this one is free, and allows you to earn further cards through playing through the campaign. Business model seems fair, highly related to Hearthstone. Contains the features other Magic games were lacking, such as a better tutorial system, the return of 2v2 play, and improved deck-building.

Almost all of the negative reviews are because people are having server connectivity issues when trying to run the game. I'd urge you to read past the reviews made by idiots who can't even Google their simplest technical issues, because player stupidity is not a reason to give a negative review.

Give it time for them to sort out all of the server connectivity issues, before deciding to write a game off because of launch-day server issues (like every other game always suffers from as well).

Game is incredibly buggy - choose a server, it's full despite having 9/10 players (hardly any players by the way). Choose spectate, game exits to main menu before randomly spectating that server a full minute later.

Finally get on a server, game asks me to choose a side. Choose side 1, tells me side 1 is full despite no players being connected. Choose side 2, tells me side 1 is full and sends me back to side selection.

Start playing, asks me to choose a loadout but gives basically no instructions on differences between loadouts. Game starts with 3 players in a 2v1 scenario despite it saying the server is still full.

Dirty Bomb is a fast-paced shooter that takes the better elements of Brink and combines them with the frantic combat that makes Call of Duty enjoyable. If you're a fan of slow-and-methodical shooters like Red Orchestra or even Battlefield, you're not going to find the same enjoyment here. The game doesn't hold your hand, and it tells you that right away. You are at your best when at a full sprint, shooter without looking down your sights, which rewards those who can play with a higher sensitivity.

The game features seven "classes", each of which contains various loadouts consisting of a main weapon, a secondary weapon, two perks, and bonus features such as grenades, air strikes, healing stations, etc. It's not similar to TF2 like some think because even the most support-heavy medic still does damage, and only really heals through deployable health packs and health stations (by default they get a shotgun, which is OP as hell right now).

You start with two classes, an air-strike using rifle guy and a shotgun-wielding medic. Then two classes are on a "free rotation" system akin to League of Legends. Every class that you don't own costs either $5.99 or 30,000 credits (the in-game currency) to unlock. You get credits from playing games and from completing missions, which range from getting multi-kills to reviving teammates. Each missions I have had so far is 600 credits.

At the beginning I got 12,000 credits almost instantly (which previously was enough to buy a class, in earlier tests). Now, that credit gain haults to a few hundred per game, with the occassional 600 from mission completions. This makes unlocking classes very slow, which is annoying only because of the nature of how good some of the extra classes are, and how you don't get any initial choice as to which 2 classes you start with. Other than that, it's slow but that's understandable with only 7 classes in the game, as it wouldn't be wise to let you unlock them all in 2-3 days.

The game has maps which feature several objectives, which are mixed together in a random fashion. Blow-up this, blow-up this, then deliver packages to a helicopter. Pretty strange mix, but essentially they boil down to putting something (package, C4, etc.) in a specific place where defense must guard, and then allowing it to sit for a specific period of time before anything actually happens.

It's a fun game with a competitive future, but it's plagued by issues early in the beta phase which have yet to be fixed. First off, when you attempt to quickly join a match you're connected to full servers for some reason which ends with an error, a second error, and then getting kicked out of the queue. When you join back up, it attempts to match you in the same game, despite it still being full.

The server browser has options to limit your search, but apparently it thinks I have <50 ms ping to every single server because it didn't narrow my search at all.

Weapons are a bit of an issue with some being insanely strong, and others being fairly weak. Iron sights is not an ideal way to aim in this game but despite that the fact that recoil doesn't seem to lessen, and there appears to be 0 benefit to stability when using iron sights, that seems like poor game design. You're already standing still which is a huge pitfall in a game this fast-paced, why not give a slight boost to stability to allow longer-range shots on rifles to counter pesky snipers? As I mentioned early the shotgun is ridiculous, allowing the medic to essentially 1-shot anyone who comes even to medium range, before she heals herself up instantly and returns to combat. She also has a 1-click revive, so it's a bit of an issue when the other team stacks 2-3.

The biggest issue which plagues the future of the game is the fact that you cannot influence spawns. On trainyard the third objective is the delivery of data cores to a helicopter planted near the spawn of the defensive team. If you push the helicopter and control that area, the enemy team still spawns 3-seconds away, rather than being pushed back. This makes it quite difficult to control points where you must defend planted-C4 and other objectives, especially with a wave-based respawn timer which could randomly give the aced enemy team 4 seconds until they can spawn, or 30 seconds (similar to TF2 pubs).


Overall I think the game will be successful as long as they speed up the initial unlock on your first class so people can play as what they want until they unlock further options. Being sniped by Vasili with 0 counter snipers because no one wants to pay $5.99 is a little ridiculous, and after playing 8 games in this beta alone I am crawling towards unlocking him at a pace that will take me another 3 weeks.