Recent reviews by wooothebadman

First note: this game is indeed a proper metroidvania; the entire game is a giant, interconnected map rather than a series of levels.

This game I'd probably give a 7/10, while the original SotN is like a 9.5/10 (and this is with score being reduced due to aging poorly). I might even go as low as a 6/10 for this game.

Let me get this out of the way, SotN stands for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I need to mention that now because more than any other metroidvania, this game stands to be compared to it.

So why does this fall so short of the classic? Lots of reasons. The most pertinent, for me, I think is the story/setting. SotN isn't an overly complicated story. But it's all there. You're Alucard, you must kill Dracula (your FATHER). You're in his castle, which is some kind of living thing created by this curse. Also, Dracula was already defeated just a few years ago by Richter Belmont. Dracula doesn't usually come back until about 100 years after he's killed. So why so soon? Basically, you're a cool dude on a cool mission in a cool castle. It's got all kinds of things to motivate the player before you even get into the awesome exploration. Also, the dialogue is silly but man does it try. And it is MEMORABLE. Bloodstained (RotN)? You are some typical anime waifu who moans far too sexually when taking damage. You have some kind of dumb video game powers due to experiments or something. Your enemy... some other guy with dumb video game powers from the same experiments (but the last boss is randomly some big demon thing). The castle? Well... you gotta have a castle. That's it. That's the only reason there's a castle. Because we're aping Castlevania.

And the castle is a big problem, too. SotN didn't worry that much about making geographic sense, sure. But at least it could hide behind the whole "it's cursed! It's a living thing that creates nightmares!" Here the castle is clearly just a series of ideas thrown together without ANY thought. Like, at least in SotN there was SOME level of structural sense. The bottom went down into the caves, the top was literally on top of the castle and you could see the spires. At the west and east walls, you could see windows that led to what was outside the castle; west was the forest that led into the castle, east overlooked cliffs over the sea. And in the center was the clock room, which made for a memorable centerpiece. In RotN, you go down and hit caves and an underwater area. Under that, a ... desert? Huh? At the top left is an "Oriental Laboratory", whatever that is. But it has a bunch of outdoor areas, despite the fact that you reach it via very tall spires. And then there's a train that leads to another part of the map. There's nothing about this area that suggests you need a train to get to it. Then there's a land of giants area. Like a *$&%ing Mario game.

The enemies in the castle are just as nonsensical. There's giant puppy heads and kitty torsos. There's ninjas and girls in bunny *costumes*. There's a lot of black slime creatures at the beginning, making it seem like that's going to be a major concept. But there's only a couple other spawns of those outside the beginning. There's girls playing electric guitars that shoot fire out of their guitars. There's a couple of robot-or-something bosses that look like something out of Warframe. Madness.

So the plot/characters/setting can be summarized as STUFF. But what about gameplay? The gameplay is decent. Unfortunately the 40+ hours I have are attributed to new game+ and GRINDING, which are not things that I particularly care for. I would have wished for more interaction with the power growth systems. Like a talent tree or something where I could more clearly define and work toward a build. You can sort of do that, but mostly you improve ALL of your stats by leveling/eating food/gearing up. But regardless of that, the enemies do provide a decent challenge and gameplay loop. AND you are able to work up and make Miriam OP.

Critical path design is not great, though. SotN is a bit obtuse to get around, and that's something I attribute to aging poorly. Somehow RotN- a game that's had 20+ years to learn from these mistakes- is worse. Now I don't want the game to be fully modern and hold the player's hand and show the way, but figuring out where to go next is frequently nigh impossible. There are times when you have to explore every possible missing pixel of the map to find something to progress. There is a gate that requires you to get an ID. While there is a cute scene where you get your photo taken, it's really disconnected that you would think to get a *photo* ID from the photo. Especially since you attach a photo of yourself to someone else's ID! If that works, why do you need a photo at all?!?!

And then there's the moon stuff. Ugh, god. Usually a good game makes you feel clever. This game decided to make me feel stupid. So at some point you are given a sword that can "split the moon in half", or some such. Cool. But what is this for? Apparently you have to beat Gebel (the fakeout last boss) down until the moon in his boss room turns red. Then slice that moon in half. What makes this so eyeroll inducing it that it is a ripoff of SotN. In SotN, you run into Dracula's throne room and find Richter Belmont, famous vampire-slayer, has "taken over". Richter has shown to be a boy-scout type of "lawful good" person (which is shown to the player when you start the game as him, argue morals with Dracula and kill Dracula). So the situation is CLEARLY off. In RotN, I don't know anything about Gebel. I have no reason to suspect anything is off. Maybe his shards have corrupted him? How should I know? Anyway, if you do some searching, you find some magic glasses. If you go up to Richter wearing the glasse, you can now see an orb flying around that isn't there without the glasses. Break the orb and *gasp*, it turns out Richter was being mind-controlled! This is a much more direct design. Either you see the orb or you don't, and you can kill the orb right away. There's no fumbling about trying to figure out when and where to use a sword. Anywy, if you don't do kill the orb, you end up killing Richter and get the "bad" ending. Which makes sense because you killed the HERO and Alucard doesn't really know this guy, so he assumes job done. In RotN, Gebel dies either way. So why is it a game over if you kill him? Why can't you still slice the moon after? Miriam is the one who knows Gebel, not the player. IT'S THE SAME IDEA BUT EVERYTHING IS DONE LOGISTICALLY POORLY. So then you're supposed to go find the other moon in the castle and slash that in half to open a portal. But I forgot that moon was there because it's placed in an empty room with no important reason that the player would ever visit it a second time. Also, I didn't realize this moon wasn't the same moon. Why didn't the portal just open in Gebel's room? Why the extra steps?

Ugh. Sorry, I wanted to ramble on that because it legitimately annoyed me; copying an idea and doing it worse. WHY. Anyway, the last thing I wanted to mention is the music. I don't want this to be a major point since most video games have absolute garbage for music that isn't worth even mentioning. But this is Castlevania, dammit. And the music here is... kinda meh. There's a nice dilly here and there. A lot of it sounds like remixes of Castlevania music designed to skirt around copyright law. Except that it's weirdly dissonant. Anyway, it's not terrible. But certainly not godly like SotN.

Oh, also the ending is kinda anticlimactic. They basically ran out of zones and just decided "well, it's the last zone so I guess we put the last boss here." Par for the course, though.

Overall my feelings are positive, I guess. Hence the recommend. I do think the price might be a little high. Like, compared to something like Ori and the Blind Forest, it doesn't make sense that this is twice as expensive (looking at undiscounted launch prices).

Quite an impressive game made out of Doom open source code, especially since it is apparently the designer's first game (might not be. There's a bit in the credits that makes it sound like it is).

I only have two major gripes about this game. The first is a technical issue. For some reason, the game can't be patched without screwing up players' save files. I have no idea why this would be. My only thought is that the dev is uploading the game to Steam incorrectly. IE, she's including a save file in the build folder when it is uploaded. By doing this, Steam will assume it is part of the installation and overwrite the save file of the user. I don't know the Doom engine, so it might have something to do with how that engine works. Or maybe where it stores its saves? No idea. Anyway, this (or something else) broke my Steam's file path to the exe (???) and made it so I had to open the folder and manually open the exe from there. Because of this, Steam stopped logging my hours played. Hence why it shows 5 instead of the 12+ I actually have. While there are workarounds available for these issues, they still are critical issues that should NOT exist in a fully-released, paid product.

The second has to do with item pickup radius. Not sure why it is the way it is, maybe a bug when increasing Doom's resolution to 1080p? Regardless, it requires what feels like pixel-perfect collision to pick crap up, and that REALLY sucks when you have these super fast fights that require you to grab things in the middle of a chaotic fight. I died countless times because I simply couldn't pick up health at a vital moment.

What I want to commend is how the dev set about to making her own game. Hedon is its own thing. I've seem some negative reviews that basically boil down to the parts of the game that are un-Doomlike, but that's a completely idiotic thing to demand. It's clearly meant to be the dev's vision. It's not Doom. There's a deliberate pacing and a build up throughout the game. I will say it's bizarre that the game continues on past the big boss fight with the flying mage lady. Like, that fight is so intense it can cause the game to slow down massively. Really felt like the end of the game.

I really like the weapons. Even the axe feels awesome to smash someone with when you are sprinting around full speed. And somehow this dev figured out how to make stealth work when using a weapon that does not one-shot enemies. What a genius! I mean, I'm giving her too much credit for something so simple, but it's crazy how many games don't understand the problems created by requiring players to one-shot enemies to stealth effectively (Warframe, Skyrim, Dishonored, Deus Ex, to name a few).

The other warning I have would be about losing your place. Not that you get lost easily, but rather the game is extremely confusing to come back to if you are mid-level. I basically had to make sure I had at least an hour or two each time I played and had to complete a level and stop there. The whole "no hand-holding" old school philosophy means that if you put the game down and come back a month later, you will automatically be hopelessly lost. Not a *bad* thing, per se, but a difficult thing to deal with if your real life is very busy.

The last issue I had was with the item system. It's far too cumbersome to scroll through items to find the one you want, and there's no way I'm going to remember the dozen keybindings there are to access them manually. The last boss fight is absolutely ridiculous. It feels like you need to use every single item you have saved up to succeed. I was in a bad mood and ended up using a console command to beat it, thus ruining the experience for myself, but I feel bad about it. If the item system could have some QoL improvement to it, such as a quick menu that pauses the game or is just so intuitive pausing isn't needed, that would be the biggest improvement I could suggest.

Otherwise, it's a really cool game. Make sure to read the store page's description to see if it's your bag. And if it is, you'll have a great time!

My review of AMID EVIL is actually more lukewarm than a solid recommendation. But Steam's review system is binary, so I will give it a thumb's up; my feelings, overall, are positive on the game.

I got the game while it was still in early access, so that's a major factor in why I didn't complete the game until very recently. It is worth noting, though, that regardless of that it would have taken me about the same amount of time. Part of that is because of how busy my life has been of late, but more importantly it is because the game did not have a strong enough draw on me to want to sit down and spend time with it. I'll go over why.

So the first thing is that there really isn't any kind of story. Which is by design, no doubt, in order to fulfill that old school feeling. I guess I'm an old man now. In order for something to hold my attention I need a good story. Explosions, violence, and high speed action isn't enough. I need to know *why*. There is some kind of lore- I think- tucked away in codex entries. But that doesn't count, man. These things need to be on the screen. You can even convey them in a limited way. Just a sentence here and there. Visual storytelling. Every level is just some abstract video game level devoid of logic. There's never a sense of "oh, this is where the X does Y." Or, "wait a minute. Did they just Z?" I want to be sucked into a world, I don't want to be the one doing the sucking... heh.

Next I'll go over the thing that got my attention for this game: the weapons. I was immediately drawn to the non-conventional selection of weapons this game has. Although... some are not as unconventional as I expected. I'll just talk about each one:

1: Axe
Like Quake 1, you start off with just an axe. I read some comment that this thing is pretty useful. I'd have to disagree. Considering I always had plenty of ammo (even though I played on hard) I never felt the need to use this. Especially since it felt quite difficult to land hits without also taking damage. Even moreso the further I got with the kind of hectic scenarios that come up. Perhaps if the game was willing to let go of this particular old school design they could have had a quick melee button, rather than manually switching to it. THEN I might have used it.

2. Blue staff
This is weird to say, but this might be my favorite... uh, design decision. Not weapon, no. It's weak and niche. But it's got a *purpose*. Many old school shooters have the first weapon (usually a pistol) be incredibly weak. That way, all other weapons "feel powerful." It's a cheap idea, but effective. Here they have done that as well, but this fires homing projectiles! It's so damn useful for hitting wily, fast enemies or flying enemies or firing from behind cover. Wonderful!

3. Green sword
Kind of like a bread-and-butter type weapon. It's not that strong, but it slashes out huge projectiles that fly straight and pierce enemies. It's alright.

4. Blue Trident
Truly a mixed bag. It's a hitscan machine gun that's perfectly accurate. AND you can overkill enemies to make them explode for huge damage. On paper, it's an exciting and powerful weapon. In practice, I didn't use it that much. That's because I decided to use a controller to play (don't hate, it's easier on my hands after a long day in the office) and there's no aim assist. I found myself reaching over for the mouse when ever I *needed* to use this weapon (sniping). Aside from that, the dps isn't there. I'd much rather stick and run with a slow and heavy weapon in every case.

5. Orange Orb
It's a rocket launcher. It like, does different damage depending on what planet the orb resembles or something. I couldn't figure it out, so it just felt like the damage was random.

6. Green Mace
It's a shotgun. Kudos to whoever decided this should be considered a stronger weapon than a rocket launcher. Old school shooters love shotguns! Otherwise... nothing new, really. Pinning people to walls is a nice extra indicator that an enemy is dead, but often this means sending their soul drop to some place unreachable. D'oh!

7. Purple thing
It's a BFG. It's technically different, I guess, but that's what it is.

8. Soul Mode
I think it's worth mentioning as its own weapon. It's like a super meter that you fill by picking up enemy souls that when activated, makes you super strong for a few seconds. I'm not sure I cared for this, ultimately. By default, it activates simply by shooting once your meter is full. There is an option that lets you use an alt fire so that you can fight without being forced to waste it. It's... kind of a problem either way. By having it go off automatically, you often find yourself wasting it. And that feels awful. By being able to save it, you can trivialize any tough fight that comes up. Which feels like cheating. I would have personally preferred the old "secondary fire" concept than this. I mean, they had to design two firing modes for each weapon anyway.

So there you have it. It's not as creative as I hoped, but it's okay. I guess I just expected them all to be more unique, since there's only 6 weapons in total (not counting the melee). Another issue I found was that ammo always seemed so plentiful that I just kind of did whatever I wanted and it worked out. Towards the end I was using more and more BFG ammo and other big guns, and I barely felt the sting of wastefulness (again, I played on hard mode).

On to enemies. I've seen some comments about AI or variety. I don't really think those are a problem. Each episode has its own set of enemies for its levels, and they are made more threatening by the level's layout. That's a-okay! The problem I have goes back to the comment I have about story. I have no idea what I'm looking at... ever. They went TOO retro. The enemies look like something from SNES mode7 (like Starfox) rather than Quake or something. What are these things?!

The level design, I suppose, is the MVP of the bunch... I think. They really did their damnedest to make every level very visually distinct and have its own kind of traversal. That being said, nothing really stuck with me. Probably because of the lack of story, but also the unvarying mechanics. The entire game only has a silver key, gold key, blue switch, red switch. And while the levels allow for circling around and exploration, ultimately your path is fairly linear.

So yeah... it's okay.

So first off, this definitely is an actual Metroidvania. Although it dips into the well of backtracking a tad too much.

I do give this a positive review. I almost went negative because I went into the final boss fight not realizing it was FOR REAL the last boss and saw that the game auto-saved (even though auto-save isn't a thing in this game). But then I was able to hit continue and actually go back and do the stuff I meant to do. Whew.

But I see people saying this game is better than Symphony of the Night a lot. Which is nonsense. I wouldn't rank this above Ori and the Blind Forest or Guacamelee! It is good, though. And no, this isn't me coming from a place of rose-tinted lenses. I actually only got around to playing SOTN a few years ago, so my memory is recent. It had such an effect on me that I made Dracula my Steam profile pic. It has some outdated stuff, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is it good. And good in ways that modern games won't be. I'll get into that in this review because it is relevant to how this game falters.

The big thing that SoTN does that is so rare is how well it handles exploration. There are so many secrets and so many unique rewards hidden everywhere. There are entire bosses, levels, and power-ups that you can find in a secret area that are completely missable. The amount of thought and effort given to designing these things is still top notch, even though you may never see them. Hell, the second *half* of the game (the upside-down castle) is missable! All the while, you gain more cool tricks and powers that make backtracking extremely fun AND brisk.

Timespinner doesn't really accomplish this. No game these days does, honestly, because a game dev is always concerned about making sure everyone gets to see all the cool things. And a lot of game dev's can't even think of cool things in the first place. Timespinner has back-tracking and secrets, but very infrequently is it as interesting or rewarding. Most often your reward is more health, sand, or mana. Granted, SoTN would give you health, ammo, and mana upgrades as filler. But it would also give you stuff like Poison Mist form or Double Jump. That, alongside an entire "level" to explore and an entirely unique boss encounter. Usually in Timespinner it's just a single room. Eh.

The map layout isn't perfect. It's mostly very long. Which probably makes it feel more like Castlevania 2 than SoTN. You do get fast travel options early on, but fun stuff like Gumby slide and infinite jump come very late (I think both are missable, too, which makes them have that specialness like SoTN for finding them).

The combat is okay. You dual wield orbs that you can mix and match. On paper that sounds pretty cool, but a lot of the orbs are kinda bland. They mostly seem to fit into a Pokemon-esque weakness/strong against element system. The best ones are the Hammer, Pink Lightning Bolt, and Chakram Eye Thing as those actually have unique functionality on them. I also find the rhythm of attack to be odd. It's this "1-2....1-2....1-2" beat rather than something like "1, 2, 1, 2".

These also get dragged down by this completely unnecessary leveling system. In a 12 hour game, am I really expected to spend several hours leveling up all my orbs? I actually went through the bonus dungeon and grinded the Empire Fist thing and used items to power level them. I got them to like 50, I think, and they still could be leveled more. With this I was able to beat the last boss by Hockey-fighting him (just stood right in his face and traded blows with him). It trivialized the fight. Iunno. I guess this is for the NG+ mode. Why even bother?

The spells are pretty cool. But I feel like there was a bloat of ideas. Like they needed to be parsed down to the best ones. It doesn't help that you have to charge up to cast them (all of them), and some are functionally way more practical than others. And the same elemental damage system gets in the way of just using the ones you want to use.

Then there's the time powers. Prince of Persia this is not. It's a pretty cool gimmick to freeze people and then jump on their heads, or jump on projectiles to get places. But that's all you can do with it. You can use it to re-position, too, but there aren't other other actual time powers or uses for it.

Hey! So let's talk about the story. If you're an intolerant bigot, you might want to know that this game has the gays. I see a lot of people complaining about that. If that's a problem for you, go ahead and skip this one and play the 99.9% of games out there with a straight white male protagonist. Still here? Okay. I will say that LGBT stuff is handled quite clumsily. Like, every single one of the protagonists is on the spectrum, and the one that isn't is poly. That seems mathematically unlikely. Then there's the dialogues and interactions themselves. Which are eyeroll-inducingly PC. Everyone is so accepting and says the right thing, and then the reaction is a "Thanks for understanding!" They don't feel like characters going through drama, they feel like an after-school PSA about tolerance. All of this is completely out of left field, too. None of the story revolves around this stuff, but these guys just prattle on in full detail about their leanings anyway. The blandness of it permeates the style of the whole game. The conflict is explained with the characters blatantly spelling out that the war is "complicated" and constantly reminding the player that both sides have done bad things. No one has any real personality, and the character portraits don't have expressions. Hell, they all have the same body, too. When flipping back and forth between characters, it's really noticeable what bits of the art are being swapped out. I know I can't say SoTN has a great story, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ are lines like "What is a man? A miserable pile of secrets!" memorable for all their schlockyness.

The best part of this game is probably the music. Likely the best soundtrack I've heard all year, and probably the last few years. It does get a little too similar to SoTN, though. Like.... is this an homage? One track in particular sounds quite a lot like this one:
https://youtu.be/jL0UoyFS7Ww

Gripes aside, it's a pretty solid game. Fun, hits the Metroidvania marks to enough of a degree to be good. Not as good as people say, but worth the play.

As with each Metroidvania, my first comment will be about that. Yes: this game is a Metroidvania. You get railroaded onto the critical path for a long time, and there isn't a huge amount of forking paths, but it still fits the definition. Just a streamlined version of it.

The game is still solid, through and through, delivering on the kind of things that Guacamelee! has come to be about. To echo some other folks sentiments, I do feel like they upped the amount of "story" in the game, and that story is some sort of Rick and Morty rip off. Mind you, I try to never say a story is a rip off of another one, but in this case the timing seems right. And the efforts to utilize the whole multiple dimensions/timelines bit is incredibly shallow here.

But Guacamelee! has never been about story. All of the dialogue and characters exist as 1 dimensional quips personified. The "lore" is a mish mash of Mexican *things* and "don't worry about it, just play the game" attitude. And I say "Mexican things" because it's just that the main character is a luchador and random things are in Spanish. I don't know about the Spanish. What little Spanish I know makes it seem like what's chosen to be put in Spanish is entirely arbitrary. I know more about wrestling. So I roll my eyes when there's a move called "dash punch" instead of like, "Running clothesline". Aside from a piledriver and a suplex, there is no real wrestling knowledge here. I guess they just like luchadors.

Anyway, for as much as I enjoy this series (and this game, too) I do feel like this game is more like a standalone DLC than a proper sequel. It's just more of the same. So if you were indifferent about the first one, I don't think this one will impress you either. If you loved the first one and just want more, then here you go!

I think my biggest complaint is a lot of the chicken stuff. Someone apparently decided that the best part of Guacamelee! is that you can turn into a chicken. So they upped the amount of chicken content by approxiamately 10000%. Now you can fight fully as a chicken, there's an entire half of the game about chicken levels and secrets, and a whoooole lot of chicken-specific platforming. And, oh boy, is the platforming aggravating. See, I like jumping and double-jumping. And all that tricky mid-jump dimensional shifting and managing all your combo moves. What I absolutely DON'T care for is this flappy bird, physics nonsense. Basically there are a few sections that involve hovering, and peppering the hover button *just right* over a fan to gain lift off of it. This gets compounded by the second biggest problem, which is that...

This sequel has a strange obsession with instant death. Maybe I need to revisit the first game for comparison, but there's an awful lot of platforming AND combat that has instant death obstacles all around you. Now, Guacamelee! oftentimes just zips you back to the last checkpoint without even taking damage or reloading. But instant death means the entire sequence is reset. It's quite strange. I guess they got offended that people thought the first game was easy, and this was their "solution." Well, I hate it. I like this game just being fun, thanks. Don't reset my progress. It gets at its dumbest at the end, where a bunch of dimensional rifts appear everywhere ACROSS THE ENTIRE GAME. Just to break up the scenery I guess. Hey, you backtracking there, buddy? Guess what? Now there's instant death all over this part! Don't get complacent! It's not hard to deal with, just unnecessary.

I guess this whole game is unnecessary. But eh. So was the first one. Still fun, so thumbs up, ese vato!

I've been hearing a lot of positive buzz around Warframe the past few months, comparing it to Destiny and saying it does right by players and such. So I gave it a try. Now it's high time I debunk this bizarre myth.

This game is in no way better than Destiny (and both are now free). It has ALL of the same problems of that game, plus many more.

So what are the things about Destiny that players took issue with?
1. Story was bland/practically non-existant
2. Game was repetitive and you run out of interest really fast
3. Raids don't have matchmaking
4. All other end-game was lame

And I'll add some of my own issues with it, too:
5. Low gun variety/uninteresting variants
6. Bad enemy design
7. Bad sandbox design
8. Bad late game difficulty design

Now I'll go over how each one of these things applies to Warframe, ONLY WORSE.

1. Player is given no understanding, motivation, direction, drama, character, or interest in the story.

2. Warframe becomes repetitive from level 1 (after the tutorial). It uses all randomized level design from what seems to be a very limited pool.

3. I don't know of any kind of end-game. At least, not in the traditional sense of having cool raids and stuff. You fight the same enemies as you have been the entire time, only now their health and damage are SUPER HIGH BRO. The boss fights usually involve them becoming invincible for long periods of time... and then you can damage them. The nonsensical approach to damage calculation also means that high-level players can just annihilate these guys and skip all or most phases, deleting any half-assed attempt at a "boss fight".

4. In my 180 hours playing, I was always trying to search for the meat of the game. But it's just pointless grinding to increase your power. I don't know why I gave this game so many chances. I just kept thinking that eventually something would happen. It never did.

5. Gun variety is somewhat interesting. I found weird, creative weapons that were cool here and there. Variants, however, were practically non-existant and terrible. Only certain weapons have variants, and usually only 1 or 2. These are given out seemingly arbitrarily, and provide no meaningful changes to the weapon.

6. Enemy design is WAY worse than Destiny. Several enemies are so similar in silhouette or even their appearance that you have no concept of who does what. There are only two factions of enemies. And then there's the Infected, who are reskins of the other two factions. And the Corrupted, who are also reskins of those two factions! Then there's the uneven distribution of ranks. I probably met my first Nox like 30 hours into the game. You see like one of those guys for every 2000+ Grenier grunts you meet.

7. There's only one sandbox, and I guess it's a noob trap? I went there a couple times and I got the impression it was a waste of time for my level.

8. At least with Destiny I feel like an attempt was made. Nightfalls and Raids were cool, but enemy damage and health were often overtuned. *All* Warframe has to offer is overtuned damage and health!

And then there's all the other problems. Like the complete absence of streamlining to any part of game design. For example, most games with matchmaking will try to limit how many things there are to queue for. Usually around 4-8, or sometimes as low as 2. Warframe, on the other hand, has a dozen levels on a dozen zones, each with their own matchmaking. Then there's secondary missions on top of those. In all, there's probably around 100 things you could queue for at any given time. And the player is never given any direction on what should or shouldn't be queued for.

This is exasperated by how cryptic the entire game is. And I don't know that this crypticness is by design, really. The dev's just lack any ability to explain anything. Like: how do you farm more Warframes? Where should I go for my level? What am I supposed to be doing? How does damage work? Who are the Grenier? Why should I care about any of this? What happened to all the people? Etc

And those "dozen levels" per planet are a complete facade. As I said, all of the levels are randomly generated. So there's absolutely no reason for them to place all these points on the map for players to complete. It's just time-wasting for the sake of it. What they should have done is actually design a gameplay loop that takes time to get through and feels good. What Warframe allows you to do (and therefore ALL players do this) is speed run almost every level. So while you COULD actually explore levels and fight dudes (this takes 15 or so minutes), you would be much better off just sprinting to the end of the level and ignoring everything you can (this takes 3 or so minutes). That way you get the loot!

Which, by the way, brings me to one of the "strong" points of the game: the movement. Yes, you can move very fast and doing so is fun. HOWEVER, the existence of this destroys the game. As I said, it allows you to speed run levels and skip playing the damn thing. Furthermore, enemies move at a very slow pace; as though expecting you to sit in cover and fight in a hold-out style. It's just... these parts don't go together, man!

Another thing that should be a draw in this game is its namesake: the Warframes. Like, it's cool to collect these robots and to see all their cool abilities. But... the ability design is insane. Like, you can build a robot that just pulses out massive AoE damage that kills everything (even through walls). Or there's Valkyr who can straight up become totally invincible for like 40 seconds. Or forever, because of the energy system...

... yeah, I hate the energy system, too. It doesn't regenerate by default. And the economy is completely out of whack. You're supposed to get mana back through pick-ups. But those are tied to enemies. So if there's only a couple enemies, you won't be getting any mana back. But if there's tons of enemies? You basically have infinite mana. And health/shields suffer from the same problem.

And let's talk about loot in Warframe. It is freaking terrible. In a loot based game (like Destiny, but this is ANY game) you usually just find stuff and it's like, "Cool! A new gun!" In Warframe you have to craft EVERYTHING. So any time you find something cool, you get to wait a whole day (or more!) to actually see what that thing is. That is, *if you actually have the crafting materials for it.*

Let me also debunk the whole F2P thing, too. You *can* get away with never paying a cent, but to do so you need to play the auction house. That's not really something everyone can do. Especially since there actually isn't an auction house. You have to manually stand around in the "city" and spam trade chat. I don't have any patience for that. Luckily I'm not a cheapskate, so I just bought a little bit of the premium currency so that I could get my Warframe and weapon slots. Boy... what an exciting purchase...

Lastly, I wanna touch on the crappy manner that this game is developed. All updates are done through the launcher, so that means Steam can't auto-update it. That also means you'll get desync problems if you crash that cause Steam to think it's been uninstalled. And when you first install the game it asks for an admin password. Like, I don't have an admin log in for my PC, WHAT? *Content* development is bad, too. Rather than improve the game, over the last 5 years they just add random crap. Like a wingsuit and FISHING. These dev's clearly have no concept of game design; they just shove whatever idea pops into their heads. During my playtime they "updated" the UI. But instead of improving things like usablity, QoL, streamlining features, etc, it just... looks neat, I guess. It actually REMOVED some of the info displayed on some menus, forcing you to mouse over stuff to get that same info. And this change only affected SOME of the UI, so now it's completely inconsistent in appearance. WHAT WAS THE POINT?!

My "no" isn't a strong one. A big part of this is because the game is apparently continually adding stuff. While some see this as a positive, I see it somewhat as a negative BECAUSE the game should feel like a full, complete, polished product. THEN the idea of constantly adding stuff becomes a positive because it's like... hey, free updates! Cool! But this almost feels like an Early Access. Which would be fine *if it were advertised as such*. Perhaps I'll revisit this game in like a year and update my review then. Perhaps. I have a lot of games in my backlog, so who knows if I'll remember this.

The other big part of this is the existence of two other games on steam: Game Dev Tycoon and Mad Games Tycoon. Now, normally I don't subscribe to the idea of putting down a game simply because another like it exists already. So long as a game finds new, interesting things to do with the idea I am fine with playing another iteration. Hell, I've already played those other two games and felt the need to buy this one. So I'm definitely down for another game dev sim. What Game Dev Studio adds to the concept doesn't really do much for me. So I'll break down why the other two work briefly before I disect this one.

Game Dev Tycoon is the most basic, bare bones of the three games. If you want the most casual, brisk experience then that one is for you. It's easy, clean, simple, and the default mode is almost like a fun history lesson... or... quiz. IE if you know about the rise and fall of consoles and have a good knowledge of general games stuff (like making an ass load of cash off the Game Boy and avoiding the Virtual Boy like the plague), you can put that knowledge to good use.

Mad Games Tycoon (despite its name sounding like a crappy, Russian knock-off brand) is a much more full-blooded, legit sim expierience. You have to manage office space, production, distribution, take things off the market, make sales and bundles, etc. If you want to do waaaay more stuff, Mad Games is best.

So then we get to Game Dev Studio. What it does is tries to be like Mad Games Tycoon by adding a ton of complexity. It also tries to remove certain pieces of complexity in exchange for its own ideas: employees level up and need vacations, raises and paid company activities; other game companies form rivalries and try to ruin your business; objectives. None of these things really make the game better.

Having to micromanage employees is a hassle because you can have like a hundred of them (I think my highest count was around 40, the first real campaign wants you to get up to 60!) so you just constantly get spammed out. So much so that the game comes with auto-management features to remove the clutter. There doesn't seem to be any tactical reason to hold off on any of these things, so it's better to just use the auto-feature. Any time the best way to enjoy a feature is to automate or ignore it means that that feature is BAD.

The rivalries is probably the most fun idea, but lacks the depth to really be interesting. It seems like the other companies are like Gandhi from Civ: they just want to destroy all opposition with endless fiery rage. But I could be wrong. Unfortunately this is the one feature that I saw the least of during my game time.

Objectives are the addition that fell flat the most. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the game is very upfront with the idea of "campaigns." See, campaigns could have been interesting... maybe. There have been other sim games to do this idea. Personally it's not that appealing to me; I'd rather just go straight into freeplay. BUT if you wanted to put some kind of story or single-player "experience" into a sim game, this would be the way to do it. Unfortunately all I've seen from this game for campaigns is to give the player simple objectives. Get 60 employees, makes X amount of money, get Y amount of fans. So this idea does absolutely nothing for me because I inherently want to make it big anyway!

Furthermore, this really puts a damper on starting the game. I completed the tutorial and what I wanted to do was keep playing. But the game would prefer if you leave that game and start one of the campaigns. I thought about just continuing to play the same map but the world seemed to become stagnant. So... that's boring.

Lastly I should really mention the nonsensical manner in which games are successful or failures. In the other two games, you're supposed to find genre-topic match combos and then allocate the correct amount of priority to features based on the type of game. Making an action game? Focus on gameplay. Making an RPG? Focus on story. Pretty simple idea to gamify. Here, you just put priority up to max and it always seems to be a good idea. I made a Medieval game with "realistic firearms" and that pleased the audience. WAT?

Ultimately I found myself dreading opening the game up again. It just didn't hold my interest. Compare that to the other two game dev sims I mentioned, and those became like addictive problems. I'd look up and be like, "Oh, god! The sun is up!"because I would get so sucked into it. Suffice it to say, this genre and topic combo is usually an easy win with me.

The real shame is that there still is a version of a game dev sim that I really want out there that doesn't exist. What I really want is more focus on the CREATIVE aspect of making a game. In all three of these games, all you can really do is name the game and pick the genre and setting. That's it. I can't make the box art, write a blurb for the story, or make a dozen other tiny decisions that would help each game feel like something I actually ... uh... "made". I realize that kinda thing is stupid because it never actually affects the success or failure of the game. It's just dumb fun. Hell, there was this movie sim game I played called Hollywood Mogul 3 that allowed you to make acceptance speeches at the Oscars. Holy hell was it fun to go on a drunken, never-ending ramble on NPC's. And don't even get me started on The Movies. Agh! So fun.

NOTE: This game IS a Metroidvania- the entire game is one giant, connected map and features non-linear exploration, optional areas, and even movement unlocks that vastly speed up the back-tracking process.

I have a good deal of mixed feelings on this game. I will say that the overall feeling is *very* positive, but there are definitely some caveats that I'll get into as they can easily be deal-breakers for certain people.

I would start with the positives, but there's a big issue I feel must warn about as it is a potential MAJOR deal-breaker: there is some sort of technical problem with the game engine that can make the game "unplayable". Fortunately the problem appears to be solved by changing a couple settings in the options menu (you may also need to edit an .ini file with notepad). These issues are documented and pinned on the discussion section of Steam for this game. I am unsure if these solutions will work for 100% of computers out there.

So let's get back to those positives.

The combat system is pretty dang good. The guard mechanic makes it so that your offense and defense are one thing, and you can see-saw back and forth its meter with well-timed attacks and dodges (a successful dodge refunds meter based on the amount of damage absorbed). The attacks have weight, requiring wind-up and timing. You also do this floaty slide when you attack. So rather than having your feet nailed to the ground, you can retreat or advance a little bit while your attack animates. I really appreciate when a game plays footsies well. So should you!

The atmosphere, tone, and consistent lore are great. One thing I'm kind of sick of are indie games (Metroidvanias specifically) being so silly and low brow. You are a cool dude who fights cool monsters in a cool castle... thing. So it scratches that Castlevania itch in a way. You know, like back before Castlevania got super carried away with having z-grade, reject Anime writing.

I even like the music. It's ambient, but not too ambient. It's just sophisticated enough to catch your ear. It's not too moody and dark. It's kinda just creepy and... wistful, at times.

Now onto the negatives.

Undoubtedly the first thing that sticks out is the player health and enemy damage output. For most of the game, the player can pretty much only survive 2-4 hits, usually 2. Since your guard constantly regenerates, that SHOULD mean you can survive infinite hits. WELL. Since your guard is connected to your attack, dodge, and shield that means you put yourself at risk by doing anything other than walking around. Enemies do SO MUCH damage that attacks will often completely deplete your guard. Also! Your health pool is really tiny. So that damage would straight up have killed you if not for the Last Stand mechanic. Get used to retracing your steps from the last save point!

But wait! There is a levelling system! And what about consumables or gear? Well, there are no consumables. At all. And the only gear in game are your four weapon slots, and none of those come with any kind of defensive properties (aside from increased range to attack from safer distances). For defense stats, there's Guard, Con, and Def. Guard is pretty useful as it is both offensive and defensive. Con is really weak. Def, AFAIK, lowers damage taken by 1% each level. Stats "Soft cap" at 30. By the end of the game I had 30 of a dps stat and around 10 in luck and guard I'm gonna assume that going past 30 isn't worth it. This also means that if you got those three stats to max you'd have 410 guard, 150 health, and 30% less damage taken. That actually sounds pretty good, but remember that's 40 levels beyond my complete playthrough, and suggesting you'd have zero dps stats. Yeah. No.

It's also worth mentioning that this stat system is ... lackluster. It is functional, sure. And you can effectively create playstyles as each dps stat allows you to use specific weapons (strength is like the big sword guy, dex is like swords and bows, eld is like a spellcaster). But there's no intelligence in this design. You just decide "I wanna use big swords." So you just constantly dump points into swords. AND the amount of xp it takes to level up increases no matter what. Rather than, say, increasing for leveling up that specific skill. So there's not much wiggle room. I prefer a system with more variety in what they allow the player to do.

On top of this, the leveling system is very strange. For some reason, it costs Yth stones in addition to XP (Vitae) to level up. But leveling up also becomes grindier and grindier to the point where it becomes pointless to get more levels because it would just take too long. There's a finite amount of Yth stones in the game, but infinite XP. But I had like 50 I couldn't be bothered to use at the end of the game.

That then segues into the next issue, which is rewards for exploration. All you can really look forward to (other than seeing a cool level or a cool enemy or boss) from exploring is Yth stones and weapons. That's it.

Speaking of art... well, you can look at the screenshots and judge for yourself. I wouldn't rank this up there with the best pixel art, but it works. Mostly. Certain levels look like boxy garbage, with like lazy gradients and flat colors (the biolab, the city at the bottom of the map, the computer place, the ... spaceship?). Then there's certain enemies that look kinda MSpainty. Like the couple of shadow guys that are just flat black. Who, by the way, completely blend into some of the backgrounds. Overall I think the art is pretty cool, and there are some solid animations. But there are definitely some things that kinda make me go "ehhhhh...."

The map is hot garbage. It's ugly, lacks most all functionality, has to be upgraded three times for no reason, and its scrolling controls are backwards. I almost question why there even is a map. But I get lost and forget where things are pretty easily so I'm glad it's there. I just wish I could access (and close) it with a single button press.

The default settings for controller aren't great, if I remember correctly. I tried changing my buttons, but unfortunately I feel these issues stem from liberal button creation. Like, for example, there is a dedicated button for using the flying ability that unlocks toward the end of the game, the teleport button, a button for telling your pet to stay still, both a dodge and block button, and the entire d-pad (or left stick) is eaten up by weapon selection. Some of these things could have been freed up by combining functions. Like, say if that fly skill just replaced the jump, or having block be neutral dodge since you generally want to pick a direction when dodging (also you can't dodge in the air). Further aggravating the problem is that some buttons share functionality in menus. For some reason I ended up placing the "action" button on LB, so there would be various menu options I thought I couldn't close because I would just be pressing B or A.

I should probably also mention the story. There's no real character (Saragat is just like, a generic knight man) but I do appreciate the attempt at somber, eloquent dialogue.

Along that note, I guess it's also worth mentioning that there seems to be an expectation of knowledge of Lovecraft stuff. I don't really know crap about it, which kinda seems like a hinderance to understanding some things. Iunno.

But that's it, really. All my complaints are fairly minor, compared to the whole. I actually even played through the game twice (once back towards the start of early access, and then some time after full release). And I don't do that often any more. Not bad.

Since I start a lot of reviews of games this way, I will point out that this IS actually a Metroidvania. I have some things to say about the map layout below.

I will say this isn't that strong of a recommend. I'll start by briefly summarizing what works, and then go into the caveats/potential deal-breakers for folks.

So the first thing to notice is that this thing only costs $3. I have no idea why it is so cheap. As far as I know, all of the art assets/animations are original. The sounds and music are stock, but for a game of this size with this much effort, I could easily see this costing $5 or more.

The boss design and combat are pretty decent. Very stiff and sluggish, but still precise and allowing for planning (like Castlevania).

Uhhh... uh oh. I'm kinda out of nice things to say, heh. It works. I think this one is mostly for people who are like, obsessed with Metroidvanias. There's nothing new or amazing here. Just... Metroidvania stuff!

So onto the negatives.

The store says that the game features English. This isn't entirely true as all of the enemy names are in Portugese. The dialogue is poorly translated, too. It doesn't look like Google translate, but I actually believe Google could have done a better job. This doesn't matter too much because the story is bereft of anything interesting: drama, motivation, character, plot or even succinctness. Sorry.

Obviously the art is an issue. It looks like it does in the screenshots. So you can be the judge of whether that bothers you. It's practical and functional, so I didn't personally care. There were some *presentation* issues from the art, though. Mostly minor, but I'll list them quickly.
-Secret walls are pretty much indistinguisable from any other tile. Every tile looks cracked already, so I just attacked every wall for secrets. Apparently I missed 4 achievement-worthy ones. Oh well.
-The fire stage has a full-screen VFX that is way too busy and makes seeing things downright hard.
-They didn't think to use screen effects/wipes/fades/what-have-you to transition certain things. The teleporter rooms are especially awful as the screen rotates for far too long and then has a few frames of hitching when the level changes. You could have covered up this little piece of lag with a fade or something!

This last art point isn't really art, but I mention it before I get into gameplay stuff. The inventory UI is atrocious. For some reason, all of your crafting materials are listed in the same place where all your items go (even though there's a crafting menu for all of that already). This just creates needless clutter for your equipables and consumables in a menu that already features ZERO organization! The skills menu cannot be clicked, offering no explanation for your passive or active skills. Somehow the "Drink" skill allows you to roll. OKAY. Lastly, the crafting menu does not offer comparison stats nor does it list the items you've already crafted. If you have a bad short term memory like me, prepare to switch tabs a lot.

Speaking of the crafting system, this is where some really awkward design decisions were made. Each weapon requires the previous version as one of its crafting materials. This is quite baffling since each sword has a different charge attack (charge attack functionality can be anything from a heal to an awesome explosion, etc) AND some of the swords are strictly sidegrades. Not to mention the fact that sometimes certain ingredients are hard to find or farm. So once or twice I had already acquired what I needed for the sword after next, so once I got the first sword I immediately crafting the next one, too. Meanwhile, all of the armor pieces are purely stat upgrades but DO NOT require the previous item. For me the most concerning issue was the existence of this whole system in the first place! Why not just give out these upgrades as rewards for exploring? If you really want crafting in the game, why not let us craft potions? I think there's something like 6 health potions in the entire game. It would make way more sense to be able to farm for potions. Especially since almost every crafting material has only one use (sometimes two) so you end up having a stockpile of crafting materials that just fill up your UI for no reason. Having repeatable crafts would create such a reason.

The stats system is lacking. There's no way to forge a playstyle or do anything interesting with it, which means it basically doesn't need to exist. The stats do feel good in terms of changing the game. So you can basically fiddle with them to get what you need to survive. Nothing is explained, though, so you can't be too sure just how much a difference 1 point in strength or crit chance will make. Or what Luck even does (I think it improves drop rates).

But all of the above is pretty minor. Let's talk about the thing that angered me the most: the map design. There's no rhyme or reason to it. You can move downward and suddenly find yourself in a mountainous area. Here's a snow area. Here's a crystal area! And when you open the map as a whole? It's just a bunch of connected boxes! Like, you can tell the style of map is totally aped from Symphony of the Night, clearly. So how does that game avoid this same issue? EASY. Each area has a distinct shape. IE The clocktower area is shaped like a tower. And the general shape of an area is reminiscent of how that place is actually shaped in-game. There's also LOGIC to where things are. The underground caves, catacombs, and mine are at the bottom, where such things would be. The clock tower and keep are at the top. There's an entrance on the left side, so the areas near that overlook the forest that leads into the castle. On the far right, the windows overlook the cliff. IT ACTUALLY RESEMBLES A TANGIBLE PLACE.

Furthermore, navigating the world in this game is a nightmare. It takes like 20 rooms to get to a new area. There's not enough teleporters or shortcuts to get from one place to the next! This map screwyness easily added like 3+ hours to my playtime. I understand fully that a Metroidvania requires backtracking and getting lost and double-checking things to find all the secrets, but this is not a proper execution of that. By the end of the game, I should feel like I know where everything is and I should be able to get there in a reasonably brisk fashion.

Two last things I'll mention. Every enemy is maybe a little too much of a damage sponge. And it's a little weird that almost all of the enemies stand still, or move within a very constrained space. I'm ... not sure what to say about that. Just that it's noticeable and it feels a little weird. Like, there's so much safe space in the game. There are some rooms that create some great tension with all of their moving parts and dangers, but there's a lot of times where bad guys are just like hanging out waiting to get killed. Make of that what you will.

Quite possibly one of the most confusing games I've ever played. At least one that was naturally written in English, and not through some garbage Google translate. Then again, I don't know what the language deal is (I believe the dev team is from Spain). I first starting playing as a character with a "heavy machine gun". I load in and it turns out my weapon only has 5 bullets in a mag. Huh? After playing with him for a bit, comparing him to other characters, I had determined that this weapon is actually a grenade launcher. I have no idea what planet these guys are from to refer to such a weapon as a "heavy machine gun", but okay.

So, figuring things out wasn't impossible. Maybe it's supposed to be part of the fun? Pressing shoot when your gun isn't being aimed reloads rather than hip-firing or melee. I've never in my life played a game where shoot and reload were the same button. But fine. We're inventing new controls. Cool.

At some other point I play a different character who is stressed 100% of the time (stress effects your regen and makes you visible through walls). At first I thought the game hit a rather horrible glitch. After some research... somewhere... I found out this is due to the character's faction. No where in-game does it explain how each faction operates differently from one another. This is a common theme of the game: not sufficiently explaining things that damn well need explaining. I'm not even sure how crafting works. They completely failed to set up any kind of "carrot on a stick" type UI where you can see various unlocks that would intrigue you into working towards them.

The worst part of the whole failing to explain stuff occurs from mission to mission, where objectives can be just a little bit too confusing to understand. I played a mission where we were told to "shoot tentacles". We pretty much shot every part of the thing until we finally figured it out. I played a mission today where it said to gather Aleph using melee. I think this is actually some kind of game mechanic that permeates the whole game. Like, you gather enough Aleph and you get super powers? I have no idea because it isn't sufficiently explained and is completely unintuitive. Anyway, after meleeing about 10 enemies to death I figure that the game objective must be glitched (this actually did happen one time where an enemy became unkillable, so I figured it could be possible here as well). Turns out it just seemed to be that all the enemies that had that Aleph spawned elsewhere... I think. But my teammates who were actually picking it up didn't know they had to do something with it. So we were stuck for a good while until they finally figured it out. The next wave of enemies actually had dudes that I was able to get Aleph off of. Cool. Now I can do the objective. Unfortunately everyone died too much so the mission failed. I might not mind a complicated game with complicated objectives... if not for the MMR system.

That's right. A grindy PvE game that has MMR. What better way to help people find matches quickly with a small player base than to make it harder for them to find matches? Good idea! My MMR is now complete garbage because I keep getting groups of players who can't figure the game out. I don't think they are necessarily bad since- as I've explained- the game makes little to no sense. I tried to raise my MMR through solo matches, but that doesn't work because it isn't "Multiplayer." Even though it's 100% the same game, me taking time to learn it so that I can do better doesn't matter. Cool. So I hit "Quickplay" because I don't want to wait so long for a match. It matches me as an Antagonist. What... the ... *&$&*#*&$!!!!!! Most matches I've played haven't had one of these because I assume it's not really appealing, and the game is happy to set players up in a regular old PvE match with no Antagonist (the Antagonist plays on the enemy side by himself).

Fine. Whatever. I'll try being an Antagonist. Why not? I mean, I keep getting grouped up with noobs. It'll be fun to stomp them, right? Wrong. For the first time EVER it matches me against competant players. Like, really good ones who blast through the objectives with ease. Not only that, they seem to have no trouble finding me and wiping me out with like, teamwork and stuff. Jesus. Why me? I can only guess that this is because they have high MMR, so the game was inclined to find an Antagonist for them. I rage quit on the spot, but the game informed me that I won't be allowed into any other matches other than this one. Cool. Thanks. So I go back in and do my best. I manage to get 8 kills on players. I feel like, "Hey, not bad! Considering everything." The game disagrees. Gives me a 0.5/10 and lowers my MMR again. Yeah! It lowers my MMR! The thing that's used for matching me with teammates FOR SOMETHING I DID AS A SOLO PLAYER.

I haven't really commented on that yet. The game has a ending score system. Like... why? I just want to grind and shoot bots and you have to be like, "Well, you guys completed the mission with no deaths but you took too long so here's a 5/10." Not only that, but there is an unreal amount of unskippable crap that happens at the end of the mission. Like, you can fail a mission and be forced to watch 30 seconds of a stupid score being calculated. WE F***ING GET IT ALREADY, WE DIED. You have to rub it in with an unskippable animation where the computer berates you and scores you? Why does this game hate its players?

See, that's the real end-all-be-all here. For any positive I have about the game, it has a hundred ways that it will tell you it doesn't want you to play it. So I can't recommend the game because it doesn't even recommend itself.

And hey, Raiders? How about I give you a score right back? I'll give you... 4 out of 10. I mean, you are really creative and pretty, and there are some real moments of originality. And you are a rather complete package that is free but... well, you just didn't do it good enough. So here's a massively mean score to reflect your minor shortcomings. That's fair, right?

EDIT: Guess what? I tried to play the game a bit more. All it made me want to do is talk more crap about its faults. So let's see...

Well, for starters I wanted to talk about character design. A lot of game designers have this philosophy of trying to make every character feel "overpowered". This seems to work quite well, most gamers enjoy this when it is done right. Raiders, on the other hand, seems to have taken the approach of making every character feel incredibly weak. Every weapon is so odd, so impractical and every character has so many drawbacks. I keep trying new characters and I either hate or can barely stand playing as them.

Next, let's talk about the loot system. I've gotten pretty spoiled by modern games coming up with systems that allow each player to feel like they get rewarded for guiding the match toward victory. Raiders, for some reason, wants to evoke the feeling of loot drama you'd get when playing something like World of Warcraft. Players split up gold and faction currencies if they vie for them. And blueprints require you to roll against other players. And choosing to roll on the blueprint means you opt out of getting gold or faction. And also.. it's a blueprint? So I assume you still have to grind something in order to craft it. Jesus. Why would they implement such a loot system? These don't even work in MMO's because players end up devising their own systems (like DKP) in order to avoid it. When your playerbase actively invents their own protocol for skipping your loot system... THAT is how you know it is a failure.

And I don't think I raged enough about the Antagonist system. Why is this in the game? And why is it NOT OPTIONAL? I say it's mandatory because there's a ton of stuff that requires playing as an antagonist to unlock. Also when you queue for a match there is no way to opt out of it. LOL, I rambled so long I'm out of room. More in comments.