Recent reviews by Yokai

It's not a perfect game, but it's a little hard to take a lot of these reviews seriously when it's people complaining about getting mana-starved, sets rotating out of Standard, or White and Blue being annoying. I think you just don't like Magic, man, that's not a problem with Arena in particular.
At any rate, if you like Magic this is far more affordable than paper, or MTGO for that matter, and lets you play more matches of Magic in a day than most people can get in a month, with people all over the world and not just the same dudes at your local store or that one weird cousin that always smells like boiled ham. I'm a big fan.

I guess you could say the wait is


Unbearable

The gacha here is much more generous than in Mahjong Soul. Gameplay is... Listen, it's Riichi Mahjong, what do you want from me. It does its job.

The obvious downside is language. It isn't overly hard to figure out what buttons do what, but you can't really learn the rules of Riichi Mahjong here. To be clear: they are explained, they are just not in English. The various Yaku are also listed, but again: not in English. The game only supports Chinese (Traditional & Simplified) and Japanese. So it's best to have these on a second monitor while playing if you haven't memorized them and can't read either language.

Another thing that makes this a bit unfriendly towards new players is the lack or Roman Numerals on the pieces, which is an option in Mahjong Soul. Sure, Pin and Sou make it pretty easy to tell the difference but a totally new player will not be able to tell 5/6/7/8/9 on the Man pieces, at least not with anything resembling speed. You'll probably memorize these pretty fast (I did) but again, maybe pull that up on a second monitor just in case.

If you're new or just prefer having menus in English (a perfectly reasonable expectation) try out Mahjong Soul.

Other than that it is a perfectly serviceable Mahjong gacha game and the language barrier poses no real issue so long as you already know how to play the game. Girls are cute. Please give me an English version.

You ever play a game so polished it makes you kinda angry? Because Total War: Three Kingdoms is that kind of game. Everything about this game is incredibly polished. Its presentation and soundtrack, the roleplaying elements in characters, the battles, Romance mode feeling like something straight out of Dynasty Warriors. The endgame Three Kingdoms stage is a fine replacement for Shogun 2's Realm Divide mode, being way cooler and more

I have some nitpicks, mainly with South China being a bit desolate, siege battles being a pain, and the way vassals work, but overall this is a very, very good game.

Needs some more variety in PVE content and cool dress-up customization unlocks but hey, it's pretty good as a PVP game. Combat is fast and snappy and TTK is decent, gives you a chance to fight back but doesn't take too long.

I gotta say, I understand that the port is shoddy for a ton of people. There's one dude doing the porting, and as with every ASW title it has some bugs at launch that will get patched out later. The good news is that most of these are fixable by the user, like the game defaulting to integrated graphics. I also just got super lucky and my only problem so far has been stick compatibility. A quick trip to the internet to get x360ce fixed my problem. So like, honestly, if you're risk averse and patient, I'd wait a week to buy. Shini's a friggin' demigod, but he's still only one demigod.

Bugs aside, I seriously enjoy the game and adore the fact that it can be as simple and as complex as the user would prefer it to be. The roster is great, even with only launch characters, and while the DLC did leave a bad taste in my mouth at first it is fairly priced and I trust ASW to deliver on these characters. YMMV, but that's how I see it.

I recommend the game, but with the caveat that you may have to roll a Tinkering check to get it up and running.

The game's biggest downfall lies in the awful "minimalistic" movement system.

FYI to any aspiring designers out there: don't bind three contextual actions to one key if your game is supposed to be precise and fast-paced.

Played during the Beta, now playing during the free weekend. Will probably pull the trigger on it after this.

The criticism is understandable, but I like it nonetheless.

Honestly the playerbase is low but it's still so fun and stylish to play. It just handles well and looks very clean. My one gripe is the health regen (hoping this gets reverted, but I'm okay with the health increase from patch 1.4). It's also more of a class-based shooter than a "Hero Shooter". There's very few classes with little personality besides voicelines and aesthetics which are switched between teams (Law looks like superhero cops, Breakers look like Yakuza/Gangsters). Team comp is less important here and it's more about stylin' on fools than planning your approach with teammates.

I feel like the claims of difficulty from both the developers and playerbase are highly exaggerated. Sure, it has a high skill cap. But it's not exactly the most difficult of shooters, and it can be fun even playing at a low level. I would know, I suck at this game. Hoping this game goes F2P in the future, as it was meant to be, but it's honestly worth the money as long as you're okay with a low playerbase.

Spent all this time in training mode and still can't do flight loops

I bought this game, back when it was first released as a buy-to-play title. I never really gave it a shot. Boy, am I an idiot.

This game markets itself as XCOM meets Dota 2. I guess that would be correct. Except the only aspect of a typical MOBA to be found here is a wide range of characters to choose from.

Having never played XCOM for more than an hour I can't make a fair comparison to that game, either. However, I have played Aerena, Duelyst, and other Tactics games. This feels a lot like Aerena. But you don't know what I'm talking about, because that game is dead and nobody played it. So, basically, Aerena was a game where you built a team of characters with different stats and abilities and sent them to battle against another team in turn-based combat within a stage.

Now, you take that, you give the characters more abilities (from 2 to 5) and you make it so instead of 1v1 with 4 characters per player it's 4v4 with 1 character per player. That is Atlas Reactor.

ON TOP OF THAT, a new gamemode has been introduced with the latest patch that lets players play a more "traditional" mode where players duel 1v1 with 4 characters if they feel like having their brains explode. So if you're a 1v1 purist then this game will be even more challenging than usual.

As far as I know, you unlock characters with both in-game and premium currencies but can purchase them all for a one-time payment, a la Smite.

So basically, this game is awesome and you're dumb for not playing it.