Recent reviews by Dhelin

This game makes me feel like I'm back in time as a kid with my SNES on channel 3 playing A Link to the Past, Super Mario World and Super Metroid, minus the combat. The cool puzzles mixed with the neat graphic design, audio effects and simplistic gameplay leads to a game that doesn't just satisfy the nostalgia of old school gaming, but makes it better and brings it to the modern age. I'm glad for all of the positive reviews this game it's getting, because it's definitely deserved, and I can only hope that modern day gamers can appreciate it.

Update: I'm changing this to non-recommended. It's just way too pricey for what it offers.

5/10

I played through the main quest, several factions, a few other side quests here and there, visited some barren planets, did a couple character quests, tried building a couple of outposts, did some crafting.

Overall, I'd say it's very subpar for Bethesda. The graphics are ok but compared to recent games are pretty meh. The quests are mildly interesting, but they didn't hold my attention that much compared to other recent RPGs. The gunplay is better than Fallout, but nothing compared to other FPS's like Doom. The space traveling / planet exploring / base building was all incredibly meh. Outdone completely by No Man's Sky.

If I had to describe the game in one sentence, I'd say it's Fallout 3 in space with better graphics. This would've been considered a good game in 2005. But 18 years later, there're just so many games out there that offer a much better RPG experience for the price.

Deck builders seem to be a dime a dozen these days thanks to Slay the Spire, and it can be hard to sift through them all to find the good ones. Thankfully, Stolen Crown is one of those good ones. Additionally to being a deck builder, it also offers a 3D battlemap for each fight, making it a tactics game in addition to a deck builder. Fans of Slay the Spire, as well as games like Wargroove and Fire Emblem, will appreciate the tactics mechanics that have been implemented in this game which make it unique. Definitely give it a try.

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Picture it: it's Friday night, and the party is all here to start the new DnD session. Only this time you're online, trying to use Roll20.

You're the DM, and it's your first time using the website. You realize you don't have a "picture" required to launch the campaign, so you open the only jpg on your desktop--a photo of a plate of lasagna you made, for some reason--and click launch the game. *Finally,* you think to yourself. *We can play online now, cool!*

Only it's not cool. You get into the open game. Three of your players aren't here, because they don't know how to create an account, because they've never used the internet before--especially that one guy, Larry, who's 58 years old. You realize after launching the game for the first time that your Firefox browser which you haven't updated in the last 3 years is unsupported. So you pause for another ten minutes as you update, or load Edge (it's actually a good browser now guys I promise,) and launch the game again.

Uh-oh. You get in, but the grid you need is tiny and blank. *Why did they make it so small?* You think, as you peruse the endless amount of menus and options desperately trying to find a way to increase the grid size to no avail. Larry is still having problems connecting because he's using Internet Explorer--unaware that he should've upgraded his Windows XP laptop 18 years ago. On top of that, your profile picture is also a plate of lasagna.

The players are all just chatting now. No one's paying attention to the game, because it's been 25 minutes and you haven't figured out yet how to make the grid bigger, how to make tokens for people, or how to get Larry in here--because that's all you really wanted this website to do.

Well, with GATE, you don't have to bother with all that nonsense anymore! Just make your DM name in the menu, pick a color, click "Host" and voila. Welcome to an infinite grid size, a big fat token button that you can press and then give it a name, size, skin and assign it to your players, an easy-to-see area at the top where you can click to go between "draw" mode for drawing stuff with a marker, "Select" mode to click and move your tokens, "Erase" mode to get rid of all the phallic-shaped objects your party is inevitably going to create, and "Measure" mode for when you just can't figure out if that wizard token you made is within 30" of blowing up that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Mike with a fireball. Just tell your players to hop into GATE, search for your room name--"Larry quit using Internet Explorer"--and you're playing DnD now.

When you hop into a regular in-person game of DnD all you need is a grid map, a few markers to draw buildings and stuff, and some tokens for the players and NPC's. Well, GATE provides all of that without all the extra pomp, extraneous menus and connection issues that Roll20 is always adding. 5/5 with rice.

Questing and immersion: 4/5

PvP: 2/5

Crafting: 5/5

Community: 5/5

End-game: 3/5

My take: Great MMO for the casual gamer. No need to rush to end-game, there are plenty of things to do and a helpful community to do them with. Crafting is my favorite part of this game, if you're into crafting you'll find no MMO better than ESO. Cons: Little PvP, can be hard to find good groups for end-game content, the devs are always pushing their cash shop on you for cosmetics and utilities.

That said, it's still the best MMO I've played in five years. I have an ESO plus subscription, which I highly recommend if you take your MMO's seriously. Have fun exploring Tamriel.