The Stanley Parable Review

The Stanley Parable is a very simple first person story driven game. Your goal is really a mystery until you actually play the game for a while.

THE decision.

Because the game is based on the story, there is no mechanics but walking and occasionally interacting with a door or object. But in order to give you something let us say this: The game has a narrator describing your actions and things get really interesting when you reach a critical decision making point with two open doors.

The voice over really makes the game shine. The actor was extremely skilled in depicting the intended emotions. It is also very entertaining to do the same thing over and over or just don't do anything in order to hear his satirical lines. Overall it is a short game but definitely a very unique and interesting one.

Final Fantasy XIII Review

Final Fantasy XIII is a Japanese RPG in which your goal is to survive the unfortunate sequence of events that led you and your friends to exile.

Paradigm shifting.

The gameplay is very simple, you move your party through a very linear map battling multiple opponents. Like other games from the franchise you have an "action bar" that fills up as time goes by and allows you to queue up battle actions. The special thing about this game battle system is that each character has one of five roles: Commando, Ravager, Sentinel, Synergist, Saboteur and Medic. Each role has exclusive abilities. In order to efficiently fight different enemies proper shift of Paradigms (the defined roles of your party) is essential. The usual goal is staggering an enemy for increased damage. You only control the party leader, the other two members are controlled by the AI, a mediocre one.

Leveling up a weapon to maximum level.

Each battle awards you Crystalarium Points (CP) and occasionally upgrade components. As you accumulate CP you increase basic attributes and learn new combat actions (skills). Components on the other hand are used to upgrade equipment. This components are divided into two categories, organic and synthetic. Organic components give a small amount of experience while providing a bonus multiplier for the next components. Synthetic ones give a big amount of experience while decreasing the bonus provided by organic components. Unfortunately this ends up removing experimentation and constant progression, as the optimal strategy is to always accumulate enough organic components to reach a high level booster and then dump one single type of synthetic component to make full use off all the experience multiplier.

For some reason it was decided that each chapter would give the player increased rewards. Which means that the more battles you pick the longer it will take you to reach the strongest tiers of power. Artificially increasing gameplay time without any real benefit. Overall Final Fantasy XIII is not a bad game, we really like the idea of been able to use creature parts to enhance equipment. But the game becomes very repetitive quickly with nothing really pushing your forward but the plot. In the end you can just watch the whole thing on Youtube without having to spend 50+ hours fighting the same creatures, in different colors, over and over.

Here are some very useful links and guides we recommend giving a look:
Detailed in Depth character guide
FF XIII Wikia and Components list
How to get Auto-Haste
Mission Locations
Mission Guide

Fire Emblem Heroes Review

Once in a blue moon a mobile game catches our attention. This is an extra review, our regular PC review will follow soon.

Fire Emblem Heroes is a free to play (F2P) turn based strategy game in which your goal is to win as many battles as you can. As most F2P mobile games it has monetization strategies that are part of the game loop and we will discuss its implication at the end.

Gameplay is quite simple, in order to battle you need stamina, a resource that recharges one point every five minutes, capped at 50 (4 hours and 10 minutes for full charge). You control a party of four characters and each have one action per turn. As any strategy game positioning is key to victory. On top of that there are 3+1 "colors" of characters, each having strength over another and weakness under the third. The fourth is the "colorless" and has no strengths or weakness based on color. Been able to assemble a party that exploits this triangle is as important as positioning.

The game progresses in two ways: The first is by leveling your characters as they defeat enemies, increasing the units attributes. Unfortunately if your hero die in battle, even if he got enough to level up, even if you win the battle, because he died, he gets nothing. The second is by increasing the rarity of your characters (the number of stars they have, from 1 to 5), but in order to do that you need to compete against other players team (controlled by the computer). You get 3 battles per day and can accumulate score up to seven victories in a row. Arenas reset every week, so you get a total of 21 battles to define your top score.

Unfortunately the strategy to monetize the game negatively hits all this systems directly. Let us enumerate for ease of understanding:

1) The stronger the challenge, the higher the cost of stamina. Lv 1 battles cost 1 stamina, Lv 40 battles costs 9 stamina (18 once the lunch discount period ends). This means that the more you play the game, the least you will be able to play, unless you pay to recharge your stamina.

2) The amount of resources needed for turning a 3* (three star) character in a 4* is 2.000 feathers (arena currency), roughly 2~3 weeks depending on your performance. In order to upgrade a 4* into a 5* you need an astounding 20.000 feathers. That means about 20~30 weeks worth of resources!! We got 1.000 feathers in the first week with a 5* and 4* in our team. You can see how this takes a long time... Or, you can pay until you get all 5* characters out of the batch.

3) You can merge equal characters to make one of them stronger... The implications (and limits) of this system is anyone guess, but they point to a nasty pay to win loop. A Lv40 5* character (current max level) can be further improved by combining another copy of that 5* character. Again, how do you get 5* characters? Oh yeah, you either pay or farm for months...

The game has great art, nice music and effects. But it ends being more of a money pit than a meaningful long term entertainment through gameplay. At the moment there is no indication that you will have a reliable way through play of building a strong party. Maybe in a future patch...

Update (28/03/2017): After keeping up with the game for almost two months Nintendo decided to increase the quantity of Orbs and Feathers you get by casually playing the game every day. Although you will never be on the frontier of the trends unless you pay, you will be able to build a full 5* team and compete with strong opponents with dedication.

PS: Character attributes are random. So equal characters with equal stars are not equally good! That means even if you get lucky and get a 5* character, it might not be better than a good 4* character roll! And they also do NOT level up equally. A character that starts bad might be a late bloomer, which makes that much harder to compare them (although our experience has shown that a bad starting status never picks up). Here is a high definition image step-by-step.

Heroes of Loot Review

Heroes of Loot is a pixelated rogue-like dungeon crawler game where your goal is to achieve the deepest randomly generated dungeon you can. With random quests, random enemies you will never know what to expect!

Acid means you are rocking!

As typical from rogue-likes, you get only one life. You can choose between 5 characters and your attacks are automatically aimed (you can manually aim with the mouse). As you kill creatures you will level up, gaining more health and increased damage. Beware that the deeper the dungeon the stronger the enemies. As the name says you will be picking an extraordinary amount of loot, of which mostly are coins and gems whose primary goal is to increase your score. Yet the game lacks a local scoring system, despite keeping tracking of it. You can find the global leaderboards here.

Random God knows no fairness!

There are two forms of progression during your run: Moving deeper into the dungeon and leveling up your character. Both can also be increased permanently by finding a Medallion of Time and six Pieces of Equipment, respectively. You can only find one item of each per run. Unfortunately pacing of the game also lack some balance, either being too hard or too easy. Getting the Medallion of Time actually makes the game harder since your character level do not scale at the same pace. And Shiny Loot God forbid you wanting to change to a character that has not leveled up after picking up a couple medallions! You are in for a slow grind.

Despite its problems Heroes of Loot is an interesting title that shows how simple procedural dungeons with few enemy types and some cool magic can make for a big challenge! Due to it simplicity it is also a great game for playing co-op.

Can you beat our top score?

PS1: Our tests show that you get your first six pieces of equipment (for each character) at dungeons 1~5, the next six at 6~9, and so forth. The first Medallion of Time can be found on dungeons 20~30, the second 30~40 and so forth.

PS2: The default controller was no good, so we adapted and published our setup under Heroes of Loot (MekEye v1.0). Use X or the Left Grip to attack.

Scores are gone!

We have been thinking for a while on why we review games and what our intention in scoring them is. What makes a game 10? What makes a game 7? What would make a game 1? Would we even play a game that scored 1?

So we took a step back to consider our score goal. We want to be objective, giving our readers a direct way to compare how successful a game is in implementing its mechanics. But how can we compare a two year game made by 2~3 people in a 50k budget against a four year project made by over 200 people and hundreds of millions of money to back them up? How objective can we be without taking that into consideration? How about playing games from 10 or 20 years ago, like we did with Half-Life. Game design changed since then, but is the game not worth playing? So instead of looking for an Ultimate Budget/Quality/Release formula let us look into what makes us play the game in the first place: It looks interesting.

That means we are playing games because they already have something unique. In this two years, how many games have we reviewed not worthy of being played? In this two years, we reviewed 23 games, of which 30% were scored 10, all the rest were 7 or more. No matter how simple or small a game is, we are not going to pick something that doesn't look, say or read minimally interesting. Therefore we are probably never going to score anything 5 or bellow.

Pointing out how a game can be better doesn't mean the game is not worthy of playing. The same way that not pointing out anything doesn't mean the game has no flaws! Heck, we just made a huge Fallout 4 review and barely pointed out the many flaws in the game... Why? Because there is too much good stuff going on to focus on the bad!

So from 2017 forward we are no longer scoring games. If a game has amazing art, music, graphics or whatever, rest assured we will mention it. =)

Happy New Year and we wish you a 2017 full of many adventures!