Omega Strikers

Covering a recent game for a change. Never know how long these online multiplayer games stay afloat, and they rarely get more popular after launch. Omega Strikers, too, has already started slightly dipping in popularity after a week, though it's holding remarkably strong. You can always check how many players are playing, at least on Steam (it's also available on mobile), and you probably should, for reasons I'll talk about shortly.

Omega Strikers is a 3v3 PvP... football? action game. It has heroes, or "strikers" with 3 unique abilities each, much like a moba, and a common "strike" ability, which always just kicks the ball, or, well, hoverdisk, towards where you're aiming. Kick the disk into the enemy goal and you win the round, easy as. Win 5 rounds and you win the game, which takes about 5 minutes.
There's more nuances to the game of course, with abilities being able to knock and stun enemy players, even knock them off the field for a little while, powerups that increase your level and speed for a short while, some different maps with mild passive differences and obstacles placed around the map, and a lot more... but none of that is too important. And I think it's important that these little additions are not important and are not able to elevate the game beyond just being about who's more skilled at shooting the ball to your own players and not letting enemies snatch it from you. The map is small, 95% of the abilities boil down to creating a short- or slightly-longer-term area which knocks the ball and enemies away from it and possibly moves you, and the games get pretty repetitive pretty fast.

I don't have any complaints about the quality of Omega Strikers, honestly. I think it's well made. I also think it isn't ambitious enough, and doesn't give enough to do in the game. There is no sense of progression within a match, no sub-goals to accomplish, and no variety in how the game plays out. There aren't really any counters as far as I could tell, no matchup-specific differences in play, or at least nothing that would come close to being as important as raw skill. Maybe there's some comparisons to make to fighting games, which also don't have any intermediate goals in a match and are very much about player skill instead of meta knowledge about the game. But I'm not big on fighting games, so I can't say much about this.
On the topic of raw skill, I want to make a quick note about matchmaking. Matchmaking is difficult, I understand. It's difficult to tell how good a player is. It's difficult to tell how much advantage a pre-made group gives. It's difficult to make balanced matches. But matchmaking seems to be a strong issue for players not in a pre-made group of 3. Matchmaking is all the more important in games where the outcome is more dependent on skill, less on variance of other factors. It's also more difficult with more players in one team, and more difficult with fewer players ready to pick from at any given time. What I'm saying is that Omega Strikers could start to have serious problems with its match quality if player numbers keep falling, which could lead into a downward spiral. Just... something to keep an eye out for.

Overall, I'd say Omega Strikers is an above average PvP game. It's certainly gained a larger-than-average playerbase, and has decent player retention (though the long-term outlook is unclear). Based on just that, if the game's still alive and kicking by the time you find it, it looks even mildly interesting to you, and you have 2 trustworthy allies to accompany you, give it a try. It's free and I certainly enjoyed it for a bit. The novelty wore off too quickly for me though, and the game became something of a grind with not too many exciting or new moments. So, based on that, I can't really recommend it. I think there's still plenty of deeper PvP games out there.

Loyalty and Blood: Viktor Origins

I can't believe the standards I had... Perhaps I just thought I had more time back then...
Viktor Origins is a simple side-scrolling platformer shooter. It's composed of a bunch of levels taking a few minutes each. The game's base difficulty is fairly low, but each level also comes with its own challenges and time limit that you may optionally abide by for extra rewards. Rewards which you can use to buy, craft, and upgrade your gear with. There's also a phase mechanic that allows you to dash a medium distance, going through walls and everything else. That's about all there is to the game.

To be blunt, there's really nothing special here. Before any gameplay it starts off with more story than it has any right to, since the quality of the writing isn't that good. The art isn't bad, but it feels weird. There's this medieval vibe, yet you're wielding modern or futuristic weapons. Also you play as some elf-looking creature who's super hunched over. Maybe it's because of the gun. And when it comes to the gameplay, it's just point, shoot... very bland. I would have hoped that maybe the challenges are at least imaginative, but it's usually just a timer, kill X, where X is something you'd kill anyways, and maybe some limit on your weapon choice.

There isn't much to elaborate on here. Nothing's offensively bad, but nothing's any good either. And again, mediocrity and doing some old thing that has been done a lot before is not going to make your little indie game stand out. I can't recommend Viktor Origins - it's too poorly made for having such an unimaginative concept.

Dragon Marked For Death

I have nothing against games made for consoles first. Yet all too often, they arrive on PC as something akin to an afterthought. I believe it's called a "bad port". In the case of Dragon Marked For Death, my attempts to play were stopped in their tracks by the game not wanting to support me playing on a keyboard. Sure, there were bindings, but they seemed arbitrary, and would have required 4 hands to access them all. None of the in-game prompts referred to the keyboard even as I was playing on it, nor did I have any way to check or change the bindings after I had started the game. So I struggled onward, tapping random buttons, hoping they would be what I need, until I wanted to rebind them, but realized I would need to forego my mission progress to do so. I figured that was enough of that.

Not much of a review of the game. I do sometimes consider if I should even make these, but as I was presently running low on my review backlog, I figured why not. I didn't play for long, but in what little I did experience, there doesn't seem to be anything super special about the game. It's a side-scrolling platforming action RPG. Movement and combat felt neither bad nor super good, perhaps a bit above average. It seems to be focused on co-op, but I did not reach the bit where I could get into a multiplayer game. Not to mention you'd need to find people to play with on your own.

So, yeah, hard pass if you're a keyboard player. If not, I don't know, it might be decent, but there's probably better options.

Streets of Rogue

It's not every week or even month I get to play a game with "overwhelmingly positive" reviews, nor one of the few games I already wrote about back when I was still mentioning every game I was adding to my backlog. March 2017... how long ago it was that I found Streets of Rogue. Despite the review score, this never really seemed like my kind of game. But looks can be deceiving, and I've been wrong before...

Streets of Rogue describes itself as an action roguelike, but also an immersive sim. An interesting combination for sure, as those are on the opposite sides of the "seriousness" spectrum. Yet, I'd say it's kind of true. It's a rather lighthearted and goofy game. It makes many bad jokes, the missions are often nonsensical, like inflitrating someone's house to turn the lights off, or killing a bunch of people for a banana. Sure, it's just flavor, but this non-serious tone doesn't sit too well with me.
The game has some-dozen floors with a few missions on each. You're offered a lot of different ways to accomplish the missions. Stealth, trickery, violence... There's a lot of different classes, each with a wildly different playstyle, and besides completing the missions, you can scavenge around the level for money, items, and anything else that would help you on that floor or the ones to come. Sprinkle in co-op, random generation, status effects, level-ups, and a lot more, and you have a massive amount of theoretical variety in how the game plays.

Ultimately, the problem for me is that I don't care about this variety. Maybe I find an approach that works, and then I just use that over and over. I find little incentive to improvise some more creative solution or go out of my way to do something different. If you would consider fooling around in these small sandbox-like worlds to be fun, then I think you can get a lot more value out of this game. But if you're like me, and just want to complete the goals the game gives you, it might not be that interesting, as the variety does not actually mean that the game has any depth or is any good at keeping things interesting long-term. So no recommendation from me.

Monster Hunter: World

Y'know, I don't understand things sometimes. Various kinds of things. Things like, why are certain games massively popular. In the case of Monster Hunter: World, why was it one of the more popular games in the world for a whole two years or so after launch. I mean, even now, 4 years after release, it's got a very respectable player count. But I can try to make my guesses...

What are the first things I'd notice about the game? Well, it's developed by Capcom. So it's a AAA game, which would definitely contribute to its popularity. But also, it's a Japanese game. Normally that would mean that you could attribute some of the popularity to the anime artstyle being popular, but that's not the case here, as Monster Hunter has a much more realistic style, despite the oversized monsters and weapons. On a personal level, Japanese AAA developer = red flag. With a couple of exceptions, games from large developers from Japan (and Korea, although that's mostly "MMOs") tend to have many similar traits, and most of them are not so good. Continuing with remarks about artstyle, I would say that that's usually the strongest point of games from that region. Be it anime or not, I think some of the best looking games have come from Japan (but actually maybe mostly Korea). Sadly, Monster Hunter's characters look absolutely fucking abysmal. I think some of the facial expression are meme levels of terrible, and the overall visual fidelity just doesn't strike me as high at all for a 2018 AAA game. Okay, but, I've never been one to let the art dictate my feelings for a game, so what else is there?

Of definite note is that Monster Hunter is a franchise. Most definitely many people who picked it up already liked the series, so that increases both popularity and the positivity of the reception. I have not played any of the previous games, so that bias doesn't apply to me.
The last reason that might explain the popularity is that it's a multiplayer game. Your friends have a party of 2 or 3 together, and they need to fill out their group, so they try to persuade you to play. Multiplayer always increases the popularity, and from what I heard a couple of years back, friends inviting them was definitely a big reason people were playing. What strikes me as odd though, is that this game has vertical progression, meaning more experienced players couldn't really play together with newer ones. Cooperation is not necessary either, and I definitely wouldn't want someone with hundreds of hours of experience stepping into my game and trivializing my combat, so unless both I and my friends would play only with each other and never alone, I don't see how the multiplayer aspect could be sustained. Maybe I'm just missing something.

Okay, but I've rambled long enough about things that aren't important. Torn, what's game like?
Well, as I said, it's a big Japanese game, and that means it has lots of complexity, and (probably) not enough depth. I can vouch for the complexity bit, as the game did not ease me into its mechanics at all. The tutorials were largely unhelpful, and there were so many things to do from the get-go that I was completely overwhelmed. This time, I didn't put in the tens of hours needed to understand and assess all the systems, but from my previous experiences with system overloaded games just like this, they were not all necessary. Sure, each system, stat, option, whatever, does something, but unlike well designed systems, they were not all useful to care about. The real knowledge is knowing what's good, what's bad, and which is the 10% of the game's features that you should care about and invest into. And I don't know about you, but I consider that piss-poor game design.

Finally, the combat, which I thought would be the bread and butter of a game about fighting giant monsters... Is one of the worse ones I've experienced in an action RPG. Perhaps a more subjective problem was that it was slow. Even the fastest weapons took a good second or two to finish their attack animation, and you generally couldn't animation-cancel either. Sure, you could argue that this is a design choice that encourages committing to your attacks instead of just spamming them and then pressing dodge when the enemy is about to attack you. It's prediction-based, not reaction-based, you say. It's valid if you feel that way. But I don't. And I think that with the way games have been going, most people would agree that they prefer reaction-based too. It just feels bad to see an attack coming, or an enemy moving out of the way, and you being locked into an animation that you don't want to be in.
But what I found completely unexcusable was how you could not change your attack direction mid-combo. It just felt so miserable doing my attack string, the enemy moving out of the way, and my character not being able to turn their body unless I got my weapon into a neutral position first. The combat just felt so unsatisfying. Let me attack, or let me dodge/block. Don't make me do this song and dance where I attack, reset, then I get to attack again, then I gotta manually sheathe my weapon to pick something up, and ugh, it was the furthest thing from fluid.

Long post, let me conclude fast. Monster Hunter: World feels like a pretty standard, if perhaps sub-par action JRPG. While the idea of the game just being about killing large monsters instead of mostly trash mobs like most games is somewhat interesting, I found no gameplay aspect or game system actually worthy of praise. Despite the many flaws I listed, the baseline was well enough made (even on combat) that none of the systems were bad either, but a whole load of mediocrity does not add up to a good experience. I can somewhat understand the popularity, but I would not recommend it regardless.