Helldivers 2

How unusual for me, playing these highly popular and newly released games so soon after launch. This time it's Helldivers 2, which caught my eye because it reached nearly half a million concurrent players, and because I almost enjoyed the original Helldivers, which came out nearly a decade ago.

Conceptually, it's the same game. You play in a party of (up to) 4 and drop onto a planet to complete a mission, be it killing a bunch of enemies or gathering stuff (while also coincidentally killing a bunch of enemies). The focus is still on the same goofy stuff - accidentally killing teammates, physics bouncing a grenade off some obscure surface back into your face, or crushing a teammate with a drop pod. But not only has Helldivers 2 expanded into the third dimension, they have added a whole lot of production value to the game to the point it feels close to a AAA game now. For the most part, it's all around a better experience.

Now, about the negatives. There are a lot of problems with network errors and crashes, but I don't want to hold it against the game too much, since I believe they'll be fixed - it's only a matter of time. Still, it currently poses a problem where people will randomly disconnect from your mission (or disconnect you from their their mission) and you won't get a new teammate because their system doesn't like assigning new teammates to existing missions. Don't get me wrong, this absolutely ruins the game at the moment were I not playing with friends who can reconnect at any time, but I believe it will be fixed.
The real problem, I'm afraid, is closer to the central design of the game. This is a third-person shooter about killing hordes of aliens. Sure, the missions are nice, but everyone just wants to kill stuff. Problem is, the design is conflicting, where drawing aggro has no benefits, and a lot of negatives. You do not have enough ammo to kill everything the game throws at you, and so you'll be quickly overwhelmed if you try. No, the real strategy is to ignore as much fighting as possible, running around in circles, splitting up, and trying to sneak objectives between dying.

The core gameplay is fun, and the combat feels good, even if it takes a bit of getting used to. Everything in the game feels like it has real, tangible weight to it, and that's odd if you come from games with very snappy movement, but I learned to absolutely love this feeling. There's also not too much content, but I believe that can all be fixed. If the developers decide to change the design to really encourage combat, which is where this game shines, I think it can become something really enjoyable to play, even if you were to grind the same style of content over and over.

At present, play with an established friend group, and don't feel bad about sticking to lower difficulties if you want to actually have fun and kill the enemies. For players who want to be more dedicated or run solo, I'd advise waiting another few months to a year and hope the game's still alive by then. I hope they'll fix the crashes. I hope they'll change the design to incentivize combat. And I hope they will add more content. I would love to play more of it, but as it stands, I can't quite recommend it.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink

Covering a relative recent game for a change, it's Granblue Fantasy: Relink. I'm always on the lookout for new multiplayer games to play, and I saw this having over 100k concurrent players even weeks after release. I pitched it to my friends, got a couple of them to agree, and so we set off.

For a bit of background, Granblue Fantasy itself is a 10-year-old turn-based mobile gacha game. Relink is nothing similar. It's not available on mobile devices. It's fully action-based. And there are no microtransactions. The characters are the same, and it takes some thematic ideas, but the games are completely different. Relink has you controlling a single character in a party of four. There are a total of about 20 characters, with more on the way, and each character has a unique moveset, as well as a choice of 4 abilities out of 8 (usually). Each character also has several different weapons (stat differences only), as well as a pretty lengthy yet linear skill tree and 12 sigil slots for slotting various powerups.

The game is essentially divided into two parts. The first is the ~20 hour singleplayer campaign which tells you the story and runs you through most of the game's content and mechanics. You can already do some missions on the side in multiplayer as you progress through the campaign, but for most people, the majority of the game is after you've finished the campaign. Basically, you play through isolated encounters of harder and harder versions of the game's content, mostly bossfights, as you evolve your characters on the side. This part is entirely multiplayer, with each person controlling a character, and while you can play it solo with bot teammates, the game heavily recommends you play with others (premades or randoms). It plays quite a bit like Monster Hunter, except without the tedious bits of tracking and chasing the monsters, instead focusing on getting straight to the juicy combat. The combat also just feels better than Monster Hunter, at least in my limited experience, perhaps because of the flashier special abilities all characters have. Overall, it was just a real joy to play. The bossfights, which there were dozens of, were some of the best ones I've ever experienced, and that's already reason enough to recommend it.

Now, this is already 40+ hours in, and well past the end of the campaign, but it does eventually start to settle into a bit of a grind, and not the best kind. Despite the very fun bossfights, I feel the difficulty wasn't balanced all too well. For most of the game up to this point, encounters were never a question of "will I win", but rather "will I get the best grade", so running through them felt like a bit of a chore. Eventually, the missions do get more difficult, but then you're left to farm older missions for resources. Sadly, it's generally not the most difficult missions that give the best rewards that you should be playing over and over again, but the easy ones, which doesn't feel so great. I'd love to just do some of the hardest missions I can until I've progressed enough to move on, but that's not how the drops system works.
In the end, it took me about 70 hours to beat the final boss, and while I was nowhere near maxing out even just one character, I didn't feel like continuing to grind out more progress. Due to only being able to use a single character in combat, there was also little reason to heavily invest or even ever play other characters, which I feel was a missed opportunity, considering how well made most of them were.

Despite most of the game being too easy, and the part that wasn't too easy forcing me to play the not-so-enjoyable content over and over, I must say I still really liked Relink. The quality of the gameplay, the animations, the voice acting (I still wish they'd stop with the annoying high-pitced helper NPC trope), and most importantly the epicness of the bossfights was really, really good. I would recommend at least playing through to the final boss, and maybe if you like the grind more than I did, to see how much further you can take your characters. The harder bosses also have new moves, so there's fresh gameplay for 60 hours, and then grind for another couple hundred hours, if you're so inclinced.
For my final verdict, despite its flaws, this goes onto my list of the best action RPGs I've ever played.

NGU Idle

I got the craving to play an incremental / idle game suddenly, so I looked up what the highest rated ones were on Steam. After Cookie Clicker, which I had already completed, the second highest rated one was NGU Idle, so I took it for a spin.

Somewhat anticlimactically, despite my urge to play an idle game, that urge soon vanished. Not that there was anything wrong with NGU Idle. I just realized that the good feeling of seeing a number go up was countered by the feeling of wasting my time just clicking on things. Kinda silly of me to say that - that's the point of idle games after all, but for a "good" long-lasting idle game, you need a lot of mechanics, a lot of features, a lot of buttons to press. And yet, the act of managing all my various bars and numbers is not quite a full-time enough experience to qualify as playing a game. On the other hand, I still have to put in enough effort that I can't just leave the game running and go do something else without the time spent idling being basically meaningless, at least for the first 90+% of the game.
A similar problem of a system being neither here nor there is that the gameplay is not braindead enough to allow me to do it without any thought at all, e.g. while talking to someone or watching a video, but is also not meaningful enough to make me really think and care about what I'm doing. I need to level things up and click certain buttons eventually, but the exact order in which I do stuff isn't terribly important, so there's no excitement of figuring things out.

Overall, this review isn't about NGU Idle but more about idle games as a whole. I think there's definitely room to "fix" these issues I spoke of, and there are definitely more involved "idle" games out there (though I suppose they wouldn't qualify as idle games then), but I also think some people like them as they are. If I had to say a few words about NGU Idle, then it certainly has a plethora of things to do. The quality of those actions doesn't seem that high, and the look and feel of the game isn't polished (there's no audio at all, for example). Other than that, it's a pretty standard idle game. So if you like idle games in general and like quantity over quality, go try it. As for me, I think I'll skip generic idle games for at least a few more years.

Baldur's Gate 3

I've been wanting to play Baldur's Gate 3 ever since it was announced back in 2019. The developers' previous two games, the Divinity: Original Sin series, were my two favorite turn-based RPGs ever, and considering their success, I was hoping their next game would be even better and more polished. Definitely wrong of me to get hyped, but looking back at it now, it sure delivered, right? Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't really require me to say anything about it, as it's one of the most popular and highest rated games of all time now, not just among RPGs. I played through it in co-op with a friend. But what did I think about it?

Baldur's Gate 3 is a game that runs in real-time as you move about in the world, but once you switch to combat, everything goes turn-based. It is almost entirely based on the D&D 5e ruleset, and so I dare say has very traditional RPG combat. Thinking about it, I couldn't really highlight any elements of the game that were really unique to it. But then again, with how well everything is executed, it doesn't need to do anything unique to be appreciated.
I do have a problem with how directly it copied the D&D experience. See, D&D is a great tabletop game, because the rules are deep enough to allow for a myriad of different possibilities at the hands of a dungeon master, while being simple enough to be fulfilled by the players and the one running the game. I don't think they're a good fit for a video game though. Despite how many different outcomes and scenarios the developers wrote into this game, a program still doesn't have the creativity of a live person responding to the actions of the player - that is not the strong suit to play for in a video game. Meanwhile, the mechanics of tabletop game are simple due to necessity, not because that's the most interesting option. A video game could do much more by delegating work to a computer, and I feel sticking to closely to the tabletop rules fails to take advantage of that. And I write about this in such detail, because it's by far my biggest problem with the game. I believe that mainly due to this, the gameplay is not fun. It's fun experiencing the story, and finding creative ways to approach the problems it gives you, but I find the combat quite sub-par.

Now, arguably a bigger problem, although one that I don't take as seriously, as it's not deep-rooted and will hopefully be fixed, is how full of bugs the game is. The first act is relatively polished, but acts 2 and especially act 3 is where everything starts to break down. The most jarring problems being quests that are left in broken states, unable to be finished. The worst of that being the main story quest that prevented us from getting to the end of the game. With a bit of cheating through modding we managed to resolve the issue, but I'm quite certain more than 90% of the playerbase could not manage to do so, and would have been forced to start a new game.
Aside from the extra bugs, I found act 3 to be the weakest act overall. This was in part due to the game being far too long in total. When I heard it was a long game, I was expecting 90 hours, not the 150 hours it took us. By act 3, I was already slightly exhausted with the game, and with the quests now just being thrown all over the map with no clear order in which to do them, completing them felt all the more tiresome.

Despite all my negativity, I still liked Baldur's Gate 3. It's just that, as I said, it doesn't really have anything unique to talk about. It's really well made in general (bugs aside), and is the closest thing you could get to a giant, well thought out D&D campaign in a video game. I just feel the focus was too much on the story and the many ways you could go about it. That's not something I care about, and I even believe that the more branches you allow to the story, the less the maximum potential of the story is. Meanwhile the gameplay was quite uninteresting, and even too easy, despite playing on the hardest difficulty (on release, not the new Honor mode). All in all, I would still recommend it to anyone who likes turn-based RPGs, and especially to people who like stories in their RPGs.