And now the video games from my other favorite genre besides Superhero fiction. As there are a great many Fantasy video games I still wish to play, this is very much a list in-progress.
PVP portion due to the hideous, awful, no-good microtransactions. But the Story Mode / Campaign, which can be beaten WITHOUT having to use microtransactions, is a different story, and so is ranked separately and higher.
To be absolutely clear, I'm not one of those WHF fans who hates Age of Sigmar and everything to do with it. But that's actually part of WHY I was so let down on this one: because I had such high hopes for it. Age of Sigmar has so many colorful factions each with their own units, that the game could have done a great job of capturing that. Instead, we get a mere three factions (and three of the most obvious and predictable ones at that). This by itself wouldn't have been so bad if 1) there was the promise of more factions getting added later and 2) if the gameplay was really good. But neither thing applied here. To be honest, I don't actually like Roguelites very much, and this game is one of the reasons why. In a game where dying and losing is so easy, the levels getting completely changed each time just feels way too punishing. I know some people love it, but I don't. So in all, this one was a huge let-down for me. I'll be sticking with just getting and painting the miniatures.
I love the premise of creating hybrids of different Fantasy races. Pity it had to be attached to a mobile phone game that I lost interest in VERY quickly.
While I actually do like some of the character designs, and the idea of a Dark Fantasy fighting game is interesting, the execution was lacking. Most of the critics at the time certainly thought so.
And here's another Roguelite. Granted, it's way more polished and fun to play than Storm Ground was, but my same problems with Roguelites in general still apply here, and in fact this was really the game that made me realize that Rougelites as a genre just aren't for me.
Poor Conquest. This game was turned into an absolute punching bag by critics when it came out, and there are definitely some clear problems with it: the graphics are a bit shaky even for the time, most of the voice acting is poor, and if you're any kind of stickler for faithfulness to the source material of Tolkien's work, you'll probably be spitting nails within the first level or two.
But for all that, I still have a soft spot for this game. It's one of the few Lord of the Rings games where you can play as Sauron in all of his awesome, armored glory, and I do think the game does a solid job of making him feel decently powerful. Similarly, other major villains like Saruman and the Witch-King/Nazgul are also fun to control. As Gameinformer noted in its review, the combat gameplay definitely feels way more Dynasty Warriors than Lord of the Rings, but I for one am able to live with that. It's still fun to carve through people or use arrows like a rifle.
So is this a great Lord of the Rings game? Well, frankly no. And definitely much worse than the Battlefront games made by the same studio. But if nothing else, I'd still take it over the terrible Aragorn's Quest and Gollum games.
There's no getting around the fact that DSIII is a very different beast from its predecessors. That alone makes it something a lot of folks would probably hate out of the gate. Speaking for myself, having played this game before getting a chance to play the first two, I wasn't bothered by that. But it is the case that I can't particularly remember much of the gameplay, meaning it didn't stand out much to me. It's also a game I never finished, and while there are aspects of his setting and worldbuilding that I find interesting (mostly the Steampunk angle), in all, I can't say this one stuck with me to any significant degree.
This one would probably rank higher, but I never did get around to finishing it, so I can only go off of what little I played. That was enough to tell me this is a good game, but wasn't enough to tell me whether or not it was a great one.
I'm not gonna lie, I really do like 90s-era side-scroller beat-em-ups. They're simplistic as all get-out, but done well, that's part of their charm rather than a detriment. I just love the colorful worlds, sprites, and overall visuals, and seeing the different enemies and bosses that accost you in a given one. That, and frankly many of them are kind of hilarious in terms of how over-the-top and lacking in internal logic they are.
So yeah. I like 90s Sidescroller Beat-em-Ups. And Knights of the Round here is a very good one. I especially like how each player character gets more elaborately armored as they level up, something one associates more with RPGs than beat-em-ups, and I think it really helps to convey that the characters are progressing.
Also, one of the boss battles is a Samurai. Awesome.
This one's part of my childhood. My Dad and I used to play it at an arcade located in our local mall until it became a graveyard shadow of its former self. But in its heyday, that arcade was a fun place, and this was one of my regulars. I myself mostly played the Yellow Wizard.
Nostalgia value aside, this is a pretty good game overall, if you've got the patience and quarters for it. Crying shame it's never been ported to the PC or modern consoles.
Given that Diablo Immortal is THE lowest user-rated video game on Metacritic, having an attitude towards it that's something OTHER than 100% negative will probably get me some amount of incredulity. But while I agree that this game's microtransactions are the worst of the worst, it is also the case that, if one limits themselves to the campaign/story mode, the game can be played and beaten without having to spend anything. At least, that has been my experience thus far. And without the microtransactions, I've found the game to be an overall pretty enjoyable and addictive dungeon crawler, no less than any other Diablo game. And you can play as a spear-wielding Vampire. So I'm not really seeing the downside.
Solid mix of melee and ranged gameplay, a bevy of levels taken from the first two Lord of the Rings games, and an actually fairly impressive and rewarding leveling / experience system (especially for the time) adds up to a pretty solid Lord of the Rings game that has aged far better than is typical for movie tie-in games. And hey, you can unlock and play as Isildur, who in this game is basically a maxed out Aragorn in full plate armor. Nice.
Much of what was great about The Two Towers applies to this one, but with the added awesome of getting to play as Gandalf, who does become somewhat OP the more you level him up, but...it's Gandalf. He SHOULD be OP. Honestly, I kind of wish Gandalf in the movies had let loose with the magic badassery a bit more after playing this game's levels over and over.
Where Roguelites really aren't for me, I have to say that I think I've really taken to Dungeon Crawlers. I mean, I actually LIKE playing Diablo Immortal (outside of the PVP), so I think I'm definitely a bit of a sucker for these. And Path of Exile is a pretty solid one. The magical powers of the Witch (who I play as), feel mostly satisfying to use, and she can still use weapons despite not being a melee-oriented character, which is nice. And while I don't think there's a lot to the setting overall, I do like the premise of being stuck on an island where criminals are exiled to by a despotic regime. A bit similar to movies like Escape from New York, but in Dark Fantasy. And the best part? This is a free-to-play game that (at least when last I played it), doesn't smother you with microtransaction nonsense. Hooray!
Another one that ranks lower than it should due to my never having completed it, and in fact never getting close. Still a classic though.
