A classic metroidvania (non-linear action platformer) heavily inspired by the GBA Castlevanias, but lovingly polished and beautifully illustrated. The plot will throw you for a loop, but the gameplay is excellent. I would consider this a must-play for genre enjoyers.

This game really scratches the itch left by Final Fantasy Tactics, with complex strategy options and a good deal of customization. It starts out relatively simple, especially for veteran tactical RPG enjoyers, but ramps up to some reasonably difficult fights that require research and multiple approaches. Game balance is good so you can solve most encounters a few ways.

The story is quite good, it won't leave RPG fans disappointed. The art is charming and inventive, and the lore is not dumped in your face so you can let the world mature as you go.

One complaint is how so many important keywords and mechanics are just never explained, leaving you to smash out what they do through trial and error. Prepare to read the battlefield thoroughly and hunt for tooltips, or at least skim through a general guide once you start to get stuck. There are also events and rewards that become locked if you don't do the right mission order, with no indication this happens. In some ways, this evokes the old-school RPG feel of keeping a notebook and discussing with friends wtf is going on, but modern gaming has shown that not telling you things is not fun.

Overall, I found it easily worth the price and time, and I think it is both a great title for tactical RPG fans and players new to the subgenre.

This is a great roguelike in that it provides a reasonably fresh experience hundreds of times, BUT you can still completely control each run with skill. Instead of fishing for the god runs, you can enjoy the variety and still push to complete very difficult endgame challenges.

This game takes the simple concepts of an arena shooter and a dungeon crawler and makes an addictive core loop, and I find myself doing "one more run" for hours. Over 100 hours in and I'm still finding new items and strange interactions, and the community has discovered new core concepts years after release.

I would easily call this worth the money.

I've hopped around MMORPGs since middle school, spending an eventual 7k+ hours in wow, and a few hundreds in RS, GW2, TERA, KOTOR, Rift, etc. This game, FF14, is by no means perfect⁠—but frankly its as close as I've found in all these years. It holds classic RPG elements in a refreshingly high regard, giving you plenty to do besides the usual race to max level and grind to run raids/battlegrounds. Read the below list and decide for yourself.

Pros:
* One of the most engaging profession systems of any game, you actually enjoy making things. Gathering is more zen than usual with fixed, client-side resource nodes and a solid fishing system. Crafting requires some thought to beat the minigame, and a lot of the gear is actually useful.
* Having every class and profession (both referred to as jobs) on one character is an awesome system, and it feels great to swap to a needed job while progressing on the same character. It also amplifies your connection to your character, which makes you want to play more, etc.
* Player housing, elegant armor designs, unlockable hairstyles, etc. all celebrate player expression. There's a lot of personality in the players and it makes cities feel very lively.
* The storytelling is genuinely good; many put it on-par with story-driven single player RPGs. A far cry from the usual "bad people are doing bad things, we have to stop them" of other titles.
* End-game combat is complex and rewards good decision-making, with many situational abilities and party considerations. Some find they have too many buttons, but it reminds me of MoP/WoD-era combat with rich reward for understanding your class.
* Tons of relevant content thanks to their level-sync system and reward structure. Basically any instance that has ever come out is worth doing, regardless of your progression goals.
* The community really is as nice as people say, I have encountered maybe 10 flamers for any reason, and half of them apologized within minutes. Reports appear to do something meaningful here. After swimming in elitism and toxicity in many other games, playing with so many nice people feels terrific.
* The gold saucer (collection of minigames ranging from scratch-offs to full-fledged tower defense) is actually pretty fun. Even as a very raid-focused player, I find myself messing around with the card game way more than expected.


Cons:
* Pretty much all of those nice things I said above DO NOT come into play early-game. Up until perhaps level 40 (of your first job) the game is just painfully slow; combat is brainless, the story isn't great, the professions are somewhat limited, and the instances are just not fun. Every single MMO-playing friend of mine that has not enjoyed FF14 cites the same reason: combat, and progression, feel miserably boring. MMos aren't known for good early game, but this one is particularly painful.
* To expand on combat: The base global cooldown (time before casting another 'core' ability) is 2.5 seconds, where most MMORPGs use something like 1 second. As a melee player this feels like eternity. Eventually you often gain GCD-reducing buffs, as well as an arsenal of off-GCD (oGCD) abilities to use between the basic GCD stuff that dramatically improves combat, but until you have those it just feels bad.
* There is an air of stiffness to many things, largely due to a huge pile of technical debt related to the original release of the game. The UI feels clumsy, there are arbitrary limitations on things like glamour and inventory, and the class-into-job transition feels completely meaningless. I personally do not forgive "legacy spaghetti code" as an excuse, if management cared they would pay to fix it. This is common to many older MMOs, but I'm not letting it pass.
* Without spoilers, the endgame PvE grindzone is probably my least favorite of any game I have played. It highlights a lot of clumsy open-world issues with cooperation, and punishes you for deaths while making it astoundingly easy to die without warning. It just shines a light on a lot of stuff they should not have done.
* It's a triple-monetized game: You buy the game + expansions, you buy a monthly sub, and THEN they have an in-game shop with exclusive content. I don't know why WoW gets blasted over the same thing, but somehow people accept when FF14 does it? I personally do not forgive it; I have plenty of disposable income but that doesn't mean you are entitled to all of it. AND they charge for account services like realm transfers. This business model is inexcusable, and I don't blame anyone for not supporting it.


It may look like I wrote more cons than pros, but my final view is that this is a good game. I often find that the higher the quality of something, the uglier the defects start to look, and so its easy for me to rant about the flaws. Fortunately this game (famously) has a free trial up to level 60 (and you can level every job to 60 without limit) so you have the opportunity to see for yourself.

If you have that dastardly MMO itch, and none of the usual titles are scratching it, I sincerely recommend giving this one a shot.

I grew up playing puzzle games as my favorite genre, with the Myst series always holding a special place in my heart as a beautiful mixture of story, lateral thinking, and exploration. If you feel the same, then you will enjoy Quern, as it is best described as a love letter to the Myst series. The game takes a while to rev up, but once it does you will find yourself in that familiar trance.

For negatives, many of the puzzles are summarized as finding 2 lists and sticking them together. Many of the more frustrating moments come from from realizing those 2 lists are combined in a non-intuitive way, which comes across less as a clever solution and more as an aggravating miscommunication. The lore is somewhat interesting, but remarkably shallow: there is little meaningful characterization of anyone and it leaves a bad taste. A few of the puzzles give poor feedback for long periods of time, which feels a bit like having your time wasted when it takes 10 minutes to find out you had a wrong assumption.

However, with all that said, I did play 15 hours in 2 days. For all the negatives, there were absolutely enough positives to make it an enjoyable and memorable weekend, The closer to perfect something is, the more glaring each flaw becomes; I absolutely recommend this game despite the critique.

This game takes a relatively simple genre of puzzle and pushes it to the absolute limit. At every step the developers found a way to add more mechanics and interactions, forming very complex and intertwined puzzles. Several of them actually astounded me in how well they explained a very challenging puzzle without any words.

All the while, you are surrounded by a gorgeous and vibrant island, rendering many cultures and scenes in a clean aesthetic jam-packed with reward for exploration and observation. The game never asks you for anything, there are no carrots on sticks: It is simply a mountain that presents itself to those who feel so inclined to climb.

This is unironically the best match-3 puzzle game I have played, and I've played a lot of them. The porn is okay but it's really not a reason to play on its own. I continuously play this game, enduring the jokes when folks see my active game on Discord, because it's addicting and very engaging and always leaves room for improvement. Ignore the stigma and live yo life.

This is some of the best shooting I've ever experienced. Super classic feel in every way.

This is a very grindy and self-motivated game about loot for loot's sake; that said, you are a backflipping space ninja with unreasonable superpowers and overpowered weaponry. Basically the core gameplay revolves around running a few basic game types like defense and capture to gear up, level equipment, and collect resources for more equipment to do it all better. Though it is a grind, it's one about setting entire armies on fire or clawing them apart with your bare hands with your buddies.

I didn't think much of it at first, and it certainly looks like a standard pay-to-win time waster, but after a few hours I found myself having some honest-to-goodness fun and a fair environment to have it in. The movement is exciting and the community is refreshingly polite and helpful. It's fairly easy and efficient to grind out valuable items that other players will buy for premium currency, so even the most luxurious MTX cosmetics are within reach.

I do feel a small monetary investment (I've paid $5 so far) is necessary to feel comfortable, but that is a necessary evil of funding a game like this. The decisions of the dev team can be questionable, but the core gameplay is solid. Just expect the usual "devs plz" ordeal and trust that the overall direction is stable and positive.

Overall I give it an 8/10. It's far from perfect, but for a free (or very cheap) game, it's a heck of a time.
I still enjoy logging in and killing 4 grineer with one arrow while spreading toxic spores over entire maps, and that's enough reason for me to keep playing.

I can't stop playing please send help

Extremely nostalgic for any fans of the Harvest Moon series, provides a very simple and expansive gameplay environment designed to never make you unhappy. Enjoyable even for hardcore min-maxers.