Life Outside PLT1

VIDEO GAMES - Only the negatives

September 1, 2010 on 2:49 pm | In Other Gaming, Reviews | | Sicopath

Well ok, let me just state for the record that I play a pretty fair amount of video games. The good points of newer games is easy to find out because let’s face it – the way hype spreads throughout the internet can be mind boggling even when you take advertising out of the equation (which it hardly ever is).
As a service to everyone, i’m gonna go ahead and list a bunch of the games i’ve played this year and give a quick summary of the bad points about the games you may not have heard about or have had explained to you in detail.

In Alphabetical order:

Avalon Heroes:
• The voice acting sucks,
• Spelling, grammatical and language syntax errors everywhere indicate the development team is lacking an English proof reader,
• Poor localisation of servers leading to latency problems and language barriers,
• Match finding system is primitive and leaves you at the mercy of team “leaders” who might kick you because you’re not German/Turkish/Brazilian/level 999.

Clive Barker’s Jericho:
• No multiplayer,
• Horror element is extremely downplayed – I was hardly scared by any point in the game,
• Ending easily ranks among the top 10 most disappointing video game endings of all time,
• QTEs are annoying – this is not game specific; they are annoying in every game that has them.

Dragon Age Origins:
• Character models lack polish,
• Buggy engine randomly causes problems with loading times, CPU utilisation and in-game performance,
• No voice acting for player character.

Dragon Age Origins: Awakening:
• Game too short.
• Dialogue is poorly written in some places.

Heroes of Newerth:
• This game is pretty much the poster child of the rating office phrase “Gaming experience may change online” (NERD RAGE);
• The game is pretty close to a letter-for-letter DOTA: Allstars clone so it suffers from the classic fault that is inherent to the specific title – the game is significantly less fun if you’re not winning (NERD RAGE).

League of Legends:
• Rune system is extremely grindy,
• Importance of team composition makes solo-queue play frustrating at times,
• Gameplay imbalances,
• Choice of graphic and art style produces problems with visual clutter.

LOCO:
• Unintuitive inventory system,
• Account levelling and item collection is extremely grindy,
• Gameplay is shallow and not balanced.

Mass Effect 2:
• Storyline slows down completely around the middle which feels like nothing but poorly related sidequests,
• Plot is not very engaging – few emotional moments and connection between missions,
• Combat lacks difficulty while some boss fights are designed to be as annoying as possible.

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty:
• Enforced online latency lowers playability for players outside server locales;
• Forced online multiplayer due to no LAN support,
• Without an ever-present anchoring point to the storyline the single player is at serious risk of feeling like nothing but poorly related side quests.

World of Warcraft:
• Graphical bugs and clipping problems that have existed since first release still exist,
• Endgame content encourages powergaming,
• Latency issues resulting from poor optimisation,
• Game is very difficult to stop playing (much like a psychological experiment where a lab rat is given a button that only sometimes releases a food pellet – the rat is compelled to keep pressing the button even when he isn’t hungry).