Category: F2P

SolForge Fusion

Before I talk about SolForge Fusion, I want to talk about SolForge. SolForge was its predecessor. A digital-only card game that lived a brief 4 years, and then died. We should talk about why.

SolForge never had a problem being fun. Its core mechanic was, and remains, brilliant and simple. Here’s how it worked.

In SolForge, each time you played a card, it got stronger in future rounds. Decks were small, and every few rounds they’d shuffle all the upgraded cards back in.

This created a simple, but very exciting core tension: Playing the best card for the moment vs. playing a card that might be less ideal now, but was better later.

SolForge didn’t die because of bad mechanics. It died because it didn’t make any money.

But here, from the ashes, comes SolForge Fusion, a brand new digital/physical/web3 card game! Bringing back the traditional upgrade mechanic, it’s replaced its deck construction with a combo of KeyForge and Smash Up.

Gameplay

SolForge Fusion is played over four phases of three rounds each. At the start of each round, players draw a hand of five cards from their deck, then each take alternating turns, generally playing a single card into one of five lanes.

One player is given the forge to start, marking them as the first player for that round. They will play the first and third card of the round, while the other player will play the second and fourth (and final) card. Creatures played by the player with the forge are aggressive, meaning they will attack the turn they are played, while creatures played by the non-forge player will defend, but not attack. After one turn, every creature in play moves to the top of the lane and attacks.

If this sounds complicated, it boils down to: alternating first player, and since the first player is somewhat punished by the opponent getting to see all of their plays before combat, they also get to go on the offensive.

At the end of each round, players discard their unplayed cards and creatures slam into each other dealing damage equal to their attack. Unblocked creatures deal damage to the opposing player. After three rounds, cards are shuffled back into their owners’ decks, including upgraded cards, and the process repeats.

Whoever runs out of health loses, and if both players have health after all four phases, whoever has the most wins. There is a bit more to it than this, but this is the general loop.

So, is it worth playing?

Yes.

That’s a yes that I’m going to caveat heavily over the next few sentences, but I’ve had a lot of fun with SolForge Fusion. Specifically, a lot of fun I’ve had exclusively playing the digital version of SolForge Fusion.

I wrote about SolForge Fusion briefly before in 2022, but I was writing about the paper version of the game. To summarize my opinion from then: the game is simply far too clunky to play in paper. In digital, though, all of those issues are managed by the computer, so it’s a silky smooth experience*.

*Compared to the physical game. More on this later.

A second caveat is that I’ve spent most of my time playing the Roguelike PVE mode. It’s a sort of Slay The Spire thing where you pick a deck and fight through a series of enemies, culminating in a boss. While the content feels limited, it’s just very fun to play. Currently there are only 2 campaigns, and only one is free. The second costs $10.

But now that we’re talking about money, let’s talk about the in-game economy.

The in-game economy is a mess.

SolForge Fusion has Web 3 integration. Here’s the whitepaper. I got 3 slides in before my eyes glazed over, mostly because the first 3 pages are the exact same set of words, rephrased.

Side Note: The official position of this blog is that crypto can suck it. At some point I may clarify my position on this.

Now, you can ignore this and play, in which case… it’s still a mess. Even after playing for 18 or so hours, I haven’t saved enough gold to get one permanent deck.

There’s also a premium battlepass that comes with the second PVE campaign. I paid to unlock it, and then realized that the good rewards on it would require me to play 40-60 more hours of the game. Frankly, I feel like I got my $10 worth out of the campaign, not so much out of the battlepass.

It’s just a mess.

Side note: I posted about the grindy battlepass on the SolForge Discord, and the response I got was that it’s intended for long term players who have played the game a lot more than me. I understand that viewpoint, but I think it misses the point, because the end game track rewards are additional decks. As a new player, I would have liked to have more than 4 decks to play with, so that I can actually… y’know. Experiment and enjoy of the game. Which might have led to me playing an additional 40-60 hours. But given that really only have one deck to play with currently, I’m now a bit burnt out.

Bugs and Weirdness

As I was playing a few final games to put the finishing touches on this writeup, I played an online game where the server hit a critical error and crashed, kicking me back to the game’s login screen.

There are also a few goofy UI things. For example, when you complete a quest, it doesn’t auto-claim, so it’s possible to complete your quest and then forget to actually get your rewards.

Also, the store still has purchasable items for an event that already ended, and can’t be played further, so that’s great.

These things are small, but they’re part of a clunky experience that just drags things down a bit.

I’m sure some folks will defend the game by saying “It’s an early access alpha!” to which I say “It has a fully released cash shop that takes real money, as such I will treat it as a fully released game”.

Overall

SolForge Fusion is fun, which is a bummer because I still don’t feel compelled to spend any more money on it than the $10 I put in. Given that I may well be the patron saint of spending money on card games I don’t really play, that probably doesn’t bode well SolForge Fusion’s long term success.

One thing I didn’t touch on in this write-up is that the player base seems low. I didn’t mention it because it’s not really relevant. There’s PVE, and if the game detects that you’re sitting in the PVP queue for too long, it’ll match you against some pretty decent bots that count as players for the purpose of rewards.

So yeah. Download it. Play it for a bit.

Then just decide if you want to play more, or go do something else. I wish I could say that its fun gameplay will carry it to success. But there’s a lot of junk here, and quality is often no indicator of games’ long term profitably.

Stalcraft

Ed Note: Most of this writeup was written earlier in the year, around Christmas, as was my time in the game. Some of this info may be out of date. Still, Stalcraft is weird enough for me to want to talk about, even if I don’t plan on playing anymore in the near future.

Stalcraft is strange. If you want to know why and don’t care about context, you can skip ahead to the section titled “The Weird Bit.” If not, let’s lay some groundwork, and do a normal review before everything goes off the rails.

Stalcraft is a F2P pseudo-extraction shooter that takes place in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. It’s inspired by the short story “A Roadside Picnic,” using much of the book’s language and terminology. The game’s title is a portmanteau, that thing where you combine two different words into one word. The words in question here are “Stalker” and “Craft”.

If you’re going “Wait, isn’t there another game that does this?” don’t worry. We’ll come back to that.

In the game, you’ve suffered a hallucination, and woken up in the Zone—the game’s shorthand for the Chernobyl exclusion zone. You pick one of two starter factions, then you slowly work your way up through the ranks of various bases, completing quests, and traveling across the map deeper and deeper to try to understand what caused you to end up in the Zone.

Gameplay Loop

After creating a character with one of the game’s two starting factions and being given a brief tutorial, you’re dropped into the Zone with a location for the main story quest, a base to return to, and about 5 bullets.

Most of Stalcraft’s gameplay loop takes place across the game’s various zones. Zones are permanently PVP-enabled between factions, and full of enemies

There are two primary parts to Stalcraft’s gameplay loop. Both parts have the player adventuring out into the zone. One is quests, and the other is just general looting and gathering.

A Hunting We Shall Go

Looting and gathering in Stalcraft is fairly simple. Load up your inventory full of bullets, go into the world, travel to various areas, and shoot everything that moves. Since this is an extraction shooter, if you die, you will drop your stuff. Well, not all of it. Some items, like your weapons and armor stay, as do a few quest items. But ammo, snacks, and med-packs are goners.

Stalcraft equipment follows a pretty standard F2P game sort of model, with each piece of being upgraded from older equipment. Doing so requires gathering various zone based resources. For PVP protection, when you’re killed the resources drop, but other players can’t use them.

Instead, they drop in a backpack, a container that can only be opened by the person who gathered the resources in the first place. The result is that it’s not really possible to progress your gear by PKing, but it is possible to PK for a profit by killing other players. Then ransoming their items back to them.

It’s a very slick piece of design. It forces players to engage with the primary system/loop, while still rewarding player killing, and preventing it from becoming a primary method of progression.

A Noble Quest

Quests, on the other hand, involve the same general “running around trying not to die,” but with a more story directed focus. And for every quest that asks you to kill 10 boars, you’ll get one that’s a bit stranger.

Crawl into a dog kennel, and solve a jumping puzzle.

Solve a mildly frustrating riddle.

Deliver these items.
Into an active volcanic area.

They’re some of the strangest and often incredibly hard things I’ve ever had to do in a video game. Sometimes that’s because they’re janky, and sometimes that’s because… well, you have to cross an entire map of enemy players to get to the place to actually do the damn thing.

The Weird Bit

If you’ve been paying attention, or looking at the screenshots, you might have started to put something together. Or maybe you also play a lot of games.

See, while Stalcraft now is a fully standalone game, that’s not what it started as.

You ready?

Stalcraft is/was a mod/private server for Minecraft, with the majority of the game, setting and world taken from the open world game STALKER, and its sequels.

The end result is that Stalcraft is a sort of weird chimera of design. Why are there so many (awful) jumping puzzles and riddles? Because those are comparatively easy to design and implement in Minecraft. Why do all the characters look the way they do? Same thing. Why are the characters and story so weirdly detailed and thought out? Because the whole thing was almost just ported over from another entire game.

To be clear: at no point did StalCraft team, as far as I’m aware, give a penny to anyone above. They just kind of… built someone else’s game inside their own game, and turned it into a generally fun, if aggravating extraction shooter.

It’s incredibly novel, and I’ve just never seen anyone do something quite like this.

That’s all very nice, but should you actually play it?

I played about 70 hours of Stalcraft before I burned out. Ultimately, this is a F2P game, with F2p monetization. Unless you have a huge amount of time or money to burn, you’re not getting to endgame.

That said, it’s an incredibly unique experience in the F2P genre. It can be tense, funny, and aggravating. I got killed and had my corpse camped, only to run back and die over and over again.

There was also a time I killed someone in an enemy faction sort of out of panic, looked at them, realized I didn’t really care if I killed them, rezed them, and then we just looked at each other and ran off.

I think what makes Stalcraft worth playing is how different, weird and janky it is. It’s not the same as something being good, but compared to so many other games, it’s interesting.

In many ways, the general experience reminds me a lot of Sea of Thieves, though slightly more dangerous. You’re dropped into a playground, full of glass, bits of irradiated metal, and told to go play with the other kids, some of whom will beat you up. And sure, the whole thing is cobbled together: those monkey bars are rusting, and some car somewhere is blasting Russian Christmas carols.

But god, if it isn’t fascinating.

PAX Report – Path of Exile 2

So, one of the coolest things I got to do at PAX was sit down and see the media demo for Path of Exile 2. I’d like to thank the folks Grinding Gear Games and Octavian0/Chris for showing me the game, since I’m obviously a much smaller outlet than a lot of other folks. If you’re curious about why you should care about my opinion click here.

Overall Thoughts

There’s a bunch of interesting small things, but as someone who previously played a bunch of PoE, two things stood out to me from the demo:

  1. A focus on making the game much more reactive than Path of Exile is.
  2. An intention to simplify the parts of the game that can be simplified.

Let’s go through them!

Increased Reactivity, Less Spamming

There were two big sets of changes I saw in the media demo of Path of Exile 2, and the demo I played. The first was that bosses felt and played differently than in the first game. I watched one boss fight thathad a sort of bullet hell sub-mechanic, and I fought against two bosses in the demo.

Of those bosses, the demo’s version of “Hillock” is a good example here. Hillock is the very first sort of mini-boss in the game, and he’s just a big chonky dude. In PoE, he just runs at the player, so you kite him back, and whack him down.

In Path of Exile 2, the boss has a much larger variety of attacks, including summoning packs of zombies, and a ground targeted panel that crosses a large portion of the screen and has to be dodged with the game’s new roll/dash. Plus, Hillock was just generally much more aggressive with its gap closers.

On the player’s side of the media demo, Octavian0 showed off a much larger level of interactivity between skills than I’ve seen previously in PoE. This included things like: throwing down clouds of poisonous gas and igniting them with fire; and setting up plants to grow over time, but that can be detonated early by casting another skill onto them. Instead of just having PoE’s synergy between skills, there was real interactivity between them.

Simplification

This might sound bad, but it really isn’t. In this case, I’m mostly talking about simplifying some of PoE’s internal systems, specifically mechanics around getting early game items.

I saw two big examples of this. The first was skill gems. Instead of single gems, gems now come as uncut gems that when dropped, and you use them to choose what skill you need.

The second was around…. GOLD. Yes, PoE has gold now, but it seems like it’s mostly to buy campaign items from vendors. And honestly, it feels like a really good change for onboarding. I’m someone who loves PoE’s economy, but asking a new player to understand the idea of alterations and chromas and vendor recipes, as well as the skill tree has always felt like a bit much when I try to get new friends into the game.

So yeah. Simplification of systems that can be simplified.

Some Other Notes, and Neat Stuff

I’m just gonna be rambling now, but there was a bunch of other cool stuff I saw. For example, there are gonna be mounts! And Rhoas have been been redesigned look more like Chocobos, and less like head-crabs with legs.

The WASD movement feels great, as does the dodge roll. It honestly feels better than right clicking. There are skills on weapons, so that seems neat. Also, many bosses seem to build up stun, giving them a much nicer sense of pacing than “dodge dodge dodge dodge pray flask dodge”.

Overall, after what I’ve seen, I’m really excited for Path of Exile 2. It’s gonna be a different game, and potentially a much harder one, but it looks incredibly fun. It’s trying to address a lot of the problems Path of Exile has, just as a result of 10 years of incremental updates.

My Background

I like Path of Exile. How much do I like Path of Exile? Well, here’s my Steam playtime.

And this before I switched over to the single player client, where a majority of my play time is.

For fellow PoE players, who are going “Yeah, but for all we know, that was spent farming tab cards in Blood Aqueducts,” I offer the following notes.

  • I killed Uber Elder when it was peak end game boss.
  • I almost exclusively play necro/summoners, but I’ve also played trappers/miners in a few leagues.
  • Most of my playtime was between Delve League, and Echos of the Atlas, with a smattering afterwards, so I am a bit out of date. That said, I tried to chat with some folks who have played more recently, and did a quick act 1 run for comparison with the demo I played at PAX East.

Legend of Mushroom

Legend of Mushroom confuses me. It is, technically, a video game. It is technically a video game that I have played a lot of. But in the grand scheme of things, if the average free to play game is a lure on a fishing line, Legend of Mushroom is made entirely out of hooks. It has no real bait aside from pretty graphics, and the most bare bones of dopamine reward loops. I’ve written about idle games before. Legend of Mushroom is different.

It looks like a game. It feels like a game. But much like John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” the second the flesh peels back, it becomes apparent that what you are dealing with is not of this earth, and would terrify even the devil.

Mechanically, Legend of Mushroom is what you get when you set out to make a Skinner box game, and do the Skinner box part, but forget the game. Every mechanic in the game is accompanied by bells, whistles, and a complete absence of player agency.

There’s a battle system, but you can just have all your skills auto-cast. There’s a gear system, but all gear is from a random lootbox, and after 15 days, I’m still not at a point where anything matters for the gear other then bigger numbers. There’s a pet/skill system, but getting pets and skills is, again, a random lootbox. You can’t really make builds, and the better ones are so much better that there’s no reason to not just slot them in.

And yet, technically, I have “played” this game for 15 days. In that time, I don’t think I’ve made any meaningful decisions about gameplay. Instead, I have just clicked on the things to be clicked, and then watched ads. And then I have watched more ads, to get more things.

Why bother writing about it?

Two reasons. One is the fact that after writing about this sort of game, I tend to stop playing. Writing purges any desire I have to continue. The second is that, as always, these sorts of games have some weird shit going on.

The standard weird shit is that one of the events the game is currently running is an event for spending money. Not too uncommon. But the amounts of money are just plain bonkers, especially for a game with no game play.

The game has another weird system though. It’s referred to in-game as the “Employment” system.

Here’s the UI.

You might now understand why I put those quotes up there. It’s also not really thematically about employment, because I’m unaware of a system of employment in which someone just beats you up, chains you in a basement, and extracts wealth from you until you either break free, or someone else sets you free.

That’s just called slavery. I’m not sure why the cute mushroom game has a system for taking other players as slaves, but is does, so that’s neat.

Conclusion

There is no reason to ever play Legend of Mushroom, and with this post, I am free from its grip. If you for any reason, were tempted to play, don’t. If you were tempted to spend money in Legend of Mushroom, do something more productive with it, like buying drugs, or lottery tickets.

Or setting it on fire.

Or “investing” in crypto.

SIGIL

I like bubblegum. I like cereal. I like a hearty stew.

That doesn’t mean I want to mix all of them together and eat the result. I have a similar problem with SIGIL.

Sigil (full name SIGIL – Magical GPS Action RPG), is a single player alternate reality game. Players walk around in the real world to move in-game. Combat is real time, and takes place on a large grid, involving casting spells, and trying to avoid the enemies spells. There’s a tone of whimsy in the design and theming of the enemies, which is a nice change from every mobile game being themed around nude anime girls.

All of which is to say, I’d really like to recommend it. But I’m just not having enough fun with it, and there are some real pain points.

First up, exploration. You can only interact with items in an 150m radius of your player character, and there are a fairly limited amount of things to do. In theory, that’s when you get up and walk around. But unlike Pokemon Go, or Orna, SIGIL doesn’t let you see far away from you, or a map.

This makes it hard to set goals, or to target specific items or enemies to fight. If there’s some sort of system for how enemies and harvestable items are spawned, the game does not explain it, and I have not been able to figure it out just by looking. The game also doesn’t have an in-game map that underlays the interactable objects. This means that the only way to get more stuff is to just go out, and walk around.

This brings us to the second big mechanic: Combat.

Sigil has a grid based real time combat system that feels really interesting. The game starts you out with a single long range attack and block, but there are unlockable spells to summon minions, walls to block to block projectiles, and spells that require you to charge. You do all this while moving around, trying to stand in specific locations on the grid to get buffs, and pick up “Mana” that boosts your resource pool for the fight you’re in.

I have a few problems with the combat, but none of them are directly with the combat mechanics. Instead they’re all parallel problems. First off, you can’t play combat passively at all. You have to be actively engaged, moving around, attacking and blocking at all times.

Which is fine. That’s how video games are supposed to work. The problem is that with most video games, I’m not playing them while also trying to avoid walking directly into the path of an oncoming semi-truck.

The other issue with combat is the performance. I have a relatively new iPhone, and on the lowest settings, the game just sort of chugs along, occasionally lagging, and in one instance straight crashing.

My last painpoint is with the resources themselves. There is no easy way of figuring out how to get most things. One critical resource that’s used in every single hex craft, or hex upgrade, I straight up never found.

Instead, I went and bought it from the game premium currency shop, because of course it has a premium currency shop. It also has ads you can watch after combat to double your rewards bonus. This to me is almost more egregious, because, remember, this is an augmented reality game. You seriously want me to spend data streaming and watching an ad while I’m walking around outside?

You know what screams victory to me? Being told that if I watch an ad of someone screeching at a slot machine, I could get double rewards!

SIGIL is somehow less than the sum of its parts. It has a beautiful weird Tim Burton-esque world I actually would like to know more about, instead of being the typical mobile “Wow, you’re in a world where you need to collect girls who are an anthropomorphic personification of rocks/trains/boats/the subconscious desire to be loved.” It has a strong and unique combat system.

But the combat doesn’t work with the augmented reality, the crafting feels incredibly grindy, and typical mobile garbage rears its ugly head early, and doesn’t put it down.