Gametrodon

Category: Video Games

  • Siralim 3 – It Is Eh

    I really want to like Siralim 3. But I don’t. I’m not sure why. Let’s talk about that.

    Some of my most played games overall are Path of Exile, Pokemon, and Disgaea. On my Switch, Diablo clocks in at about 120 hours, and my Disgaea 4 save file has about 160 hours on it, and a few of the endings. We could talk about how much time I’ve got in PoE, but that would involve noting the questionable use of several thousand hours of my life. So let’s not instead, and say it’s my second most played game of all time.

    So when I say Siralim sounds like the bastard child of those three genres, I feel like the end result should be, “Hey, I’m gonna play this forever.” And according to Steam, I have played about 8 hours.

    I’m not sure why then that when asked how I feel about Sirilim, my answer is sorta just, “Yeah, it’s fine.” But the thing is, I’m not sure I’d actually recommend it.

    Siralim 3 is a 6v6 RPG battler. You wander from randomly generated realm to realm, collecting monsters, leveling them up, and fighting forward. The game has extensive scripting and macro capabilities, letting you more or less just automate fights if you wish, and you can even make said scripts conditional. Of the monsters, I’ve seen about 30-40 of them, and they all seem to function pretty differently. Finally, the game has a weapon and spell gem system, and on top of that, you can craft and recraft those items with different modifiers.

    So, we have a lot of systems with interesting tactical depth regarding equipment, (PoE/Disgaea), massive variety of characters (Disgaea/Pokemon), and a massive replayability and grind automation to just make the happy numbers go up (PoE/Diablo).

    And yet the game still feels very meh. I think this is a two part problem, at least partly based on the artwork and the writing of the game. The artwork is… fine. But it’s not inspiring. I don’t really love any of the monsters in the game. None of the creatures feels like they’re part of “my team”. They all feel pretty interchangeable. In fact, I decided to see if I could name any of them, and uh, I can’t. Not off the top of my head. Despite playing for 8 hours.

    The writing ranges from “Yes, this is writing” to “Bad”. It’s not gonna win any prizes, and I don’t think it’s trying to.

    If I had to try to pinpoint why I don’t enjoy the game, it would come down to two main things: first of all, the general feel of the game itself is pretty bland. Despite being mathematically and mechanically interesting, it feels dull to look at. This makes it hard for me to ever really get invested, or push through the boring bits for the next cool thing. There’s nothing Siralim is going to show me that I’m excited to see, be it boss, dungeon, item, etc.

    The second thing is that Siralim feels a bit overwhelming. I recognize that this might sound a bit rich from someone who claims to love PoE and Disgaea, but in both those games, I’m usually interested enough in continuing to play the game that I end up caring about whatever bullshit system they make me learn. I’m willing to learn how stacks, orbs, auras, etc. all function because I want to see more of the world and story. (Hello, all 10 other people who care about the lore in PoE, whats up?)

    So, would I recommend Siralim? No. Would I buy it again? Also, probs no. I don’t think it’s bad. But the lack of compelling writing or interesting things to look at in terms of art means that I have zero desire to continue learning it’s system and mechanics. Siralim is clearly someone’s game, the newest version, Siralim Ultimate just raised $90,000 on Kickstarter. But it’s not my game.

  • Helltaker – Short and Sweet

    This review is more in the form of a rambling recounting essay than anything else, but as per Gametrodon editorial standards (i.e. my own self enforced and designed standard that applies to myself), I’m gonna save some reading time. Helltaker is really neat, and it’s free. You can get it here. Now, back to the stories.

    In Ye Olden Days, otherwise known as the 2000’s, I did not have a computer. Or to be more precise, I did not have a computer you could play games on. My family had a desktop mac, that eventually succumbed to the ravages of time, but even if the operating system had been compatible with PC gaming at the time (it wasn’t), I still wasn’t allowed to use it to play games.

    Instead, any computer gaming I did at that point in time either took place at my friend’s house, or the library. And in both cases, I mostly ended up playing various weird random flash or other web browser games.

    Looking back at it now, I suspect that most of the sites that I played on were primarily rips, and copies, stealing games off other sites, and then uploading them on their own. But at the time, I didn’t know this. All I really knew is that I could go to those websites, find something, and then just play it for hours.

    When I see people talking about independent games these days, I don’t often hear people mention those early flash games and weird browser hybrids. Things like Minecraft, Binding of Issac, and Cave Story are pretty easy to point at. But for me, there was a massive amount of weird shit that I played that is more or less lost to time, and the fact that I can’t remember their names.

    I say all of this as a lead-up to discussing Helltaker, because as a game it reminds me of those small, strange little flash games. It’s short, sweet, and polished, with a few hidden secrets. You won’t be playing it for years to come, and you’ll finish it in a day. But it sticks with you.

    There’s not much point in talking extensively about Helltaker’s gameplay, as it’s a fairly simple/straightforward puzzle game where you need to get to the exit (Demon Girl) before you run out of moves. There’s also another part of the game that subverts that a bit, but most of your time in the game will be spent on the puzzles.

    Also, Modeus best girl.

    One of the demons from Helltaker.

  • A Hat In Time

    A Hat in Time came out in 2017, and I still haven’t finished it. It’s incredibly well reviewed, has a lovely community, and I still see fan art for it every now and then. It funded at 1000% on its Kickstarter, and could be considered one of the Indie darlings of that year.

    I’m leading with all of this because I don’t really like A Hat in Time. I also don’t think this review should necessarily be a reason to not play it, but I still feel it’s worth pointing out. The other reason I’m writing this review is that I finally just deleted the game from my backlog on Steam, as I’m just not motivated to keep playing it, and I figured it might as well be worth noting at a bare minimum.

    A Hat in Time is a collectathon platformer, a genre I’ve never really been super into. I’ve finished Super Mario Odyssey, but I never played any of the other games that it often gets to compared to, like Banjo-Kazooie.

    For whatever reason, A Hat in Time just never clicked for me. I found the jumping floaty, and I found myself often having more frustration then fun. The fun cartoony aesthetic also just wasn’t my thing. When I’ve asked other people about it, some of the things I don’t really enjoy are things other players love. It’s interesting to see, and I think a good reminder of how diverse peoples tastes in games can be.

    Regardless, A Hat In Time was not my cup of tea, but if you love games like Banjo-Kazooie, I’d say check it out. Maybe you can find the spark in it I missed. But for me, it just never clicked.

  • Project Winter – Skill Based Social Deduction

    I really like Project Winter. I like it a lot. If those two sentences have persuaded you to buy it already, just click here. If not, keep reading. (I know the $20 price tag might turn people off a bit, but I’ve played over 300 hours of this.)

    If I had to describe it in a single sentence, I’d call it a skill based social deduction game. So what do I mean by that?

    Many of us have, at one point or another, played a social deduction game of some sort. Maybe it was Werewolf, or Town of Salem. Maybe it was Mafia at a party. Maybe it was Junta at another party with friends who were a little more intense then the Mafia friends, or maybe it was Secret Hitler.

    One thing all of these games have in common is that when all is said and done, they come down to one big thing: convincing the other players, “No, I’m not the murderer,” and if you fail, you’re done for. This is not necessarily the case with Project Winter, because unlike all those other games, should you fail to be persuasive enough, you can choose to just fucking leg it into the great wilderness, and try to not die.

    This for me is the biggest strength of Project Winter overall: it’s a social deduction game where the voice of the mob is quieted slightly. If you find someone standing over a corpse in the middle the woods, after hearing someone shout for help, there’s no amount of smooth talking they can do that will stop you from applying a sledgehammer to the kneecaps. Likewise, if you go off into the wilderness with two random people, and the second you’re out of earshot of the rest of the group they do a localized reenactment of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre starring you as the massacred, it doesn’t feel quite as cheap as, “Yeah, well, the Mafia picked you to die last night. Sucks to be you.” There are actual game play mechanics, actual movement, actual skills, strategies and tricks in play.

    Okay, so now that I’ve written two paragraphs of fluff, what actually is Project Winter? Well, as noted above, it’s a 5-8 player social deduction/survival game. Of the starting players, 1-2 of them will be traitors, and the rest are all survivors of various sorts. The survivors have 30 minutes to complete two objectives, call in a rescue vehicle, and board the vehicle to win. The traitors just have to stop them. And this is where things get good.

    Unlike the games mentioned above, Project Winter doesn’t progress via vote systems or orderly rules. The game play itself is in a top down isometric view, and the actual game play is more akin to Minecraft Diablo. You can craft items, harvest materials, open supply bunkers, and interact with objectives. Most objectives require you to complete a task of some sort to repair them, like placing a certain number of mechanical parts in them.

    In addition many tasks will require multiple players to be completed. Most bunkers, full of the supplies you need to fix objectives, require 2-3 players to actually open them. The amount of supplies to fix an objective is almost always more then what a single player could carry on their own, and even if a single player can carry everything, it tends to require that player to drop a weapon, and to have every inventory slot filled. And you don’t run as fast while holding an item, and the lack of any means to defend yourself makes you a very tasty target.

    I won’t go into detail on all the other systems in the game, but there are a bunch of great mechanics like local voice chat, and being able to swap clothes with dead players and disguise as them. The whole game is structured to make each round as fun as possible, and there are multiple ways to succeed, regardless of your role.

    If you enjoy social deduction games, lying to strangers, or being hunted/hunting someone to death in the woods as you both slowly starve and try to survive, I’d highly recommend picking up Project Winter.

  • How much does Runeterra really cost?

    Update 5/24/2020 – The initial table has been updated to clarify that this is the maximum a deck could cost you. This was how we intended the table to be read, but we can see that the wording was unclear, and so it’s been updated.

    Hiding the conclusions about things at the end of your article is for people who need clicks, pageviews, and ad conversions. I have no ads, no clicks, and still haven’t set up google analytics. So let’s give the conclusion right here.

    Cost to buy the base set if you start with nothing$450
    Cost to buy the base set counting cards earned for free progression after about a week~$310-$330
    Cost to buy the full first expansion~$210
    MAXIMUM Cost to netdeck any Runeterra deck from scratch~$60
    If I don’t put text here, the chart looks ugly. So, how are folks doing?

    I’ve talked about some of the things I liked about Runeterra in a previous post, and one of the things about it is the fact that you can just buy the cards you want instead of boosters. It also makes it much easier to figure out how much it would cost to buy Runeterra.

    So, that’s what this article is gonna be about. Figuring out how much it costs to buy Runeterra.

    There are a few things we need to know first, so let’s just jump into it. I was gonna write a whole bunch of stuff, but that seems excessive. So instead, let’s just look at how much a card costs in actual US Dollars, at each of the price points that Riot sells Coins.

    Card Rarity / Cost of Package of Coins4.999.9919.9934.9949.9999.99
    Champion$3.15$3.00$2.93$2.88$2.80$2.73
    Epic$1.26$1.20$1.17$1.15$1.12$1.09
    Rare$0.32$0.30$0.29$0.29$0.28$0.27
    Common$0.11$0.10$0.10$0.10$0.09$0.09
    So, for example, if you buy a 4.99 package, it costs you $3.15 overall to buy a single Champion card. But if you spend 99.99, it only costs you $2.73 per champion card. Except you also already actually spent $100, and unless you have $99.99 worth of cards you want to craft, I’m not sure the .50 cent discount is that great.

    Cool. So with this chart, it’s pretty easy to figure out how much it would cost to buy an entire set of the cards. For right now, we’re gonna just look at the base set, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment. A few quick maths later, and we find this.

    Coin Cost4.999.9919.9934.9949.9999.99
    Base Set Playset$512.45$487.31$475.66$467.62$455.80$443.41

    Still, this assumes we could purchase coins at any amount we want. That isn’t the case. We can only purchase them in the amounts defined above. So instead, let’s look at what the cheapest we can get it.

    I went through a few quick scenarios which assume that you need to buy all the cards, and each time I did my math, it worked out to about $450 to buy a playset of all base set cards of Runeterra. (Because you can’t buy half of a package or anything, you need to buy four $100 bundles, and one $50 bundle.)

    However, this assumes you had to buy in to Runeterra, and that you had to buy every single card you ever got. And I don’t think this is super accurate either. I’ve been playing for just about two weeks at this point without spending any money. So I punched in my own collection so far, and what it would cost to complete it. And when I did, I came up with another number: about $320, maybe give or take about $10.

    This is all well and good for the base set, but lets take a look at something more interesting: The first expansion for the game, the Bilgewater themed The Rising Tides.

    After more QUIK MATHS, I ended up with about $210 to buy a full playset of the expansion, starting from nothing. I’m gonna write about whether or not I think that’s a fair price, but it’s good to know that for each future expansion, that’s how much it might cost you to keep playing, assuming each expansion is about the same size.

    So, we have two numbers so far. $350 to finish the base set after you play for a bit, and maybe $210 for an expansion. So we’re all good right?

    I say “No.” Runeterra is a card game. Ultimately the thing that matters with card games is how much it costs to play them, and for some people, that means the cost of making a competitive deck.

    Decks in Runeterra have a maximum of 40 cards, and can only have 6 champion cards in them. So lets assume you needed to netdeck the new hotness, and it was a 40 card deck with 34 epic cards in it, and 6 champs. This runs us a total of about 5880 coins.

    In order to buy that many coins, you’d have to spend just about $60.

    That was a lot of math, and I was planning to discuss how I felt about this at the end of the article. However, since I now have done too much math, I think I’m gonna save that for another day.

    Until then, stay safe my dudes.