Pokémon Legends: Arceus

I won’t spoil much of anything here. But let’s talk about where it drops you into the world and generally what the story is. You are literally dropped back in time through a rift. You land on a beach and you’re in the past. The you meet Professor Laventon who vouches for you and gets you into a village and a team of Pokémon researches. So you need to go out there, complete missions, complete requests, and capture and battle Pokémon.

How Is The Game Play?

The game play enjoyable. I won’t say that it’s amazing, but it’s very fun as you go around doing what you expect to do. And I think that’s kind of the best thing to say about it. Are you capturing Pokémon, yes you are. Are you battling Pokémon, yes you are. And when it comes down to it that is going to be what you want to do in a Pokémon game.

The controls themselves are very easy to learn and master in the game. It actually gives you a lot of assisting when it comes to targeting. There is an element of the game of dodging that I’m not that good at. That is a me issue, not the game issue. The game gives you warning when something is going to attack. For me it is just remembering which button to hit, and I am not that great at it. It’s the one element of the game that really has timing with it though. So I think that it might be an area that some players will struggle like I do.

How Is The Story?

I plan on avoiding spoilers here. But that might be tricky to do when talking about the game. I think that the story is again solid. It is good enough that it keeps me generally engaged with what is happening. It also isn’t so much that I feel like I’m going to forget everything if I take a break. That is the challenge for me with a lot of games, I tend to play for a while and then pause and come back again later.

But the story is fun, and the characters you interact with are fun. I also like how it is building up this history for the game. I know they need to have a lot of history for all of the games that they have, but it’s a fun element to the game. When you start the game, you build the Pokedex. It isn’t something that exists already. That is generally your goal in the game beyond the main story is to build that up.

I find it interesting that they are doing an out of time story as well. You find yourself in the past, and that is unique as well. I think they could have just done a story where you are just really talented as a Pokémon scout/fighter for Galaxy Team. But to be from the future is a nice twist and gives characters other ways to interact with you. And it is good at making the story feel big because of that.

Final Thoughts on Pokémon Legends: Arceus

Pokémon Legends Arceus is a fun game. It’s also a fun game for me because I can play it while my kid if watching. Some of the other games that I just love either aren’t interesting to them, Balatro and Slay the Spire, or are a bit violent and mature, Horizon and Baldur’s Gate 3. And while I enjoy playing games like Mario Kart and Mario Party Jamboree with him, I think it is more fun, or just as much fun to play that type of game that is more of a game. Mainly, I find myself playing it even when he isn’t around.

The one more negative thing, and I suspect this is the case with all the Pokémon games, is that it does feel like you do a lot of the same things. You catch Pokémon and you battle Pokémon. You might say “well duh” but it is an element of the game that is just fine for me. It is something that I expect from the game for sure. But it being my first game, I find that it is enjoyable, but sometimes it feels like I’m doing the same thing a lot. Or I feel like I should grind some in order to get to the level where the next big mission is comfortable for me.

That said, I find this game fun. I wouldn’t keep playing it if I didn’t. And I think that it’s a very solid and enjoyable. And I suspect that when I am done, I’m going to go find another Pokémon game to play. Such as Violet which we own.

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What Is Baldur’s Gate 3

So, normally when I write about board games, this is the section on how to play the game. I’m going to touch on that some for Baldur’s Gate 3 here, but also, what is the game in general?

Baldur’s Gate is a role playing game on the computer. You make your character and take them through adventures having dialogs with the NPCs both in your adventuring party and outside of it, to explore the world and to try and solve the problem that you’ve been faced with. You also face off against enemies in combat.

As you progress through the game you also progress through levels for your character and party members. So you gain more hit points, improve stats, and unlock more spells. All of this is taken directly from Dungeons and Dragons as to how you progress.

And that is the majority of the game. It’s about dialog, combat, and exploring the world. All the while working through the story that of the game.

Is The Story Good?

Let’s start then by talking about the story. Baldur’s Gate 3’s story is engaging from the get go. The game drops you into the story and you just need to start running with it. I like the set piece that you start in, which is in the trailers, of the hells.

And it teaches you while still expecting you to play the game at the start of the story. If you fail to do some things that will impact your game going forward from the get go. It might not be the biggest things, but you might miss out on a whole character if you aren’t careful, which is pretty impressive to start a game.

The story continues to grow from there. I like how it progresses not at that quick a pace, so it gives time for side quests. But it progresses in ways that makes you think about the story before. You need to remember who the characters are and where you’ve met them before. Because, it will matter as characters come back again in the story.

How Does Combat Work?

I think that combat is the area that trips most people up. Cut scenes with dialog and picking options. That all is normal. But the combat in Baldur’s Gate 3 is Dungeons and Dragons combat. You get an initiative, you pick from a lengthy set of spells or you need to consider your combat moves otherwise. And you do that for your whole party. And the monsters work in that way as well.

I know from what I’ve heard that some people don’t like this style of combat as well. And it is not going to be for everyone because it is different. That said, I like it. I like it because I don’t need to be quick on the buttons. When I play a game like Dragon Age, I set them casting some spell or using some shot, and I just keep on eye on cooldowns for when I can do it again. Or I need to try and spam moves or button mash. But here, I take my time to figure out what I want to do and I do that.

Now, as you gain more spells, it might become overwhelming for the player in the game. And it helps that I know what the spells or moves are from Dungeons and Dragons. So I sit down and I see “Fireball” I know what it is going to do. If you are new to Baldur’s Gate 3 and to Dungeons and Dragons it is going to be a different experience for you.

Final Thoughts on Baldur’s Gate 3

Why isn’t there more, you might ask. Surely there are more elements of the game to breakdown. There kind of are, and there kind of aren’t. So much of the rest of the game I’d consider to be traditional in what you are doing. If I’m playing a game or have played fantasy role playing games, or even something like Horizon Zero Dawn, you know what to do in these sorts of games.

The big question is, does the game grab you with the story? And is the combat something that works for you. I think some people will love the combat. I think other people, it is going to be too slow or too overwhelming with everything. And because of that, there is going to be a learning curve that some people won’t want to do.

For me, I love what the game does. I love leveling up my characters and seeing everything that can happen in the story. And I like the check system, maybe the other thing I could have written about. But the classic Dungeons and Dragons D20 system brought over to a video game, and it works well.

Have you played Baldur’s Gate 3, do you enjoy it. And is it worth getting and playing the older Baldur’s Gate games?

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Horizon Zero Dawn – Story

I won’t go too far into the story, as it is one worth discovering on your own. But you play as Aloy, an outcast from the Nora tribe. Shunned by this primitive society of hunters and warriors, her goal is to get into the tribe which can only happen when she is old enough to take the test and become a hunter herself.

However, the world is not an easy one to survive in. Technology is primitive except for machine creatures. And these machines have been become more hostile over recent times. So it is a struggle to survive in this world as part of a tribe, let alone cast out from one.

Horizon Zero Dawn – Game Play

The game play is mainly combat focused. You are in third person view where you climb around terrain, use a bow and arrow to fight, or use your spear, it’s up to you on how you want to play. You can hack and slash or you can snipe, or somewhere in between the two of them.

It’s not a button masher, though, in that there aren’t combos. There are certain skills that you can unlock, like a silent strike/assassination if the enemy hasn’t noticed you. But those are prompted for and is a single click versus a combination of clicks. So you can get better if you want to at those things, or you can use the skills you started with.

I will say, I prefer to play on easier modes because I generally play games for the story. Zero Dawn offers a lot of combat in that still. But I didn’t need to learn how to use some of the other equipment and traps as much because of the level I was on. Still with that, you would generally be using your bow and spear in most combat.

What Didn’t Work?

I just said, I play games for the story. And I love the story in Horizon Zero Dawn, however, there is a stretch, after the prologue of the game into the main story where that story is slow. You follow along with events that do matter, but don’t fill you in on the main story. And that, I wish, were more part of the game throughout. If you rush the main quest it could be, but that’d be rushing everything you are doing.

And finally, not a major negative, just if the story sounds interesting, you do fight a lot even in story mode. I suspect you might fight a bit less, but only a bit. You mainly just see easier monsters to fight, or weaker versions of the monster. So you still fight a lot during the game.

What Works?

Story

Now, on the flip side of what I said about the story the first time, the story really does work. When you get into the teeth of it and information dumps, you find out so much about this world which is fascinating. And the characters you meet along the way are really good. So it creates a very compelling experience with some good choices as to what you do in it.

I want to mention the characters you meet. But I think that is one thing I wouldn’t have minded more of, but also isn’t a negative, you get a lot of your standard branching ask for questions/backstory on things and then prompt to start quest. I want more choices and more choices with the characters. Side quests that were locked or unlocked by how you answered, not major things, but minor things. Kind of like I think of with Dragon Age: Origins. Benefits you get from how you interact versus more static, because the characters are great.

Combat

And the combat is not hard. Now, I again will remind you that I played on the story mode. That is the level of my gaming skill for the most part. I’m there for a kind of cinematic ride or experience. And Horizon Zero Dawn does a good job of not forcing combat to be too complex or hard. Complex is likely the better term.

And I like being able to pick how I want to fight. Most fights did end up getting up close and personal with the bigger monsters or bosses. But with smaller monsters, I got to the point where they are easy enough to just take out. So I spent a lot of time sniping those versus rushing into the fray.

Ending

I also think they do a good job of completing the story. Might seem obvious it ends, but it needs to complete the story and have enough to continue the story. I do not know if Horizon Forbidden West was the plan all along, kind of seems like it. But, it easily could have been a situation where they knew they wanted a sequel so they didn’t truly end the story of Horizon Zero Dawn. But instead we got a real ending to this part of the story and promise of more.

Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed that gaming experience that I played over several months. The game is fairly long, but not that long. And I definitely didn’t do or find everything that I could have. That said, I still experienced a lot of great game play and a lot of great story.

I don’t think that this game will suffer in play by playing at harder levels. I really think it mainly scales the difficulty of monsters you fight, not how many you fight. Or at least most of the combats will still exist no matter what. So you get story and you interesting combat throughout the game. Like I said, I maybe wanted more moments of heavier story thrown throughout the game. They stack up at the end, but overall a great experience of combat and story.

This is a game that I think will work for most people. There are some difficult moments in it, mainly dealing with loss. But it is not a game that is graphic in violence or sex. There is violence, but that is happening within the flow of the game. And it’s an action adventure game versus being a heavily RPG style game, so interactions are kept simpler.

My Grade: A
Gamer Grade: A
Casual Grade: B- (too much time spent fighting between story I think for a very casual gamer, but just barely)

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What’s The Game?

Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes is a squad combat game. Both for battling with ships and with characters we know and love. It is also a leveling up game where you improve your characters, get better ranked characters and unlock new characters as you go along.

There are a few different game modes that you play a lot of depending on how far leveled you are into the game. In the start, you are just fighting against computer generated levels. You are trying to get more gear and more character shards to level up your characters. Then you start to level up in the character and ship arena getting more rewards and seeing how high you can climb. Finally you get to different events, conquest, and grand arena that really push you into more and interesting game modes.

Is It A Good Game?

Now this is a subjective thing. I will say that I really do enjoy the game. I don’t always love it, but it doesn’t do anything to make me want to stop playing it. That isn’t a ringing endorsement, so let me get into the details about what I love and what I don’t.

Pay to Play?

Firstly, this is an app game. You can 100% pay to “win” at the game from the very start. This is totally normal for an app game. They need to make money somehow, and because the app is free, that means that they are going to give the opportunity for in app purchases. But with that said, I have been playing for five years or so at this point. And my ships on my “server” are top 20 every day in the ship arena, my characters are top 200 every day. So you can get a long ways up by playing free to play.

This model will always bug some people because they want it to be “fair”. Games like this are a business first and foremost. They have development teams that are adding in new content to get new players and they need to be paid. So free to play is always an option, it just might take longer.

New Content

Now, while the pay to play is a negative, this is a massive positive. They do a great job of putting out new content all the time. It helps that Star Wars is pumping out new content all the time, but it’s not only new characters. Though, I do love getting new characters into the game. So, for example, while the Mandalorian Season 2 was wrapping up on Disney+, they were putting out new characters from the first and second season, like Bo-Katan and Dark Trooper.

But they are also putting out new game modes. Conquest was a new one this year and it’s been a lot of fun thus far. It allows you to do all sorts of crazy things with your characters that you couldn’t before. So they are giving us players who have been playing the game for a very long time new stuff to do.

And they do add in new ways to improve your characters. This is actually a negative at times because some of them are for really high level players only. Such to the point that some of the things I can’t even get to and I’ve been playing for five years. This goes back to the whole pay to play aspect. The people at the very very top that are getting this last 3% of the content are the people pay to play.

Repetitiveness

Now, this kind of falls into that content category, but does this game feel fresh enough? Or do you just do the same things over and over again? This is another mixed bag, there are certain things that are a grind. Especially early game you will be grinding a lot. Now early game should last maybe half a year or less if you play often. If you want to get leveled up fast in this game as a free to play there are YouTube creators like AhnaldT101 that can help with that. He does a free to play guide every year for new players.

Once you get further into the game, the game gives you more ways to play. The biggest one is Grand Arena. This is basically a battle against another players in the game. Each of you sets different areas of defense and then you attack each others defense getting points. The person who gets the most points wins. How you set up your defense, what you leave for your offense, you can come up with different strategies, and since everyone’s rosters look different, it different each time you face off.

Also conquest game mode is built around getting these cards that unlock new powers for the mode. So you can customize how you use those cards based off of the roster that you have. So that is fun to play around with right now, and these data cards that you get, they are rotating them at time goes by. One strategy might work one time, but you might get a whole new strategy the next time.

Ships

Now, we need to talk about one of the bigger negatives of the game. While getting new characters can be a pain, they have tried to improve it. Ships on the other hand just suck. Not only are they much harder to get, they are much less customizable. With the characters I can put mods on them to make them hit harder, survive longer, or take more turns depending on their role on the team. With ships, that doesn’t exist, all ships are just the same. So a good team in ships for me is going to be the same as another team.

But really, it’s the grind of leveling up that gest you. You need certain ships to unlock certain characters. And getting a ship from 3 to 6 stars can take the better part of a year. And that sucks when you are working for one of the better characters or towards one of the Galactic Legends characters that are really hard to get. Now you are farming a lousy ship just because you need it, even though you won’t use it anywhere else in the game. This is something that a lot of us long term players are still dealing with the grind of that.

But Is It Fun?

I mean, that’s the real question, are you patient with the game. It is hard to say, for me, the game is fun. Especially now that I am starting to get involved more in the game. I didn’t mention Guilds, but being in a good guild with higher level players means you can get a lot of things a whole lot faster. So if you are a free to play person like myself, it’ll take some time, but it is a lot of fun. If you are going to spend money on it, you can get the good characters really fast.

I think the most important thing is you need to love Star Wars. Without loving Star Wars why play a Star Wars game. It is kind of odd, there is Marvel Strike Force, a similar game for Marvel, that I played a little bit but then gave up on. It was mainly a time thing since I started Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes first. But I like Marvel better. This just gives me some fun Star Wars time and something to spend a few minutes on when I get the chance. But if you are looking for a game to sink your teeth into and enjoy, Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes is solid.

Have you played it? What is your favorite app game that keeps you coming back every day?

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The Game

In Slay the Spire you are battling through rooms as you climb your way up three levels of a tower. Each of the levels get progressively harder, but that’s okay, because you get more and better cards. Like a standard deck building game, you start with a certain number of cards, generally 10, enough for two hands. You’ll have some basic attacks and basic defenses, but as you clear rooms, and beat monsters, you get the option to add more cards to your deck. These cards can give you better defense, more attack, or maybe even some permanent affect like dealing poison at the start of each of your turns. You also get relics which can do all sorts of crazy things, some give you more energy to spend, make attacks or defense better, heal you, give you an extra card every few turns, or more gold. If you can survive all the way to the top of the tower you’ve won, if not, you start at the bottom again and climb away.

What Doesn’t Work

Some climbs are just going to be better than others. When you get cards and relics, they are fairly random. Sure with cards you can pick from three, but if it doesn’t work with your strategy do you take a less ideal card or just skip a card all together. And some relics are way better than others depending on what you are doing, attacks that cost 0 doing 4 more damage is great for The Silent if you are going with one build, but if you are going for poison, way less useful. So there is that randomness. But honestly, that is the only thing that I’d consider a weakness in the game. And since the runs are fast.

What Works

The room system works really well. You are given a branching path up each level and you can see the whole thing. So if I know that I want to go to a merchant room as fast as possible, I can plan for that. If I just want to fight for a little bit, can do that. If I want the random rooms, they are easy to plan around as well. Overall, the whole room system just works really well because you can plot your course to some extent and choose what you are looking for. I go for routes that will optimize how many relics I get, permanent effects, because I like to get a lot of them. But if you want to optimize your health, it’s probably better to avoid those epic monsters.

I also like the characters. There are four different characters that you can get in the game. You start with one and when you get far enough, you unlock another and then another, and another. It is a blast to play the different characters, and the characters are really different. The Ironclad is your most basic aggressive character who is going to be able to dish out massive hits. Then the Silent gives you either shivs or poison but is about dishing out damage in a more defensive way. I’ll let you find out about the other two characters yourself, if the game is interesting. But they are more complex.

Each character has multiple ways to play them as well which is awesome. The Ironclad, I said that he’s good for dealing massive amounts of damage, and that’s true. But you can also play them more defensively. The Silent you can either build towards poison or shivs. It might overlap later as you go though. But each strategy is viable. And this is where some of the randomness that I was talking about can be bad. If I build the silent to attack with shivs and then I start getting all poison cards, I’m going to end up with a weird mix and be less effective. But if I get the right cards, you can do crazy combos that make the game a ton of fun.

Who Is This Game For?

Is this just a video game for board gamers? I don’t think so, I think a lot of players of video games will enjoy the rogue-like nature of each run. The deck building aspect is there, and it comes from board games, but it’s an easy enough concept to understand. So I think this game with it’s low barrier of entry and fun game play will work for a lot of people. The hard core FPS players, now, maybe they won’t like it as much but the more casual player, this game is a blast.

Final Thoughts

There aren’t a ton of video games that I come back to over and over again. I like video games as a concept, but too often I’ll play, get distracted, forget where I am in a story and have to start over again. Slay the Spire is not like that. Slay the Spire is simple to play for an hour, stop and do something else for a week and then drop back it and play again. It reminds me of some older video games that way. You play them for a little bit and then you put it down, and pick it up whenever you want. The less time I have to play longer games, at least video games, the more I appreciate games like this.

Overall Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: B
Casual Grade: A

Kristen and I played through this game in two days, which doesn’t seem like it would have a ton of content to it, but it would hard to play that game any longer. When I say it is like Veronica Mars, I mean it’s very like Veronica Mars, you are a high school student, Max, who finds out that things at her school aren’t quite as normal as had thought. When she witnesses a murder, she learns that she has the ability to turn back time and rewind and do things differently. That is where the decision making comes in, sometimes you can choose to rewind a decision or action that allows you to progress forward, and sometimes it is a decision that you have two different choices and you can play through both for their immediate aftermath and see what happens. This really allows you to tailor Max into the character you want her to be.

The story is very intense, so I would recommend playing it with someone, Kristen and I had plenty to talk about with it as it touches on a number of issues that don’t show up often in video games or at least that aren’t handled well. In this case they handle the sensitive issues with a great deal of respect and rarely misstep treating issues with the respect that they deserve. The couple of cases where they do are very jarring because of how well they handle everything else. The only other slight criticism of this game that I would have is that they take away some choices that they really should give you and it feels a bit like you are railroaded through a scene. In my case, my version of Max was a timid and compassionate and there is a scene where she gets handed a gun, and there was no way for me to decline that even though it didn’t make sense with how I played her. But for the most part you don’t even notice that in the story as they handled it so well. Like I said about them handling most things tactfully, when you don’t get a choice, ,it is jarring.

Overall this is an engrossing game and a very heavy game. Even though it is tough and difficult with the decisions that you have to make, and even though it’s fairly linear in terms of that the story will always have the same major plot points and twists and turns, it is a game that you can play more than once. I would say that it is a game that I won’t play again often, but there are different choices that you can always make, and for that reason I’ll want to play it again sometime. This is a game for gamers and non-gamers alike, and is on a variety of platforms. It’s also only the first season, though the second season won’t have the same characters, so the development company says, but it should still be interesting if they keep it the same style of story.

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