"Bastion" Game Review.

First game I've beat this year is a good one, thankfully. I finally beat Bastion. I bought it last year during a Steam sale and played for the first 2-3 hours of it then quit. I did this type of thing A LOT in '11. Too often, honestly. I beat a small handful of games in 2011 and that's going to change, so here's my thoughts on the first game I've beaten this year: Bastion. 

Bastion was one of the games I looked at all the time whenever there was someone talking about it. They always said how awesome the game was, how amazing the narrator was and the phenomenal soundtrack tied into the game. I thought they were exaggerating. I was wrong. From the get go, you already feel like something big has happened. The simple fact that you start the game lying in bed and there's little to no ground around you. There's a piece of a wall, some floor, your bed, you and nothing else. From the get go you know something has happened and it's something big. 

So the first thing you do, of course, is get out of bed. This is immediately recognized by the narrator, who in my humble opinion has a fantastic voice, with the best part being that the gameplay continues. The simple fact that the game is narrated as you progress without it interrupting the game makes it feel fantastic. The whole game is told through the perspective of the narrator as he recounts your tales of dread, angst and woe as you venture through the completely decimated world and it makes the game feel fantastic. It makes it feel as though you're playing a story that's being told to you as it happens while also making you feel as though you are the story teller. It's a quite awesome experience and the story becomes so engrossing and in-depth the further you go, which keeps you playing.

As the kid wakes up and you move, the world rebuilds itself around you. This game is an extremely gorgeous game to watch as you're playing it. The walkway, ledges, barricades and whatnot rebuild as you move with possible holes in them that allow you to fall into nothingness. You don't die, though, which is great. You fall back onto the walkway, take a bit of damage, and the narrator makes a small quip about it and the game continues. The artistic touch on this game really shows with how the world reacts to your movements and actions as well. 

Then there's the score. The score for this game is one of the best I've heard in a very long time. I loved listening to the music in this game. Enough that I bought the soundtrack for it. I haven't bought a soundtrack for a video game in who knows how long, but I did for this one. It's a fantastic score with memorable songs. A masterpiece you could say. It's very well integrated into the gameplay also as you move from world to world to world as well as event to event. Then there's the "Grammaphone" as it's called in game which lets you listen to the majority of the soundtrack. 

Then, of course, there's the gameplay. The most important part of the game. The gameplay and flow are very smooth with a leveling system and a variety of awesome weapons. The leveling system is easy to understand with the ability to customize what your levels do. You gain a flat amount of health with each level followed by choosing a "Spirit" at the Bastion. You choose the spirit at the distillery which gives you some kind of perk with an example being the "Squirt Cider" which gives you a flat +10 health or the "Mender Mead" which gives you the ability to gain some health back with each successful counter-block. 

They did an amazing job with the weapons also. My personal favorite combo was the Breaker Bow and the Brusher's Pike while swapping the Bow for the Dueling Pistols depending on the situation. There's a huge variety of weapons with 55 different combinations total while also giving you the ability to upgrade and customize your weapons allowing for very personalized load-outs. For instance, the first tier of upgrades for the Pike you can choose from either +15% crit chance or +50% reload speed for throws. 

Overall for this game, it's a wonderful experience with a deep, rich story and a very polished experience. I would recommend this game to nearly anyone and everyone to play. Games like this really don't come around too often. When they do, though, they're games that shouldn't be missed and this is easily one of those great sought after games that doesn't come around too often. With the addition of a very low price point ($15) it's a must have. 

Final Fantasy XIV Review

Just going to say this straight: If you're a fanboy of everything about Final Fantasy XI, you will like this game. If you are the other millions of players that didn't like it for the multitude of reasons not to, you will not like this game. Here is my first statement of this game: This game is junk and is not worth any kind of subscription fee. That being said, lets talk about it.

The game is in shambles in so many areas, but we'll talk about one of the most important features of any game: It's User Interface. The UI is utter crap and severely outdated. If you played FFXI through and through, then you're used to this old and broken UI for the most part. If you played almost any other MMO, free or otherwise, you will understand how terrible and clunky it is. Adding a friend to your friends list as well as just trying to get them into your party is tiresome and overly complicated to extremes. They don't tell you the commands to add friends to your friends list, let alone help you figure out how to do 90% of what's required of you in the game. Have fun guessing your way through it.

Exploration, where do I start? It's slow, tedious, overly long, boring. Do I need to use more adjectives to describe it? When the average MMO lets you use some type of mount type system to travel around, and for good reason mind you, this one doesn't. It baffles me as to why when the world is as large as it is, because it's huge. It would also help if the maps were a bit more intuitive as they can be cumbersome to try to navigate if you can navigate them at all for that matter. For instance, Kotaku.com found 90 some odd exact copy and paste areas of the map in a single area. Holy shit that's a ton of laziness and that was just one map! Don't worry, the environments suffer the same copy/paste problem as well.

Then there's the quests. Oh questing, how terrible you were. Here's a good example: QG(Quest Giver) "Go north and talk to <bob the fake npc>" Me: Oh ok, where north kind sir? QG: "North." Me: "Any general direction? How far north?" QG: "North. Do you not understand what direction North is?" Yes it's truly that open ended. They honestly just want you to wander and find it yourself. This isn't all that fun when you're level one and are having trouble just navigating the large town you start in. Yes, this is truly the quest you're given at level 1. Good luck and have fun.

The one thing I can say that's a positive is the graphics are astoundingly gorgeous for an MMO. They just look utterly fantastic, if your rig can run it (which mine could). I can say I haven't played a better looking MMO out there to date.

I don't think I need to say much more about this game, so I'm not going to. It's unfinished, unpolished and extremely rushed. Unless they just wanted to copy FFXI and make it prettier, which is probably what they were doing, except removing the Auction House in the process (Seriously, WTF were you thinking Square-Enix?). You will ONLY like this game if you played a LOT of FFXI or are completely new to the MMO genre and don't know better. Otherwise, go elsewhere. F2P MMO's are better designed and more polished than this. Steer clear and don't waste your money on this one.