Recent reviews by Vexivian

I initially picked this up on their launcher back in 2017.

So Neverwinter has really nice combat and if you like the system of D&D you'll likely enjoy Neverwinter's system as well as it is very similar. The game plays really well and it is enjoyable. It is definitely not the questline or lore that would capture you right off the bat, but rather the mechanical aspects of the game.

Leveling (after the change to lvl 20 being max lvl) felt incredibly fast which can be good or bad all depending on what you want. We'd complete a quest and ding (wow yay new abilities), then five minutes later they would let us ding again.. Sometimes combat felt way too easy; there wasn't much of a challenge. Oh, that's a boss? Okay, he's dead. Alright, I suppose. Then later on it starts to feel a little more challenging.

While I will say it is not necessary to pay for anything to progress as far as I know (leveling process), running in to the Real Money Shop (RMS), where you buy items with Zen (the in game real money stand-in) is unavoidable. Your likely first run-in with it is literally part of the main leveling quests which makes you buy something off of it (you get a 100% off token for said item). This sort of thing is incredibly predatory. It "teaches" you how to use the shop - making you use it - which then makes purchasing items with actual money much easier for you later on since you have already technically done it before. In addition to that the Real money to Zen ratio is incredibly steep and don't you love it when the packs that are available to you always seem to be too small for what you can get and then you have get the one that's more expensive which leaves you juuuust short left-over for another item? Yeah.
Both of those things are common practice for greedy "item shop"-based games..

So you thought Zen and in-game gold is all you need to worry about? Nuh-uh. It can get really confusing figuring out all the currencies and what they are for and ohh no I guess you need Astral Diamonds for this... Which by the way is the main other currency in the game among the others. How do you get those, you wonder? Well, the main way of getting these is by turning Zen into Astral Diamonds (AD) on the trade market. You also get AD by questing and refining AD shards. This process is signiiiificantly slower as you might've expected.

Overall I think Neverwinter is pretty enjoyable. I don't play for the story as there really isn't very much to speak of.. but the combat is great. I have found it incredibly frustrating, annoying and confusing to have all these run-ins with things gated behind Astral Diamonds. Or events that are especially tedious, but hey if you buy this thing from the Zen shop it will be super easy! I really don't like that sort of practice.. I want the game to make me want to play it all based on what it can offer, and not for all the things I can buy and unlock or how powerful I will feel if I get this powerup thing from the shop.

My suggestion would be to play this game casually; to ignore the prompts towards the RMS and just pick a class you enjoy because it is still worth playing for the gameplay in itself.

Nice scenery, shabby camera, repetitive gameplay. Drags out or repeats a bunch of fights and scenes for the sake of lengthening the game. A lot of the enemies may have different models but they seem to largely move and attack in the same way. Enemies courteously wait for you to execute their minion in the same way you've executed all the other minions and you can effectively cheese this forever if you want to - breaking his attack animation by dragging another minion over to rinse repeat execution. Lots of invisible walls..

I mostly played this game with my friend who has completed the game; that's why my hours are below 2 hours at this point.

I played the original version first and then this one again when it released and.. to think you can get this masterpiece of a game for less than £20 where I am is absolutely crazy. When you consider other games that are currently being released costing double that and not even coming with half as much polish as this gem.. Lost for words.

This was a wonderful experience. The game threw PLENTY of obstacles in my way and I failed often but I eventually 100% my save - which I don't do often for games. It means it truly captured me. The platforming is solid, creative and challenging. The story got me; hard.. I didn't want to leave. The music is gorgeous and immersive. The environment and art is fantastic. I really can't put my feelings and thoughts into words fully. If you like platformers you will enjoy this game. I'm certain. Play with a controller.

Yes. Feels good, man.
I've only played two stories so far (and those were not particularly long, aprox. 1 hour each) but it's been very enjoyable so far.

Edit: I've now played through 5 stories and spent 5 hours so the approximation of 1 hour per story seems accurate.

The only negative thing I have to say about Secrets of Grindea is that the story mode isn't finished. I played this on multiplayer and it was super enjoyable for the both of us but we were very bummed out by it just suddenly being over without the story actually being over.

... 5 years later and it's still afflicted with the "early access" curse. Shame, really. It's fair enough you want to involve the community in your development, however you lose those same community members when they have to wait forever for the game to be completed. People end up putting the game down; waiting for the update (that never comes) and forget about it. Every now and then I wonder if this game's finally released, but no, it never is. And at this point I don't think I care to go back into the game and pick up where I left off with my friend. What are you guys even doing? Which is a damn shame.

When the "Most popular community and official content for the past week" in the Community tab shows posts from 2015 and 2020; it is loss.

OOOOF <3

Absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gorgeous!

<3
Skyrim overall, to me, is a great game. The Special Editiona adds a bunch of graphical updates, but (currently) it is probably not better than your modded original Skyrim with ENBs and so on. Eventually, though, I think SSE will surpass even that since the modders will most likely be moving on to SSE as well. There are already a bunch of good mods ported over from the original Skyrim, and new ones, too.
Once again I am addicted.
As a sidenote, though, you don't NEED the special edition to enjoy the game. Just pick what you prefer.

Waited a while to play this game due to the frame issue talk. When I started playing it it played fine. While I noticed some miniscular frame-dips in specific areas, the majority of the game played smoothly. I was playing on the bestestest settings with a GTX 1060 and an i5-6500 CPU, 16GB RAM.

As for the actual gameplay I loved it. I was already a fan of how Dishonored (1) played. The puzzles were good, the fact that you have all these choices in terms of how you want to complete the mission is great. The atmosphere is fitting, soundtrack makes it quite immersive. Graphics and meshes look good, even when I could notice some clipping here and there when characters were moving.

Something odd I noticed was that you would occasionally just randomly be spotted, even when you shouldn't have been spotted. Another thing is that characters will occasionally start dialogue with you when you are (for example) one level underneath them in a building.
Occasionally I would get to places where I suppose I "shouldn't" have gone, making me unable to progress in that direction, even when I should have been able to in terms of in-game ability.

Overall I found this game to be very enjoyable. You have a great amount of space to be sneaky up high and get past enemies. You have a nice variety of enemies; the game also doesn't hold your hand to explain to you what each enemy's abilities are (which I personally think is very good, you just figure it out on your own). The objectives are interesting. The maps themselves hide a bunch of interesting things and for those who go out of their way to find everything this is really great.

Another cool thing is that you have two characters to choose from in the beginning, which adds some re-playability in addition to the different chaos-level completions. So needless to say I will be replaying this game at least once. Possibly twice down the line. I wonder what sort of DLC will be made for this game. <3

I've played RIFT up to around level 30 and quit because all my friends just played less frequently and then not at all. RIFT would be my choice for a traditional-feeling MMORPG if I had a dedicated group of friends to raid with. Definitelly. This game looks good, feels good and keeps the traditional WoW MMORPG feel alive. There are so many things happening around you so you should theoretically never get bored.
The class (or soul) system is great, too. You have one character but can step into several roles. I was specced to be a healer but when I changed my role (souls) I was suddenly a mage with nice burst damage.

I've heard that the endgame is supposedly very pay2win, however I haven't noticed any of that as I never got there. Earing slots can only be obtained by paying real life money and some souls are also restricted by a paywall. However, whether you pay or not, you will still be able to play all the different styles/classes that you would expect to see in an MMORPG. I'd say that RIFT is good if you're just looking to casually enjoy the leveling process and not so much care about endgame.

I recommend RIFT because I enjoyed the time I spent on it and because there were no issues caused by the game that made me want to quit.