#no microtransactions either btw it's a complete game

[sasaranurude]

Okay. I've been playing Tokyo Debunker today, since the release happened to catch me on a day when all I'd planned to do was write fanfiction. I just finished reading the game story prologue (it was longer than expected!), so here's a review type post. If you're reading this post not having seen a single thing about this game: it's a story-based joseimuke gacha mobile game that just released globally today. It's about a girl who suddenly finds herself attending a magic school and mingling with elite, superhuman students known as ghouls. If you look in the tumblr tag for the game you'll see what appears to be a completely different game from 2019 or so: they retooled it completely midway through development, changing just about everything about it due to "escalating competition within the gaming industry."

I'll talk about how this looks like a blatant twst clone at the end.

Starting with the positive: The story is charming. I enjoyed it thoroughly the entire time and am excited to read more. The mix between visual novel segments and motion comics was really nice--it broke things up and added a lot of oomph to the action or atmospheric scenes that visual novels generally lack. I like the art in the comic parts a lot. the live2d in the visual novel parts is... passable. Tone-wise, I think the story was a little bit all over the place and would like to see more of the horror that it opened on, but I didn't mind the comedic direction it went in either. The translation is completely seamless. The characters so far all have unique voices and are just super fun and cute. Of the ones who've had larger roles in the story so far, there's not a single one I dislike. It's all fully voiced in Japanese and the acting is solid. (I don't recognize any voices, and can't seem to find any seiyuu credits, so it seems they're not big names, but they deliver nonetheless.) Kaito in particular I found I was laughing at his lines a ton, both the voicing and the writing.

He's looking for a girlfriend btw. Spreading the word.

The problem is like. The gameplay is the worst dark-pattern microtransaction-riddled bullshit I've ever seen. Hundred passive timers going at all times. Fifty different item-currencies. Trying to get you to spend absurd amounts of real world money at every turn. There's like five different indicators that take you to various real-money shop items that I don't know how to dismiss the indicator, I guess you just have to spend money, wtaf. Bajillion different interlocking systems mean you have zero sense of relative value of all the different item-currencies. I did over the course of the day get enough diamonds for one ten-pull, which I haven't used yet. Buying enough diamonds for a ten-pull costs a bit under $60 (presumably USD, but there's a chance the interface is automatically making that CAD for me--not gonna spend the money to check lmfao), with an SSR rate of 1%. BULLSHIIIIIT.

There's like a goddamn thousand-word essay explaining the dozen different types of character upgrades and equippables and equippables for the equippables!! Bad! Bad game design! That's just overcomplicating bullshit to trick people into thinking they're doing something other than clicking button to make number go up! That is not gameplay!

In terms of the actual gameplay, there is none. The battle system is full auto. There might be teambuilding, but from what I've seen so far, most of that consists of hoping you pull good cards from gacha and then clicking button to make number go up. There's occasional rhythm segments but there's no original music, it's just remixes of public domain classical music lmao. I'd describe the rhythm gameplay as "at least more engaging than twisted wonderland's," which is not a high bar

At least there's a cat in the rhythm bit.

And like, ok, I gotta remark on how derivative it is. Like I mentioned in my post earlier, this game is unabashedly aping twisted wonderland's setting and aesthetic. (That said, most of the stuff it steals from twst is magic school stuff that twst also basically stole from Harry Potter, so...?) However, it isn't exactly like twst: in this one, the characters say fuck a lot and bleed all over the place and do violence. Basically, the tone is a fair bit more adult than twst's kid-friendly vibe. (Not, like, adult adult, and I probably wouldn't even call it dark--it's still rated Teen lol. Just more adult than twst.)

Rather than just being students at magic school, the ghouls also go out into the mundane world to go on missions where they fight and investigate monsters and cryptids. Honestly, the magic school setting feels pretty tacked-on. The things that are enjoyable about this would've been just as enjoyable in about any other setting--you can tell this whole aspect was a late trend-chasing addition, lmao. So, yeah, it's blatantly copying twst to try to steal some players, but... Eh, I found myself not caring that much. Someone more (or less) into twst than me may find it grating.

Character-wise, eh, sure, yeah, they're a bit derivative in that aspect too, but it's a joseimuke game, the characters are always derivative. Thus far the writing & execution has been solid enough that I didn't care if they were tropey. If I were to compare it to something else, I'd say the relationship between the protagonist and the ghouls feels more like that of the sage and wizards in mahoyaku than anything from twst. There's some mystery in exactly what "ghouls" are and their place in this world that has me intrigued and wanting to know more about this setting and how each of the characters feels about it. I have a bad habit of getting my hopes up for stories that put big ideas on the table and then being disappointed when they don't follow through in a way that lives up to my expectations, though.

So, my final verdict: I kind of just hope someone uploads all the story segments right onto youtube so nobody has to deal with the dogshit predatory game to get the genuinely decent story lol. Give it a play just for the story if you have faith in your ability to resist dark patterns. Avoid at all costs if you know you're vulnerable to gacha, microtransactions, or timesinks.

[orchidvioletindigo]

Hey what’s up with the slime game why is it fun? It’s got such good reviews and kinda seems like smth I’d be into but I can’t figure out from looking at pictures and gifs and stuff like. Is it just breeding little friends that kinda all look the same ?

It's so much fun! You don't breed them though, you find them out in the wild and you suck them up with this vacuum pack you carry around. Then you take them back to your ranch, put them in enclosures, and feed them, and they produce these things called plorts that are how you make your money. The game is sort of half exploration and discovering new slime friends and half expanding and improving your ranch to hold and take better care of your new slime friends.

Idk what other games you're into but I'd compare the feel of it to Stardew Valley.

[the-desolated-quill]

Predator: Hunting Grounds - Video Game blog

No spoiler warning because... well... there’s nothing to spoil.

When Sony announced that we would be getting a Predator game, I was extremely excited. For those who don’t know, I’m a huge Predator fanboy. I love the movies, I grew up with the comics, I even liked that Alien Vs. Predator film from 2004 (AVPR and The Predator can go and fuck off though. What even was that shit?). Predator is just a great concept with loads of potential and it’s about time the big game hunter from outer space got the same love and attention as the Xenomorphs get. It’s tiring, you know? Watching all you Alien fans play the shit out of Alien: Isolation while I’m sat here going ‘Hey! Where’s my Predator game?’ So Predator: Hunting Grounds came as a fantastic surprise. And it was, at the time, announced as a Playstation exclusive, which was just even better as Sony have been knocking it out of the park recently with Horizon Zero Dawn, Spider-Man and the new God Of War.

Then things went silent on the whole Predator front until just over a month ago when the beta was released and people were largely disappointed by it due to numerous bugs and glitches and absurdly long wait times to get into matches. After that, the game was spat out onto Playstation Network with no buildup or fanfare whatsoever. I only knew it had come out because of a random YouTube video in my recommendations.

So I bought it and played it. What did I think? Honestly... it’s alright. It’s not terrible. I had fun with it, but it’s not exactly an amazing experience either. It’s just... okay.

Predator: Hunting Grounds is an asymmetrical multiplayer first person shooter developed by Illfonic Games, the guys behind that Friday The 13th game a few years back. Each match consists of five players. Four of them become members of a Fireteam called Voodoo (nice Predator 2 reference btw. Me like a lot) who have to complete a series of missions and evac successfully within fifteen minutes. The fifth player takes the role of the Predator, whose goal is to hunt down the Fireteam. The match ends when the Fireteam completes their objective and escapes via helicopter, the Predator kills them all, the Fireteam kills the Predator, or when the timer runs out. Simple.

The Fireteam plays like any other first person shooter pretty much. You pick a class, kill baddies, protect the flag, all that stuff. What makes the game more fun is the Predator. That’s by far I think the biggest compliment I can give to this game. It’s amazing how just changing one element can be enough to completely shake up a traditional formula. What starts out as a fairly mediocre play experience very quickly becomes unpredictable and genuinely terrifying when the Predator starts trying to hunt you. Normally your best bet is to stick together as a group because while the Predator is tough, it’s not indestructible and four squadmates can overpower it if they work together. However, in the heat of battle, it’s very easy to forget that and I’ve honestly lost count of the number times strategy went out the window as soon as the Predator showed up and we all just panicked and scattered.

When playing a match as the Fireteam, you have to choose whether to prioritise the mission objectives or take down the Predator. As I said, four players working together can overpower the Predator, but it’s easier said than done. The Predator is a bullet sponge, can move super fast and can leap really far. The point is you’re never safe, giving each match real tension. You can cover yourself in mud to hide yourself from the Predator’s heat vision, but it doesn’t work for long. A good Predator will always find you eventually and you end up becoming paranoid as a result, scanning the trees for flickers of light and reacting to every little noise. It’s genuinely unsettling.

Playing as the Predator however couldn’t be any different. The game here is played from a third person perspective and more emphasis is placed on speed and power. It’s like a cross between the Batman Arkham games and Assassin’s Creed. You’re swift and strong and you have access to all the Predator’s gadgets, including the cloaking device, the plasma caster and the net gun. You can even mimic the Fireteam’s voices, like in the movies, to trick them and lure them into a trap. The Predator is awesome to play as. You feel powerful playing as it, but remember you’re not unstoppable. You can’t charge in headfirst and hope for the best. You’ve got to be smart. Find ways of splitting the group up and pick them off one by one. Booby trap places where mission objectives will be. If you get wounded, you leave a trail of luminous green blood, which can lead the Fireteam right to you if you’re not careful. But if worst comes to the worst, you can activate your self destruct device in a last ditch effort to kill everyone.

The attention to detail is really cool with lots of Easter eggs and references to the movies. You unlock new weapons and skins by levelling up or by purchasing loot boxes using an in-game currency (don’t panic. There’s no microtransactions... yet). You can also customise your Fireteam and Predator characters, although your options are slightly limited. Also, one little nerdy criticism I have, you can play as a female Predator, but it’s the typical female body type you usually get in these games. You know, small waist, big boobs? Which sucks because a) Predators are reptiles, so them having breasts doesn’t make sense, and b) in the comics it’s established that female Predators are bigger, stronger and more aggressive than the males. So if anything, the male Predators should be the slim ones and the females should be the hulking bodybuilders. I mean I guess you can play as a female Berserker, but that’s not the point. I want to play as a muscular female alien monster goddammit, and Illfonic was too cowardly to commit. #FemPred #Womencanbeuglymotherfuckerstoo #Feminism

But in all seriousness, I think the customisation options best sum up the experience of playing Predator: Hunting Grounds. Cool, but limited. It’s fun playing as the Fireteam and the Predator, but after a while it does get really repetitive. While the Predator adds some much needed variety and unpredictability to the game, at the end of the day you are basically playing the exact same level over and over again. It also doesn’t help that the game only has three maps. Namely the jungle with temple ruins, the jungle with warehouses and the jungle with sewer pipes. Couldn’t they have expanded it to include other locations from the movies? How about Los Angeles from Predator 2 or Antarctica from AVP? I don’t know, just something other than a poxy jungle.

What’s worse is that the wait times between matches can be annoying. If you choose to play as Fireteam, the wait isn’t too bad. It’s usually between thirty seconds and two minutes. If you want to play as the Predator however, you have to wait between five and ten minutes to get into a match, if you’re lucky. The only way I got a chance to play as the Predator was in a private match. Maybe it would be better if the roles of players were randomly chosen rather than asking players what their preference is. Because obviously everyone wants to be the Predator, which means there’s going to be a long fucking queue. Or maybe they could expand the game so that you can have more than one Predator in a match. Maybe have a level where you have five Predators in an open world map competing to see who can get the most trophies before the time runs out. Maybe have that be an AVP event or something. There’s a lot of potential here, which is what makes it so frustrating. It’s not as if I hate the game or anything. It’s enjoyable to play. There just isn’t enough stuff to do.

Which brings me to my biggest complaint. The price. I paid £30 for this game. A game that consists of one level and three maps. For £40 you can buy the Deluxe Edition, which consists of one level, three maps and an exclusive Fireteam and Predator skin. I’m sorry but that’s just highway robbery. £40 for basically a beta game? What the actual fuck?!

Now apparently Illfonic’s last game, Friday The 13th, wasn’t very impressive at launch neither, but over time it was expanded with new content. Predator: Hunting Grounds looks like it’ll be going the same way. Illfonic have already announced a roadmap. This month we’ll be getting an Arnold Scharzenegger skin, which is nice and all... except it’s paid DLC. So I’ve already forked out £30 for not even a base game, it’s one level and three maps. And I’m now being expected to hand over more of my money in order to eventually get the complete game. Fuck off! This is basically EA’s Star Wars Battlefront reboot all over again.

Is Predator: Hunting Grounds a bad game? No. It’s a fun experience. If you’re a diehard Predator fan, you’re bound to get some enjoyment from this. However I cannot in good conscience recommend you pay full price for this game. There’s just not enough content to justify it at this time. My advice is wait until there’s a sale or when the game of the year edition comes out. For now, £30 for one level and three maps plus extra for DLC? No fucking way.

[knightoflodis]

As a buyer of games, what review bombing does for me is make me ask why the game is getting review bombed. The reviews that are just “this game sucks” are 100% unhelpful. But sometimes they say why they bombed. Sometimes it’s for microtransaction practices that feel more predatory than fair. When I see that, I flat out avoid those games. Sometimes it’s for things like game devs adding in characters of certain demographics. That makes me either ignore the bad reviews or makes me pay closer attention to the game because maybe it has representation for me. Review bombing can be annoying as hell though since a lot of it isn’t useful. I def hate when I see a bunch of 5s/10s and a bunch of 1s with nothing in between. Makes it hard to determine what’s going on and what people actually feel about the game. Btw. I get annoyed by the only stellar reviews as much as the 1s since it can sometimes be hard to tell how many of those top scores are by super fans that can see no wrong because it’s a certain ip/developer. I have seen super fans be fully behind companies/games that include practices that I find disturbing/don’t like and they treat those practices like a good thing. I tend to try and find some middling reviews to see what people truly think. When those exist they usually have a good grasp of things. It’s usually a complete breakdown of what they liked and didn’t like. Usually by someone that really wanted to like the thing but something held them back. And since it has a breakdown like that I can usually just read what they didn’t like and determine if that will bother me or not. Sometimes no, sometimes yes.

Review bombs show that fans are angry with something for some reason. It makes you want to look into it more and see WHY they are angry. And if it is something that makes you angry too, you vote with your wallet and don’t buy.

Does so called "review bombing" ie. Steam user review etc. actually work / does it matter at all?

Not in the way the review bombers hope. We already know that there’s a vocal and passionate fanbase for our game out there - that’s a major reason why we employ community managers. And we know when they’re upset. But it’s like throwing a tantrum - it might feel good while you’re doing it and you leave a huge mess, but it won’t ultimately change anything that wasn’t going to happen already anyway.

All review bombing really does is (continue to) convince both publishers and developers that user reviews aren’t worth anything. We already hold a pretty low opinion of user reviews because they are almost never representative of the actual opinions of the user base, but they are sometimes useful for specific feedback on things. User reviews are, after all, self-selecting by nature. Only players that feel really strongly about a game will leave a review, which makes their reviews sometimes more detailed than others in specific systems. Brigading reviews just makes everything unreadable and makes user reviews useless for actually gathering feedback. 

Review bombs aren’t real reviews, and they don’t provide any real feedback. They are an angry reaction to some thing that’s enacted by a [small, passionate, and vocal part of the fanbase], a message borne out of frustration. However, the frustration part isn’t because the developers or publishers haven’t heard the complaints before; it’s because the devs haven’t acknowledged the issue to the satisfaction of the angry mob, so the mob feels they must act out negatively. Review bombs usually happen for a specific reason - Dota 2 was review bombed because the bombers wanted HL3 and had practically nothing to do with Dota 2. It’s not like Valve isn’t aware of the community’s hunger for HL3 (or HL2 episode 3), but it really doesn’t help much when an entirely separate team gets a bunch of noise to cloud up their signal. 

Thus, review bombs don’t help anybody. New Dota2 players might get weirded out by the bad reviews and might not get to find a game they actually might enjoy. Hardcore HL fans won’t get any more traction with Valve than before (which was already basically zero). Valve already knows what the HL fans want and has their own schedule and development going on. We don’t look at players more sympathetically because they tried to trash a game; it just makes us think of that small group of players as throwing a tantrum. Nobody on the development or publishing side has ever changed their minds because of a review bomb. 

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