Recent reviews by The Last Brickman

DayZ is an Arma II-based post-apocalyptic survival game that emphasizes hyper-realistic gameplay. Every little detail of survival, including maintenance of your gear, to gunplay, to combat, is precisely as you'd expect it to function in the real world: combat is extremely lethal, with each gun still functioning as it should: as a weapon designed to murder many people. No matter how well-armored the opponent, the best guns will always kill them in 1-2 shots. Only low-caliber weaponry is even remotely safe to go up against when clad in full military attire. You can't just tap "R" to reload whenever you please, you need to manually load bullets into clips, and if the gun you have doesn't have a clip ready, it needs to be hand-loaded each time you fire. Guns can jam and refuse to function whenever they're below "Worn" condition, and this, to a degree, balances their sheer lethality. You need a blade of sorts to open cans of food, and anything not found inside of those tins is liable to spoil, if not dried. Helicopters are extremely difficult to pilot, leading many unready players to their deaths. Rain will make you wet, and more liable to get cold. Layering up too much before a series of sprints will leave you sweltering and melting.

I list all these things and adore each little detail that goes into them, because I just adore survival games of that variety. The clunky, clumsy nature of combat combined with the lethality of firearms creates a true horror-game experience, inspiring a necessary fear of your surroundings at all times, never allowing you to feel truly safe. (At least, unless your server has base-building mods.) Interactions with other players and their success rate are often down to who finds whom first: if that party decides to be hostile, odds are at least most of the targets will be dead before they realized what happened. If the party decides to be friendly, if cautious, they'll be at an advantage even if things sour into hostility. It's an incredible experience and it's unique to DayZ, as well as broader Arma.

However, it's hard to deny that there's a tedium to the majority of the game that is quiet; having to manually load your bullets in each time you find a new clip can lose its charm after the first 10 times or so. Knowing that if you die you lose any and all progress after undergoing monotonous routines for hours upon hours is disheartening even in a game like Minecraft, where realism is so far out the window that it's cartoonish; so you can imagine how aggravating it'd be to have the same thing happen when you get picked off by some clown in a sniper tower half a mile away, outside your render distance. It's a *bit* disheartening.

However, these are simply endemic to the genre of survival games. So they can be easily overlooked. So you may be asking, "Why is there a thumbs-down on this review?" Well, it's simple: I've talked about how intricate and beautiful DayZ's mechanics are, and how well-designed they can be, and I even stated how survival games with realism tend to be a more rewarding experience when you succeed. But what I haven't talked about, or at least expanded upon, is DayZ's resource problems.

I'm not well-versed in PC hardware, but my computer has about 8 GB of RAM, and 4.0 gHz of processing power. It's not the worst possible software you could have in this day and age. Some would say it's even decent! And in spite of that, even with potato-mode on DayZ's graphics, I can't effectively run the game. This game, that was released in 2013, even if updated since then. I've spoken with other people and even did research to find that even streamers with incredibly top-tier systems still experience framerate lag; you can see how some of them have entire frames for Zombies skip. This is intentional, as without the modifications they made to make that happen, the zombies would just overwhelm them through what from their eyes would just look like flash-steps. Running zombies are by no means new, but if there's one thing we learned from games like Left 4 Dead, those frantic, shaky, scrambling movements they make are *very* resource-heavy. And while it's immersive to see them like this, there's not much point when people can't afford a good enough computer to effectively enjoy it. All of my deaths that I've experienced? They weren't from players. They were from zombies. Zombies that, once they scream their battle cry, engage in that same shaky movement that causes my frames to plummet into the abyss. And by the time I can even see the next frame, 4-5 of them are on me. And before I can even let out a curse, I'm dead, for my guns and melee weapons are designed to be clunky in combat, demanding lots of careful precision with my controls. Precision I can't have with a framerate this abysmal.

The research I did has led to the confirmation that DayZ isn't properly optimized for all systems. You need specific types of hardware for a game like this. And that's inexcusable in a day and age where PC parts are becoming more and more expensive due to their advancements.

But I could forgive even *that* as something that's just endemic to my own poor hardware situation, if not for how unstable the game is. In the time I've tried booting up the game, and setting up things in the launcher, I've had exactly *ONE* successful first-time startup when joining a server. *ONE.* At *BEST,* every startup typically requires two attempts. And that's assuming everything *works*, and, say, an update hasn't come out that breaks something. It may say I've played 92 hours at the time of writing this, but in reality I've played maybe around 12; when I close out of the game, it doesn't properly close. Steam still says I'm running it. I can't find it anywhere in my task manager, yet it persists like a ghost, forever haunting me for my failure to shoot that one ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ military zombie. By the time I realized this was happening, I'd already accumulated 19 hours of "playtime", so I had no way to gain a refund after my initial reluctance to get into this game. If I weren't so charitable to the developers, I'd insinuate this was on purpose.

If they can manage to better-optimize their game in the future, and fix this accursed issue without expecting players to, I'll gladly recommend this game and give it a positive review. But until then, I say this: if you like this type of game, go for it. It's definitely great in terms of design. But be aware that it demands a lot from your computer, and your experience might not be so rewarding otherwise.

MARDEK was a title I came across as a starry-eyed 12-13 year old child in 2009-2010. Its witty dialogue, memorable and likeable cast of characters, and impeccable game design are all things that drew my whimsical little mind in for hours upon hours of fun. It was through this game that I found Fig Hunter, the website Mr. Cornwall ran back when he used his online alias, Pseudolonewolf. That community helped set the foundation of my growth as a person by teaching me many things both about introspection and interacting with others. All of this from a small parody of RPGs lovingly crafted by a singular man with an equally set of self-admittedly starry eyes.

But this is a review of a game, not a My Life Story retelling! Let's get into the actual game and what makes it great.

==[THE GAME'S DESIGN]==
MARDEK is a game whose mechanics I sorely took for granted as a child, only recently appreciating it as I returned to it with knowledge of game design and intuitive mechanics. The game rewards exploration of your surroundings, and even offers a guiding hand *without* the walkthrough that's included! Even from the very beginning in chapter 1, which is as much of a tutorial for the game proper as it is an inciting incident, which I'll talk about below, you're rewarded by taking the initiative to explore various places and talk to people. The only sidequest available in that chapter is specifically designed to offer you a piece of equipment that makes a miniboss' trump card against you a cakewalk. As the game goes on, more and more loot becomes hidden in dungeons, with no visible chest containing them. But wait, before you go clicking randomly into oblivion, take into consideration your map. That's right, not only do the maps help you remember the way out of dungeons (assuming you're trying to immerse yourself and not use the warp feature), they also help you find this hidden loot!

But if you really want to be uncharitable towards this project by one guy, you could just say that these things should just be standard in any game. Which is fair! And why I wish to bring the following up:

Most RPGs, especially JRPGs like the kind MARDEK parodies, have one universal, *hated* thing in common: Grinding. Mother. [PROFANITY]ing. Grinding. We hate it, you hate it, I hate it, my mother who doesn't even play videogames hates it. It's boring. It's tedious. It's repetitive. But we do it out of necessity in a lot of cases, because that's how you progress. But MARDEK did something that incredibly alleviates the problem when Chapter 3 was released in 2010: The reactions and skill progression systems.

How it works is pieces of equipment have certain skills attached to them. Some are spells/skills that are actively used by specific party members, but the rest are Reaction abilities, and they're divided based on physical, magical, offensive, and defensive capabilities. They can be things like increasing your chance to dodge a physical attack on successful reaction, having a chance to poison your opponents, or, in the case of passive abilities, things that can outright negate status effects!

But I digress. Point is, you can equip gear that has these abilities and gain access to them. But thankfully, you're not limited to just using that gear forever! You can master the skills it has attached to it and then move onto better equipment! For spells/skills and reaction abilities, you just use it a certain number of times, and passive abilities you just have to complete battles. It's a special, min-maxing feeling to hear that little harp that plays when an ability gets mastered.

How does this tie back into grinding? Well, as I said, you essentially have a secondary objective to satisfy, one which helps you in gameplay and feels rewarding to progress through.

And, to cap all of this off, for reasons you'll find out as the story goes on, Mardek, the title character, possesses your earliest healing abilities. Before Chapter 3, he's entirely meant to be a support character. Coupled with the fact that you always have him in your party, you will never be lacking in a support character.

Speaking of the characters, by the time you've filled out your party in MARDEK 3, there's a whopping 11(technically 14) party members, each with unique personalities and dialogue to offer to situations. Almost every segment of the game demands one or more of these companions, the story threads leading you to all but one of them. And they're all so unique in their playstyles that they don't ever feel shoehorned. It's a special feeling to have Elwyen completely negate all magical damage for the party through a certain cheese tactic, or to use Mereador's versatile gadgets to solve practical problems.

==[THE WRITING]==
In terms of narrative story arcs, it's very hard to do anything in a truly original fashion. Fiction is as old as sentient thought, after all. But still, MARDEK has a nice blend of sci-fi and fantasy, incorporating legacies from past projects that are all set in an expanded universe. The lore is mysterious and fascinating for new players, and a fantastic call-back to long-time fans of this developer's works.

Going back to the characters, MARDEK's cast is truly diverse and a delight to read from over and over. Mardek, the title character, is, for all his heroic qualities and earnest endeavors, is still a dim-witted, leaf-in-a-river lad that just wants to become a hero with his best friend. This goofy, shonen hero personality bounces off of other characters, especially party members, quite well, from Maraeador's s-s-s-s-stuttering, to Elywen's own airheaded behavior, to Deugan's serious and snarky veneer.

But truly the best part of the writing is Tobias' impeccable wit. The dialogue is, as advertised, every bit as enjoyable, tongue-in-cheek, and hilarious as one could hope. The lack of replay value is more than made up for by the sheer delightfulness of it all. This is perhaps best exemplified by the segments at the end of each chapter, in which a certain cast of characters "talk" in a conference... and this meeting is an absolute mess, with *tons* of back-and-forth banter, inane blabbering, and witty insults. I like to think of this as the reward the player gets for completing the game.

==[THE SOUNDTRACK]==
The soundtrack is lovingly crafted, like many other things in the game, by a singular person. And this ended up working in favor of the quality and cohesiveness of the compositions. There's firmly established leitmotifs that very clearly hint towards varying situations depending on the rendition. While my hearing isn't the most optimal, it was a treat to listen to the soundtrack again with the knowledge I have now.

For the past 3 years, I've been watching this game undergo development through a good 5 versions.

Alpha 12 hooked me in, and despite losing my interest, regained it once again with each new update to come out.

Most developers would've scrapped 7D2D by now and moved on to something else, but the Fun Pimps show dedication time and again by continuing to polish the game to perfection. It's clear that this game is as much a labor of love as it is a business venture, and it seems like the patience is starting to pay off, since the upcoming update may full well see the introduction of more vehicles, beyond minibikes!

Now, for gameplay, it remedies the quandary of DayZ's TDM obsessions by making the zombies a bigger threat than other players. Sure, a decently armed player is a threat, but shortsightedness and selfishness can result in everyone dying and all of the gear at the battle being lost to the hordes of zombified humans and animals. As a result, it ensures that players cooperate and help one another instead of harassing each other.

It places the strain of resources less on the lack of available resources and moreso on the fact that everything's useful in some way, and you WILL need it at some point, but can only carry so much.

The game is brutal by default, unless you tinker with the settings. The zombies WILL maul you with ease if you're not prepared properly and train your skills.

In short, this is a wonderful game carefully tailored by the dev team. Like many other games, it is treated with respect for both the genre, the medium, and the players who contributed.

That said, it'd be nice if we could see a release date in the next few years.

As a long-time fan of the Rebuild series, I was pretty excited to have contributed $20 to the kickstarter page back in late 2013. I felt like I was truly helping with fun developers make something new and improved in a series they've been using as a juggernaut.

However, perhaps I overestimated how in-depth the game would be. As a few other people have mentioned, the gameplay becomes extremely repetitive once you play through at least 3 or 4 cities. It's still fun to play, and at least a decent way to think about how you use resources, but outside of the plot, there's not much else to it.

Earlier, I mentioned I put $20 to the kickstarter. According to the kickstarter page, I would have access to the alpha (which I did) and later the Deluxe Edition when the game finally came out. I've received no notification to this day of such a thing, meaning I essentially paid $5 more for the final product than the average player. Doing some research, I found others experienced this problem and tried inquiring, only to get handwaved away. In short, I find that's a bit of a backhanded move on the devs' parts. Whether they deliberately held back on their end or simply bungled the situation, it really makes it difficult to want to put faith in any future titles they put out.

And speaking of the price, $15 is a bit steep for a game that has a total of maybe 20 hours outside of free-play mode. I get that you need to put food on the table and make sure to have enough for travelling, but the simple fact of the matter is at $15, it's not worth it.

Sorry, Ms. Northway, but I'm gonna have to give a Thumbs-Down for this. :\ The quality of the game and the price you're demanding for it could be overlooked if you had at least delivered for the kickstarters.