To lead off, the game runs really well, looks really nice, and plays very competently. Gameplay and combat rely heavily on traversal, and with each character having unique movement options, it helps aid that you get a relative unique experience if you decide to hop between characters. It's really enjoyable to play. That's about all I have for positivity though, as this is an incredibly stale game at best, and a terrible, lifeless and, depending on how much you actually care about DC, even insulting experience at worst.

While the gameplay is good, the avenues to supplement it are very poor. Most missions boil down kill enemies travel to next waypoint repeat, and it doesn't help the boss fights are same-y and stale, while mobs are made of paper to your arsenal, meaning build diversity doesn't matter all that much. Loot is tiered like in every other game, but you get unique and legendaries extremely early in. Normally this would be a good thing but what this devolves into is 99% of the gear you obtain will be crap. Most side missions have an addendum such as you can only kill enemies with grenades or shield breaks, making what would be a fun enough time waster when doing basic defend the point or collect the data from enemies, into such a tedious endeavor where you're forced to duck and dodge about waiting for ammunition to restore or cooldowns to come off. Between loot being inconsequential and the missions expunging tedium, most people will probably gravitate to just finishing the story, which doesn't fair well either.

It's "Kill the Justice League" but you would expect some more fanfare from following that path. Legacy heroes are treated like the fodder you'll murder in most of your playtime, and with the direction the story goes the tag line ends up feeling like an afterthought. It also doesn't help that some heroes get special, tasteful send offs while others are left laying there as background corpses, so it throws away the potential hook that the squad is just that disconnected from humanity, because they aren't. Not to say the game doesn't have the occasional charm, and if you've been a fan of the modern retelling of Suicide Squad, you'll find more entertainment here than most. Just know that the beginning is the peak of quality in terms of tension and writing. All on top of this technically being a sequel to Arkham Knight, which is an entire mess of worms you have to let sink in.

And with the hook deflated, that's really about it. Suicide Squad does absolutely nothing to stand out amongst its contemporaries. Open world action loot shooter with cash shop, battle pass and rotating seasons. There's really no reason to play this over the 40 other live service loot games that do the same exact thing. Come back in 3 years when the game's been marked down to $2 and has almost double the content with 0 charge, don't support this beta test.

I have a strong bias towards the Battle Network franchise, and I'd argue this is one of the best games ever made. It does just about everything I love in these RPG's, with extreme amounts of customization, a rich and colorful world that progresses with you and the plot, a ton of fights and unique bosses that will test every aspect of your deck building prowess, and just an abhorrent amount of content. Compared BN titles before and after this one, there is just so much to keep you distracted, from boss time trials to grinding out different forms and battle chips to side quests and NPC offerings littered in the overworld and net world.

There is a whole lot I want to say about this game, but genuinely I believe it would edge into rambling territory, so I'll cliffnote the important bits and disclaimers to try and make this as good as a sales pitch as I can.

They've vastly improved on every aspect of this game from its predecessors, from even more unique chip interactions, better navi customization that allows you to fine tune both parts of Megaman, for the most part net worlds and the overworld are made so concise that it never grows tiresome to explore either of them, while at the same time never stepping into repetition territory with endless amounts of needless backtracking, a pitfall nearly every other game in the franchise falls into. Style changes, which are basically different forms Megaman can change into, have a lot more power and influence in most combat encounters, are very easy to grind out of if you don't like a particular form, and if you're green to the series, always comes as a nice surprise to what you get and makes the early and mid game so much more enjoyable for it.

So I guess a few precautions for recommendation, as the issues I list aren't issues to me personally, but they can unfortunately work as deterrents. I've mentioned grinding a few times, and the game can be just that. You'll have to have 1 of every single standard chip to see 99% of the game's contents, and it takes 100 battles minimum to change forms. Again, not really an issue for me since that usually just surmounts a video on the second monitor, but it can be grueling if you're new and you're pushing for post-game content for the first time.

There's also the "Blue" in the title. This is the BN game that started the trend of multiple versions, and unfortunately Blue just has better things going for it. A ninja (shadow) style over White's ground style, which while the latter has some really cool applications, shadow style's ability to just avoid damage is just vastly better. Blue comes with a unique boss fight in the form of Punk who, while doesn't drop anything besides money, begs the question why he's only in Blue. And Blue having one of the best chips in the entire franchise with FoldrBak, a free chip you can put into any deck that you can use whenever to reshuffle your hand and deck and draw new hand. Anyone with a basic understanding of card games can understand how absurd this effect is, while White gets a chip that lets you... use the last navi chip you used. So in terms of version exclusives, you're either choosing a free mulligan + draw 7 at any point in a fight, or 50-100 extra damage maybe.

Lastly, if you want to see EVERYTHING this game has to offer, you have to either trade chips with other versions, chips that are exclusive to each game (you cannot trade FoldrBak btw) or modifyyour game file. While this is made easier with the Legacy Collection available on all modern platforms as of writing this review which comes with online connectivity, you're still forced to find another human being to trade with. You aren't missing out on much, just the T4 versions of bosses to fight, but it's still annoying to have this restriction nonetheless.

All that said, Battle Network 3 is still a gem people should absolutely experience. It's an amazing game that still holds up to this day, and it both wasn't and won't be my first and last times playing it. If you want to jump right in there's no harm starting out with this game, but just for plot sake I'd at least recommend playing through the first 2 Battle Network as there are some narrative beats that come out better with context from the first 2, including a fairly major spoiler between Megaman and Lan, the protagonists.

Please play Battle Network 3.

For a bit of history, Magic the Gathering has always had a string of terrible PC games with poor customization, poor optimization, no match making, very limited format and deck options, terrible monetization, and negative support post-launch, and it's usually a combination of all these issues.

I bring all this up because Arena circumvents nearly all of these problems, and is arguably the best digital CCG that WotC has put out. Of course outside of a few weeks at launch I put off actually putting time into the game, as its release meant the death of their previous live service title, Duels. Unlike Duels though, it seems like Arena is here for the long term. (Hopefully) And unlike at launch, it's a much more packed game.

For comparison, the game launched with just standard. Anyone that knows anything about standard will tell you it's a hellscape. Luckily there are a ton of fairly active game modes available. You have brawl which is basically mini commander, you have alchemy which uses digital only cards as opposed to just the physical equivalents, you have historic which is the game's legacy lite, and a bunch of events, drafts and rotating experimental game modes. There's certainly a lot to do here, and similar to other CCG's like Hearthstone, the cards and board are well crafted and animated. There's a lot more polish here compared to what we were dealt with in the past 2 decades.

Of course it's not all rainbows and sunshine. Despite having the most polish of any MtG title, the PC version is optimized poorly. Even on mid and low settings the game will lag and stutter, something I've never seen with any other card game on my computer. And it's not just isolated issues there, as even on my phone I'll get occasional crashes. Despite me gassing it up, it's not doing anything real technical. You don't have Elspeth or Liliana standing on cardboard with 3D renders. I can only theorize it being a server issue, but it really adds to a mixed experience during long sessions.

And that brings to whats my opinion the main issue; the monetization. And it's real messy. A pack is 1000 gold. You get about 300 gold a day, and about 2k gold a week. That's about 4 packs a week if you're choosing to be f2p, which really isn't good. To compare, Hearthstone you can get a pack a day at worst. That's really not good, and to boot the cash shop has the usual flood of cosmetics, overpriced pack bundles, random (pretty) uncommons sold at some few thousand gold each, it's a mess. The 1 upside is you can obtain wild cards as you open packs, which you can trade in for cards you want, ie a rare wild card let's you get any rare card you want. I would say it's more generous than your average dust system, until you realize you probably need or want 4 of the same rare or mythic in your list to stay competitively, which can really jack costs up.

Now that's not to necessarily say the game is p2w (well in some formats it will be p2w) but say we have climbing the standard ladder as the benchmark, you can make a relatively cheap mono red or mono black deck and climb to mythic (the game's top rank) without too much trouble. Paying is if you want variety in deck building and other game modes, which I imagine is most of the fun for most deck builders.

I mentioned how much gold you could make a day, and yeah that's another issue which creates a real monotonous gameplay loop. Each win nets you 25 gold, sometimes a random uncommon card. You get 15 wins a day for earning gold. Meaning you'll be playing about 15-40 games depending daily. Most of those games will either be with a very linear deck like mono red or mono black, or with a constructed starter deck. You get your dailies done, and that's about it. There's nothing here to keep playing and work towards. You can grind out ladder rank for end of month rewards, and you can gamble and try to go infinite through drafts, but it's not consistent. So for months, this will be MTG Arena, until MAYBE you get a somewhat sizeable card pool.

As such, this makes Arena an incredibly difficult game to recommend for the long term. If you never played Magic then I couldn't recommend this game more solely to introduce you to the franchise, but as far as spending goes? Your money is better spent either on MTG Online or the physical game itself. And if you want to goof around with friends, you have much cheaper alternatives like Tabletop Simulator or Untap.