I really liked the art of this one and the general outlandishness of the designs. Like you can play as a knife-wielding mummy in trousers or a baby piloting a mech suit. All while moving through colorful environments of escalating wackiness. And it has vehicles which I always like in games like this, even if these are pretty clunky.

I wish there was a super power, though; it’s just attack, grab and jump which while they have nice animations and a few interesting combos, just don’t offer enough variety for my taste. There are weapons, but those all feel pretty overpowered and are balanced around only lasting a few seconds. The core combat just felt simplistic compared to other beat-em-ups I’ve played. It really makes me appreciate the more expressive move sets of the newer ones like Shredder’s Revenge.

Fortunately it’s short, and has infinite continues in the Capcom Beat ‘Em Up bundle, which was enough motivation to see it through to the end in one sitting. Overall not particularly interesting combat-wise but a goofy and eye catching diversion.

To be fair, I did not play this very long. I was expecting it to be extremely corporate and predatory, which it is. What I did not expect was for it to be very poorly made, which it also is. It crashed within the first 30 minutes. Character models are unreadable, homogenous blobs. Action animations look incredibly stiff and artificial. Environments are drab gray smears. The cutscenes... oh my god the cutscenes are SO UNBELIEVABLY SLOW. The characters are so torpid they make Geralt of Riviera look like Sonic the Hedgehog. It's like they inserted a 5 second pause before every line to give it dramatic weight. The actual result is that this action game simply has no energy; the whole thing seems like it's on the verge of a heroin overdose. Combine that with all the on-screen movement consisting of these blobby characters shuffling randomly back and forth, and the writing and voice acting being bottom of the barrel bad, and this whole package looks incredibly amateurish.

Making this some kind of MMO is a weird choice too. What is gained by taking away my ability to pause the game? How is my experience enhanced by seeing "xXxHOTBABESLAYERxXx" running in circles around my armor vendor? Maybe it's just a nod to Sartre; hell really is other people.

I don’t think it's too much of a stretch to say that Diablo invented the loot box. You kill a monster and something might pop out; it might be incredible or it might be total trash. When such tension was novel it was exciting and addictive. Now every live service game has embraced this mechanic as a means of padding out a game's playtime. A regular playthrough of Dark Souls might see you walk away with, what, 30 or 40 cool weapons? A playthrough of any given Diablo, though, will have you looting literally thousands of weapons, each with a minuscule chance of being cool. One of these models perfectly slots into a live service game's carefully calibrated withholding of joy. Too little and you get frustrated, too much and you get bored and/or consume the content too quickly. With the "Shop" tab prominently on display in the main menu, this feels less like a game and more like a mail-order catalog.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I have enjoyed these games in the past, but this really does feel like Diablo in its inevitable final form: a corporate IP with no soul, fashioned into a treadmill of monetizable nonsense (like $65 mounts!). Content mash, to be drip fed forever.

I just sampled this as part of the Xbox beta test, since I've always been curious how a game like this works on console and just generally how a Final Fantasy MMO was implemented.

My first impression was how flawless and smooth everything ran. I don't know why I expected bugginess or sub-optimal performance, maybe because it's a beta test but everything looks fantastic with tons of frames and I didn't experience any kinds of bugs or roughness.

My second impression was how totally they just lifted basically everything in this game directly out of World of Warcraft. WoW did more or less the same thing with Everquest, but at least made major improvements with elements like maps, quests and NPC interaction. In the opening hours at least this feels much less like an evolution of the formula and more like a reskin.

Speaking of skins, the UI is really bad. I had heard a lot of good things about how they managed to make this PC game playable on a controller. I can confidently report those things were wrong; this is a terrible experience. You can really tell this UI was designed with a mouse in mind; everything on the screen -- which is A LOT OF THINGS -- is "clickable" which is an unnatural and counterintuitive interaction on a controller. It seems like they haven't done anything to simplify the UI or cut down on the superfluous interactable elements. I was very disappointed with this aspect but I'm sure that with enough practice one could git gud enough with it to move around the world confidently. I can't imagine it's a ever particularly fluid experience, though, everything just takes way too many steps.

Years of EQ and WoW completely depleted my love for MMORPGs so I was never going to start an FFXIV account and really dive in, but I'm super glad I got the chance to try it out finally. It's awesome they're finally bringing this to Xbox and that the dozens of Final Fantasy fans that don't own a Playstation will finally be able to join their friends.