It looks nice! It sounds nice! I liked the crossdressing bit! But...

Among my friends I have been known for years as the resident BOTW hater. I liked the game and completed it, but I've always had a ton of problems with it and have always been baffled by the uncritical praise it gets. Now that Tears of the Kingdom is out it's funny to see people go "oh wow this is so much better than BOTW!!" Yeah? It's so much better than the game you said was perfect and had no problems?

The difficulty of the game scales poorly, the world is repetitive and lacks significant location variety in most areas, the shrines are very hit or miss, the different powers are mostly boring and inconsequential besides Stasis, and the story and writing suck ass. I genuinely think this game has a great formula, much better than most open world games, and that's why people love it. I just think it's a very flawed execution of that formula. I liked it enough to finish it but was left more frustrated than satisfied in the end.

Anyways, there's nearly no reason to come back to this now. Nintendo proved my point by making the same game again but far better in nearly every way. Also fuck this game for dooming the industry to 10 decades of open world hell. It was already heading that way but I think this was the nail in the coffin.

This game is admirable in the way that it managed to piss everyone off. For the casual player, the game's card trading and ticket system probably seemed insane in a world of free to play card games like Hearthstone. I personally didn't really mind it too much, having already gotten used to the concept playing Magic the Gathering Online (which is undoubtedly where Artifact's devs got the idea from). This was mostly a gaming equivalent of Stockholm syndrome, I think that monetizing a digital game this way is deranged and exploitative. Regardless, at the time I was willing to accept it. Valve was probably trying to target a more "core" digital TCG crowd with this anyways, the sorts of people who wouldn't mind it.

For this "core" audience, the game had to justify its existence to really gain anyone's lasting attention. At first glance, it seemed like this was the case. The game was filled with unique mechanics, most notably the fact that you manage three boards at once. I know that starting out playing it I was excited to learn how to grapple with the game's systems and learn what strategies were viable. It wasn't immediately obvious to me how fundamentally flawed it was.

I had some friends that also adopted the game early, and as we all played it we gradually all came to the same conclusion: it got worse the more we played. At a surface level it was fun to try and manage resources between three lanes, and it felt fresh to play because of how different it was from other TCGs. As you get better at the game though, you start to realize something awful.

Almost none of your choices seem to matter because so much of the game is random. Basic unit placements, attack patterns, what shows up in the shop, etc. It felt incredibly frustrating to try and strategize effectively when an unlucky roll of the dice could turn a great turn into a game losing mistake. All games like this have an inherent level of randomness, and that's what makes them so engaging and replayable. There's a fine balance between variance keeping things fresh and feeling unfair, and this game falls heavily into the second category.

I think that with a free to play model the game could've found a niche even with it's problems. I've (personally) never liked Hearthstone on a mechanical level but it found an audience since it's accessible. Artifact was based on an existing IP in the same way, but any kind of casual crossover from DOTA fans was destroyed the moment they decided on the monetization system.

This system has worked for Magic, MTGO is still online and has a seemingly pretty dedicated player base despite the existence of MTG Arena as a F2P alternative. However Magic was already proven as a game. Artifact fell apart even after just a few hours of examination.

So who was this game for? Was it for the established audience of the Dota franchise that didn't want to pay to try out something outside their typical interests? Was it for the TCG fans that would quickly discover the game's lack of depth? It's hard to tell who this was even targeting exactly, because it didn't really do a good job catering to anyone. With enough momentum it could've stuck around for long enough to refine mechanics and come out with more cards, maybe. I know they tried to overhaul the game for a while after its failure but at that point the damage was done. I think it was doomed from the start.

I always feel insane for how much more I seem to like this compared to other people. The driving has incredible momentum behind it, it feels great and visceral! I love the way you progress each car individually with races to unlock part upgrades, it gives great incentive to play different cars rather than sticking to your best one. The open world is fun to explore with just enough going on compared to the size of it all. The multiplayer aspects were really great if you had some friends also playing it.

It's a bit stuck in the 7th gen aesthetic but I'd argue it creates a bit of a personality for itself between the soundtrack, the surreal cop chase intros, and decent environment design. It's not really out of the ordinary for a racing game like this to be a bit visually bland, I would say it's a problem for a lot of the genre and anything that escapes that really stands out.

I like this better than Burnout Paradise! Better soundtrack, better selection of event types, has cop chases. If this had been marketed as a Burnout game instead of having it bizarrely named after an existing NFS game I'm convinced it would've been much better received.

I think this game made a lot of solid incremental improvements over the first game and I prefer it mostly. The more linear structure is a plus in my book, there's less downtime and still plenty to find off the beaten path. I liked the visual design and environments a bit better, it does a good job differentiating itself from the first game and Crash. The puzzles were more fun and the combat is mostly fixed.

It's still not perfect by any means (I really don't like the writing most of the time) but I've grown to love the formula of the series and am looking forward to seeing where they take it next.

I hate what this represents. Playing this game makes me feel like my life force is getting sucked of me through my eyes.

I still blame Candy Crush more than anything for ruining the mobile game market, but this stands as the modern result of it. People gave games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope shit but those were decent games targeted towards a casual audience. They were simple and fun and I think they deserve a spot in the gaming cannon just as much as anything else.

Maybe this game was also fine in a similar way when it came out, but now it feels highly engineered to squeeze out maximum profit make you addicted to it.

Conceptually it's the "thing I like + other thing I like" indie game cliche, but it's executed so well that it transcends its influences and creates a strong identity of its own. All the great aspects of character action games and retro shooters combined in a way that sidesteps the typical downfalls of either.

My only complaint is that it doesn't lend itself well to the Early Access release strategy. Every time an update comes out and I start it up again I get crushed by the difficulty scaling in the new content as I struggle to get a grip on the mechanics all over again. Probably will be best played all at once when it's actually finished.

the Ice Cap level for Big the Cat is maybe one of the worst levels in gaming history and I don't say that lightly. if you don't manage to notice that some patches of ice have a slightly different texture to show they can be broken, you're boned. you will wander the frozen hellscape endlessly. you can't jump out of water. the camera is your enemy. good luck figuring out that there's a powerup hidden underwater somewhere that's basically required to progress. if you die in the game you die in real life. if real art is supposed to make you feel, then I guess this qualifies because it made me feel like I had a hangover. this shit should be studied in a lab

the rest of the game is pretty good though

Great way to play draft without being harassed by LGS regulars for being transgender.

Jokes aside, the strength of magic comes from the freedom. Play cube, play commander, play on the hard concrete. Play with proxies instead of supporting the insane secondary market. Arena doesn't allow for any of this. It's convenient and accessible but it's also rigid. Taking out the social element can be a positive or a negative (my opening statement wasn't exactly a joke), but it kills the soul of the game in the end. The game as a system is incredible, but Arena is very enclosed. They want you to play all the worst configurations because those are the most profitable ones.

So yeah the monetization sucks really hard, but the same of true of the game overall. The cards come in Booster Packs™ for fucks sake. I've heard people say they don't like Arena because you can't resell cards like you can in real life. I've seen people buy entire display boxes of packs because it's "good average value". I like the game as a game, but as a product I've always thought it's a bit of a nightmare. I don't like what it does to people. Arena isn't really any better or worse, just different.

When the stars align and you end up playing a good format without feeling like you've been robbed, it's really incredible. That is also true of Arena. A lot of recent sets have been incredible for drafting, and I had a stretch some years ago where I was really enjoying Historic. Even so, without a group of friends to mutually enable each other, it's hard to continue to justify. Arena doesn't have that sense of community. Those stars won't align consistently.

Over the course of life I've lost the community that used to support this game that I love, so Arena feels like the only option left. It's a good adaptation of the paper game from a business perspective, but not beyond that. It captures fleeting moments of that enjoyment but they feel hollow. I wish I didn't feel so cynical about it all, because I really do love playing Magic. The "playing" part is the only part that doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth.