Playing this for the first time I was shocked by how well it holds up. I used to take 5th generation 3D games for granted after hearing so many people say that they "hadn't figured it out yet" or "feel dated". I mean, talking to most people their interest in older video games caps out with whatever generation they started playing with when they were kids, and going beyond that is just not worth the annoyance. I bring this up because it kind of was my perspective as well for a long time. I grew up on PS2 and PS3. Why play anything older? I was convinced that it would bring nothing but tedium because obviously the later generations had "figured it out".

I credit this game a decent amount for changing my perspective. Convention doesn't necessarily mean perfection, and any gameplay traits that died out due to some kind of natural selection aren't inherently inferior.

Specifically I want to mention the camera and controls here. They're actually fantastic. Right from the start you're running down a tight alleyway as your perspective swoops and swerves in a way that I haven't really seen in modern games. Since you have tank controls, this doesn't even affect your movement. You can control your character independent of the camera, so the camera is free to do a lot more. The game exploits this heavily and it contributes a lot to how atmospheric the whole experience is.

So right from the start, a supposedly dated and inferior control scheme actually provides an advantage that modern games lack. For me, realizing this was mind blowing. I know for a lot of people this isn't anything new, but it genuinely shook the foundations of my views on one of my favorite hobbies. I kinda have a deeper connection to this game for that reason alone.

Beyond that personal revelation, this really is just a fantastic game. It's moody, it's tense, it has an interesting world, and it looks fantastic. I genuinely love it, and I don't think I have anything else to say that hasn't already been said by people that are much better at describing why it does all those things so well. The biggest mark against it is the weird emotionless voice acting and cutscene direction but everything else works so well that it hardly drags things down.

Anyways, I would highly recommend this to anyone that can appreciate a good horror experience, even if it's out of your personal comfort zone for "retro games".

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.