Recent reviews by Tomfoolery

If you're unfamiliar with the story, it's a magical murder-mystery set in a comfortable remote rural city in Japan. It deals with teenagers trying to carve a path for themselves in life and discovering who they are, ordinarily a side-plot in most games but an integral part of the story here.

The gameplay is turn-based combat with simple but effective procedural dungeon crawling where battle initiative is decided by who hits who first. With a bit of practice you will almost always get preemptive initiative which is good because the combat works on a "Once More" system which provides additional turns upon landing critical hits or striking weaknesses. This means that the combat is momentum based, most fights are either effortless clean-sweeps or knock-down-drag-out slogs with little middle ground. Since enemies can also benefit from additional turns, you can find yourself quickly being overwhelmed in fights that seem otherwise harmless, but this is more often the result of careless play than rotten luck.

But this game has two *kinds* of gameplay and I only described the combat. This game is also something of a life/social sim with dating elements included. The whole game's story takes place on a full year's calendar, with you waking up every morning and going to school. Sometimes you answer questions in class or have lunch with a friend, but almost always after school you decide how to spend your time in the afternoon and again at night. Choices include but are not limited to: Studying to improve knowledge, working to earn Yen and improve diligence (a dump stat if there ever was one), eating spicy curry to improve your courage, playing with cats to improve your expression, spending time with friends to improve their combat abilities and gain bonuses to the Fusion system, or going fishing.

The soundtrack and art direction in this game are second to none, although the aggressively cheerful J-Pop soundtrack may feel grating at first, a sort of Stockholm Syndrome sets in and you soon find you require the catchy tunes to continue living. The artistic influence of this game was far-reaching at the time of it's release.

The quality of the Port from PSVita to PC is beyond reproach. The game performs spectacularly at high resolutions (so long as the aspect ratio is 16:9) and high frame-rates. Although not much can be done about the simplistic PS2 character models and areas, most if not all textures in the game seem to have been uncompressed and the increase in clarity is astonishing. Some users report issues with the baked-in anime cutscenes, however these are heavily weighted at the front end of the game and almost entirely disappear until the very end.

The popularity and success of the initial release and of P4G on Vita lead to something of it's own franchise, with a rhythm game, a fighting game, two anime series and a pair of 3DS spin-off games sprouting from it.

Potentially the only game to ever exist where, as a free player, you can get a seemingly infinite amount of the free to play currency just by playing and trading items with other players. I would highly recommend using warframe.market for earning your currency through trade rather than slogging it out in the free enterprise of the trade chat channel however.

Be advised, certain player-produced cosmetics cost real money and can't be purchased with earned currency.

The Sierra Madre's surrounding city provides an excellent challenge for high-level characters who relish in scavenging for scraps and barely getting by. The barren and poisonous environment feels wonderful to conquer, unfortunately once you enter the Sierra Madre proper it takes a serious dip in gameplay flow and the conclusion is a bit of a mess.

I breezed the final encounter the first time through by sneaking out the door but on trying to reproduce it the game threw up impenetrable walls for no reason and forced me into a different approach.

In all, the opening hours of this expansion are magnificent but it kinda peters out towards the end, and leaves the player with very little lasting assets or bonuses.

Although the area in which it is contained is rather small it is very densely populated with interesting locations and side-content. Both the story content and gameplay segments are fantastic, and with a little investment in side-quests this DLC provides potentially the best home-base I've ever seen in a video game.

The true greatness of Old World Blues lies in it's optional dialogue. A high Science and high Intelligence character will have a bevy of hilarious and entertaining dialogue options. Especially compared to the other DLC's Old World Blues is essentially a comedy expansion and it nails that approach.

Only a lobotomite wouldn't love this DLC.

Lonesome Road is a great and rather lengthy gameplay DLC with story being rather light, which is good because the story is a bit vapid while acting like it's very deep and important. Shrug off the over-dramatic lectures and enjoy a wonderful little post-apocalyptic playground filled with new items and careful level design, plus an optional super-boss area.

More guns. Basically just a place to spend all the money you've earned throughout your game as it's all bloody expensive. I'd never buy this individually but as an addition to the ultimate addition it's nice.

Feels like it should just be in the main edition.

Zion is beautiful and Graham has a really cool animation of servicing an endless stack of m1911 handguns, but to me the story was rather lacking and there was a serious lack of secondary content or explorable areas. Unlike Old World Blues or Lonesome Road the only real overall contribution to the full game that Honest Hearts has is an increase in your level cap.

Ran into a bug early on where I sniped a VITAL quest NPC at a distance because he was dressed like the surrounding enemies and he died.

Currently pretty broken but possibly the most promising and entertaining Alpha I've seen since Kerbal Space Program. If they do HALF of what I think they'll do with this game then this is a definite yes.

Some kind of a middle-ground between Microsoft Flight Sim and Call of Duty, Arma 3 aims for realistic military strategy and deployment. Unlike a standard first-person shooter this doesn't manifest as a "gritty" and "hard boiled" experience, more rather it can bring to your attention just how hum-drum and by-the-numbers modern warfare can be waged.

Arma goes for such a hands-on touch that means in order to be effective in practically any deployment you must first familiarize yourself with the standards of calibrating your weapons for the specific range of the enemy you are engaging, and many encounters can be as simple as spotting an enemy combatant and relaying their bearing and distance from your position to an artilleryman.

To many this can be boring, but there is a rare value in such authenticity. That being said the scope of the base game is best left behind in favor of a modded gametype, and indeed the vast majority of working servers do require many mods to play. It can take a fair amount of time to properly set-up and play a modded game of Arma, but it should be known that Arma is workshop compatible and contains incredibly easy-to-use modding tools in it's own launcher.

Between finding players, setting up mods and generally familiarizing yourself with the game, it can take very long to get started, but thankfully the result is fantastic and completely unique, if a little buggy.

MAIN GAME:
With an engaging and practical plot, solid gameplay and fantastic pacing, GTA V is constantly entertaining with virtually no bad or boring parts. Every mission is individually unique and memorable. You will find yourself wishing to replay it a few months after you first beat the game.

PC version is the best available and runs well on even low-end gaming PC's.

Online:
Bugged and unoptimized, GTA Online requires an abundance of patience. Loading screens last minutes at a time and often fail, triggering another load equally as long. The in-game economy is insurmountable and getting together enough money for any of the additional features requires either purchasing microtransactions or grinding LONG hours with a heist crew which is also easy to screw up if one person is not in the know, or does not speak your language (did I mention it requires patience?)

Ostensibly true to the Californian lifestyle, you will have to pay $400,000 for a decent apartment to run heists from, at least $700,000 for a decent racing car, at least $1,000,000 for an office space, $200,000 for a motorcycle club, $500,000 for a bullet-proof car to run missions with, and $10k-$50k per weapon plus $100,000 dollars worth of ammunition. Ready access to a tank or fighter jet will run you multiple millions of dollars and a Yacht can get as high as $10,000,000. Certain weapons cost hundreds of dollars to fire each time, destroying your car will cost you a fair percentage of it's worth to be replaced ($10k~ for sports cars) you'll lose money every 24 minutes for every apartment and office and yacht you own... Bear in mind that the average income in this game is about $15k for a ten minute game, capping out at the high end of making $500k over about 4 hours by hosting a Pacific Standard (Paci-Stan) heist and paying your accomplices poorly.

Yeah, it's designed for sinking real money in to.

There is some serious fun to be had, the bones of online are still rooted in the good gameplay of the main game after-all, and heisting does have a sort of strategic and calmly cooperative feeling to it, expecially with the right people. However, inbalance and grinding can really dull it down.