yeah ill get to barkley one day but in the meantime
warhammer 40k dark nexus arena
warhammer 40k dark nexus arena is a free to play moba in early access and with negative reviews on steam and that alone set off every warning bell but i played it anyway because warhammer. its not actually that horrible barring the incredibly low skill level of almost everyone who plays and some balance issues. also the lore is a little forgeted up because you have assault terminators and meganobz fighting fire caste warriors and stormboys and scouts but whatever mobas suck richard at accurately representing power levels. if you dont believe me in dota you can have satan and the personification of the heat death of the universe fighting an archeologist and a dwarf who can shoot good and another dwarf who is dr kleiner but a dwarf. maybe you can fluff it as all of them being special characters or some stuff i dont know. also i dont know how much of this review will be understandable to those who arent versed in warhammer 40k but just google stuff if you dont know what im talking about.
dark nexus's gameplay focuses on some sort of king of the hill stuff with murder and grimdark. you and your team are tasked with killing the stuff out of the other guys and their team and sacrificing their souls to the dark eldar spectators or some stuff via standing on a giant circle in the center of the map and soul capping can be contested if anyone on the other team is standing on the circle while you are and it takes a few seconds to cap. theres also no leveling system. thus the game focuses primarily on killing the stuff out of the other guys which is good that was the only thing i enjoyed about dota and league of legends. it is actually refreshing to have a combat focused moba without any of that boring ass grinding stuff people have to do for 50 minutes before the game ends. it plays more like a constant brawler or a one unit rts than a traditional moba. i should coin moba fighter as a genre. as i was saying immediately this game beats out dota and league and all those other ones no one cares about by cutting the boring stuff. the game also gives everyone a dash which is the equivalent of a short ranged flash that has a cd of like 15 seconds for instant repositioning which is also good. the game operates via wasd instead with left click being a basic attack which makes it feel more arena-y but made the devs do this weird work around to the problem of not having all of qwer available for skill hotkeys.
that work around is to reduce the number of button skills to two and add a left click charge skill. the ultimate skill aka on e is also on a stupid cooldown thing via some energy meter that i have yet to find out how to charge except via powerups and the ethereals passive. for real i get like two in a fifteen minute game. there are realistically two skills active without any left click chargeup, which also can take a while and since left click is also attack charging it usually means you get forgeted up if the other guy is killing you while you are, at any given time and this is a moba which is basically babbys first rts already. thats right forget you moba players im calling you out. moba is a loving dumb acronym anyway but arts sounds pretentious and is obscure and dota like is too long so whatever ill buy riots marketing gimmick. i guess the game is going with the your team is your collective skillset approach of all other mobas but that approach has and will forever be a joke in application. the skills themselves arent anything new or divergent either theyre basically all just damage deliverers or buffs that would easily be found in the competition. there arent any left click to autotarget a person with this skill skills either which translates in mobaspeak to all of them being "skill"shot except they are painfully easy to land for anyone with basic prediction ability due to their fast speed and the opponents relative slow speed but i guess you can dodge them with movement skills and dash. this whole lack of skills and depth leads to a situation where basically every character has a "combo" of skills that sort of chain together to do stuff and thats the entire character's gimmick even moreso than normal with normal being standards by other mobas. there are some characters that are just boring as stuff too like the ethereal is basically a walking buff machine which no one plays because he cant even kill anyone. thankfully the game allows you to swap guys at death to any other hero/champion/whatever which is good if you clicked ethereal.
speaking of characters all of them are free and i guess i should point that out. congratulations the game does not have a stuff business model. what an age we live in. the characters all have differing health numbers and theres some stuff called shield that seems to be health that regens amazingly quickly but might be vulnerable to something i dont know the game really doesnt give you the numbers on anything. all of them have three skills, a left click charge thing and one of the skills is an ultimate, and a passive which for most characters is just okay but theres some with good ones. they all appear to have the same or very similar movespeeds although that can be changed via skills. they all have a dash of the same distance and cd. characters with a ranged left click attack slow down if you are running away and shooting which i thought was nice. they have between 750-1500 health depending on character. i dont know i thought i should add this to give perspective on the skills thing theres nothing outstanding here i didnt cover before.
as for the geography of the arena there is a grand total of one map in dark eldar style spikes and grimdark and i think its nice but im not here to talk about how it looks yet. in the center stage theres the big soul circle i talked about before and that stuff is huge by the way. scattered around the map are jungle mobs collectively known as creeps to anyone who plays mobas that you can kill to get a powerup which is nice but they seem a little imbalanced because of stuff im about to mention. chasing players around are smaller slave looking creeps that basically just harass people and are pretty stupid as of the current implementation of them. these slaves seriously just chase people down and will catch up to you no matter what you do and start dealing small amounts of melee damage when they do until you shot them because they die in like 1-2 left clicks. when you kill them they give a small buff that lasts until you die and there are like 7 buffs and they all stack so if you dont die you can have like 30 of each buff which can make you much more dangerous than anyone who doesnt have them. none of the buffs are straight stats though which is good and the dev team doesnt seem to know what to do with them because they were previously just gold givers and the gold was to buy the buffs so whatever. either way they seem pretty dumb and break the game when it comes to the buff creeps because you can easily get enough vampirism to actually gain a ton of health via vampirism when you get enough of that one buff. they arent continuously spawning but they do spawn at decent rate and dont really seem to have a purpose other than haha were moba now. the buff implementation thing is dumb too because you get the same amount of soul shards for killing a player with buffs as without. its a pretty dumb feature and seems to exist as a wip but they should really just remove them if they dont have any purpose so players can get back to killing each other because these forgeters will swarm you at the most inopportune times. other map features include fog banks which make you invis to anyone not in the fog ala league bushes and a bunch of walls and stuff to make the map not one giant clusterforget but other than that theres nothing too special.
balance seems okay for the most part except the ork stormboy has the power to slaughter absolutely everyone if used correctly ie by me and has an amazing and potentially team spamming stun, good ass damage, and superb mobility combined with a decent amount of health and a get out of jail free while killing everyone card as his passive. the khornate berzerker is the lifesteal and supposedly jungle hero which is okay but he sucks because the jungle buffs arent worth enough to give him any victories in a straight up melee fight with other characters. his main gimmick is his large melee arc but chances are you wont be hitting more than two other players with it due to the presence of ranged characters. other than that everythings pretty swell to my knowledge.
as for misc stuff the payment model of buying skins is good keep it up and also there are no dark eldar characters in a game that supposedly takes place in commorragh come on son. i understand why there arent eldar due to the no psykers policy but the dark eldar revel in this soul murdering stuff wyches in particular are actual arena fighters and they have yet to make an appearance. the soul shard grabbing thing is pretty dumb and it is actually sometimes more beneficial to die surrounded by your team than to live because your team can get your soul shards. readd the souls automatically going to the killer. i think im done with the gameplay stuff i dont know maybe.
as for music and sound stuff i didnt really care about the music much but the voice acting. oh man. voice acting for every single character is hammy as forget. they clearly did not hire any talent for voicing except for the dark eldar announcer who sounds like shes getting off whenever anyone murders someone else which is surprisingly in character. even so the voice acting is still endearing in a dawn of war soulstorm kind of way although soulstorm was
even more ridiculous. other sound effects just sort of exist i didnt really care too much about them and the voice acting and stuff may be subject to change if this ever gets out of alpha (haha no).
the graphics are pretty good though and the arena gets that dark eldar stuff going on that is rarely depicted in other warhammer media. there is a very low amount of graphic violence though with the most intense thing you can do being execute someone which is a delayed curb stomp without any of the head explosions expected of curb stomps and its more like a taunt. the fog clouds also look out of place and some of the jungle creeps ie the nids dont look too good but its an alpha the graphics probably wont be the same by the time you finish this review.
the networking has its highs and lows with its lows being that i get 140 ping on every game im in, but thats probably due to location and a lack of servers, and the highs being that you can instantly join a match via quick match which places you in a game with some other chuckleforgets immediately although very few people actually play this. other lows are the horribly implemented joining system which has this idiotic system of placing people on teams in a stupid way. to illustrate if theres a game with two people on each team and someone leaves the team which had the last player joined the next person joining is going on the team where nobody left making it a 3v1 instead of placing people on teams based on team count. there is also no teamswapping or auto balance feature to balance this stuff out. also i dont know how different the ranked stuff is from quick match which is what i detailed here because i have yet to get in a ranked match due to no players. its still alpha which isnt really an excuse but whatever.
the game has potential to be the sort of fighter-moba thing i was talking about before although the devs seem to be going for the more traditional moba-moba approach as seen by the trailers and stuff which depict a dota or league like river map with a jungle and three lanes which is a shame. the game would be greatly improved by adding some more skills to all heros. this game is certainly not as super serious as other people try to make moba-mobas out to be you just beat the stuff out of people. if you liked the parts of mobas where you beat the stuff out of people give it a try and pick the stormboy hes op. even if thats what you like the game still lacks the depth it needs to attract players and stuff, going for the blizzard dota casual approach of having incredibly low skill ceilings instead of doing its own thing with a lot of diverse skills. i might check it out again if it gets out of alpha but it wont. i played it for 5 hours you will probably get around 5 hours of enjoyment too.
essential games
bad tier
yume nikki
unessential games
good tier
profit motive
decent tier
chrono trigger
station 37
skelemania
the witch's house
warhammer 40k dark nexus arena sluggish morss
space funeral
planetside 2
mimicry man
mediocre tier
ib
space funeral: the legend of earth birth
hylics
mogeko castle
extremely unessential games
boring tier
presentable liberty
spookys house of jump scares
lieat
ananke
super columbine massacre rpg
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ao oni
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furry tier
major/minor
space funeral 4
hell
worse than Riddler tier
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off tier
off
worse than off tier
wadanohara and the great blue sea
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