Review: Secrets of Grindea[EARLY ACCESS]: Slow but Steady....

You may or may not have heard of an old game called Legend of Zelda. It's an obscure one, yes, but everyone I've talked to who has played call it a "classic" or "famous" or "its one of the most defining games of the in the industry, of course I know it!"

Secrets of Grindea is a top down RPG made by Pixel Ferrets which exists in a similar vein as the original Legend of Zelda and other SNES games, but adds it's own mix of skills, magic, arcade modes and co-op features that make it stand out. I will quickly note, this game is in Steam's Early Access program at this stage, but it is already of high quality, and at the least deserves a stern looking at, as if it were your adorable new dog after it pissed in the house.

Secret's of Grindea has two modes: Story mode and Arcade mode. We'll be turning our focus to the story mode primarily, because it is the center of the game's experience, and because arcade mode is hard (like Dark Souls!(sorrynotsorry)) and I apparently suck at my only job. Yay.

The game's story centers around you, [CHARACTER NAME], as you travel to the big city to follow your dreams of being a Collector. It pretty much means that for the entirety of your life, you, [CHARACTER NAME], plan on beating the ever-loving crap out of monsters and innocent rabbits because money. However! Things are not all as they seem, and you, [MYBUTT], learn more of some of the worlds mysteries. Lucky for you, [xX_Proto_Ganist_Xx], you've got friends, you one armed father, and some rich kid who wants(?) to be your friend like in The Prince and the Popper, only he's even more of an a-hole, to help you.

So... not to complicated, at least to begin with. But what about gameplay? The game's combat begins with a basic sword and shield, and gets more complicated as you go on and gain abilities. The game rewards using your shield intertwined with combat, as you can block out of most moves, and by guarding right before an attack on you lands, you perform a perfect guard. This gives you a variety of different options, which I'll let you discover yourself. TL;DR: Combat is satisfying and offensive, rewarding your mad skillz with more opportunities to use said skillz. But thats only one way of playing. You can also be a ranged caster! Or a summoner of monsters and what-not. Which segways me elegantly to this games defining feature(at least in my humble-but-totally-correct opinion): the skill system.

Grindea doesn't use a skill tree like other RPGs, no, rather, you have a set bunch of skills, grouped into three sets of skills: physical, magic and utility. On top of that, you have "talents," which is a grab bag of passives and general improvements to your character. Every level, you gain one silver skill point and one talent point, and every five levels you gain a gold skill point. You can upgrade a physical or magic skill with five silver points and, once you do that, with five gold points. Utility skills only have three silver points put in them, because, you know screw support classes. Or the devs wanted to focus on combat and making sure that you have fun too. Probably the later one. But I digress. The genius here is that your character is always advancing. You never have to save up for a new skill, and you can work on multiple skills at once! It makes creating a build that suits you easy and fun.

In the end, Secrets of Grindea is a fun game, with fun combat, fun leveling, and fun, well, everything. It's easy to pick up, but difficult to master. It's been worked on for at least five years now (stats are hard to come by; it doesn't have a Wikipedia page yet), and shows no sign of slowing down. It's $14.99 on Steam, and I seriously recommend it. The developers have done a superb job of listening and responding to the community, and the game is very close to completion.

It may take a while, but once that dog is potty trained, he will be SO worth it.

Warframe Breakdown: Making Crowd Control Fun

Crowd control. CC. Stun your foes, drop their accuracy, throw them back or interrupt their attack. Anything that can control a crowd. It's an essential part to Role Playing Games, especially turn based ones, MMOs, and, more recently, online shooters.

Here's the thing. Most crowd control will reduce stats, or freeze enemies, or throw them back. And as much as that is fun, it doesn't (in my opinion) have the same satisfaction in those action based games. Sure, in the stuff of my childhood like Paper Mario and The Thousand-Year Door, it feels great! But in action games, it's just feels like another extra layer on top of my perfectly timed button presses.

Introducing Warframe, free-to-play online third person shooter in which you fly around the battlefield like a jet plane infused monkey, rain death on your enemies, and grind so hard you lose a third of your fingers and your ass is most likely fused to your computer chair by the time you reach the last few planets. In Warframe, you pilot strange, cyber-organic suits (aptly named warframes) which have a small set of abilities, in addition to a passive. Limbo is one of these warframes, and he has the ability to push himself and his enemies into a slightly different plane of existence. Only enemies on the same plane of existence can harm you, and vice versa. The only thing that can damage both planes at once are another warframe's abilities.

The ability to separate a crowd into two groups is a vastly different crowd control technique compared to what we normally see, and it only gets better from there. Limbo can stop time in this "rift plane." When using this, your enemies freeze and so do your bullets, but you don't. This means you can banish, freeze, set up, then when the time is right, release the time stop and destroy a crowd instantly.

The main point: "setup, setup, setup, and release" is a brilliant and satisfying way to kill a crowd, and my fingers are crossed to see more of it in action based shooters.

P.S. Before you mention the Dishonored series, yes, I know, the same argument applies. However, should any other game do this well, please tell me about it.