Gone through a few games since the last post.
Spiral Knights: Zelda: Four Swords meets World of Warcraft's instanced dungeons.
Solid gameplay, reasonable F2P balance for Co-Op and PvE. Sells PvP power, but it's tradable. Lots of cool weapons that actually play different. Crafting system has serious flaw in that energy used to play is consumed by crafting, so players often have to decide between playing today, or crafting a better weapon to use tomorrow. Regular content patches keep the random dungeons fresh.
Terraria: Minecraft meets Diablo II.
Cool game if you have enough people to play with. Not really enough content to keep the gang engrossed, and you tend to run out of new bosses to fight before you maax out your gear. What am I supposed to do with my uber gear, since I killed all the bosses to get it?
PvP might add some longevity, and Hamachi lets me build with friends who have moved away, but the game feels played out after just a week or so. Glad I bought it on sale.
Dragon Nest: Clan favorite Dungeon Lords meets tragically flawed Nexon Classic Dungeon Fighter.
This sounds like recipe for joy, but only in the same way that you might put puppies and birthday cake in a blender and expect liquid friendship to come out. The reality isn't quite so pleasant.
It should work, but it just doesn't seem to. The deal breaker stamina system that drove us away from Dungeon Fighter is gone (the replacement is nearly invisible and perfectly harmless), and the combat is smooth, tactically rich and largely unaffected by normal ping times. Nobody ever wants to play this game with me.
I haven't got far in this one, but I'm not sure I'll make it much further. An MMO where PCs come with a story and a little personality is nice and all, but the character who I like most mechanically (the sorceress) is thoroughly unlikable. Her motives are almost designed to be at odds with those of the player. No matter how badly you want to get into the dungeons and kill some mobs, she has to talk to every person in town twice, in the right order, before she'll shift her lazy bones and do some adventuring. I hate her so much, I hope her story line ends with painful come-uppance.
Killing mooks is a load of fun, and I wish she would let me get on with it.
Also the game is too easy by default, and you have to clear easy mode, to unlock normal mode, to unlock hard mode, to unlock even more difficulty levels that will still feel to gentle to veteran gamers. It's like the designers have no conception of what a difficulty selector is actually for so I don't have to play games that are too easy!
This isn't rocket science, or even puppy based alchemy, it's games design 101. Relatable characters + customizable challenge + existing good game mechanics = winner.