[Review] Magical Drop V

A cult-classic puzzle game by some, the Magical Drop series is a fast-paced puzzle game with an emphasis on matching colored orbs to create combos to crowd your opponents screen to win, similar to the Bust-A-Move series by Taito.  Back in the day I've played a bit with an earlier entry, Magical Drop 3, and it was extremely fun.  Now the newest entry in the series makes it's appearance on Steam and it is a blast.

Released on November 15th, Magical Drop V features a story mode for solo play, along with local play versus modes, which includes a 2-on-2 team battle mode and a 4 player king of the hill.  There's also online play for each of the modes and leaderboards for high scores.  The game features 10 playable characters w/ 4 unlockables.  Each character in the Magical Drop series is made unique with a drop pattern.  As you create combos, orbs will drop in a pattern unique to that character.

New in Magical Drop V is the Ghostlop game mode, which apparently was an unreleased arcade game that got incorporated into Magical Drop V.  Ghostlop is accessed by playing a select few characters and at first glance it looks similar to playing Bust-A-Move, but it is completely different.  Ghostlop is played by tossing a fireball up towards an arrangement of blue and orange colored ghost orbs, and to break them your fireball can switch between a blue and orange glow to destroy the appropriate colors.  It's a more difficult game mode from my experience.

Winning a round of Magical Drop comes down to 2 different objectives. First is to meet the quota, which is to destroy a certain number of orbs before your opponent. The other method is if a column of orbs reaches the bottom of the screen.  So to do real well in this game is to be fast and have a good eye for setting up combos.

The story mode is just your typical arcade style solo play where you pick a character and go through some short dialouge between them and the various cast of the game till you reach the final stage and play off against a boss character.

The graphics are in a clean and crisp HD with a very colorful scheme to it all.  The visual effects are great when combos are made as orbs explode, and as high combos are made, there are some nice magical visual effects such as water bubbling, fire blazing, and thunder appearing on screen.

The sound effects are satisfying as you pop orbs and that really energizing ding you hear when you keep comboing goes into a higher pitch gets you pumped up.  Characters are voiced in Japanese, but some of them can sound a little bit obnoxious.  Music is a nice, light, and cheerful tune when on the various menu screens, while during matches they're more faster paced, but it's difficult to pay attention to it when the sound of popping orbs and combos are just all over the place.

Overall, Magical Drop V is a real fun fast paced puzzler that is great to kill any amount of free time.  The game is available on Steam for $9.99.

NIS America steps onto PC with its first Steam release Cladun X2

NIS America releases its first PC game on Steam and it's surprisingly not a Disgaea title.  Cladun X2 is a action RPG dungeon crawler with some rouge-like elements including random dungeons, items, and traps.  Some cool features this game includes is the ability to create your own party of adventurers, your own weapons, and your own armor designs with the in game edit mode.

Creating a party in this game is unlike a traditional RPG.  The game has a magic circle system where you pick one character to play as, and the rest of your party gets placed into spaced surrounding your main that will enchance your stats and may give you additional bonus effects.  Your party members will also act as a shield for you main character until they die in which you also lose the bonus effects they give.

Cladun X2 was originally released on the Playstation Network for the Playstation Portable system.  I can't wait to see what else NIS America will bring over to Steam in the future.

Review: MicroVolts

So I came across this little free to play shooter on Steam a few days ago and decided to give it a try.
At first glance I thought it was some kinda anime shooter(cuz of that anime figure), but it was just a shooter that used toys/action figures as its theme.

It's gameplay is typical of a shooter with the third person perspective, but in this game for most of the modes you have access to seven weapons you can switch to at anytime; melee, rifle, shotgun, sniper, minigun, rocket launcher, and grenade launcher.  The game has quite a lot of maps to play on and several modes including free for all, team deathmatch, and capture the flag gametypes.  There's also an elimination mode where a player has one life per round to kill their opposing team, a zombie mode where a player is chosen at random to be a zombie to infect others, and there's also a single player wave survival mode.

Now as a free to play game, there's a in-game store to purchase new weapons and costumes for the four playable characters.  Most can be purchased with in game money while some are bought with cash.  Weapons in the game have stats, so that means higher level guns do more damage.  Costumes come with stats to increase movement speed or health points.  Now the cash only versions of these items of course offer higher stats than the ones you buy with in-game currency.  Some players may find it unfair or claim it to be a pay to win kind of game.

I've found this game pretty enjoyable and it's great for some casual fun once in a while.  Like every shooter, skill does play an important factor aside from what stats a weapon may give you.

Steam Summer Sale

Looking out for great games to go on sale.  So far I've got Ys Origin for $7.99, originally $19.99.  Bought the Batman: Arkham City collection for $24.99, which includes Arkham Asylum,City, and Gotham City Impostors with all the DLC, Huge savings from that deal as it would normally cost over $130 or so.
Only thing I've got left on my wishlist to go on sale is the GTA 4 collection, hoping for it to go 75% off for the entire thing.