Fortnite Festival (PS5) Review

 

Fortnite Festival is one of 3 big new game modes, which are supposed to help Fortnite branch out with more gameplay options. Many people are speculating that it might be Fortnites wish to become the next Roblox, the big game for everything. To be honest, I guess we will have to see, but I am not really convinced. Anyhow Chapter 5 introduced the Lego Mode, Rocket Racing and Fortnite Festival to the game. Lego Fortnite is an Open World Survival mode with Lego units. Rocket Racing is the new Racing mode and Fortnite Festival is supposed to be Fortnite's new Music mode.

Festival actually consists of two seperate game modes. One is called Main Stage and is, in my opinion, the only real Festival mode and the other one is called Jam Stage, but we are going to talk about that later on.

Main Stage is a rhythm based game, in which you have to press the right buttons at the right time to hit the music notes. Hitting multiple notes correct in order will increase your score multiplier. If you mess up however your multiplier will reset. You often have to press more than one button at the same time and you can even increase the difficulty of the song, which will make it much harder not to mess up, but which will also give you many more points. Since I haven't played many of these games, I found myself satisfying challenged on the easy difficulty. I would also strongly recommend to change the default control scheme, since I personally found it to be pretty convuluted. Switching to the shoulder buttons made it much more manageble.

In any case, if you ever played one of the popular 'Guitar Hero' or Rockband' videogames, than you will fell right at home. The special Fortnite twist is, than you can also emote during short music breaks of your instrument of choice. It is certainly some fun for a while, but I am not sure how often I will come back to this game mode in the future.

Jam Stage on the other hand is much more relaxed and less competitive. You are in a park area with multiple music stages and you can play your instruments by emoting. Other players can join you and listen to your music. There is nothing else to do or achieve here. I am personally a bit confused, why Fortnite added a seperate Jam Stage mode instead of adding it to the already existing 'Party Royale' mode. Having both of them in the game seems pretty redundant, since they are both just focused on relaxing and playing music.

So let's talk a bit about Cosmetics and Monetization. The game mode is obviously free, like all game modes in Fortnite. Fortnite Festival however is the only gamemode aside from Battle Royale that offers it's own Battle Pass. This Battle Pass costs 1800 Vbucks, which is nearly twice as much as the 'real' Battle Pass. It only has 11 Levels and doesn't give any Vbucks back. On the free track you get 5 songs, a couple of emoticons, a loading screen and a guitar skin. On the paid track you get a couple more songs and instruments skins, as well as a single character skin.

I think it is fair to say, that this Festival Pass is pretty controversial. If you just compare the price to value ratio with a regular Battle Pass, than the Festival Pass is obviously abysmal, with far less content and a far higher price. Some people however seem to be happy with pricing, since it is only a bit higher than a regular Skin in the shop. Fortnite is already planning for a second Festival Pass Season in February featuring a new musican. I am personally not really convinced, that many people will purchase this. You also have to consider that nearly all challenges in the Festival mode give XP exclusively to the Festival Pass, which is very different than for example Rocket Racing, which helps you level the regular Battle Pass. Except for a small niche I don't see many more players playing this mode regularly, since it involves a second grind for a Battle Pass.

Apart from the Festival Pass you can also purchase Music instrument skins in the shop, as well as new songs. The pricing of these songs is however also a bit controversial. Every song in the shop costs 500 Vbucks, which is the equivalent of 5 Euro. Guitar Hero and Rockband players however pointed out, that new songs in these games often only cost around half of that. You also have to consider, that every day there are a couple of different songs in a free rotation and you can experience some of the paid songs, if your teammates add one of them to the song selection of your Main Stage match.

 

Result:

Fortnite Festival is a nice side attraction to Fortnite and I do agree it that extends the gameplay variety of Fortnite. That being said, I see two main problems concerning the longevity of this mode. The biggest fans of this mode are probably going to be Rockband and Guitar Hero players, but why wouldn't they just keep playing the arguably more polished versions of Fortnite Festival. It does have the free Price Tag, but challenges exclusively contributing to the Festival Pass and the monetization currently being very high, are probably going to scare a lot of casual players away. Fortnite Festival is a somewhat fun gamemode and probably worth trying out, but I am not sure it's still going to be played in weeks or even months from now.

 

6.5/10

Veiled Experts (PC) Review

 

Veiled Experts was a 5v5 based Third-Person Shooter by the Japanese Nexon company. The game released in May 2023 into Early Access and has now in December 2023 only half a year later been shutdown. I know Veiled Experts players don't like to hear this, but the game has clearly been heavily inspired by Hi-Rez 'Rogue Company' game. Which is pretty funny, since Hi-Rez also has a reputation of taking a lot of inspiration from other games, while also putting their own Hi-Rez spin on top of it.   

I also want to make clear, that Veiled Experts is by no means a scuffed Rogue Company Clone game. In fact, Veiled Experts is actually pretty high quality and not scuffed at all. It is a good-looking game, that doesn't have to shy away from a comparison with Rogue, some even prefer the style of Veiled. The gameplay was also pretty good. Movement felt very smooth and you could easily sideroll or vault up surfaces. Gunplay is probably the biggest difference to Rogue, while it might look similar on first glance, there was a lot more recoil with a lot of weapons in Veiled. Nonetheless, I never felt it was unfair and I also enjoyed this gunplay approach. There was also a pretty good variety of weapons in the game. Pistols, SMGs, ARs, Shotguns, Bows, Snipers, you name it.  

Something that Veiled did pretty well, was also the fact, that all characters were unlocked from the start, which is quite unusual for Hero-based Shooters. Games like Rogue Company, Apex Legends or Rainbow Six Siege usually require you to either grind the game, or cash in, in order to unlock characters, but Veiled just gave players access to all of them. Of course this on the other hand also took away a bit of the grind motivation to unlock characters, that a lot of other games have, where you feel like every match helps you to progress towards a goal. Nonetheless, I liked this player-friendly approach by Veiled.

I mentioned that Veiled Experts is a Hero-Shooter and I am referring here to light Hero-Shooters, similar to Rogue Company or Apex Legends, where Shooting is 90% of the gameplay and the hero ability is just a nice bonus, in contrast to heavy Hero-Shooters, like Overwatch or Paladins, where the hero abilities entirely determine your playstyle. While talking about Heroes, the characters in Veiled Experts were fine. Most of them didn't seem particularly memorable, but maybe that's just because I discovered the game too late to get familiar with all of them. That being said, characters like Young Sik, Kyle, Nicki and Lily Rose did remind me of certain Rogue Company characters, either based on looks or abilities. My absolute favourite however was obviously Jack, who was total John-Wick Knock-Off, so I always called him 'Jack Wick'. Shameless imitation or not, it was an awesome character. So why the hell not?

Veiled Experts had two gamemodes: Bomb Defusal and Team Deathmatch. Both are absolute classics and there is nothing wrong with them, but it is not much in terms of variety. Unfortunately the game also had only a couple of different maps. I have a hard time finding concrete information about how many there were exactly, but it can't have been more than 6 or 7. This would have been fine as a starting point, but it is a bit low overall.

The whole shutdown of the game generally feels a bit weird. The game actually has a pretty respectable foundation in terms of gameplay, artstyle and so on. It just feels, like Nexon expected to hit the ground running and be a massive success on Day 1 or immediately shut the game down. They could have really added some nice content updates on top of this solid foundation, but it feels like they never really tried and just gave up instead. If you want to be massive success from the start or to slowly build you playerbase, you do need some kind of marketing. I never saw anything for this game. It was a complete coincidence that I stumbled upon this game on the video of a fellow Youtuber, who showcased undervalued F2P games. I heard that Nexon sponsored a single game session with Shroud to promote this game. Paying streamers is fine, but that can't replace classic marketing. Veiled Experts probably failed, because few people even heard of it.

 

Result:

Veiled Experts was one of these actually good games, that few people have even heard of it. I liked the gameplay and artstyle, but the game unfortunately did lack content and bit of polish. More maps and gamemodes and possibly a console version, could really have helped the game and who knows where it would be in a year from now. The way it went, Veiled Experts was only a promise, that will never live up to its full potential.

 

7.3/10

Scuffed Fall Guys Clones (PC) Review

Today we are taking a look at scuffed Fall Guys Clone attempts. Fall Guys is a popular minigame based Battle Royale Game, that has a lot of platforming stages. Games like 'Stumble Guys' or 'Bro Falls' are good alternatives, if you like these kinds of games. There are however also a bunch of really cheap knockoff-attempts, that consumers can only be warned about. Some of those, were are going to take a closer look at today, are 'Royale King', 'Yappie Knockout' and 'Fall Girls'. I am also going to shortly mention the Fail Guys stages of 'Let it Flow' (previously reviewed: https://gamereviewnation.blogspot.com/2021/06/let-it-flow-pc-review.html). 

Royale King released on October 2023 on Steam and has an all-time player peak of 23. Right now there are usually 0 players online. It has 6 very similar stages based on the Hex-A-Gone Final of Fall Guys, 3 classic Race-Stages from Fall Guys, some Arena stages with enemies and one really odd Dodgeball stage, which didn't seem to function properly. The Hexagon stages work fine for what they attempt. The Race and Arena stages are just annoying. Obstacles move multiple times faster than your character and a single touch immediately takes you out of the match. I am not sure what is supposed to be enjoyable about these stages. There is also a map creator in the game, which sounds great, but doesn't seem to work at all.

Controls in Royale King function okay, but are nothing special and the visuals are very simple and basic. Overall I would probably give this game a 3/10.

Yappie Knockout released in July 2023 on Steam and previously on Itch.io as well as their private Yahaha Launcher. This also bothers me a lot. You can download the game on Steam, but you can't play, unless you register on their Yahaha Website and download their launcher from there. If you release a game on Steam it should be directly playable on Steam. According to some players this might have been different at the Steam Launch and might have been patched in later, which would be very scammy. Anyhow, Yappie Knockout has an all-time player peak of 17. It might have had higher player numbers at the Itch.io launch, even though I doubt it.

Yappie Knockout is probably a bit better looking than Royale King (not much though), but the developers of this game are, in contrast to the Solo Dev of Royale King, a professional studio. Yappie also rip-offs much more stages of Fall Guys than Royale King did. There are Yappie versions of Starchart, Snowball Survival, Hoarders, Hex-A-Gone, Tip Toe, Door Dash, Egg Scramble and many others. Honestly I am not going to bother to list them all up. They are just low effort rip-offs of Fall Guys stages. On a lot of these stages they didn't even bother to change the name. It is a miracle that there hasn't been a lawsuit against this game. Probably because nobody plays it. As far as I could tell there wasn't a single original level in this game. To be fair, there was however still a bigger variety in stages than in Royale King (even though just because Yahaha Studios seem to be better at stealing), therefore I would probably give Yappie Knockout a very generous 4/10. 

Another Fall Guys Rip-Off I want to mention today is Fall Girls. It released in March 2022 and has a player peak of 35. The game even uses the same fond as Fall Guys, just that all characters are waifu girls. Dear goodness... In contrast to Royale King or Yappie Knockout the game isn't even F2P, but regularly costs 5 Euro instead. I am certainly not going to spend this to try this game out. From the footage I have seen on Youtube I would say that it might at least visually looks the best so far, but that is not really an accomplishment. In contrast to the other games, Fall Girls is actually not an Online Battle Royale, but a Solo Platforming game instead. There is no timelimit and the Bots contestants don't matter at all. The movement speed is also painfully slow. This game is clearly just a joke, but an expensive one for that and honestly not even that funny. As mentioned, I haven't played my self, but I don't think I would have given this game more than 2-3/10 at most. 

Another game that I actually did play was Let it Flow. It is the result of a chaotic Twitch experiment, where a streamer asked his audience to suggest him content to implement into a new game and Let It Flow is the product of this insanity. It is clearly also a Meme game, but at least it is occasionally funny and completely free. The game has 6 different game modes. One of them is Trophy Hunt, which consists of obstacle based parkour levels and most of these stages are called 'Fail Guys' levels. These stages are like racing levels from Fall Guys, except that one player has to grab a trophy at the end to win, similar to Fall Mountain from Fall Guys. Hitting an object (like rotating toilet paper rolls or bounce pads) will make players bounce uncontrollably into the nowhere, which in most cases will lead to an elimination. Players however can infinitely retry till somebody catches the trophy. What gives these Trophy Hunt levels a special twist is the fact, that players can also shoot at each other during the race, which makes it even more chaotic.

An update of the game to Unreal Engine 5 has unfortunately broken some parts of the game, so that players will for example fall through the ground on some stages. That's unfortunate. Without this glitch I would have probably given the Fail Guys stages a 5/10, which is at least better than any of the other really scuffed Fall Guys imitations so far. 

But lets not forget Block Arena, which is actually the best of the Scuffed Fall Guys clones. I already reviewed it in a previous article, but I think it is worth mentioning in this context (https://gamereviewnation.blogspot.com/2021/05/block-arena-pc-review.html). Block Arena specialises in copying the Hexagon levels of Fall Guys, but offers a couple of unique twists to the falling blocks formula. There are options for super jumps, which can allow you to jump back on a higher floor level, and there is also a short speed boost ability, which allows players to run quicker and potentially cut off other players (There is also a grappling hook ability, that only works in combination with the super jump). All abilities require stamina, which replenishes itself. There are sadly only 3 maps in rotation in Block Arena. These 3 maps are not bad, but the game could have really used some additional content. The lack of players is also definitely a problem. At least the game shows you in the main menu how many other people are online, so that you don't waste your time. Since I feel it is the least scuffed of the shameless Fall Guys Clone Games, it gets a 5.5/10 from me.

So what can we learn from this article? There is taking strong inspiration from other games and there are scuffed clone versions. The first ones can actually still be pretty entertaining, while the seconds ones usually do suck for the most part.

Is Disney Speedstorm actually Pay-to-Win? (Discussion)

Is Disney Speedstorm actually Pay-to-Win? That is the question we want to answer in this discussion today.

There are arguments to be made, why Speedstorm has a severe P2W problem, but there are also arguments to be made, why this issue only affects a part of the game and shouldn't necessarily discourage people from playing and trying out this game.

Let's start with the reason why I believe that Disney Speedstorms P2W issue, while it should be addressed, is overall in my opinion overrated. There are essentially 5 different parts of this game. There are the Singleplayer modes, which consists for one on the Season Tour, which is a season-based campaign of races, and on the other hand on daily, weekly and special Events. Neither the Season Tour nor the Events have any elements of P2W. All Missions and Events have certain Level requirements, but all Bots in these races will be based on these levels. You can easily level up, so you can participate in them as a free player without investing anything.

Than there is the Multiplayer, which has 3 different parts. There is the ranked mode, the regulated Multiplayer and Freeplay. In Regulated Multiplayer all players and drivers are scaled to the same level, so there is 0 P2W. Than there is Freeplay Multiplayer, where players can play alone or via Splitscreen with up to 4 players. Players can choose their maps and Bot difficulties. Once again there is 0 P2W here.

Now we have to address the biggest problem of the game, which is the Ranked Mode. Every Driver has his own ranking. You start at Rank 0 and can move up to Rank 40 (ranks btw don't reset after a season ends). In contrast to Regulated Multiplayer and Freeplay, drivers are not scaled equally. Drivers with higher levels will have better stats than drivers with lower levels. The game usually tries to somewhat balance the Ranked and Driver Levels of the players for the matches, but experiences can vary quite drastically.

Driver Levels can be upgraded via Upgrade materials till a max level. In order to level up further, the drivers require higher star levels, which can be achieved through more driver shards. The Upgrade materials are primarily earned through rewards from the Season-Tour, the Events or Ranked mode Level-Ups. Upgrade materials however can also be unlocked in the daily selection of the item shop as well. These will usually require Season Coins, which all players can unlock through the Season Tour and daily events. Nonetheless, paying Players could also cash into the Premium Currency and transform them through horrible conversion rates into Season Coins, so they can unlock upgrade materials more often. So this definitely has some P2W potential, but Speedstorm actually does give out a lot of upgrade materials through the daily and weekly events, plus the Season Tour. Therefore I don't think this is too much of an issue.

Much more problematic are the armies of item shop packages and lootboxes, in which players can straight out buy the much rarer driver shards. Especially epic driver shards are much harder to come by as a free player. Players investing huge amount of money into gambling via the lootboxes can therefore have a significant advantage, if they reach higher star levels and are therefore also able to level up their drivers much higher. This is by far Disney Speedstorms biggest P2W problem.

During the first 15 Ranked Levels, where players can not loose points, this doesn't play too much of a role and as a free player I never feel at a disadvantage. These lobbies are also filled with a lot of newer players. Any experienced driver should therefore be able to compete for wins in pretty much every race regardless of your driver level. From ranked 15 to 25 things become significantly more competitive, but as a regular free player you should still be able to compete in these lobbies. From Ranked 25 or 30 onward however the P2W problems will become much more apparent and reaching max rank without paying seems more of a fever dream than a real option.

So this is definitely an issue and something people should call the developers Gameloft out for. I nonetheless think it is a bit sad, that many potential players are going to completely miss out on, in my opinion, one of the best kart racing games ever made. The gameplay of Speedstorm is fantastic and if it didn't have these P2W issues, it would probably sit right there in the Kart Racing Olympus besides the Mario Kart Games, the Sonic and Sega Racing games, Crash Team Racing and the often overlooked Diddy Kong Racing. Now it only sits right below them. Yet I still think it is important to point out, that the overwhelming majority of Speedstorm has no P2W issues. I understand and respect everybody, who doesn't want to play the game because of this issue, but I also believe it is important to point out, that this game has much more to offer and players should at least get the full picture, before they decide whether to try this game out or not. If you want to play Disney Speedstorm casually or competitively in Regulated Multiplayer, than there is certainly a lot to like here.