January - Chasm, Black Mesa, Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter, Serious Sam 3: BFE
February/March/April - Skyrim, Skul: The Hero Slayer,
April/May - Battlechasers: Nightwar
Battlechasers is a game that you can definitely tell it was a Kickstarter game. That's not to say it's bad because it was a decent RPG but there were a lot of things that screamed "amateur hour".
Pros: Graphics are pretty good as well as the animations. Voice acting wasn't bad and the story is told in a pretty interesting way. The dungeons are also fairly unique with plenty of puzzles as well as things to keep you busy outside of the main quest.
Cons: I feel like this list will be longer so I should preface this by saying the game isn't bad, but if you're itching for a turn-based RPG, you can do better. I think the reason this list will be longer is that while the game was fun, the cons definitely stood out above the pros.
First off: the writing. The soldier in your party? Yeah, his incredibly unique name is "Garrison". The giant robot? Callibretto... Right off the bat, the lazy names put a bad taste in my mouth but I had to realize this wasn't a large studio where they paid professional writers but even then, you meet the last person to be recruited into your party (about halfway through the goddamn game though) who tells you he's part of a mysterious group called "The Order". I feel like a high school student could have come up with literally anything better than "The Order". After a few hours into the game you meet one of the big bad bosses who are trying to destroy the world whose name just happens to be... Destra. The names just felt lazy.
While on the amateur subject, the vast majority of enemies in the game are just reused sprites but with different colors to denote their shift in difficulty. I am a little split on this one being a con because I grew up watching my dad play older NES RPGs like Ultima, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Warrior so the color palette swaps felt like a little throwback to the old NES days, but on the other hand, the game was made in 2017 and it feels like it was less on the intentional nostalgia throwback and more on them just not wanting to create new sprites and animations.
Going back to the dungeons, while the dungeons are procedurally generated, it's pretty much just the layout that changes. Most of the rooms will change as well as random events inside the dungeons, but there are a lot of static rooms that won't change no matter what. This really isn't a con, but it ties into one of the bigger cons of the game and that's your movement speed. The speed isn't slow enough that it made me want to quit or not run the same dungeon again, but it was slow enough that if you had to backtrack for any reason (grab a shrine before the boss, check a room you missed, hit a crafting bench, etc.), you became extremely aware of the movement speed. Not that big of a gripe, but it is noticeable.
Now, the biggest con of the entire game might just be because I haven't played any modern RPGs (I honestly think the closest RPG I played to this in terms of years was Suikoden 2), but the difficulty spike in this game is exactly that - one goddamn spike after another. To start, you can't really powerlevel or farm levels in this game. Once you reach two or three levels above the current enemy level, they give you about two experience per battle. You can run through the current dungeon a few times for a chance at better gear, but I found out that trying to squeeze every last bit of loot out of the current dungeon was pointless because no matter what level you were or what gear you had equipped, when you'd unlock the next area, the starting enemies you meet can one or two-shot anyone in your party. I ran each dungeon on Legendary difficulty for better rewards and I ran them multiple times for better gear and I was still meeting normal enemies that could wipe my entire party in two turns. At first I thought I was doing something wrong or missing something, but no, that's just how the game is played. After you grab a few more levels in the new area, enemies go back to being a normal challenge and I'd say once you reach the halfway mark in the new dungeon, the game goes back to easy mode again. There's eight major dungeons in the game so just expect eight giant spikes in difficulty on your journey through this game. I did jump into NG+ for a few minutes but after loading into NG+ with my max level enchanted gear from the normal game, I watched my characters get one-shot by a level two slime and that's when I pressed the uninstall button.
Edit: I forgot the mention the story is confusing as ****. Don't try to follow the story at all.
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