You know why I avoid services like this as much as possible right now?
Medical practitioners that follow this guideline absolutely deserve violence, and I worry that I might be the first to do so, the moment such a thing happens in front of me.
I heard Marasai was bad, hadn't heard much about Mahiroo. But I'm not good enough at these sorts of games to judge unit balance. Hell, from what I saw, Zaku II (R) seemed like one of the weakest units of all, yet some people are just absolutely amazing with it. I at least tried to get a decent understanding of Sazabi and Methuss before I dropped it. And I certainly wanted to try Unicorn, but once I fully understood how the game would judge matches with no consideration for performance in point ties (when you can only get up to 2 points, that'll happen OFTEN), I knew my short temper with this sort of thing wouldn't be able to take it.
Follow all these recommendations, and once you've seen a good chunk of them, watch Build Fighters and Build Divers. Extremely fun "battle simulation game" setting, but requires a decent amount of knowledge of the franchise to understand when they're making a very specific franchise joke.
Batman-Arkham is the only game with that system where I actually kinda liked said system. Every other game I've seen a similar combat system was nowhere near as polished. And as I recall, aren't these the same devs? I know you said you don't like it, but if it's the same people with a very similar system, that gives me some hope.
Now if you want to get into the faults of Arkham Knight, while I was glad that it finally got to pull out the Batmobile to do awesome Batshit, controlling it was a godawful pain in the ass.
I honestly can't even remember much of the books' material outside of pretty much all the points made in the movies. It just didn't feel very important to the main plot, regardless of how well it built the world of Middle Earth.
So yeah, you're definitely right in that regard.
On a bit of a tangent- There's a Shadow of Mordor + War bundle for about ten bucks. At that price, I'm suddenly considering it, and that's even though I'd heard Shadow of War did some pretty stupid stuff with its lore (I don't think I ever heard anyone complain about gameplay).
I REALLY wanted Gundam Evolution to be decent, for the sheer purpose of telling Overwatch to fuck off. But unfortunately, the ruling systems for that game are not fair and balanced in my opinion, I couldn't keep going. Hell, it was a match that ended in victory for me that finally made it clear how bullshit the ruling system was.
Streaming games absolutely will not succeed as a primary service. It can make a decent enough side service (I tried Playstation Now for a trial month some years back, gave me access to quite a few games I wouldn't have even thought about, no space requirements), but if it's the main draw, you have nothing, simply because your competition can create the same sort of service while primarily supporting live games.
NOT ANYMORE!
https://twitter.com/wario64/status/1575520361617117196?s=46&t=BUE4ehGQa7EqgE6MOdixaQ
(Sorry for the twitter post)
Man, discussions like this really
ReFlEcT tHe WoRlD wE lIvE iN tOdAy