Spiral Knights:
What I love:
+Entertaining, fast-paced combat that requires you to think ahead and watch out for a wide variety of surprise attacks
+Wide variety of weaponry
+Frequent updates
+Whole game is well designed with the option for both co-op and solo in mind
+Free to play but allows purchase of energy for in-game rewarded crowns. Despite this being (entirely?) player-based it's still at rather fair price.
+Especially given the skill basis of the game, F2P is a completely viable option. The F2P implements are designed well to ensure free to play doesn't equal pay to win.
+Listens and interacts with the fans well. Also willing to admit their errors and quick to apologize in a variety of ways such as half-price elevators or free Unique Variant tickets.
+Recently came out with a more challenging series of daily missions (danger missions) to offer more content for the more hardcore players.
+Great art design, music, and story.
Problems:
-Lag is absolutely and completely fatal to the gameplay. Playing this with a subpar connection is absolutely and completely impossible, which is quite sad when you want to play it with a friend who doesn't have a very good connection.
-"Fair price" is coming from the view of someone way into the game. For those just starting to get 4-star or 5-star weaponry the prices can lead to progression being horrifically slow. Even having done pretty much everything right, it took me nearly a year to get a full five-star loadout.
-Many weapons are underpowered or overpowered, whether that's in the normal game or in PVP
-Blast Network, my favorite of the PVP games, is a direct clone of bomberman.
-Lockdown, the more direct PVP game, is incredibly unbalanced because of trinket slots (Trinkets cost a small investment of energy every month. With the right setup you can increase your max health by 10 pips. Without the trinkets you are at a humongous disadvantage) There's certainly plenty of other problems with the balance though... Almost nobody plays guardian or recon because striker is so fast and capable of dealing so much more damage.
-Lag can happen serverside too, and the server does not handle it very well. Did I mention lag is an absolute killer?
-Most of the new enemies are ridiculously easy varieties of cannon fodder (A tiny gremlin that comes in hordes with incredibly slow attacks and can be knocked down by a puff of wind. REAL THREATENING) or incredibly incredibly annoying. (Jellies that combine the two most annoying jelly attacks in the game, a flash-step and a random-direction 4-way spike shot, that also leave the ground a sea of poison and/or fire. Lovely!)
-ALL of the latest bosses (from the danger missions) have been stupidly easy. One requires you continually smack him until he keels over, then repeat until he stands back up, repeat steps one and two and then keep smacking him until he dies. One requires you avoid some friggen' laser beams until it drops its shield, /then/ smack the crap out of it a few times.
-Economy is ridiculously broken. The only way to make decent amounts of crowns once you've reached the current endgame is to grind the danger missions and the final boss mission. (At least the danger missions have the justification of being rather difficult, but Vanaduke is easy if you know what to do and have a decent party) As someone who enjoys exploring the clockworks, it's depressing when I get about a third of the amount of crowns as I would from running the Firestorm Citadel. It could easily be fixed by increasing the amount of crowns given from danger rooms (small and very difficult arenas tacked on to the side of certain levels in the clockworks) or simply increasing the crown amounts overall in the clockworks, but Firestorm Citadel grinding has been a thing since the very beginning of the game.
-Despite having some rather interesting weapon types exclusive to it, normal damage is nigh-useless once you amass a proper arsenal. (Useful when you're just starting though since it's equally effective against all enemies)
-Shields lack variety. Rather than having some shields with high amounts of health but have them regain that health more slowly and some vice versa, some shields are more effective against certain damage types than others. That is all.
-Recently released a DLC mission that is ONLY available for purchase directly (or through Steam trades). Problems galore with that, whether it's the lack of people playing it, the exclusive nature of it, or the fact that the two weapons that you get as a reward are ONLY available from the mission.
-Lag kills you quickly. Just wanted to make sure you got that.
I think that's long enough. .-.
I love the game but there are many things that bug me about it...
Edit: decided to add another short one on:
Tribes: Ascend:
What I love:
+F2P done well
+Very different shooter mechanics
Problems:
-Crashes every third round
