Pros: Halfway decent graphics, plenty of features when you finally unlock them, informative and helpful tutorials
Cons: Repetitive grindy gameplay, lack of player involvement in combat

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This week we checked out Imperial Hero 2 from Imperia Online Ltd., a new free to play browser RPG that focuses on Hero and team building in a fantasy RPG setting where players pick up quests, increase their stats, acquire new gear and constantly work towards building up their Battle Power.

Putting in a few hours to see what was on offer, we’ll admit up front that we spent far longer in the early pre-level 10 phase than we were happy with, with many of the features unlocking at 10 we only really got to check out early game content as levelling up took a surprising amount of time.

As a Hero builder we were initially quite disappointed, but not massively surprised, that there was very little in the way of customization, able to name our character we could only choose from a selection of character avatars. For the most part gameplay revolves around trying to increase your Battle Power, based off your attributes, skills, gear, and other peripherals that you unlock as you level up, as well as your Team Battle Power based off your Mercenaries that fight in your party. Increasing Battle Power allows you to take on more challenging quests, which are colour coded for ease of identification, with Red being pretty much impossible and green being super easy.

 

Quests are a constant throughout the game, but more predominant in the early portions where you have little else to do but quest; they consist of picking up a quest from an NPC in one of the many villages, cities and other settlements around the world, then journeying around the provinces to different locations to complete them. Traveling, as with everything else in the game, takes up time, any location that takes under a minute to reach can be instantly finished, but over a minute and you either have to wait or spend Diamonds (the games premium currency) to get there instantly.

Once at your location there’s typically going to be some combat, unless you’re going for crafting resources, but most of the time you’re going to be jumping into battle which is made up of a number of back to back encounters that you need to defeat to clear the stage. The biggest issue we have, as we always do with these kinds of game, is that the emphasis on “strategy” and “tactics” is placed on the preparation for the battle, being well equipped and playing around with Mercenaries and formations, as opposed to any actual tactics whilst fighting. After choosing your mercs and formation the rest of the battle is completely automated consisting of the combatants moving their icons towards each other as they make an attack (there are no attack animations) and watching as health bars slowly deplete. That’s about it.

Now, given that the game pretty much revolves around combat, like a good 90% of the game is PVE or PVP, we only wish that there was more to do in battle than sit and watch how the battle is going to turn out. The reality is that, for PVE at least, you pretty much know whether you are going to win based off the difficulty colour of quest, with a yellow-orange quest it could go either way and that’s the only time your own personal “strategy” comes into play. Working on different builds by distributing your attribute and skill points differently, or choosing your formations, that is about the extent of things, gear is a no brainer as it simply comes down to upgrading when something better comes along, save a few items that have different boosts and bonuses such as improved crit or spirit boosts. The problem is that most of these small additions only make a difference at the end game, and it feels like that’s what everything is built around; get to max level and then play the game.

 

At max level your options are primarily pushing dungeons either solo or with your guild, trying to improve your guild ranking, or PVP fighting against other players for rank. Factions play an additional role where at level 10 you are thrown into one of the three available factions (which you can switch later), here you can earn faction points to not only raise your standing and your rank within the faction itself, but these directly translate to influence where factions can take over entire provinces in an ongoing territory focused faction war. The competitive gameplay is there, whether PVP or PVE, but the problem for us is that it just feels like trying to be at the top just for the sake of being at the top as that’s all you have to do, the actual process of getting there isn’t fun... it’s repetitive.

That’s the biggest issue, the game is just a bit of a grind for those players that aren’t invested/interested in this genre, combat is the same throughout only the icons of what you are fighting change, gear is the same items but with different stats and it’s just a constant trade up without much thought. The game looks okay, but the lack of animations feels like a lack of effort, and quite simply there’s just not enough engaging or unique content to the game and we’ve seen everything done a dozen times over including a lot of the things we hate; Stamina being at the top of these. Players have stamina, with pretty much everything they do they use up stamina, it replenishes over time slowly but ultimately you will reach a point where either you can’t carry on playing or you have to pay Diamonds (real money) to carry on playing… it obviously works for them but we can’t honestly think of anything in the game that would compel us to want to pay to play it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2016 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Puedes dejar una respuesta, o un trackback desde tu sitio web.