Pros: Decent looking GUI, lots of Heroes to recruit
Cons: Very linear progression, completely unoriginal, terrible dialogue
Gameplay: 4
Graphics: 5
Performance: 8
Overall: 6
Recently we took out the time to try the open beta of R2 Games’ newest Asian fantasy browser RPG God Wars, a free to play title it sees players taking on the role of a summoned hero looking to recruit a team of Hero companions and battling against the rising armies of the Abyss. Honestly, the number of times we see armies of the Abyss being the main threat in MMOs from this genre it’s hard not to think that each new game is just a clone of the previous. God Wars, lore or not, isn’t much different and everything from the game concepts, content and mechanics are all pretty much the same as everything we’ve seen before, and yet players keep playing and so we’ll keep checking them out to see what’s different.
An unoriginal concept was further damaged by an uninvolved character selection, no customization to your character outside of some pre-gen words to make up your character name, and a choice between two gender locked classes; a female Mage and a male Warrior (a female Archer is in the works for release at some point but was unavailable). So we ended up as a male Warrior name Betty Judy (random names for the win), the bits of class description told us we were a front-liner and our Str and Stamina were higher than the mage (though no description of what this actually meant in mechanics terms). In combat we could use some low end skills that would build up a set amount of Rage, and then spend that Rage to use our more powerful abilities; all in all for a Warrior it seemed to work and made sense. Unfortunately the Rage mechanic, and the general play-style behind the Mage, were exactly the same other than some different utility on the Mage’s abilities there wasn’t that much different between them.
Stepping into the game and the glimmer of story line was pushed through with some brief lines of dialogue, outside of being summoned to kill Demons, and some terribly cheesy one-liners and comical threats from said legions of the Abyss, the actual story content was lacklustre at best. Worse still were the typos, bad English and a strange bug that constantly clipped off the end of what every NPC said so that they never actually finished a sentence. Clearly, as is usually the case with these games, the story just isn’t that important and is just a platform for the theme of the game and the types of Heroes we’d recruit.
The number of recruitable Heroes gave us a little more optimism, from the Territory feature we could spend currency to upgrade various buildings that would allow us to then unlock a variety of different types of Hero, each with their own skill, stats and features. With a small team recruited we had a “Deployment” system to choose the formation of our Heroes when in combat; a 3 x 3 grid where we could have a maximum of 5 Heroes at any time depending on what strategy we wanted to focus on. The various Heroes and the more flexible formations, did provide a lot more customization, or would towards the late game when we’d opened up our Hero pool a little more; in the early game our Heroes unlocked in a set order by completing the PVE Questing Campaign.
The PVE Campaign was essentially a series of linear staged instances that needed to be completed in order, the source of a lot of pointless back and forth between the area portal and the quest giver, the “quests” were nothing more than “Complete <Name> Stage”. Oddly the descriptions of the stage didn’t even match the actual content, from the icons of monsters we didn’t see, or the area description of a crypt where the dead have risen again leading us to fight a bunch of wolves or something equally inappropriate, it was all just badly thrown together as if the players wouldn’t care (and in fairness probably don’t), but if the story isn’t important then we say just don’t have one as opposed to having a half-assed one. Worst of all, at least for us, was that in the two plus hours that we played we still didn’t unlock any other PVE/PVP features for the game, getting to the mid-20s, our entire “gameplay” had been grinding stage after stage of the same general content with nothing else to do other than spend resources and currency to level our Heroes up every so often.
The combat was very much what we’ve come to expect, it started by looking promising requiring hands on control by us to fire off our own character’s Rage skills, as unattended we’d only use basic attacks. Then we noticed that there was an AFK mode that would take full control, but we just had to complete the first six stages before we unlocked it. In fairness once we’d done the first six stages we were pretty happy to just AFK and not have to suffer the tedious combat any longer, and the game would essentially play itself and our own input was relegated to little more than mouse clicking to leave the victory screen at the end of the battle and then going picking up the next quest to do the same thing all over again. From time to time we would have to step in where the AI’s use of our skills was pretty basic and so would result in a team wipe sometimes, but for the other 90% of the time it was a fairly automated game.
Overall a fairly unoriginal, uninspiring and extremely linear game that has taken the most common and the worst aspects of all the other F2P browser RPGs that came before it. Skipping God Wars and you won’t be missing out on much, if you want a lot more of the same stuff you might have already played but being able to start fresh on a new game then God Wars will be suitably familiar to you.
Deja tu comentario
You must be logged in to post a comment.