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Free2Play Spotlight: Bullet Run

Posted by :Meroka On : August 11, 2012
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Category: Free2Play, Reviews, Shooter

Bullet Run is a brand new first-person shooter from ACONY Games and published by Sony Online Entertainment.

Honestly, I almost thought I wasn’t going to be able to review this game; the install process was distinctly nontrivial. Between installing punkbuster, patching and setting up an additional Sony Station account to be able to play it took far longer than strictly necessary. And then the launcher helpfully puts an animated bar next to the Play button that looks akin to a loading bar at a casual glance. I waited at the launcher for about half an hour before I realised patching was complete. Oh well, you live and learn, I suppose. It worked eventually.

So what is Bullet Run? Bullet Run is a modern shooter set in the near future where you are a contestant in the hottest new reality TV deathsport. Stop me if that sounds familiar. To be fair these have been doing the rounds for years, after all that was the fundamental premise of Unreal Tournament some thirteen years ago. Unfortunately at some point since UT, someone decided if we’re doing reality TV, we need commentators. This works fine if you’re Uber Entertainment and your writers are fantastic and you have enough dialogue that it rarely repeats itself. ACONY hired two painfully American voices to do a handful of corny lines which get spouted over and over dozens of times per game. It starts to grate, if I’m honest.

The gameplay is in the same vein as Battlefield and CoD, going for gritty realism and high lethality. From this you’d automatically assume I’d hate it, being a staunch opponent of the two, but I don’t. It borrows enough elements of other games as well that it’s more interesting. For starters Battlefield and CoD punish accuracy of weapons while not looking down the sights so harshly that you may as well not be shooting, whereas Bullet Run’s weaponry is still reasonably effective firing from the hip. It’s probably not everyone’s cup of tea, but as an old-school shooter fan, the ability to fight without needing to crawl around on my belly staring down a scope works for me. Fulfilling the ‘near future’ part of the description is a bonus array of gadgets to play with to spice up the combat. You get 4 gadget options with a choice of two in each slot. The basic one is a minor healing device or an adrenaline boost for minor combat performance (okay, I don’t know what that is, I couldn’t tell what it did). You unlock the remaining three over the course of a match by performing well. These include a small explosive or stunning drone, pretty much guaranteeing a single free kill if you get the jump on someone, sentry guns and gatling guns among others. By their limited nature you won’t see a lot of these, but they add a little extra flavour to the old ‘run and gun’ from time to time. Another feature lifted straight from a popular modern title is that of the ‘Active Reload’ from Gears of War. Pressing reload will begin a progress bar with a little notch on it. If you right-click just when the bar reaches the notch you’ll get a fast reload, but if you miss you’ll jam your weapon. This can make a or break a heated firefight and once again, manages to mix things up just enough so that things aren’t always boring.

Progression within the game is on similar system to that of Cod or Battlefield wherein you start with basic gear and unlock better stuff as you level up. It mixes this with a typical free-to-play system too, though and you don’t get to play with your new toys until you buy them with in-game currency. So without further staving off the inevitable…

How free is it?

Here we have the same old, same old. The two currency system of ordinary credits earned by playing and ‘Station Cash’ primarily earned through real money transactions. Station Cash is a currency used universally among all SOE’s free-to-play games, so if you also play Everquest or Pirates of the Burning Sea or DC Universe or anything else by SOE then the currency is cross-compatible. Probably of minimal use to a majority of players but nice to have as an option nonetheless. In terms of credits you start with 10,000 and earn about 500 per match. Low level guns will run you about 14,000 credits and high-end guns are nearly 80,000, so prepare to grind a bit for those if you’re playing for free. Cosmetic items run you anywhere from 3000 to 15,000 (and one silly viking hat for 50k) with a lot of items frequently on sale, so you should be able to earn these reasonably easily. The game incentivizes you to buy cosmetics with a ‘style’ system. For every item you buy you earn style points which correspond directly to a percentage multiplier to your experience and credit rewards, with a cap of 50%. Style decreases by 1% per day (as your wardrobe gets stale, I suppose) so you’ll need to keep buying new items to keep your multiplier up. In real money terms, weapons cost anywhere from £1.60 to £16 and cosmetics cost from about £0.80 to £4, which at least as far as the vanity items go is much fairer than some games on the market. Whether you think a single in-game gun is worth £16 though is more debatable.

On top of all this is a $15/month or $90/year subscription plan offer. Providing a huge array of perks including but not limited to credit boosts, store discounts, bonus station cash and no level restrictions. This is presumably the domain of the person that really, really loves Bullet Run. That’s not me.

That’s not to say I don’t like it. It takes a lot of the successful aspects of other games and makes a really solid product out of it. But equally, it doesn’t have a lot terribly original about it feeling like a bizarre Frankenstein of Battlefield, Unreal, Gears of War and APB. It’s entertaining but has very little merit of its own, unfortunately.

Bullet Run, by ACONY games is available on Steam or from Sony Online Entertainment.

Free2Play Spotlight: MicroVolts

Posted by :Meroka On : July 8, 2012
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Category: Free2Play, Reviews, Shooter

MicroVolts, by NQ Games is a title I’d seen before. It took me a while to realise it, though. Almost two years ago today a trailer for a Korean game appeared and made some waves in Team Fortress 2 communities. It appeared to advertise a class-based shooter and on the face of it was an exact copy of TF2 with the mercenaries we know and love replaced with dolls and toy robots. The trailer very obviously lifted scenes straight from the TF2 launch trailer. The game was H.A.V.E. Online. MicroVolts is H.A.V.E. Online re-branded for a western audience.

If you’re still reading after that, do not be dissuaded because, for all that the trailer sells the game as TF2, it doesn’t really play as TF2. What MicroVolts actually is is a fast-paced third-person shooter with a diverse set of weaponry available to all players because – and this is the important distinction – it’s not actually class-based. Yes, yes, I saw the trailer, and that very much looked like a scout and a soldier and a heavy and a sniper and a demoman to me, too. But the way it actually works is that every player is given access to all seven weapons so you can mix and match to suit the situation.

Matches are incredibly fast-paced. Fights rarely last longer than a couple of seconds and respawn times are less than five seconds. Keen eyes and quick wits will serve you well. If the players moved a little faster I’d be quite content to make the comparison to the arena shooters of old: Unreal and Quake and their ilk. As it is, it still comes close, the thrill of running around with a ridiculous arsenal on your person blasting others to bits is recreated nicely.

The style is essentially that of Toy Story. A lot of toys running around in oversize environments. Usually. For some reason a few of the levels decide to not stick with the toyland theme and are scaled to a normal size. Weapons are all rather toy-like and mêlée weapons include silly things like pencils and hotdogs. There are four playable characters, two of which need to be bought initially; a hip hop action figure, an anime girl doll, a scantily clad demoness doll and a toy robot. These are all extensively customisable through the in-game store.

Which obviously leads us conveniently to the usual question: “How free is it?”

The store, like most f2p games, uses two currencies, in this case Micro Points and Rock Tokens. Micro Points are earned after matches, typically earning 100-200 points depending on the length of the game and on your performance. Rock Tokens are the premium currency with 10,000RT costing £6. A new character costs 20,000MP, weapons cost up to 18,000MP to unlock permanently and costume items are 22,000MP. Lower price points let you use the weapon or item for a shorter time frame. Items bought with Rock Tokens are unfortunately undeniably superior, however costumes cannot be unlocked permanently, with 3000RT giving you the item for 90 days. The advantage any given item provides you is on the whole pretty negligible, with only minor buffs to damage and stats, but with all premium items stacked this would give you a 12% speed boost or 24% extra health. That’s not an insignificant edge. The cost of this full max-power set would put you back about £30 for the weaponry and £10 for the costumes, with the costumes needing to be re-bought again in 90 days, making it a £30 up-front cost and £40 per year subscription, essentially. That is of course assuming you feel the need to buy an edge over your competitors, when a lot of people won’t be buying into this system.

From a personal standpoint, it is a lot of fun, given that there’s not been a good arena shooter since Painkiller, and I could quite comfortably see myself spending a small amount of money on this game. The fact that any costume piece worth buying expires after a time limit rather reduces the appeal somewhat, though, so I’d probably stick to the weapons.

It’s well worth a look, particularly if you’re sick of trudging slowly around brown military environments. And it certainly isn’t the Team Fortress 2 reskin that the launch trailer prophesied. At the end of the day it has failed to escape its Korean stereotype roots, though and the person with the fattest wallet will likely still win.

MicroVolts is free to play now on Steam.

Spiral Knights: Free to P(l)ay.

Posted by :Scribble On : June 12, 2012
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Category: Action/Adventure, Free2Play, Indie Gaming, Reviews

Following on from Meroka’s encouraging article regarding the stigma surrounding Free-to-Play gaming, here’s why you should be giving Spiral Knights a try!

With a massive rise in Free-to-Play games it’s difficult for individuals to stand out, be long-lived and become profitable for the developers. So what makes a good Free-to-Play game? Accessibility, the chance to earn all content in the game without spending a real life penny. Community, a structure that allows players to interact, socialize and work together. Value, because if you are spending money to enhance you game play experience, it’d best be worth it. And new content, lots and lots of new content. Keeping players interested and involved in-game makes it more likely for the developers to generate more money from their customers. and because doing the same thing over and over again just gets boring.

Spiral Knights has been running as a Free-to-Play MMO for over a year now, and as far as it goes I’ve managed to rack up roughly £50 of spending in it over that time. And I can honestly say I feel like I got my money’s worth. Why spend that much on a Free-to-Play game? Allow me to elaborate over the course of the article, make a cuppa’ if you like.

Boosh and or Ka-kow!

If you’ve not tried your hand at Spiral Knights before, the styling is rather cutesy in an androgynous kinda way. Your custom Knight and a community of others have crash landed on a mysterious construction known as the Clockworks. Stranded, but not the first adventures here, you’re tasked with finding out what happened to Alpha Squad and reach the Core to find the strange power source that could potentially get you and all the other Knights back home.
The aim of the game is to descend down through the Clockworks by way of elevators through twenty-nine levels of increasingly hardened monsters. You fight with various swords, guns and bombs. It’s generally quite a treat.

Your main source of currency are Crowns, you earn Crowns by killing monsters, smashing boxes and by selling minerals and materials. You can then use them to buy recipes and gear from Vendors or try the Auction House and see what other players are selling that might be interesting or useful to you.
Heat is the Spiral Knights equivalent of experience. But instead of levelling up your character, Heat is distributed evenly between all of your current equipment. The more equipment you need to level up, the longer it will take to complete all their levels.
Prestige is a reasonably new feature that ranks you and every other player in the game. The more missions you complete, the higher rank you are. This only really serves to stroke a players ego, but it’s all in good fun.

RAWR!

It’s well-known that a large aspect of every MMO is its community. The nice thing about Spiral Knights is it’s pretty difficult to be a dick, easy to be a beggar, but not so much a dick.. Largely the game isn’t PvP apart from it’s fantastically structured mini-games, so chances of some higher levelled character butchering you while you’re bidding for your favourite accessory is out of the question.
Spiral Knights encourages you to fight alongside other players on your adventures, the enemies might be harder, but mostly you gain more heat and coins by fighting in groups, which is all shared equally. There’s even benefits to reviving your downed team mates by stealing their heat to level up your own equipment.

Where Spiral Knights makes in money is in Energy. Players are given 100 free Mist Energy that fills itself up automatically over 24 hours. Players use can use Energy in several different ways as a secondary currency, mostly by using 10 to travel down each layer of the Clockworks. But it’s also used for unlocking extra sections within levels, reviving yourself if your team mates are unable and it’s also used for crafting, which will advance your equipment up into the next Tier.
On these alone it becomes clear that you’ll eventually need more than 100 Mist Energy to allow you to decend into the harder levels and craft better equipment. This is where Crystal Energy comes in. Wondrous, marvellous Crystal Energy. It can be bought in-game by a handy Trade system where by the players themselves decide how much the energy is worth in Crowns, or you can get your wallet out and buy the energy with your own hard-earned real life cash.

This is a great system because it means you get to decide how much you want to invest into the game play, as well as being massively accessible to anyone who doesn’t want to pay for their Five-Star equipment and get months worth of genuinely great game play.
Until the expansion, Operation Crimson Hammer, it was entirely possible to earn every scrap of content in the game by grafting hard and being smart and restrained with your free Mist Energy. Although it’d take you weeks to be able to afford the crafting recipes and Crystal Energy needed, you won’t have to pay a penny for it and you’ll be able to appreciate a game that actually has a lot of mileage in it. But then there’s always the option to spent a little money, it’s actually pretty reasonable, and give your characters equipment a much needed boost.

I’m just as poor as everyone else, don’t bother asking me for anything ;p

And what do you get for your money besides cool gear? Well, by supporting Three Rings and their developers it gives them the opportunity to regularly put updates into the game. Of course it’s in their best interest to keep the gamers happy so they spend more money. And they do it well. In the last year that I’ve been playing this game, it’s come a long way. There’s been all kinds of costumes, accessories, new quests, events, features, story content and improved functionality. Spiral Knights just gets better as it goes along. And it’s thanks to the customers that it continues to be a successful game.

Operation Crimson Hammer was launched on February 29th of this year as an optional DLC. Being a big fan I had to try it. It came with a five new levels in different difficulties as well as exclusive gear at a price of £3.99. I have to say I wasn’t impressed, the new gear looks nice, I liked the new boss fight. But I don’t believe it was worth launching it as a separate add on at cost to the players. Especially when Spiral Knights have launched similar content in the past for free that I felt was inclusive and useful to alot of players. Not only did this restrict players that were unable to purchase the DLC online, it stopped players who already had the DLC from putting the exclusive items in the Auction House for other Knights to buy. Bad form.
I realize that the cost is trivial to most, but I’d use the same wording to describe the new content in the DLC. Not enough new enemies, no innovative or challenging objectives, just more of the same. It’s just not worth it.

Despite this, to say I got a 395 hours worth of enjoyment out of Spiral Knights over the last year, as apposed to maybe the two or three days I’d get from a big console title. Yes, I’m content with thinking I got my money’s worth, while supporting Three Rings.

Free to Play on Steam here, and by no means buy the DLC here.

GFG

~Scribble

Lamenting the Stigma of Free-to-Play

Posted by :Meroka On : June 9, 2012
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Category: Free2Play, Rant

“So yeah, I’ve been playing this new game, it’s really fun, you should try it, it’s free!”

“No thanks, I’ll give it a miss.”

“What? Why? It’s free, all it’ll cost you is time and bandwidth just to try it.”

“Those games are always won by the kids with the richest parents.”

That’s paraphrased from a few different conversations I’ve had, but the general theme is always the same; if it’s free it can’t be any good and it can’t possibly be anything other than Pay-to-Win. The counterpoint I usually hold up at this stage is the wildly popular Team Fortress 2 from Valve. Already a cult hit, the game moved to a free-to-play model almost a year ago. All non-cosmetic items in the game can be earned without ever spending a penny, and Valve’s dedication to balance among the game’s items mean almost nothing will give you an advantage, anyway. Sounds good, right? You’d think others might have adopted this model for themselves. They have. Plenty have.

Dude riding a levitating dugong? Free.

Valve, despite their sterling reputation for it, didn’t even pioneer this concept. The earliest example I’m familiar with of Free-to-Play, Pay-for-Hats is League of Legends. As a game I’ve covered before, I’ll jump straight to the business model. There are 99 champions to choose from to play but on any given week only 10 are available. You can permanently unlock a champion with currency in-game or, if you so desire, with real money. Each champion also has a number of alternative outfits available, which you can purchase with real money, and there’s also a few extra non-essential metagame things you can buy to make your life easier. So there’s nothing that’s absolutely integral to the game that can’t be earned for free.

Spiral Knights, in spite of recent DLC controversy, initially launched using a very similar model two months prior to TF2’s transition. My own personal vice, Super Monday Night Combat, uses an almost identical model to League of Legends. In my recent review of Moon Breakers I noted that while the accessibility of free content could use some rebalancing, it’s still all available to those who would put in the time.

Jelly King? Totally free!

So, in the light of so many demonstrably fun and balanced titles, irrespective of whether you’ve flashed the plastic or not, why are gamers, broadly speaking, still so opposed to the idea that a free product can be a good product?

While League of Legends may have been arguably the first to “do it right” so to speak, it was by no means the first to use free-to-play as a business model. There’s a long history of MMOs marketed as free-to-play and these have historically run the gamut of downright awful through to merely mediocre. I’d be lying if I said I knew the reasoning behind this, but these games have broadly speaking been of Korean origin. Keen followers of MMO games will likely have heard the term “Korean grindfest” thrown around. These are the ones I mean. Bland, slow-paced, mostly centring around the “kill 10 boars” type of questing, with no real effort to engage the player’s interest. The principal selling point being that unlike the big hitters out there it won’t be setting you back up to £10 per month, it’s completely free to play! Once upon a time, this would have been a unique selling point, drawing in a crowd just for the chance to get something for free. Those who stuck with it would find themselves inclined to invest, with exp boosts available to minimise the grind and a whole armory at their disposal for the right amount of money. These are the titles deserving of the moniker Pay-to-Win. Drop some cash and your character can have a glinting mithramantium sword, or that shiny diamontanium armour, then go hop into a game with those less fortunate souls.

These guys? They're free too!

The times, though, they are distinctly a-changin’. Developers, as they are wont to do (indies particularly), have seen where the Koreans went wrong and built upon that formula to create something a lot more friendly to the end-user, especially those with little or no money to burn. For the consumer, however, it’s a case of “once bitten, twice shy” and a lot of consumers have been bitten. Those wounds are going to need some healing before we see any degree of success in this area. The best any of us can hope to do is give them a shot. At the risk of repeating myself here, it’s free! Worst case scenario, you don’t enjoy it, wasted some time, but at least you took the time to try something new. In the best case, though, you might find something you absolutely love, purely by accident because you were open to trying new things.

GLHF

~Meroka

Free2Play Spotlight: Moon Breakers

Posted by :Meroka On : May 30, 2012
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Category: Free2Play, Indie Gaming, Shooter

My last Spotlight showcased Super Monday Night Combat. Uber Entertainment return this time in a publishing role, playing host to Imba Entertainment’s Moon Breakers. A company I’ve been able to find precious little information on, the game shares a number of credits with those of SMNC which, in addition to the naming similarities, leaves me wondering if they aren’t in whole or in part the same guys.

That’s an aside though. Irrespective of who actually made it, it’s available now on Steam and Chrome and it’s free to all who would partake, so that means it’s up to me to poke it with the review stick.

Moon Breakers is a space-based dogfighter with a WWII-era dieselpunk aesthetic. In layman’s terms, you fly in around spaceships that look like old planes shooting each other. In its genre there’s not a great deal to compare it against. Back on the N64 there was a Star Wars game called Rogue Squadron. Aside from its later Gamecube sequels it’s really the only similar game I can think of (I guess there was half of a level in Halo Reach, too). It feels like an apt comparison anyway, because it does feel very similar in terms of gameplay.

Pew Pew!

Your basic ship is armed with laser blasters and missiles. These are both projectile weapons and all your targets will be zipping about in three dimensions so you’ll need to get good at leading your targets with your shots quickly. Games consist of 32 players, 16-a-side with one team representing the government and the other being space pirates. Matches are your standard online multiplayer fare of team deathmatch, capture the flag and the like. Your justification for the conflict is the old SF trope of fighting over Helium-3, which is as good a reason as any.

Moon Breakers is straightforward enough to just jump in and get into the action quickly, but it feels like there’s a lot more to the combat that can only really be learned through experience. Dodging a hail of fire not only from the enemies but also from the numerous mounted cannons on the enemy’s flagship is as tricky a business as hitting things flying through space in the first place. Arenas take the form of an array of interesting asteroid fields, including one looking very much like a shattered moon. Aside from looking impressive these can be used tactically to take shelter from enemy fire or just as cover to try to slip through to the enemy base undetected. These are just my first impressions, too, I’d be quite confident in saying the more experienced players probably know a few more interesting tricks that haven’t even occurred to me.

That's no moon! Okay, I guess it was once.

After a game you will receive ‘creds’ depending on your performance. I’ve received anything up to 3000 creds from a game but a better performance would probably net you more still. This rate of return is good for buying cheap upgrades to your ship but unfortunately saving up for a new, better ship will set you back anywhere from 180,000 to 3,000,000 creds. A bit of quick mental arithmetic and I get an estimate of 15 hours of gameplay, in which I perform well every match, just to unlock the single cheapest ship. By extension, that big one? 250 hours! You can probably see where this is going. Cred boosters can of course be purchased using your real money offering up to 10x return on the payout each game. That valuable He-3 you were fighting over? It turns out that you can just buy it with a credit card. $2 will net you 350 units of He-3 with, as usual, price breaks at higher quantities, and then that He-3 can be used as an alternative currency to buy ships. To put it in perspective, that 3,000,000 cred ship is instead 7500 He-3 and will set you back $38; the cheapest would work out at under $4.

So then how free is it? Technically, there’s nothing in Moon Breakers that is locked to free players. I stress the word ‘technically’ because it is such a colossal grind to unlock anything at all without spending any real money that it may as well be locked. It’s a shame then that after working so closely with the UberEnt guys they didn’t learn anything useful from SMNC’s pricing structure.

Stuck between a rock and... another rock.

As a game, it’s solid. There’s plenty of fun to be had in spaceships, more so taking down enemy flagships, Death Star style. For me it’s a lot more enjoyable played casually, just cruising around not playing for keeps. If you’re determined to be the best of the best though, you will either have a long grind ahead of you or be prepared to open your wallet.

Moon Breakers by Imba Entertainment is available for free now on Steam and Chrome

GLHF

~Meroka

Free2Play Spotlight: Super Monday Night Combat

Posted by :Meroka On : May 3, 2012
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Category: Free2Play, Indie Gaming, Shooter, Strategy

I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been back and forth on this, debating whether to review Super Monday Night Combat or not. I’m biased. Well, I feel biased. It’s not like I work for Uber Entertainment, or even that they’re paying us for advertising or sponsorship. I’m not even a prominent enough player to be one of the lucky chosen few to go to PAX as one of Uber’s exhibitors. But goddamn do I love me some Monday Night Combat. So take the following with a pinch, nay an entire shaker of salt.

Monday Night Combat started out as a DOTA-style class-based shooter on the Xbox Live Arcade. Somewhat successful, it was ported across to PC on Steam. As predominantly multiplayer games with smaller marketing budgets – and by extension fanbases – than things like Call of Duty tend to do, the game’s community dwindled. It disappeared off the radar for some time until PAX prime last year with the announcement of Super Monday Night Combat. And that’s what we’re here to throw our free2play spotlight on!

Let’s start at the beginning. I wrote about DOTA not so long ago, so I won’t go into the fundamentals again. It’s a class-based third person shooter. Being a free shooter is relatively new territory to begin with, so kudos for pioneering, there. Whereas the original MNC had 6 classes and they all played to greater or lesser extent like TF2 classes, SMNC ups that to 15 at launch and there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on with them. Notable newcomers include Cheston, the tommy gun-toting gorilla thespian who throws barrels like Donkey Kong; Captain Spark, the superhero raised and trained in martial arts by hyperintelligent electric mer-eels; Karl, a reconnaissance cyborg programmed by his upper class creators to believe he is human, with a monocle and moustache to match; and unveiled at PAX East, Leonardo freaking da Vinci, cloned from the DNA extracted from a fingerprint found on a sketch of a badger-powered military tank (to save on war elephants). Enough said, I suspect.

For anyone still in any doubt, the whole game is just as over the top. Set in the not too distant future in a heavily capitalistic state (MNC implied totalitarian too, though there is less allusion to this in SMNC) you’re fighting primarily for the purpose of televised entertainment. Money acts as experience and money will buy you many advantages, from traps to healing and buffs to additional bots (the DOTA creeps). Bullseye, the MNC mascot will appear periodically and shooting him will make him drop money and prizes. Chickey Cantor, a giant cyborg chicken, will appear later on to fight players and defeating him will reward the entire team with a variety of buffs. Oh, and bacon is the most powerful powerup in the game. The whole affair is tied together with commentary from two charismatic hosts, GG Stack and Chip Valvano. Some lamented the loss of Mickey Cantor from MNC. Oh hell, I lamented the loss of Mickey Cantor, but it didn’t take long for these new personalities to grow on me. Clearly the product of the same excellent writing, the voice acting may be different but the dialogue is just as hilarious as their predecessor’s.

The game’s been in beta for about 7 months now, so testing and balancing has been extensive and it’s come out of it well. Sure, some classes will always be strong against others, but that’s just how class-based games tend to work. There are plenty of moves that will undoubtedly be called “cheap”, but nothing you can’t avoid if you know what to look out for. On the whole combat is considerably less lethal than pretty much all other shooters on the market so tactics and teamwork will give you a much-needed advantage and you can stay alive more if you don’t run in alone. Of course, some classes work better that way but you’re still going to struggle to take on a crowd by yourself.

The one critical question, I suppose is “how free is it?”. Quite free. Out of the 15 pros (characters) 6 or 7 will be available to play for free each week. The others can be unlocked permanently for a fee. Most pros are $1.99 and a few of the pros demanding more skill to play are $7.49. After each match, you’ll be awarded with “combat credits” and if you save up enough of these you can buy pros with these without ever having to open your wallet. Really, the only things you’ll find with only a real money price tag on are cosmetic items, ranging from $1.99 for reskins to $14.99 for the really cool stuff. You can sometimes get these after games in a similar fashion to TF2’s random drops, too. Obviously if you have your heart set on the cool demon wings specifically you could be waiting a while, but hey, you wouldn’t be prepared to pay if it were so easy, right? There’s also combat credit and experience boosters to purchase, but as is fortunately becoming the popular trend, they have no actual impact on games themselves, only serving to help you unlock new stuff faster. Personally I’ve bought a few of my favourite pros and a new outfit for my main, the Assassin. About £20 in all, I reckon and half of that was on cosmetics. But I’ve sunk a lot of time into this game and will continue to do so, so I feel like that’s not an unreasonable price tag for the entertainment.

So that’s Super Monday Night Combat. If you’re looking for something new to play and you’re strapped for cash you could do far worse than SMNC. I’m not sure you could do much better, either. I don’t know why you’re still reading; I mean, it’s free to go and have a look, isn’t it?

Super Monday Night Combat is totally free on Steam on PC.

GLHF,

~Meroka

Free2Play Spotlight: Realm of the Mad God

Posted by :Meroka On : February 28, 2012
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Category: Free2Play, Indie Gaming, Reviews

With the recent rise of the indie gaming scene, free-to-play games have matured somewhat beyond the (often Korean) pay-to-win grindfests and can now be viewed as a genuinely acceptable business model for a respectable game. In this column, I’m going to attempt to experience as many of them as possible to try to separate the wheat from the chaff and hopefully uncover some diamonds in the rough.

First up in the spotlight: Realm of the Mad God

RotMG has been around in a publicly available format for a little over a year at this point with the “official” launch on June 20th 2011 and an open beta prior to that. It very recently debuted on Steam, bringing it to a new audience of millions, myself included. Developed by Wild Shadow Studios and Spry Fox, whose previous notable works include Panda Poet and Triple Town, it brands itself as “the first ever cooperative MMO bullet hell shooter” which I personally think is a pretty good selling point to begin with.

Jumping into the game, the first thing that will strike you is the graphical style. All the player characters are 8x8px sprites with the enemies rarely much bigger. Each pixel is huge, however creating a fairly normal sized sprite with a very low resolution. Overall, it makes for a very unique visual style.

Maybe this will illustrate it a little better

You’ll quickly find yourself in the central hub of the game, the Nexus. From here you can reach a number of different game instances each of them containing a vast world to explore and capable of hosting 85 players at any time. Whether you chose to work with your 84 new friends to overcome hardships or just go it alone is up to you. Jump into whichever one looks most appealing, they’re all much the same and you’ll pop into the world, sometimes with other players, sometimes alone. It is, as described, a bullet hell shooter, so all classes have a basic ranged attack, even ones you’d expect to be melee, like the rogue. You’ll start out with your basic wizard though, who wields a fast firing magic missile spell and a much more powerful bolt with a large area-of effect. Quests are as basic as a map marker telling you where the next big baddie you should kill is. You’ll burn through stuff pretty fast, more so with other players as all xp is given equally to all combatants. You’ll start out basic killing elf magi and giant scorpions and crabs and the like and work your way up to Gods. Whilst in the world you’ll periodically hear the titular Mad God yelling about his lesser gods and guardians and things. At some point around level 15 your quest tracker will point you to one of these. These are significantly tougher to reach, much less kill. From this I can infer the ultimate goal must be to band together, reach the cap of level 20 and take down the Mad God himself, not that I’ve personally reached that stage. Still working on the getting to 20 without getting squished. Oh yes, minor detail, the game features permadeath. If you get in over your head and die, it’s back to square one. No spirit healers, no casting resurrect, no cloning, just thanks for playing, here’s your score and go reroll a new character. Playing a class to a certain level will unlock further and more advanced classes so at least you’re likely to have something interesting to try out when you get dumped back to your blank character select page. Silver linings, and all that.

So all in all, that’s the game. It’s fast paced, unforgiving, quite a lot of fun and definitely very original. There’s one elephant in the room, still though. How do they make their money? Of course there’s the standard alternative in-game currency that you’re never going to get without dropping some real money. 500 coins will set you back $5USD, with bonuses for buying larger quantities. What will that get you, then? A second character slot can be picked up for 600 coins and as you are generously given 100 to start with, that’s easily done for $5. Cosmetic improvements to your character from colour changes to patterns cost up to 200 coins. I can’t say for any certainty how permanent these cosmetic changes are in light of permadeath i.e: if I buy the stripy costume and die will my next character get to keep the stripy costume?

This is important to know

Admittedly there do appear to be a handful of functional items available for real money, however they seem to largely be convenience rather than pay2win gear; bundles of health potions for instance. They’re not going to hand over the Sword of a Thousand Truths to the person with the biggest credit card limit, so balance has been taken into consideration. As with ever increasingly more f2p games, the value of the paid items is pretty much what you make of them yourself. Am I content to buy skins in Super Monday Night Combat or hats in Spiral Knights? Yes. Am I prepared to buy a pattern to put on my pixellated wizard’s head? No, quite frankly. But if you enjoy the game and end up playing long enough you might place more value on it. Each to their own, as it were.

So is it worth playing? Are you nuts? It’s free and it’s a 39MB download. If it sounds anything other than awful to you, you might as well have a look. Fans of MMO’s and Shooters alike should definitely give it a go even if just to see a fun twist on both the genres. The class progression and roguelike permadeath elements definitely give it plenty of replayability too, if you find yourself enjoying it, which I think is pretty likely.

‘Til next time, GLHF

~Meroka