Rusty Hearts - First Impressions
Have another first impressions review for you.
This is the new Free to Play MMORPG from Perfect World. It's available now on Steamworks (Steam) as open beta.
Deagle and I put about 4 or 5 hours into it today and despite the general sour taste I have developed for free to play games I think that this one gets the thumbs up from me.
About the game:
It's a MMORPG - Meaning Massive Multiplayer Online with (Action) RPG elements. Rusty Hearts in particular seems heavily anime influenced. You can go online and create a character on a server and then anybody else on that server will be online with you in a centralized town area.
From here you can chat and socialize and most importantly get your quests and form parties so that you can go into the dungeons.
Dungeons are instanced and load quickly, the party is from 1-4 players. They are made up of several sections that get harder as your progress. So say Area 1 is level 2-4, then area 2 may be level 5-7. To get access to the next area you need to beat the previous area and you can unlock 2 higher difficulties for each area as well. You start on Normal, but can unlock Hard, and Very Hard.
You get ranked on performance SSS is the highest rank and you must get a certain rank level to unlock the next area/difficulty.
Gameplay:
It has great graphics for a game especially Free to Play - They use cell shaded graphics aka Borderlands style, combat is live action where timing, position, and tactics all come into play. Its very much Devil May Cry style, in fact the "style ranking" from DMC is here as well. So while playing I thought of the game as a Anime Multi Player Devil May Cry. For me personally thats a cool mix
Story:
It seems there actually is a big overall plot and lore you can explore, I was skipping most of it for the sake of time and recording (have some footage I will try to post up later of us playing) It starts off the game with spoken dialog and live action cut scene but the normal questing dialog and stuff is just text driven. Very traditional RPG feel to it.
Free to Play v.s. Pay to Win
One reason I hate F2P games is they often just lure you in with the gist of free to play and you find out later that your game is severely limited in some fashion if your not willing to fork up real money for something. They hope by the time you discover this that your already hooked on the game or invested too much time to easily just give it up.
So far I see none of that in this game. You can get a head start or be lazy by buying items but it seems the game is fully unlocked and anybody playing for free can get all the same items as paying persons can and its not a super major grind. So far at the point in the game we are at its questing and having fun and not a grind. The game is going to be repetitive though so do not get the two confused.
From start to end you will be entering a dungeon and taking on hordes of enemies and bosses with your combos and special attacks. So if your not a fan of monotonous gameplay like that then you probably shouldn't look for any RPG game .
Overall I am impressed and while I only planned to just check it out, I now plan to keep playing it. Its a great time sink and sort of reminds me of a game I used to love to death Phantasy Star Online, except its free and toned down a bit.
Summary
Pros:
Free to Play
Good Time Sink
Fun To Play
Good Graphics
Good Soundtrack
Cons:
F2P games may be more limited than full blown pay monthly titles
Not much character customization.
Last I will just hit on the largest "con" and that is that everybody must choose from one of the 4 characters (only 3 avl right now) so everybody looks the same. Its not like other MMO where you have a character creator. I know people will complain about it and so I will just touch on my feelings about it.
I personally do not mind it, because in traditional RPG games like say Final Fantasy you did not customize your character, you took the role of that character and played with them. I think Rusty Hearts is doing the same thing. Your not "creating yourself" your playing as one of these characters and taking on their story. I think this helps make the game more centric on the plot also I think it gives the game a revenue strategy.
If your serious about the game you can buy a costume or something and look different, but this is optional and gives you no benefit in game. I much prefer they sell something like this than some high level items and stuff that would ruin the game for me. Also you can find and craft cloths & costumes in game without spending money so you still are not forced to pay out. So naturally your character starts to look different as your progress into the game so a high level player will look quite different than a low level player. Just still not customization of characteristics like size/height/etc.
Overall like I said its a winner in my book and has given me a new hope for free to play games. I guess some of them are ok. I actually learned about 4 other games that look really good while researching this one so I may do some kind of play of those in the future.
I was a bit too busy just playing today to test for surround support, but plan to give that a shot later and if it has any success I will post up a video of it.
Update: Lost my first footage where I started the game for the first time, but here is some co-op footage that I took shortly after. Surround confirmed working 100% will be doing a video for that soon.