Pros: Lots of different characters, fun action focused combat, good storyline
Cons: No real early game customization, lack of crafting, no PVP yet
Score: TBD
We finally got a chance to try out HeroWarz (published by KOG Games), a free to play action RPG that has just gone into open beta testing, being released now in North America we had previously been region blocked from checking out the game (even in Europe) and so now we finally get to test it. The game has been out in Asia for a little while, so the NA release is definitely a bit behind, with this in mind we’ll talk about the game in its current form but also mention what we can expect in the future (the core of the game won’t deviate that much between versions/publishers).
The focus of the game is a story driven action RPG, players will be given quests to head into action based PVE stages to complete quests and clear them to help their character advance, give them loot drops and most importantly (at least to some) advance the storyline. Unlike many free to play RPGs HeroWarz does in fact have a pretty decent story behind it, introduced with a cool anime cinematic at the beginning which gives you a brief background of world events and where players are currently at. The general gist is that in 2016 an agency turned a young boy named Ibrahim into a Dream Shifter, he was able to create things by dreaming them into existence, pretty cool until he accidentally dreamed of a cataclysmic tidal wave that consumed the earth and nearly destroyed civilization. Thanks Ibrahim. Five hundred years on and the remains of mankind has rebuilt, but now we’re in danger of it happening all again with a girl called Maya who is trapped in her dream.
We’re fairly certain that’s what the story is about anyway. Unfortunately whilst the cinematics we good and the NPC dialogue is pretty accurately translated, the story did feel a little disjointed and at times hard to follow. There’s also something about a shattered necklace that contained Ibrahim’s powers giving people their own power, generally bad guys that we need to hunt down, but it wasn’t really clear where this came from and was glossed over quite quickly. The rest of the story is revealed as you progress through the linear PVE stages.
The PVE stages are actually pretty fun, they’re all instanced based and if you’re playing in the default Public Channel then other players will join the instance with you, the more players in the battle the more difficult it will be, which we thought was a nice touch. We went through a few stages with other players and whilst it only made the content marginally more difficult at times, and there wasn’t necessarily a ton of coordination, it was nice to be able to play with other people cooperatively. However, for those social outcasts that want to play solo you can go into a Private Channel and experience everything on your own. The stages have an obvious Asian style about them, fighting through hundreds of minions, beating up elites and sub-bosses and then a final stage boss with a typical half a dozen health bars you need to burn through, you finish the stage by getting a score, some rewards and a chance to turn over some cards for more stuff.
The game currently has 7 characters, but the Asian release does have quite a few more, so we know that more will be trickling in over time and this is set to be a fairly ongoing thing; the characters we got to play or see did have a lot of variation about them and completely different playstyles. Our own primary character was Audrey, a machinegun wielding female soldier that uses rocket launchers, explosives and sniper shots to get the job done, with her slides and quick flips she’s also an extremely mobile ranged character able to get in and out of a fix easily. Each character has around a dozen base skills that are unlocked in a very linear progression as you level up, with the possibility of upgrading each skill with skill points once you reach level 70. The cool abilities weren’t just for us though and the AI had some pretty nifty moves and attacks themselves, not just a ton of hitpoints; one of the boss fights against a huge spider woman showed her spitting webs around the map slowing our character, charging in with quick melee dashes, and summoning plenty of mobs to distract us as well.
Gear has two main purposes and happen throughout battles, can be bought from vendors, and also earned as quest rewards. Firstly they enhance your character, both their stats, skills and they can occasionally give you new abilities, secondly each piece of gear has a “Depth” value, which gives your character a Depth score total so that they can go into deeper dreams (or something like that, very Inception) i.e. more difficult stages and game content. The issue with this is that it is purely gear based and so (from what we’ve read) the gear grind to try and get best epic gear to get to the final stages can be pretty rough. One thing we were surprised not to see was any form of crafting, not to make consumable supplies nor gear, which is pretty disappointing as crafting is a pretty big staple of action RPGs these days.
At this stage in the open beta PVP hasn’t yet been activated, but from the Asian release we see it focuses on a classic 3 lane MOBA style battlemap, pushing minion waves, destroying towers, fighting enemy players and trying to destroy their base/core type structure. Whilst we couldn’t test this out we will say that the combat style from the PVE that we got to experience will definitely translate well to PVP and should be a blast.
Our time spent playing HeroWarz was actually very enjoyable; it’s a good little game with some strong combat mechanics and an interesting storyline. It falls down on features a little bit, being somewhat bare bones (even with the MOBA PVP in place) and so aside from pushing the linear PVE quest stages there’s not that much else to do. Customization only really scrapes the surface and whilst you can put your skill points where you like, or choose gear that gives different abilities or boosts, there’s a lack of diversity within the same character and little to no customization early on in the game. Worth a play, but we’d say it’ll probably be better to wait until it’s out of the beta phase and has all its working features available.
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