MythForce Review (moJoe)
The game was on sale today, so I picked it up to play with friends. I am giving it a positive review because I have been enjoying it, and because it looks like it is still being worked on. So I'll start with the positives:
It looks great. It plays smoothly. The voice acting is pretty good. It's fun to play. The over all vibe is good.
That said, I agree with many of the negative reviews here on a few points, and am hoping that they can be ironed out:
It feels a little like an early access game, not that it's buggy, just that it feels a little incomplete.
First is the lack of level diversity. I have had runs where the same area appears two or three times. Once twice in a row with a vendor in between. The levels are very cool looking and well designed, but definitely repetitive. I'd love to see two or three times as many different areas to explore in. Maybe more. Most of the area's feel very samey, with little to nothing to differentiate them. The first little bit of the game is in the forest, but then quickly changes to crypt type environments, and so far have stayed there.
Next is the lack of monster diversity. It would be cool to see more monsters in the game. Not as big a deal as the repetitiveness of the levels, but it would still be welcome.
The monster AI is interesting. They dodge, they run in, they hang back and shoot, and sometimes it feels like a real challenge, but other times they stand around swinging at thin air, or doing nothing at all. This is a minor gripe, but to me it seems like they could use a look.
Normal difficulty seems a little too easy. I am on the seventh or eighth area, and have yet to die or even come close to dying. I think there is some sort of roguelite system to the game, but I've never seen it.
Some of the power ups are WAY better than the others. The main example I can think of is the one that gives you bonus health for using potions. This is very easy to cheese. Some areas will have 4 or 5 potions drop, and all the player need do is stand in a torch until their life is low enough to take all those potions, and boom, they are loaded with HP. My last run I had over 1200 HP as the magic user. It makes it pretty hard to die when you've got 1200HP.
The mid-run vendor is a kind of a bummer. The stuff he sells is expensive af, and as gold is used for permanent progression as well as for items you lose at the end of the run, it so far has made very little sense to waste it on the vendor. Not sure how to get around that other than having a separate run specific currency that also goes away at the end, so that players have nothing better to do with it that spend it during the run.
Again, this game is very fun, I don't regret my purchase, and I am excited to play it with my friends. I really hope the devs don't give up on it. If they went nuts on just the level diversity, and added in more monsters, this game would be easy to recommend to any fan of the genre(s).