MMO Row: Freeware MMO Line-Up Review Series

Stranger of Sorts

Individual #472
Aug 23, 2009
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Rather short review there Mr. NewClassic, though I guess you explained why, it did feel a bit lacking as far as information is concerned. What do you actually do in NeoSteam? Is there any kind of story? What types of classes are there? You only mention one.

NewClassic said:
That, sadly, is more than could be said about the music and graphics, which are average in the best case, and bad in the worst. The music itself is entirely forgettable, and the graphics tend to be average.
You use the word average slightly too much in this review, I know it may be to hammer the point how of how bland this game is but it can't hurt too much to vary the vocabulary a bit more.

I know I'm hardly a master at writing these things but I'm getting pretty good at reading them.

Otherwise there isn't anything else bad I can say about it, keep 'em coming.
 

NewClassic_v1legacy

Bringer of Words
Jul 30, 2008
2,484
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[HEADING=2]
Chapter 8: Spiral Knights
[/HEADING]

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Polish can often be the making or breaking point of a video game. The simple truth of any medium is that ideas are not created equal, and the only way to apologize for a repeated idea is to hone the craft to such a razor-point that it's impossible not to praise the little perfections rather than dwell endlessly on the mediocrity of an idea as a whole. Put simply, when in absence of a solid idea, good craft can turn an experience from something unenjoyable to something entertaining. If this can be consistently entertaining, then all the better.

Spiral Knights, a free-to-play MMORPG from Three Rings and SEGA, fits this mold wonderfully. Top-down action games of this type have existed in one form or another since the early Atari 2600. Since then, the genre has been done and redone from countless perspectives for every major console, even leading up to the seventh generation. Because of this, it's hard to give Spiral Knights any benefit for the idea. Considering the very saturated field of free to play games, whose options and style number in the several hundreds, and come in styles for every type of player, computer, and aesthetic, it has large shoes to fill.

Spiral Knights pits the player as a knight on an unfamiliar planet, emerging from an escape pod. The knight's task is to make it to an outlying camp, and ultimately "Haven," a town put together from the remains of a crashed ship. The leader of the knights reveals the core of the planet has an untapped, unknown energy source that should be sufficient for recovering the ship to its full glory, and take it and its knights away to their home planet. The challenge to getting to the core is exploring "The Clockworks," a series of ducts and passages that should ultimately lead to the core, and thus, freedom. The above is largely the full depth of the game's story, and feels tacked on rather than made a major part of the experience.

Anyone familiar with top-down action games, especially Zelda: Four Swords Adventure, will be immediately comfortable with the game's mechanics. The gameplay centers around several floors of dungeon, called Depths, which are generated by player input. The generation process is fairly creative if unintuitive, but produces several enemy and zone types. This provides a lot of aesthetic variety to suit a wide range of color palettes and play styles. However a character is equipped, they're rarely worthless in a fight.

http://www.free2play.com/img/spiral-knights-screenshot-2.jpgTo compliment that, the challenges of the dungeon are pretty merciless. The early depths are more or less filler floors for the first time dungeon crawlers still getting their feet wet, but as the floors grow deeper, the challenges scale much harder. Regardless of the level of equipment, the game will punish mistakes with complete indifference toward the player. Each hit can, and often will, take a significant amount of health. Up to 40% of the player's maximum health per hit. Offset that with a guaranteed heal only every 4 floors, which compound the challenge. These hits stack up very quickly if surrounded, and it means a great many fights will come down to two or fewer hits until death, and several waves of enemies to go. Often times, this task seems impossible without sufficient equipment.

It is fair about its difficulty, though. The game's shield and user interface can both be used to provide the player with solid tools to win most fights without taking damage given good enough equipment and maneuverability. The game shows, with light patterns near the enemies, which way and when an enemy is attacking. Anyone with enough focus can keep track of the enemies, their party, and when an enemy is about to attack. Defending deflects damage, and if used correctly, can also be used to push enemies away. All of this provides a very daunting challenge to the player, but not an insurmountable one. The task provides the player with hard but fair dungeons, and endless hours of replayability.

Which is good news, considering just how polished the play actually is. The controls are adaptable, comfortable, and give the player huge ranges of play styles and equipment choices. The dungeons change with enough frequency but stay just similar enough to not over-complicate the game. It's a comfortable game which is served equally well with long term play for the higher endurance players, but doesn't punish the relaxed players for wanting to take their time, and play only a little each day.

Add to that the game's natural aptitude for co-op play. The dungeons are designed with multiple players in mind. The system for joining, or being joined by, others is an organic and natural process. Although a player can solo, the game generally encourages the players to play together constantly. This process works very naturally in most cases, and seems altogether absent in others. Although, for the most part, the game will have a player playing with at least three others at nearly any point. This, plus the game's simple user interface, helps mitigate any of the most absurd difficulties the game could throw at the player.

http://i52.tinypic.com/2evapsp.jpgIf dungeon crawling was the only mechanic to the game, and everything else was just accruing resources to sell for new equipment, the game would be a testament to just how much a well-polished system could turn a saturated idea and genre into a true gem. However, this is sadly not the case.

To go to each progressive floor in the dungeon, a set amount of energy must be used. Specifically, to activate any elevator in the game, one must insert 10 units of energy. In game, there are two ways to go about acquiring this energy. Mist Energy, a limited amount of energy, refills slowly over the course of time, and will fill up from 0 to 100 every 22 hours. It will never go over the 100, and refills automatically as time passes. The other alternative is crystal energy, which has no upper limit, and can be purchased either from other players in an energy market, or for real-world money. The player run market is a relatively reasonable way to go about this, using in-game currency to purchase sets of 100 Crystal Energy.

At time of writing, it's not too hard to earn enough currency (Crowns) in 10 floors to afford another set of 100 CE, which is good for another 10 floors. As long as the player is careful with their resources, and don't use their energy too frivolously on revivals or optional in-dungeon extras, dungeon crawls can be completed into infinity, providing a very solid dungeon-crawling experience.

This alone wouldn't be a problem, except there just isn't enough material or profit to advance. Once the player's equipment starts to become too obsolete for the mounting challenges, it's fairly certain that they just don't have enough resources to both upgrade their equipment and continue to dungeon crawl. Even if a player used exclusively Mist Energy to crawl, they would need to dump all of their crystal energy into crafting upgrades, and would take literal weeks to be able to bring all of the equipment from Tier 2 to Tier 3 equipment, and longer for Tier 3 to Tier 4, and longer still to Tier 5.

If the economy would be kind enough to produce a consistent profit, or the dungeons a little more forthcoming with materials and wealth, this wouldn't be a problem. However, the game is in the perfect position to not withhold anything from the player, yet still make the real money trading for energy a very, very enticing prospect. It's hard to begrudge the developers stacking the deck in favor of the dealer, and just as hard not to become disheartened at the idea of a solid game open either without upgrade or advancement, or come at some cost to the player, either in time or money.

The alternative to the grind of the Clockworks is to use the mission system, allowing a player to run through predetermined mission depths in order to unlock prestige and equipment. Although this system works perfectly well in theory, it doesn't fair as well in practice. Each mission is scaled to a certain level, making it so that players that predate the mission system have to burn through time and mist energy to catch up to the missions worth their character's level. Assuming a new player is doing the missions from the beginning, there are few opportunities to find other players playing missions around the same rank. So the missions, which play like certain Clockworks depths, will often have to be played solo simply because there are no parties available. Whereas if they did a similarly challenging mission in the Clockworks, there would be several.

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Compromises like these can be quick to drain the fun out of the game, turning it into something of a chore to either grind out the missions in silence, or have to invest long stretches of effort to grind out advancement.

Lastly, there is something of a latency issue. Because nearly everything is stored server-side, rather than client side, it's possible to rubberband around maps and have enemies appear and disappear from range without warning if the player's ping is too high or unsteady. Compounded with a higher difficulty, this could make the game completely unplayable with enough ping, or just too punishing to be enjoyable.

That said, it's harder still to discount the game entirely. The concept is simple, the execution so precisely tuned that gameplay even this old and common is still this good. The problem lies in what has value to the player. If they can't be bothered to wait almost a month to make little, individual upgrades with mind-numbing patience, then their only recourse is to pay for their upgrades out of pocket. The value of playing is a really solid game that is a joy to play, but that value comes with a steep, unavoidable cost. Assuming your internet is even good enough to let you, as sometimes, it may not be.

Bottom Line: It really is a system that does everything right from the gameplay perspective, and everything wrong for the player's comfort. It's fun, brutally so, and refuses to apologize for all of its shortcomings. A brilliant game hidden behind a restrictive system and occasional latency issues.

Score: Four clickable Red Buttons out of Five.