From T3 Entertainment, Mythos brings the highly successful “Hack’n’Slash” formula to an action packed online role-playing game. The comparison to Diablo, Torchlight and Titan Quest should be very familiar to anyone. Combat, skills, stats, leveling systems, inventory and many more features of Mythos will be very familiar to people who’ve played these kinds of games before.
Like any other MMO worth its salt, the game’s lore is set against the backdrop of an ancient war – yada yada – and players are tasked with picking their path by choosing from one of the games races and skill-sets.
Mythos’ races are made up of four character types – Humans, Cyclops, Gremlins and Satyr – each with their own bonus skills depending on your play style.
These are further broken down into three classes – Pyromancer (Mage-style class with spells), Bloodletter (warrior-style melee fighter) and Gadgeteer (riflemen (and women) capable of tinkering-up toys of destruction).
Hardly an overwhelming selection, but assuming it’s done right, more than enough to create the variety and balance needed for the PVE and PVP gameplay on offer.
Without wanting to use the terms ‘hatchet job’ or ‘cut and shut’, there’s no avoiding the fact that, while Mythos has some pretty cool ARPG core, the MMO elements like the crafting system and micro transaction-powered item shop system do seem to have been ratcheted on like the rear end of a 1998 Ford Mondeo.
The two sides of the game simply don’t gel and instead of creating an experience greater than the sum of its parts, the game is a collection of component parts thrown at the screen like a very confusing digital jigsaw.
The game world is split up into quite small towns and villages which are connected by portals or skyship transport that load you into the new area. Most of these places have a dungeon portal that will take you to the various dungeon instances, which quests will direct you too. Quests are obtained using the “Talk to an NPC with a floating exclamation mark above their head” mechanic favoured by most MMOs. The quality of quests during the low levels were pretty good and they felt less of a grind. Sure most were kill and fetch with some nice low level bosses. but I didn’t get any ridiculous demands like “collect 20 wolfpelts” or send you to the same boar inhabited forest every time like in other Online MMORPG Games. Instead the dungeons you were sent to varied a lot, something I appreciated since it would have been easy for a Dev team on a free to play MMO to use the same template over and over for filler quests. Also to prevent having to travel back and forth from dungeons each time, around 3 NPCs would be offering slightly related quests but with different objectives around the same time for a particular dungeon. As good as the quest system is though, I found through research that end game content is basically more of the same but bosses with high HP count. I’m not convinced this will be enough for some.
Combat itself was tons of fun, I was running through the dungeons shooting and looting like a madman. That to me is the hallmark of a good Action RPG, fast and addictive combat and piles of loot. As you would expect then from a game of this style, combat is done with left mouse click for normal attack and right mouse click for your special attack and that is it. You can get different special attacks from certain weapons or investing skill points to unlock new skills during level-up. This will be different to some who are use to an action bar with 10+ different attacks you can use when you like. Not everyone likes having such a simple system but fans of games such as Diablo 2 will have no problems with it.
To add a little more depth to the combat and skills system, weapons can be upgraded with rune slots, which as you may guess allows you to add runes that modifies character and weapon stats. Mythos also uses an achievements system with a purpose. Each achievement has a bonus like 3% to health, though only one achievement can be active at a time. The achievements help add another option to tailoring your character build, but I must admit even with these features Mythos lacks the kind of depth in building a character up that you would get in other MMORPG Games.
The other main game play feature is an extensive crafting system, that allows the player to create better and sometimes unique equipment. The basis of crafting is materials and recipes, both of which are dropped by monsters with materials also being gained from breaking down looted equipment. Crafting is a chance based affair, where there is a risk the item will break and fail during creation. Once you have an item you can improve it further in different ways, by merging them with items to improve its power, adding rune slots or by enchanting. Again there is a risk the item will break during refinement but luckily you can get it repaired again for a price. It’s a nice addition that adds to looting aspect of the game, giving you something more involved then just dumping cheap loot on the nearest merchant.
Crafting items brings me to the Free to Play model of Mythos. There is an item shop that has the usual annoyance of requiring you to buy in-game currency first instead of directly paying through the shop. In this case the currency is known as Bones, with Bones you can buy the usual Free to Play premium items like extra inventory space, XP gain boosters and of course equipment that is unobtainable through normal game play.
Pros
- Simple yet addictive combat
- Good quest variety
- Interesting class system
Cons
- Need to enjoy Action RPGs
- Lack of quality end game content
- Shallow Character building options
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
OS: Windows XP, Vista, 7
Processor: Pentium 4 1.8GHZ
Ram: 1GB
Graphics card: video ram 128mb, Geforce Ti 4200/Ati Radeon 8500
Direct X Version 9.0c
HD: 1GB
Schedule of Open Beta Test (OBT) is January 12, 2012.
For more information, please visit http://mythos.t3fun.com
Credits: http://www.timepers.com, http://www.mmorpg-center.com, http://www.mmoreviews.com
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