I Feel A Little Rusty After This One

I was really looking forward to Rusty Hearts, mainly because the trailer made it look so good I swear I was watching an Anime. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the trailer was actually almost completely in game content. Let’s get one thing straight right now, Rusty Hearts is NOT a game, it is an Interactive Anime, and worst of all it’s a Bad Anime. Bad Animes have clearly defined heroes, clearly defined villains, no anti-heroes, no changes of heart, and no story driving anybody forward. The heroes go one pointless adventure after pointless adventure and it all drags out a lot longer than it should. Like Inuyasha or Trinity Blood.

Returning to the point I made earlier in that paragraph, Rusty Hearts is not a game and is by no means a RPG, but I guess if I absolutely HAVE to give it a game label it’s an Action slice-em-up MMO and I use the term “MMO” lightly cause I hardly saw any other people while I played it. There is no customization at all; you are playing premade character and the game reminds you of this every time it can with bad unskipable cutsceenes and NPC conversations that are ridiculously linear and throw our your characters name (the name of the hero not your in game name) at every turn. The characters you can choose from are a male vampire, a male werewolf, a female witch and a school girl with a large pair of breasts and a lead fetish. You know, the Full Metal Panic version of school girls. Seriously how hard is it to make an Action MMO with customizable features? At the very least you could slap on a Male of Female option to the game, getting rid of gender lock alone would make the games just so much more amazing to play.

If there’s anything good to say about this game it’s that the graphics are alright, but this is an anime game so that’s to be expected. All the areas are dark and dreary proudly showing off the depressing 'Castlevania' setting of the world. The armor you find does nothing more than boost your stats, they don’t want you messing up the characters they worked so hard to make; heaven forbid they look any different for when Perfect World actually tries to make an Anime out of this like they should have in the first place. The weapons and skill animations look cool, but that's really not saying much. Every Hack-N-Slash "MMO" goes out of their way to make the skills as unnecessarily lavish as possible in hopes that the amazing combat alone will be enough to make us forgive and forget the fact that we're not really playing as ourselves, but hey newsflash that doesn't even come close to helping action MMOs get out of the very VERY deep rut they have dug themselves into.

I find it increasingly difficult to find mean things to say about Perfect World seeing as this is the same company that showed me the absolutely amazing WoW-Killer that was Forsaken World, but looking back I probably shouldn’t have started with that game as it forever set PWE’s bar just a little too high. Truly Forsaken World was their crowning achievement and starting with that I feel I’ve skipped the main course only to start with the dessert made by the Ace of Cakes; only to go back to find that the main course was prepared days before by the hotel staff and was simply reheated for today’s meal.

Anyway long story short, Rusty Hearts scores a 1 out of 10 It’s bad, don’t bother, find something else, yada-yada-yada.

An Ever Expanding Universe

Big name companies like Blizzard seem to be in favor of Demos as of late. It’s almost like an apology letter to the people out there who are true legit gamers and not cultists, or perhaps it’s a brainwashing tactic in an attempt to real in more devout followers and earn more cash. But then again, I got to play World of Warcraft (the real one) and Lego Universe a bit and wanted to join neither so I guess either option 2 is not the case or they simply have no control over my strong anti-cultists mindset.

Any way I played WoW for all of a day which is hardly enough to give it a good review seeing as how big it is so here’s Lego Universe a game I played for three days.

(There's always something happening around you, even if you don't know it)

Make no mistake Lego Universe is fun; it is really, really, REALLY fun. However as long as it is P2P it will never be a legitimate MMO in my eyes. The story of LU is that an evil wizard saught to control creation through the use of a powerful magic that brought one's imagination to life. However this only corrupted the magic and as a result the "maelstrom" was created. A powerful force that is constantly churning out bad guys through the use of corrupted LEGOs. The whole experience is best described as an MMO version of Lego Star Wars, only with a significantly larger amount of customization. That’s one of the main things I am truly happy about when it comes to LU. The people demanded customization and LEGO more than delivered. A lot of the weapons and armor you find all do the same things stat wise so both weapon and armor choice is cosmetic and centered almost entirely on personal taste. There are no classes but you’re certainly welcome to favor knight in shining armor over sorcerer or techy, or better yet be a combination of all three. I was running around with a scythe and an owl on my shoulder and frankly I didn’t know how my outfit would look any more badass. Unless I found the LEGO equivalent to the Lich King’s armor.

There are no stats in game, but there are three bars you should constantly keep an eye on. Your Health, your Armor (gained from clothes and some weapons) and your Imagination.

Imagination is what you use to build things in the world. Ironically your ability to create comes solely from your ability to destroy as imagination is primarily filled by breaking stuff. It’s a nice concept and definitely keeps the flow going in a LEGO MMO which would quickly lose interest if one person built everything while you were asleep, and you logged on the next day to find all the puzzles solved for you and most of the quests impossible to finish.

This game also has a really weird name mechanic. If you’re a member you can input your name like any standard MMO, but if you’re F2P you make a name from a set of pre-selected adjectives. Normally this would be a middle finger from the game and would turn me off right there, but they have every adjective in the dictionary and the monkey dictionary to use which can make for some truly awesome names. I wasn’t complaining in the least as I walked around with the super awesome username “DarkNexusGoul.”(NOTE: As you’ve probably noticed by now I don’t make a habit of revealing my usernames, figured I’d make an exception since the name was premade…and awesome.)

LEGO Universe scores a 5 out of 10 the score having obviously been kicked down a bunch of points as I was only able to play a demo of it. Again, if the game was F2P, as it should be, it would have a MUCH higher score.