Where to start.
This game is fun, at least until you start wading through the other islands. It's rate of killing off new players was immense, that or them succumbing to cheats/hacking the code. It's funny though how I saw people running around in what was the "best" gear possible, yet killing at the same rate as me against the tougher foes. Granted they had long term survivability due to their armour, but they were unable to kill critters any faster, excluding lucky streaks. Reason being that they hacked up gear, not character attributes and skills.
I found the easiest charcter to play in MP mode was a high/max dex player, I forget what stat I sacrificed, but he ended up looking ironically scrawny. Single player is comparatively an easy and fun start to finish game, not the kind of challenge you get in MP. Honestly MP reminds me more of an MMO you don't pay monthly for because of all the grinding I had to do. The repetition really hits me at the end of the first island and as you start into the second.
Granted when I made my first metal knife and worked up to the best non-metal armour in the second island I felt like a king; but I was either far wealthier than the other still legitimate players or was playing among people who had caved with obviously hacked up expensive gear. Weapon skill is perhaps the most important thing in that game, and I frankly didn't care for the spear. Lowering your defence means the enemy is hurting you a lot more and much more likely to get in a head-shot for an instant kill. Given you fight a slew of enemies in a constant grind, the higher that chance the more likely you're going to end up losing your gear and crawling around naked or something similar.
This was another reason I could play among the "big dogs," my defence was high enough that my health stayed fairly stable, theirs fluctated from healthy turtle to flailing, hmm, cockroach? I could get by with lesser healing, knew how to fight and what I could take. The difference in playstyle and knowledge was immediately obvious and I could smell the cheats from a mile away. Sadly I never actually met another legit player who went as far as myself, I guess I was just really stubborn.
I found the starting hammer with high dex placed me well above the norm. Pumping my melee skill made it so I could one shot most everything by placing called shots to their heads. Frankly that was the way to go, just hold back fighting new critters until you could reliably head shot them. Anything else and you'd end up wasting more time trying to recover from the damage, and your income would suffer along with your sanity. Really the single player was a lot better off than the multiplayer, comparatively they're two different games.
I eventually caved myself and hacked up some gear and skills, mainly the latter, and stomped off to the third island to see what was up. I later learned that one mission, very similar to the singleplayer, pitted you against some cyclops in a predicatable style very close to the start. I discovered a way to take on that mission legitimately before I could clear out the later maps on the second island. That little insight allowed me to suddenly go from pauper on my old legit character to sultan overnight.
There's something wrong with that, it's hardly logical that a late mission on the third island is easier and better rewarding than practically everything on the second island. That led me to my final, game shelving discovery. I went back to the hacked guy and prepped him with the best skills and gear I could find, maximizing the potential of a legitimate character, and strode out onto the final island. I then got my ass handed to me by the first mob.
After shaking off my dobut I made every possible overpowered charm I could, maxed out healing potential and such and went back out to study my foes. The first thing I learned was that I couldn't get in a head shot. I then switched to bashing their arms so they were no more than a punching bag. That sort of worked, with effort I could sit there all day pounding on them. I tried just letting fate decided and went with no called shots, that ended with a hasty retreat back to the cave. I came back and looked over their stats more carfeully, and boggled at what moron made them up. They had skill levels well above the maximum, and even weapon altered maximiums with max dexterity.
What that ment is, if I may make this example, this was the equivalent of taking an Epic incredibly old Prismatic dragon in D&D with more AC than several gods, and pitting a non-epic fighter up against them with a shiny little glowstick. There wasn't a chance in hell of my solo character taking them out, and I can't imagine any amount of weapon based fighters being able to hurt, much less kill, even one of the mobs out there. Given that was the first critter out there, and that they get tougher all around as you go in deeper, I was unable to wrap my head around why they did this. No matter who you were it was obvious that you needed the best possible attack magic to deal with these guys, and that was it.
I should make a note here, they had extremely high hit points and with their regeneration that ment they healed at a rate that would make your sterotypical Troll go even more green with envy. It was all I could do to keep their arm wounded, and I should also note that for realism beating up a person's arms and/or legs did not kill them. Fully breaking them, even both I think, did not take away all their hit points. There was a scale for limb health to total health, the head counted for something in the range of three to ten times the body, and thus a few shots there ended any critter's life quite rapidly. The unfortunate side of magic is that you can't call shots, it's random.
I'm going off memory here, and this may be a bit faulty, but if I recall shots directed at the arm or legs came at a -5 pentalty to weapon skill for hitting purposes. You'd feel that, but every shot that did hit would be against that your chosen target. The thing was a head shot was something like a -10 penalty, it wasn't that hard to reach and a few head shots to kill a guy, or a few shots to make them swing at you very slowly, you decide. You could make called shots to the body, but that didn't come with any advantage what-so-ever, you might as well let fate decide and hope for a lucky head or limb shot. Maybe if a called shot to the body increased your accuracy or something, but it didn't.
If you got a small team of super wizards you could clear that island, and probably with little effort to boot. Get any amount of physical attackers and you might as well just commit suicide now and save yourself some time. All I could make out of this is that it's cheaper to go the physical attack route to get yourself started, but to finish the game you have to go deep into magic and grind yourself the best possible wands you can manage so you can get out there and slowly, tediously work your way to the end. Although you very likely wouldn't be able to take out any quest bosses alone, and the expense on those wands gets ridiculous.
At that point thought, the game is over anyway, in more ways than one. Knowing what to do gets you there legitimately so much faster it isn't funny, but after learning the ins and outs of this game I have only one thing to say.
Buy it for the singleplayer experience, then shelf it for the multiplayer.
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- Anolis, "What did old Walter Cronkite used to say?"
- Anolis Mk.II, "And that's the way it is."
