I am here to review another mmo for you all, which many of you probably heard of, Hunter Blade, an action game released by JoyChina, which recently just ended its closed beta phase. But after getting into the game I didn't have a chance to play enough of the features to really do an in depth review, so instead I will give you guys a lowdown of my experience in the closed beta and my thoughts, so basically a mini review.
Before diving in, I need to clarify something first. As most of you know, this game is a clone of Monster Hunter. We all know this, and really, I don't care that it is a clone. Capcom has had shown no signs of bringing their pc mmo version of Monster Hunter to the west, and if someone wants to mimic it and bring it over, I say all the best to them, and it's Capcom's loss for not catering to their western fans who would have loved to see this game come over. So now that we established that, we can move on.
I managed to con one of my friends into playing this game with me, so I did get a bit of time in with some co-op play, which games like this are more enjoyable as, in my opinion. Starting our journey off was the character creation screen. This offered one of the more generic character creations in which you chose your characters looks from preset arrows picking the face, hairstyle, and gender. There is a pallet for choosing hair color as well, which offered about ten choices for colors, which was nice. Beyond that you are also able to choose a portrait and starting weapon.
During the beta there were only two range and about four melee weapons to choose from, but from the looks of the menu there should be several more coming out soon enough, so suffice to say there will be plenty of weapon choices to choose from in the game. During this play-through I mainly played using dual swords, while my friend started out with a long sword then switching to a single handed sword and shield.Diving into the game itself, it seems very quest oriented. In that, I mean you don't really feel like you can progress at all without doing quests, and when you do them, there is a lot to do. Most of the quests we encountered were the talk to this person, then that person, and finally do this guy's quiz. Personally I felt that most of the quests had me running around, more than actually getting in the action. Some of them were actually informative, but a lot of them felt like filler in getting you leveled up to face the next boss. The one nice thing about them however, is you can click on an npc's name in the quest list to auto walk to them, so you won't have to walk form npc a to npc b on your own if you don't feel like it. As for the combat quests, unfortunately they're rather repetitive, I cannot tell you how many times we had to go and kill the same monsters from various quests. For example we got the kill boar quests at least five times, and had to kill the Boar King at least three different times. This was during the level 20-25 phase, since we didn't unlock a new map yet, we may have had to do it some more. But this may be due to it still being in the beta phases, so hopefully a more variety of monsters will be out in later releases.
Some of you may also start asking about the cash shop in the game. There is actually an inclination of how the shop will work, and there was a partially functioning one during the closed beta. Most of the items I saw were cosmetic, which lasted for timed intervals, no permanent ones so far. Players can also pay for additional storage or warehouse space, which I am not necessarily a fan of, but you can survive without paying if you manage your inventory well, and sell off items you no longer need. But if you hoard stuff like I do, you will find out that the added space is needed. There were other items like refinement that have yet to be added, and I am also unsure if any of these will be tradable, which I am hoping they are. Overall the cash shop is looking like most standard shops out there nowadays.
