Rusty Hearts Review #1

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Fellow Budget Players! Welcome back! Today we'll be looking at:

Rusty Hearts is a brawler style Action MMORPG. It was developed by Stairway Games, is published by Perfect World Entertainment in the US and Europe (and WindySoft elsewhere), and was released September 20, 2011.

BLUF: Gorgeous anime art to watch and a fast paced combo-centric fighting style make this a fun, if repetitive, brawler game. Get your quest(s), kill everyone, gather the loot, turn in your quest, and repeat, repeat, repeat. Munchkins rejoice.

SCORES:

1. Playability: 3/5 The combat is combo-centric, and the amount of button mashing is high, but the number of skills you can use at once is a little too high, and several cancel out the use of each other for a while. That having been said, you can just repeat the basic attacks for a pretty good effect, so it's not impossible for a newb to start off with.
2. Atmospherics: 4/5 B-e-a-utiful artwork for the characters, NPCs, and monsters will keep you visually interested. Each set of dungeons have a particular motif, but the levels themselves are unique.
3. Community: 3/5 All interaction I had was polite, but no one seemed to go out of their way to talk to me, and there was no reason that I could see to want a party on your jaunts through the dungeons, although that might be different on higher levels.
4. Learning Curve: 4/5 The learning curve starts a little high if you want to use all of the skills available (and I found that I did). However, the flexibility and customization available in both your skill layouts and your weapons allows you to really stretch and find your groove.
5. Cash Value: 3/5 The cash shop has a variety of buffs, costumes, and one additional character available, all of which seem to be reasonably priced, and probably useful. There are also ways to earn Zen (in-store cash) without paying, but most are the “buy from our sponsors” type.
6. Support: 4/5 For now. I found one glitch in the game while I played, reported it, and as of today, have not heard back from them. That being said, one glitch during several hour long gaming periods over a week, and regular updates to improve or add to the game (including several Events in the game) gives them an overall high reliability factor.

OVERALL: 21/30 Enjoyable, munchkin style gaming that kept me playing for quite a while, this game has a lot of potential to really do well. If they continue to add to it, and if the levels eventually get more challenging at the higher levels, then I can see great things for this game's future.

BACKSTORY:

Vampires and monsters and bears, oh my. Long before recorded history a race of vampires came into existence. They were discovered by humans, coexisted for a while, even had some half-breeds, but in the end Count Vlad (Main Baddie) decided enough was enough, and set out to destroy all threats to his race. The heroes of the game are part of the Golden Seal Team, a group organized to destroy Vlad and his followers.

The mythical country of Rumania, and more specifically the city of Bramunez, is the site of this little adventure. Within the Castle Curtis, the Golden Seal Team believes that they have captured Vlad, and are preparing to attack, when the heroes of the game show up, calling themselves specialists, to get Vlad themselves.

You have the choice of four heroes to start with. Tude: A hand-to-hand fighter who uses gauntlets or claws. Frantz: Almost turned into a vampire himself, he is something in between and swings a sword or ax. Angela: A witch who favors magical swords and scythes. Natasha: Gunslinger for hire, Natasha has her choice of pistols or muskets.

TUTORIAL:

So, with no idea about any of the heroes, I arbitrarily chose to start with the gunslinger. The tutorials are a series of pause and pop-up windows that appear during the game. They try to cram so much data onto them, I found them a little confusing to understand at first. But they do contain enough for you to figure out the keys to attack, block,

grab, and activate one of six skills. One of the nicer things about them is that they don't force you to go through too many prescripted scenes and drag the process out, instead the game allows you to jump right into the action. This game is designed for you to constantly be doing something in combat, as the experience and rewards that you get during and after the dungeon you go into are based on combos and avoiding damage, which is easy enough to do while you smash in the faces of the monsters you run into. Targeting is somewhat automated for Natasha's shots, so as long as you are aimed in generally the right direction, you will hit. Initial combat is easy, fast, and although it takes some getting used to, it is fun.

THE TOWN OF BRAMUNEZ:

Town is a safe zone where you will find an ever increasing amount of NPCs, to include the usual armor and weapons dealers, the quest givers, basic fluff characters, and skill trainers that you'd expect to find if you've ever played any RPG style game before. Each has a story, and each will talk to you in long back and forth dialogs that I eventually skipped due to the vapid nature. You start out with only one section of the city you have access to, but as you complete the storyline quests, the city will open up to you, and you will find different entrances t the dungeons, with different areas to search.

QUESTS:

The main way that the game gets you to continue into the dungeons is through the quests available from the NPCs in town. Everyone wants something from you, and almost all of them result in you going in time and again to the dungeons, repeating levels at increasingly harder settings, and smashing everything you can. A l

ot of the quests that ask you to go back to a level add or change what you see in them. Sometimes there is a NPC to find, other times the monsters will change, and objects are added to be found and inspected, brought back, etc. The funny thing was that although the dungeon selection screen suggested that the hard and very hard settings for the various levels should be tried by parties, I never needed anyone to help me. I'm not sure whether this is due to innate skill on my part (doubtful), weak monsters in general (possible), or that Natasha is that much of a bad-ass pistolero with her multiple rocket launchers and all (wait, WHAT?).

You heard me. Multiple. Rocket. Launchers.

Yes, one of the skills that you can learn at a rather early point in the game is to set automated rocket launcher turrets that fire in a straight line in the direction you are facing when you drop them. They fire for several seconds, and if you set them right, you can basically sit back and wait for all the baddies to die. I don't know if the other heroes have similar abilities, as I was hooked by the sweet, sweet allure of missile fire, but if they do, a party must just steamroller through the dungeons, arguing over kill steals more than who gets what dropped items.

Crafting items is definitely available, and free gear drops regularly too, so soloing through the dungeons gave me a huge amount of stuff to bring back and sell. Some of the quests overlap as well, which allows you to clean up on experience, items, and to forward the story quickly. I was playing this over the holidays, and the event drops for crafting holiday gear and consumables were very plentiful. It felt a lot like Diablo I and II in that I had to decide what was the best gear to use from the plethora of dropped items. I never felt like I had to buy any of what the merchants offered, the dropped gear seemed to always have better stats. Leveling your character opens new items and skill levels, but there are no character stats to worry about, everything is in your gear and your skills. You can set up several different skill presets, and you have more skills than you have buttons, so if you think a certain level might be better suited for certain skills, you can swap those out. Use of certain skills will cause others to go on cool-down, and getting stunned, knocked down, or hurt badly will also start or restart cool-downs, so learning how to string them together makes you far more effective. Natasha has a kick-up skill that ties well into a shoot-upwards skill, which ties into a jumping spin-kick, which can be followed by basic attacks until you can trigger your shoot-down ski...well, you get the idea. The longer the combo, the better your style points, and the better you do overall.

After a while, the get a quest, rampage the dungeons, turn in the quest, rinse, repeat of the gameplay got to be boring from the repetition, and the easiness of setting rocket launchers up made all but the biggest rooms and mobs child's play.

CASH SHOP: The shop is available at virtually any time, and offers several buffs and bonuses, in addition to costumes for your favorite hero or heroine. Some of the quests also gave costume pieces out, so it was nice to know that you could modify your character a little without spending cash. There are also several "avatars" available; these are more or less variant skins for the characters that change their looks and effects, but use the gear of the main character. For example, Meilin is a martial artist fighter who uses all of Tude's gear. These avatars use their own character slots, so you won't have to worry about overlap. Zen is the cash for this game, and comes at the rate of 1000 for ten dollars.

FINAL THOUGHTS: All in all, I liked the game, and it definitely brought out my inner munchkin. I would like to see more variety to the levels, especially if I have to complete all the difficulty settings to complete all the quests. But the challenge of getting strings of hits without being hit myself, or pushing through a level in a certain time limit, as well as the other changes that the quests add to a repeated dungeon does keep it from being the exact same. I just couldn't see me playing it for more than an hour or two at a time without getting bored from the repetitive nature of it. If brawlers are your thing, give this one a try.

Next week I fulfill my childhood dreams and strap on a pair of tights in DC Online, till then this is NoCashReq, see ya!

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