Mytheon
http://www.rpgcentar.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/mytheon_250.jpg“>http://www.rpgcentar.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/mytheon_250.jpg” alt=”" width=”250″ height=”170″ />Mytheon is a free-to-play fantasy hack ‘n’ slash MMO released a couple days ago. I kept bumping into it every now and then in various online media during the last month or two, and through the several trailers released during that time it seemed like it could serve as a fun respite for fans of classic, mostly greek mythology. So I gave it a shot.
I didn’t have high hopes for the game as it came from a small developer, a small European publisher and was a free-to-play online game. But, I kept an open mind as the trailers seemed attractive enough. Downloading and patching the game went without any issues, and I was in the game with my first character – an elementalist, the ranged DPS choice among the three available classes, the other two being a warcaster (melee specialist) and eidolon (buffer/support). The premise of the game revolves around “powerstones”, magical pieces of rock granted to mortals by the Fates in order to battle various mythological monsters, and ultimately the gods themselves who have apparently decided it was time to teach humanity a lesson in humility. The powerstones are then used by the heroic runecasters to cast three kinds of spells: those that directly effect either monsters or players, those that summon various minions and those that erect stationary structures.
While it seems pretty straightforward, the main difference from most other games is that Mytheon uses a concept otherwise found in TCGs – you have a certain amount of powerstones at your disposal and you need to build “battle sets” which consist of various combinations of stones. The trick is that you can’t select a specific combination of stones to use during battles, but only individual battle sets. And once you exit a “safe zone”, six stones from your currently equipped battle set are randomly chosen for you. As you use up the available stones (each casting of a spell from a stone uses it up), new ones take their place after a couple of seconds, again selected randomly from your battle set.
While the core gameplay concept seems interesting enough, it is in overall execution that Mytheon fails. You start in a tutorial zone that actually doesn’t seem that way at all, after which you are thrust into a large swamp infested by various monsters. The in-game map is actually very useful for hunting down monsters you need to kill for your quests, but that’s all the quests have to offer – standard go there and kill x of y, with writing that is haphazard at best and utterly dull at worst. Combat is quite chaotic due to you having no control over which stones you’ll get the chance to use. The spells are all very flashy and rather impressive from the start (huge meteor showers and lightning storms, for example), but that’s sadly the most fun aspect of the game. After half an hour of killing monsters with no real character advancement or story progression whatsoever (you get a couple levels but no new abilities, stones or significantly different equipment than your starting gear), you could die because health-restoring shrines are few an far between, and then you’d need to run a couple of minutes from the spawn point to the place where you fell. No respawn points further down the linearly shaped maps, just the one at the start. Health potions? Apparently they can only be bought in the cash shop.
So it seems that Mytheon is just another cheap online game in the sea of hundereds. The concept, theme and atmosphere could draw you in if the game was worth anything, but alas. Don’t spend your time on it, you’ve spent enough reading this review that could have just said “it’s crap” in the start :-)
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