Ah, the first time. It should be the most wonderful time, full of excitement and wonder, but is often full of pain and ridicule. Yes, the first time blogging (not whatever you nasty people out there might be thinking) is a hard time because you have to think about what to write, how to write it, how long it should be, because you want to make a good first impression on the (few) people who read your blog. So, what’s this entry going to be about? It’s going to be about a little game called Mechquest …
Mechquest is an online RPG that uses mecha (those giant robots) as a fighting system. It’s from Artix Entertainment, the makers of two other fantastic, yet throughly different games. Actually, three other games, but the third is barely released at the moment. The general idea of the game (like any game) is to train and gain money (the money in the game is called credits, how space agey and totally not cliche…) Unfortunately, in order to buy the things you need, you’ll have to spend a while farming for those credits. However, the hard part is not getting the money. No, that’s relatively easy. In the average battle at my level (level 15) I get 620 credits per enemy. The hard part is getting experience to level up. For that one enemy that gives me 620 credits, I’ll get perhaps 70 experience. Most other games have it the other way around, but not Mechquest.
The battle system is good. It’s nice and simple but doesn’t leave much room for expansion. The idea is you buy a mecha, and that mecha has a certian amount of slots (Front/Back Arm, Front/Back Shoulder, Head, and occasionally a Body slot) that allows you to equip items in to (Body items, at the moment, are not equipable, only available as a default). So, you get 5 or 6 weapons. Each weapon has a weapon type (whether it’s ballistic, explosive or laser) which takes the place of a conventional element system (Fire, Ice, Water, Earth, Energy, Wind, Light, Dark, Bacon [Yes, one of the Artix Entertainment games uses a Bacon Element]) and each one has a weapon cooldown (how long you have to wait before you can use it again) and an energy cost (how much of the environment you’re going to pollute with greenhouse gases … no, just how much power it takes). Each mech has two stats, HP and EP. HP is your typical Health Points, while EP is most akin to Mana or MP (Mana Points). The Energy Cost says how much energy the weapon loses.
Weapons get further split beyond how much EP they use and what their cooldown is or where they’re equipped. Some give boosts to stats while others cause status effects on the enemy. The two main effects (which are divided up in to smaller categories that do the same thing but have a different name) are Stun and DoT (Damage over Turns). These are very useful in the game to have! DoT allows you to do extra damage, usually over 4 turns. Countless times it has saved my hide as I get the enemy down to 1HP with myself in a similar situation, and the DoT finishes off the enemy for me (it applies before the enemy attacks).
So, now that the weapon and battle system has been glossed over, let’s move on to the gameplay. The many city is called Soluna, a university based town. You are a student at Gears University and as such must save people because the SDF (Soluna Defence Force) are missing. Well, I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll just mention the big bad guys and move on. The Shadowscythe. To find out who their leader is (or to deduce who it is after a cutscene) you’d have to be familiar with Artix Entertainment’s other games.
A.E. always bring good yet punny games to our computers, and this game is another one of them. You can possibly expect me to write some reviews of released content down the line somewhere when I have an established blog, but don’t think it’s all I’ll write! Look forward to television reviews, movie reviews (less likely/often) and other things! It’s been a pleasure writing and I hope to do more.
