MMO

Rusty Hearts – Early Impressions

Rusty Hearts caught my attention a few months back for its anime artstyle and wild spectacular combat. Its a far cry from Orcs and Elves which is perfectly fine by me. I personally am into anime and was excited by Rusty Heart’s anime style take on MMOs. I’ll be the first person to tell you that i’m not the biggest MMO gamer out there. However, i have dabbled in a handful of MMOs mostly F2P ones like Rusty Hearts. This fantasy online action game was developed by Stairway Games and published by Perfect World Entertainment. Rusty Hearts released September 20, 2011. For this particular article i played the game through STEAM.

I want to make it clear that this article is detailing very early impressions of the game. I haven’t leveled up super high or put a bunch of hours into the game yet. Now that we’re clear lets do this. After going through the normal sign-up processes associated with MMOs you can select the world and channel that you want to play on. I selected West and Level 1- Level 20 Gorgon.

The game is limited in one aspect. The classes/characters are extremely limited. There are four and everybody kinda looked the exact same in the worlds i played in. The characters are a rag-tag group of strangers who met up in hopes of destroying Vlad. Led by Frantz Kruger. Frantz is a vampire who’s past is filled with turmoil and despair. He is more balanced with good physical skills and can perform dark magic. I personally picked him for my playthrough.

Continuing on with the class/characters you have Angela Straigend who is a witch apprentice. Sent from the Fog Forest to battle Vlad. She has wild spikey red hair and is a strong magic user as you would’ve guessed. Tude Macloud is a lone wanderer with an ancient Wolf’s Tooth embedded in his chest. Tude Macloud is all about speed and strength. Last but not least we have the beautiful Natasha who is a gun toting con artist . To be fair she has a real reason to join the group and kill Vlad. Every character look like they could star in the latest and greatest anime series. Just plug them in seriously. No customization for characters. You can make multiple characters to level up for each game.

There is a tutorial after you select your character but i chose to skip it. I immediately jumped into the main game which was actually ok since its not overly difficult to learn. You start out at the Rusty Heart’s hub located in a base/village in front of a female lieutenant who hands out missions. She gives me an order to “Meet Vincent” i meet Vincent (gained some XP) which triggers a voiced dialog cutscene between us. Apparently Vincent wants myself and my team to Scout the Canals B3 (that’s the mission name).

Some things of note relating to my playthrough up to this point. The game looks good. I really do enjoy the anime artstyle. I also like the overall atmosphere and presentation so far. I know its really early but so far no technical issues of note. The atmosphere is that of hunting, spooky, creepy, vampires with dark anime tones everywhere you look. You can drag skills to hot-keys and use a wired controller. Midway my first mission i plugged in my generic xbox 360 PC controller (barely works properly) and finished the level. I really really enjoyed using a gamepad for this game.

The actual combat Frantz Kruger was performing made him look like Dante from Devil May Cry. Acrobatic spinning sword attacks while in mid-air with special over the top attacks screams anime action. The dungeon i ventured in was inhabited by skelatons with the boss being a Red Skelaton. I played the mission alone which wasn’t a problem since you can select the difficulty before each mission. The skeletons rise from the ground in groups. Taking them out with simple sword attacks were enough.

Its early, but its ok. Rusty Hearts does lack some depth regarding characters and classes. I will say this, its an exciting visual feast compared to some of the MMOs i played. Thanks for reading.