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Terrible
While not the most popular game, I thought this one looked potentially interesting. On paper, the mechanics reminded me substantially of Elsword, a game that I liked. The combat is side-scrolling, but allows you to move in three dimensions. I was hoping for an MMORPG with combat akin to some old console games such as Turtles IV.
Nope.
One of the first things I noticed was that the game takes a long time to load. A really long time. So long that I thought the game had hung and had to open Control Panel to verify that it hadn't.
Upon actually loading the game, it was obvious that the UI was tiny. Really tiny. Now, I play at very high resolutions, so a lot of games have a UI that looks too small. But this is the worst that I can recall, and I'd be surprised if it didn't also feel too small at 1920x1080.
It quickly became apparent that the game was only partially translated from Korean into English. Text is generally in English, voiceovers in Korean, and the graphics are mixed. That's not a good sign for what is supposed to be the English version of a game.
Models are very low polygon count, and look like a relic of the era when games tried to do 3D graphics because it was the new thing, even though it looked worse than 2D. Backgrounds look substantially better than the character models, at least.
The storyline is mostly incoherent, and either badly written, badly translated, or both. Space aliens are invading, and the protagonist is persistently upset that he is expected to fight them because he wants to go meet his friends at the arcade. Food is scarce enough that the authorities don't have any, but some college student running a food cart to pay for college has tons of it. Maybe that made sense in the original Korean, but it sure doesn't in English.
In a game that is mostly about combat, that is all forgivable if the combat is good. Unfortunately, it isn't.
As with a lot of games, you can either walk or run. Most games that do that make running the default, because that's nearly always what you want. Here, walking is the default, and you have to double-tap to run. Running isn't some limited resource; you can run all day if you want. There's little reason why you'd want to walk, so you have to constantly double-tap to move properly. That is, they made merely moving around into a pain in a game with action combat. That's a pretty creative way to break a game.
Combat is also very choppy. I think that the problem is that the animations don't have enough intermediate stages possible. It looks like you're warping around a lot. It's kind of like a low frame rate problem, except that it happens even when frame rates are very high. Or at least I'd hope that a game with graphics that would have been decent but not that impressive in 2003 can run well on a Fury X. Scrolling the screen via linear movement looks very smooth, and it's only the animations that are choppy.
Mobs mostly stand there and wait for you to kill them. That's fine in a tutorial, but by level 15, I expect to have to fight a little harder than that. Maybe it gets better at the higher levels. With how awkward combat is, I'm not going to find out.
I only played the game for a few hours. I'm usually not one to give up on games quickly, as I read up on games ahead of time to weed out the ones that I'm not likely to be interested in. But this was the worst MMO that I've played in a number of years.
Nope.
One of the first things I noticed was that the game takes a long time to load. A really long time. So long that I thought the game had hung and had to open Control Panel to verify that it hadn't.
Upon actually loading the game, it was obvious that the UI was tiny. Really tiny. Now, I play at very high resolutions, so a lot of games have a UI that looks too small. But this is the worst that I can recall, and I'd be surprised if it didn't also feel too small at 1920x1080.
It quickly became apparent that the game was only partially translated from Korean into English. Text is generally in English, voiceovers in Korean, and the graphics are mixed. That's not a good sign for what is supposed to be the English version of a game.
Models are very low polygon count, and look like a relic of the era when games tried to do 3D graphics because it was the new thing, even though it looked worse than 2D. Backgrounds look substantially better than the character models, at least.
The storyline is mostly incoherent, and either badly written, badly translated, or both. Space aliens are invading, and the protagonist is persistently upset that he is expected to fight them because he wants to go meet his friends at the arcade. Food is scarce enough that the authorities don't have any, but some college student running a food cart to pay for college has tons of it. Maybe that made sense in the original Korean, but it sure doesn't in English.
In a game that is mostly about combat, that is all forgivable if the combat is good. Unfortunately, it isn't.
As with a lot of games, you can either walk or run. Most games that do that make running the default, because that's nearly always what you want. Here, walking is the default, and you have to double-tap to run. Running isn't some limited resource; you can run all day if you want. There's little reason why you'd want to walk, so you have to constantly double-tap to move properly. That is, they made merely moving around into a pain in a game with action combat. That's a pretty creative way to break a game.
Combat is also very choppy. I think that the problem is that the animations don't have enough intermediate stages possible. It looks like you're warping around a lot. It's kind of like a low frame rate problem, except that it happens even when frame rates are very high. Or at least I'd hope that a game with graphics that would have been decent but not that impressive in 2003 can run well on a Fury X. Scrolling the screen via linear movement looks very smooth, and it's only the animations that are choppy.
Mobs mostly stand there and wait for you to kill them. That's fine in a tutorial, but by level 15, I expect to have to fight a little harder than that. Maybe it gets better at the higher levels. With how awkward combat is, I'm not going to find out.
I only played the game for a few hours. I'm usually not one to give up on games quickly, as I read up on games ahead of time to weed out the ones that I'm not likely to be interested in. But this was the worst MMO that I've played in a number of years.
![[Deleted User]](http://wa.vanillicon.com/v2/a578b97d0cda5d4b095e6df2b610954b.svg)
Comments
The storyline is not bad in some cases, but there is way too much side noise which makes the main storyline incoherent.
With so many menus and so many text conversations to read through, it gets tiresome, which is my main qualm with it.
The combat I actually liked. Granted, in order for it to feel right, use a gamepad. I used the XB1 control, and while they didn't translate controls properly AT ALL, after a little bit of learning, the combat feels a lot more fluid, there are combos that you can string together, ultra moves, and strategies for harder enemies.
Not saying that it's the best thing since sliced bread, but it's an okay game. I've certainly played worse, but in my opinion it needs a few months more to get it ready for western audiences. It just won't mesh well with too many people in its current state. The music is also pretty good.
For that matter, Closers doesn't even have fluid combat by the standards of 30-year-old console games. Side-scrollers such as Mega Man 2, Zelda 2, or Turtles 2 all had much cleaner, easier to control, more satisfying combat than Closers does today. Yes, those games didn't have to deal with Internet latency, but they also did have to fit on an NES.
Where closers is concerned, the running isn't fluid, but the combo system can be pretty fluid. I didn't realize how it all melded together until I started playing on a controller and toying with the combo system some. You can string together a long list of combos, with different effects depending on whether you do it in the air or from the ground, and you can mix and match them if you want.
While the combos specifically are somewhat fluid (you still have a hard stop if you run out of abilities), the movement isn't. It's very jerky between fights. If they just allowed the run to be on all the time, it would be completely different, there's really no reason for the game to start out with walking at such a slow pace. I think in that regard, Hyper Universe is more seamless between battles. For a beat'em up like Closers, it makes no sense to require the double tap, (even though double tapping is a little easier on a controller, but still)
Torval is right though, every other portion of the game just feels ... out of place... wrong... the menus are way too convoluted.
For starters, Hyper Universe is a MOBA. It's either PVP, or else fighting against bots that try to simulate PVP. Characters have only five skills, at least one of which has a very long cooldown. A relative handful of hypers might use one skill to set up another (e.g., a stun followed by something powerful with a very small hitbox), but for the most part, combos aren't a thing in that game. A large fraction of your damage comes from your basic attack, and you either use other skills as they come off cooldown or wait for either a good situation to use situational skills or a high-leverage situation to use particularly powerful ones.
But for trakakhan especially, I would flow through 3 abilities as a "combo" pretty regularly, or 4 if I used his long CD ability. I didn't play every Hyper, and haven't gone back since they added the new ones, but I know of several others that had a good set of combinations that were used during my play time.
In Closers, you don't spend too much time with basic attacks if you're doing it "right" they really want you to push through all of your abilities in almost every encounter aside from the super special ability.
But for a triple S rank on the harder levels, it's pretty much killing as fast as possible and that means running the same combos without much strategy over and over. In Hyper Universe there was a bit more strategy involved, much less when you played against bots.
Closers didn't give me that impression at all. And from your talk about chaining super long combos together, that sounds nothing like combat in Hyper Universe. The only times you have long combos (which predominantly consist of your basic attack, anyway) in Hyper Universe is when you're trying to kill an enemy turret or a minion boss for the buffs.
Closers is different in that they boost the numbers on combos, because I think it goes into your end score, but one single ability could push 15 - 20 hits before you use your next one. I've had combos near the hundreds in closers, but the damage for each hit is negligible.
But all in all, the combo system in closers is more flash than substance, combinations bridge the combat together an make it fluid in the moment, but the movement is still choppy between encounters.
I usually consider combos ti be quick consecutive hits, in MMOs like DCUO I was able to get 100+ combos on bosses simply by using my weakest ranged attack. Without a combo meter counting them, I suppose a combo can be nebulous.
But that is straying a little from the topic, aside from the combo system, closers combat is pretty disjointed.