Our First Impressions of WILDERMYTH
Have you ever wanted to take control of your destiny? Have you ever wanted to make the story you character plays through? Have you ever wanted an almost absurd amount of options and choices to make your playthrough be completely up to you? Wildermyth is for you. This game is about making a legendary hero from scratch and building his or her story from start to finish.
As soon as a player begins, they are given three characters. These characters can be randomly generated or altered in just about every way shape or form. Stats are more random, but name, look, and even the stats can be rolled any number of times until players are happy with their set of characters. After that, players are allowed to explore, battle and travel wherever they want. What amazes me the most is the story built into all of this. Players are given significant choices all the time like a choice of weapon, the choice to follow a creature or relationship choices with other characters. These choices all have immediate consequences, and it feels like playing through a “choose your own adventure” book more than most video game stories.
Also amazing are the cutscenes that lead up to each of the choices and results from them. To be fair, it is all text and your simply made cartoon characters just put in different places, having various types of conversations. But it is still impressive that I could do whatever I wanted and the game would make a continuing story based around that.
This brings us to the visual style. The game is all 2D drawing-like images. This can be written off as lazy, but I think of it more of an opportunity for players to really indulge in the imagination and thrill of what the characters are doing. The “drawings” sitting in the 3D world and battling has a certain cute charm that makes it very entertaining.
The 3D aspect is only in the actual battles that players participate in. Wildermyth is a strategy RPG in the same vein of XCOM and Final Fantasy Tactics. However, this game doesn’t just play it safe here, the interactions with the environment, smart A.I. and heavy RPG elements make battle very intense and a joy to play. It isn’t very flashy, but it makes up for that in options. As players’ characters grow, we see a lot of active and passive abilities come to the characters, allowing them to perform in very unique ways on the battlefield. Between classes, armor, weapons, different magic, and a plethora of abilities for characters, there are many options when it comes to combat.
We see a lot of positives in this early access version of the game, but there are also a number of issues. I found the UI to be very clunky and not intuitive at all in and out of battle. I also wish that combat was better explained, especially the more complex magics and how and when to use abilities. I know it may be my lack of knowledge and experience in this area, but I had to spend several minutes trying to figure out how far I could move, what sequences of things I had to press, and what I had to activate just to blow up one box. I would compare it to an average person walking into a chef's kitchen. Yes, there are many great tools and ingredients to make amazing things, but most normal people will only know how to make grilled chicken and potatoes (if that).
Wildermyth is a game for the RPG enthusiast. There is a lot of depth and potential to make and enjoy some amazing stories and battles, seriously, there is a lot of amazing stuff that should be in other Triple-A games. However, the difficult UI and confusing/lack of direction in gameplay may discourage a large number of players. If you just love shooting things and Candy Crush, you’ll probably want to pass on this game, but if you love deeper RPG and strategy games, this is for sure something to look into and try out.
