Warcry Impressions

I've been able to put a few more hours into Warcry and sometime later tonight the "Final Ground Test" will finish. I've mostly played two classes, and gained a few levels. In the image you can see the costume I bought for my paladin which you can compare to the one in the last post. It has no real in game effect, but it does change the color of the effects on your skills. I also spent some time playing an alchemist. I didn't really do a lot with snipers or the rangers. I did play about 99% of my rounds for the "Empire" side.

The paladin is your typical soldier. He's got a middle of the road gun and a decent melee weapon. He gets two passive abilities. One is a shield, the other I never got around to exactly translating. He also has two active abilities. One is a heal, the other is an invulnerability. Each class has a "super" ability that can only be purchased at level 6 or higher. It has a 90 second cool-down which carries over if you die. I did okay with him but I got eaten alive by enemy shamans. They are the counter part to the alchemist. I'll talk about them more in detail in the next part. The paladin is a little slow, but if you can make it into a group enemies, activate your short invulnerability you can do some heavy damage before they take you out. Every character can "run", which is a forward double tap, but it uses up your action points which you might need for an ability. So you might run a little way, but if you run full tilt to the battle you're going to be shooting blanks. Overall I liked him, but sometimes you can't just run headlong into things and you need to think about it, team up, etc. He can equip two items which are grena..er magic orbs that have various powers. You get a choice between fireball, flash bang, poison, and smoke. Poison is very deadly. It will almost kill a character if they get near the gas cloud. These carry over between characters. Characters can also equip a ring and necklace specific to their class. They didn't have any necklaces available, but they have various rings which give different bonuses. The one I grabbed gave a 25% bonus to action points.

Alchemists are the wizards. They're quite powerful, but also vulnerable. Which is how wizards typically are in games. They have skill which is an instant kill when it's fully upgraded. At least, it seems to be for the evil side, the Horde. However, when I used the same skill on my Empire character, people didn't seem to die as much. Whenever an enemy shaman hit me with the instant kill crow of death, it looks like three crows coming at you, I was dead. That was it. Nothing you could do. The attack passes through walls. All you need to launch is a half second of visibility. The attack is made by putting the cursor on the enemy and right clicking. You can even jump up from behind a wall, target them and fall back down to safety. The attack will go out and seek them and kill them. It's incredibly powerful. Not as long range as the sniper rifle. I think I survived maybe 5% of the death crow attack against me, but it seems like as a good guy only about 75% of the attacks I made resulted in instant kills. I played matches where the Horde side had 6-7 of their 10 players playing shamans. It was a gong show. You could barely move without seeing crows sweep in. On top of that evil shamans super ability is a massive area of effect fireball which can kill anyone within a huge radius instantly. After a few rounds of that I found a more balanced room. A similarly built good team doesn't seem to have the same power. So, the character classes are not carbon copies of each other. I did play a couple rounds as a bad guy and the horde soldier's abilities were more focused on attack than defense. His passive skill was a bonus to his attack damage. The alchemist weapon is kind of an artillery cannon. You can shoot orbs out and if they hit someone, they'll blow right away or they'll stay solid and blow after a couple of seconds. Great for shooting around corners. Targeting of the instant kill ability is rough. Plenty of times it seemed like my cursor was read and I was clicking but nothing happening. Resulted in more than one death.

Warcry currently only has two play modes. Team death match and...wait for it... plant the bomb..er rub the crystal. I played one round of this. It's hard to make a Korean shooter without plant the bomb. This is a terrible game for it because you have two classes which have instant kills: Snipers and alchemists/shamans and one of those classes shoots through walls. When you choose quick play you'll get the screen you seen on the left. This is your map choice. The upper area contains the team deathmatch maps and the lower area is the rub the crystal maps. In this game mode you have to find 1 of 2 giant crystals and use your action key on them until they're activated. The other team has to wipe you out and/or rub the crystal in the other direction. Wax on, wax off.

Overall it's a decent little game. I have no idea when the actual release is. This is supposed to be their final test I believe, so it may be going live here any time. It has been a very long wait. I beleive I first heard about this game nearly two years ago. This practice of throwing a "coming soon" banner up on a gaming portal and taking two years to release kind of bothers me. At first, you're excited and can't wait for it. Then you realize it's going to take a long time to come out. You almost forget about it for awhile and then suddenly out of the blue you just happen to be on the site one day and you go "Oh yeah, that game." and find that it happens to be out or there is an open test up. This is driving me nuts with "Black Metal" right now as it looks to be very interesting, but they haven't updated in months and I have no idea what is going on with it. I'd recommend this one as a slightly different take on the shooter genre in Korea. Graphics are decent. Maxed out, it ran well on my new rig, and looks not bad. Level design is interesting. Most maps are not exact mirrors of each other which is kind of nice. They are close, and have similar features, but room layouts, even towers and things might be present on one side that aren't present on the other.

It took awhile but here is the gameplay video I recorded.