Card Hunter: A game about a game.

In between stripping wallpaper, painting and trying to move all my goods in eve halfway across the galaxy for our deployment to null, I accidently stumbled upon this little gem.

Card Hunter is a browser-based RPG card-game unlike anything I have played previously. The premise is that you and your friend Gary decide to play a game of his brother’s (the titular Card Hunter), do not worry, you are not magically sucked in to the game as it becomes reality. In fact the game sticks with the concept of playing a game at a mate’s house and runs with it.

The game may have a few tongue-in-cheek steriotypes.

You start by creating a single adventurer (and for once I did not call mine Brian) and go through some basic adventures. Each adventure is composed of a number of battles taking place on a board, complete with cardboard heroes and monsters to move about. Each turn you play a card for your hero which indicates the action you will take, for example a run card will allow you to move 3 spaces. Turns alternate card by card until both players pass in succession, at this point new cards are drawn and play continues.

The sheer range of cards and the abilities that they confer keeps play fresh and exciting as you never know when you may find that powerful card in your deck or have to think on your feet as you draw a hand of movement cards. The cards available are tied directly in to the equipment you are wearing and it is here that another level of strategy comes in to play. Your characters have a number of equipment slots (weapons, armour, items etc,) that increase in number as the heroes gain levels. You need to think seriously about the equipment in each slot, if you are up against a large number of weak monsters then you will want to think about weapons which add chop cards (which attack multiple enemies) or staves which add spells with blast radiuses to your deck.

Larry the Lizardman was in for a bad day at the gaming table!

Even going through the low level quests I have had to change my equipment (and thus my deck) several times as I needed more healing spells, different types of weapon damage and alternate support spells to succeed. This need for strategy ties in nicely with the loot system within the game, chests with random items drop at the end of the battle and better quality chests drop at the end of an adventure (series of battles). There is always a chance for that rare find even in the lowliest of chests and this helps to make every battle feel both important and rewarding. Excess loot can be sold at shops in order to purchase alternative equipment, although the conversion rate makes adventuring your prime source of new gear, with the shop supplying specialist pieces.

On the theme of shops, the game itself is free to play, but there is the option of paying to obtain the games secondary currency, pizza slices! These can be used to unlock adventures, different character models or to purchase club membership. There is the option to purchase a starter kit, which provides you with 11 treasure hunt adventures (each guaranteeing an epic item), a range of character models, some pizza slices and a month’s club-membership for the price of a mid-range game (about £20). Club membership provides extra loot drops on each adventure for the duration of your membership, similar to a subscription system.

That being said the in-game purchase options do not seem particularly intrusive or excessive; it is quite possible to play this game without paying any money and have a great time. The only real limitation is the lack of co-operative play, you control 3 heroes on an adventure and the setup seems perfect to all people to join your adventure and fight against the GM together. However this option is not within the game….. yet. There is a multiplayer competitive element to the game, but at this point in time I admit I am too absorbed on my latest adventure to attempt to fight real people. Apparently this village needs saving from some walking corpses………… How hard can it be? Cue repeated dying, time for a deck reshuffle!

Try out Card Hunter!

Test Drive: Age of Wushu

I have been wondering recently about exactly how much you can do in your first day within an MMO, how much of the story can you see? Are you able to get in to any crafting in a meaningful manner? How much combat is there? So I thought I would try and find out.

The brief is simple pick an MMO and play it for a day, see what happen and how much I can do. This is not a speed levelling run, just a chance to see what you get when you spend your first day in the games environs. Now on to the main event…

Age of Wushu is a martial-arts roleplaying game set within a game-world influenced heavily by Ancient China (no surprise there for a martial-arts game). I found out about this game through an article in a PC gaming magazine, but never really had much of a reason to try it out until now! It took a bit of a while to register my snail account, with about 20mins of registration failure before I got set up. The client is about 8 GB, so make sure you have a DVD on hand to watch, or maybe do the ironing.

PoorBrian in all his ragged glory!

Having downloaded the client and logged in, I begin creating my character. At present there are a limited range of visual options, but I manage to find something suitably bedraggled for my scruffy-faced character. I also need to select my origins story (which affects my starting place and probably my story-arc) and, having reviewed the option, plump for the ‘abducted sister in need of rescuing’ option (it seems suitably heart-breaking and I have decided this character is definitely going to be a tragic one). Then comes that most crucial of moments……….. the name! Given the rough-shod look and depressing backstory, one name leaps to the fore and thus PoorBrian is created!

So PoorBrian enters the world of Wushu and is lost within about 5 minutes (how unfortunate!). The quest pointers don’t always pop up on the map and so I have to mouse over the markers to find where I need to go (shock, horror!). The fact that there are so many markers on the map makes this feel like a needle in a haystack at times and I even find that clicking on the person’s name in the quest makes PoorBrian automatically walk to them, result!

The first hour or so is spent with the initial tutorial quests learning a few combat basics and fetching things for NPCs, a lot of things. I am even treated to a lovely cut-scene where PoorBrian relives the tragic abduction of his sister, before meeting a strange veiled lady who is stalking him (I wonder who she will turn out to be?). During this time there is a lot that you have to take in, particularly the interesting way that levelling is dealt with. You gain experience, which is gradually converted into cultivation (representing the fact that all that fetching has taught PoorBrian a lot, but he must first reflect on it). You select a skill to cultivate and it levels up as your experience is turned in to cultivation, voila reflecting on my time spent fetching a kite from a roof has increased my skill to fire a ball of chi. 

This is definitely NOT your missing sister!

After the initial introduction quests you are asked to choose a school of martial-arts to study (akin to choosing your class in other games), with 8 choices on offer. My eye lights upon the beggar school, that looks like the destiny of PoorBrian and I add a mental note to his backstory (namely he bankrupted himself after the abduction of his sister, spending all his money on products for the incredibly well-styled hair he has). However before he can join PoorBrian must first learn to beg, a task easily accomplished by finding the begging trainer and thus PoorBrian becomes PoorBrian the beggar!

For a group of alleged beggar the village in which they live is pretty plush, with a central stone building containing the head beggar that PoorBrian is desperate to meet. After a series of small quests, in which Poor Brian is taught the way of the beggar, our hero is sent back to the starting village and so armed with a new set of skills (and a begging bowl) PoorBrian heads off to help expel some snakes and thugs from a local tea forest.

Everything is going swimmingly, snakes are dying left, right & centre and guards fall beneath my hands (and I even manage to propel a few off of cliff). Suddenly from nowhere another player attacks and kills me in 2 hits, although dying is no big thing (you simply revive on-site or at the nearest town) it still feels a bit unfair, but griefing happens in any mmo and Age of Wushu even warns you each time you go in that it is a PvP environment. I hastily click revive on-site and PoorBrian is back on his feet, the next section of the quest asks me to form a team and try out a 3 man technique in an instance. The game shows me how to form a team and search for other players, but there are none around. It is at this point I hit a bit of a wall, with no-one around I cannot further the story (I did try to solo it and it ended up Reaper 2 PoorBrian 0) and so I decide to try my hand at crafting.

Begging is a skill and you can even try to sell random bags to other players!

Learning the necessary gathering skills is a simple matter of finding a trainer and paying for the skill, so armed with a pick-axe and axe-axe PoorBrian sets off to become the EasyJet of the mining and logging worlds! It all goes quite well and I soon have a good number of logs and ore, but you can never have enough, when the game suddenly tells me I have reached my skill cap for the day and should try again tomorrow. I have to admit this irks me somewhat, but no matter I will simply go make something with the resources I have gathered. Having learned the blacksmithing skill I quickly make my first item and am introduced to a gem matching mini-game which allows me to increase me mining skill further, this is a fun addition. However, I quickly hit my skill cap again and then another bystander kills me, again! This calls for drastic action…….

Therefore PoorBrian, who has come so far since the day his sister was abducted (who is obviously NOT the mysterious girl who follows him at every turn) and who dreams of becoming the greatest beggar of all time, sets off once more for the tea forest. The plan; to stand outside the instance and kill every enemy npc in sight, hoping that someone will help me complete it. PoorBrian stands, the body of a fallen tea guard at his feet, chi radiating off of him and the next one targeted. The in the distance heading toward him, another player, finally he can get that one bit closer to saving his sister, it’s the guys who killed him earlier. Oh dear……………………

You will end up seeing this a lot!

All in all, Age of Wushu was fun to play, but I don’t think I will be returning to it, or at least not until much later in its development (as it is still a work in progress). It is a beautiful world, but one that is hampered by unnecessary skill caps and the sometimes confusing quests. In addition the in-game store rents items out rather than offering an outright purchase, this would make me reluctant to purchase and spend any in game currency. However it deserves a lot of credit for its unique approach to levelling and for the fact it succeeds in creating a game which feels believable. While it’s not something I like personally, it does have a lot to recommend it and could be reward for someone willing to dedicate the time (and money) required to work through the early stages. It’s free to create and account on Age of Wushu, so if this sounds like your game, give it a go!

World of Warplanes: Why we all should fly!

When it comes to online games I have a strange love/hate relationship with the more competitive aspects of them. I remember playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and getting slightly fed up with the speed at which I died……Repeatedly. Ever since I have shied away from death-match style games of almost any sort and those I have dabbled with have been put down shortly after.

It was with a degree of trepidation that I downloaded World of Warplanes from Wargaming.net and entered my first live battle (after completing the obligatory training missions of course). It is at this point that many of you will be thinking how can he compare an first person shooter to an air combat game? Until about 2 weeks ago I would have responded like so ‘How different can it be, you choose your loadout, you see someone and you shoot them. They respawn you shoot them again, it’s basically all the same isn’t it?’. How wrong I was……

Admittedly my first few flights involved me dying spectacularly as I learned the ropes, namely that for some reason my wood and canvas framed biplane cannot stand head on against a twin-engine heavy fighter (who’d have thought it!) and that flying into someone right at the beginning can lead to a bit of a boring game! However as I fought more and more I realised that somehow this game had got its teeth into me and that maybe I had unfairly maligned player versus player activity based on my experience of one game. I actually care about my aircraft, I should be selling my low-tier craft and replacing with higher-tier more advanced craft, but instead I spend my tokens (the games temporary currency instead of real money while it’s in beta) buying more hangar space instead of on rare aircraft or training pilots, in order that I can have space for my beloved biplanes as well as my ever-growing range of heavy fighters, attack craft and carrier based craft.

 There is nothing so satisfying as causing an opponent to fly in to the sea.

Then there is the other thing I really love about this game, the pace of it. It is not as fast paced as something like Call of Duty, my airplane takes time to fly over to enemy airspace and in that time I have the luxury to think about my plan am; I hunting ground targets? Am I going to fly high and rain death from above? Yes it does get hectic and, if you are a fighter or carrier based aircraft, you are going to have to move quickly, but it is rare (short of the aforementioned biplane v heavy fighter moment) for an error to spell instant death. However when you do die, that’s it, your part in the match is over, but there is nothing to stop you going back to the hangar and starting a different battle in another of your aircraft, a new map, a new team and new enemies to shoot out of the sky! If you are looking for something competitive that feels a little different I urge you to give World of Warplanes a try!

Finally, having played this game has made me rethink my attitude to PvP as a whole, that maybe there is more to it than CoD, Battlefield or the battlegrounds in World of Warcraft (all of which are fine examples of PvP combat). Maybe it’s just a matter of finding one that suits your temperament and as I watch my beloved Biplane collide with the last plane on the map (which incidentally is a heavy fighter) I smile to myself as the game proclaims my team victorious!

This was not the aforementioned glorious victory!

What are you favourite PvP games (or elements of games) that you play online and what is it about them that keeps you coming back for one ………. more …………. match?