Darkrima first impressions: the game is masturbating

Today I had a chance to take Hong Kong developer Lemongame’s new browser MMORPG, Darkrima, for a spin. The game enters open beta today and is “free to play”; you can check it out here and players who try it in the next week will get access to some special gifts.

Now, it’s no secret that I’m not a huge fan of MMOs, so before I say anything else here, fair warning: I’m not the target market for this kind of game. That said, I have enjoyed other MMOs I’ve played more than this one. Here’s why.

Gameplay

My biggest problem with Darkrima‘s gameplay is that there isn’t any. I would assume that at some point the game gets more challenging, but for the hour-plus I spent with Darkrima, the game basically played itself. As a player, I really felt like my participation was pretty superfluous and the game was happy to play itself with or without my presence.

Here’s a typical quest in Darkrima: you read some explanatory text and then click “Accept” to accept the quest. Then you sit around while your character auto-travels to the quest location, auto-collects or auto-fights whatever he or she needs to, and then auto-travels back to the quest-giver to turn in the completed quest. You can, if you want, select which type of attack to use, but it’s generally not necessary. I completed virtually every quest in the game’s first hour with just two button clicks: one mouse click to accept the quest, and then a second one later to turn it in.

In fact, as I type this, my character is slaying ice monsters and spiders in another browser tab. As of when I last checked that tab, I’d slayed about 150 of them without pressing any button.

And while you can choose to turn off the automation and go off the beaten path, doing so is risky, because if you ever die, you’ll need to spend money to resurrect yourself (although if you quit the game and then re-enter, that seems to serve as a work-around). You’ll also need to spend money to do a whole host of other things.

Honestly, the whole thing feels a bit masturbatory. Auto-traveling and auto-attacking are the default options, and one really gets the impression that the game wants to play itself, leaving the player to observe (or not) and occasionally click buttons that progress it to the next quest, or click buttons that put more money into the player’s in-game account. As with most MMOs, there is more depth in the game’s equipment and skill tree systems, but the core gameplay here is so boring that I don’t think you’ll care. I certainly didn’t.

Cluttered design, but decent writing

The game’s visual design isn’t much better than its gameplay. While it features a well-drawn 2.5D fantasy world with interesting looking monsters, they’re shoved into cluttered areas in massive groups, and the screen is covered with various elements of the game’s UI. Part of the problem may be that I was playing on a laptop with a relatively small screen, but this is a browser game—shouldn’t it be designed for laptops with pretty small screens?

Moreover, some elements of the UI are borderline useless. The minimap in the top corner, for example, shows a section of the world that’s only barely larger than what you can see on the screen at any given time. And since you can auto-travel to virtually everywhere, why does there really need to be a big minimap in the game’s UI anyway? It’s not like players have to navigate anywhere on their own.