Mirror War: Reincarnation of Holiness Southeast Asia alpha client preview

Mirror War: Reincarnation of Holiness is an MMORPG from Korea featuring an interesting battle system. While it’s got your standard 3D open-world MMORPG aspects, its instanced battles are arcade shooters, vertical and horizontal side scrolling bullet-hell shooting sessions. Check out this gameplay video to see what I mean:

Crazy, huh? And just when you thought the world had moved on from arcade shooters to bro shooters.

With the English version of Mirror War slated to be released pretty soon in Southeast Asia — as early as Q1 next year — I was recently invited by Southeast Asian publisher IAHGames to preview it.

Mirror War features three different factions: the Evil Force, Black Sorcery, and the Liberation Team, all with their own characters and back stories. Each faction has four unique classes, giving players twelve different playable classes to choose from. Each of these classes contain a total of 64 professions and over 1,500 different skills to choose from. Skills are separated into three talent trees. Localization for the game was still under way, so I was not able to check out the full premise, but from what I can tell, every character has its own deep backstory.

Gameplay is pretty simple. Each quest is completed in instanced dungeon runs, where the game world switches from 3D MMORPG to arcade shooter. Your character is at the bottom of the screen, usually accompanied by a few meatshield NPCs, and you run through your spell hotkeys to attack. You control your character completely via the keyboard in battles. It sounds tough, but really isn’t all that difficult.

As you can see from the video, the user interface is well labelled and the controls are intuitive. You can also jump! Something which adds an entirely new dimension to the arcade shooter. If you’re worried about not being able to grasp the controls, there are also comprehensive tutorials that you get to run through before jumping into something new about the game. Perspectives sometimes shift during major fights, but these aren’t much more than a cosmetic change.

One thing really noteworthy about Mirror War is its soundtrack. For a free-to-play MMORPG, it has pretty epic background music. Its sound effects are standard, but boy, that music wouldn’t be out of place in a triple-A box game. And there’s a lot of it, too! Every area I had the chance to visit had different background tracks.

Outside of its unique battles, Mirror War has all your standard, time-consuming RPG features like guilds, player banks, stores, questing, fast travel, mail boxes, enchanting and achievements. IAHGames is also pushing for the addition of pets that add passive buffs, and customizable guild houses for the Southeast Asian client.

There’s only one unfortunate thing about the game. Dungeon runs use up stamina, and stamina is only replenished daily. You will not be able to buy refills from the cash shop. This means you can only play for a set time each day. The QA testers said players would be free to make more characters and play those, but the limited time with each character each day means that progression will be severely impeded. It makes me wonder if there’s enough content in the game to keep players interested, or if Mirror War’s selling point is its battle system, but we’ll see when it launches.

Characters will be capped at level 30, but IAHGames said that they already have content patches for higher levels prepared, and these will be launched when there are enough players heading towards the cap.

My time with Mirror War was enjoyable, to say the least. The arcade shooter gameplay is a solid sell based on just nostalgia, but manages to keep your interest going by actually being well developed and great fun to play. Of course, I was using a test account, so I was severely overleveled, but boss mechanics were challenging enough even for that.