Mabinogi Heroes (Vindicktus in the U.S.) is the spiritual successor to 2005's smash hit from devCat, Mabinogi 'FANTASY LIFE', a Free-2-Play[F2P] MMO that may be free to play, but has a functioning cash shop where players can purchase in game items with real world money. The game was so wildly successful that a majority of U.S. developers are now going the F2P Marketing tactic.
But I am not here to discuss marketing ploys, only gaming. But to properly discuss this game, I must talk about the first one.
Mabinogi is an anime styled game that, despite being an MMO, felt much more like a true single-player experience. Not only does it feature a very deep story based on the Celtic Mythology, the Mabinogion, but it had a tremendous pseudo-turn based combat system, that was very rewarding and very difficult. To get hit even once wounded your character badly, and early on without high ranked skills and good armor, you would die in only one to three hits. Your inventory was very limited, hearkening back to the days of Diablo 2 for example.
You played as a Milletian, a person that lived on a separate plane of existence. You would fight monsters by playing a guessing game with them. You and your enemies had a select group of combat skills, Defense, Smash, Windmill, and Counter-attack are some of the melee skills you used. But, you can never know off the bat what a monster is using, you have to watch how they act when they use skills.
For example, if you use Windmill and have it ready to go, your character cannot move, and so the enemies cannot move. This goes the same for having your Counter-attack skill charged. You have to use your judgment when playing. If you used your Defense skill, you could only walk around. If you have your Smash attack charged, you can still run around. Being able to identify the skill a monster was about to use was very important to succeeding in melee combat.
It plays a bit like rock paper scissors in this case. The Defend skill will leave you vulnerable if you are countered with it, and give the enemy a free hit. If you try to get too close to a monster using Windmill, they will knock you away. If you and your opponent end up attacking each other with Smash or normal attacks, there is a dice roll on who gets the hit, and sometimes you will just hit each other and the one with more hit recovery will have the upper hand.
There isn't just melee combat, but even more. There are plenty of magic skills, archery skills, alchemy skills, and life skills. Life skills are your crafts like cooking, tailoring etc. Then there are story based transformation skills such as the Paladin, Dark Knight, and godly powers such as Neamhain's Light and Morrighan's Power that you can stack on top of your transformation.
It is a very tactical game, with very long dungeon crawls and tons of loot and enemies to find. Armor was mostly useless unless you could upgrade it to the highest level and find good enchantments, but even then it was just aesthetics with passive stat boosts.
The game featured a depth not before seen in an MMO. The very food you ate would raise and lower your statistics for example. You would constantly need to seek aid from a healer if you were wounded, or spend time doing it yourself. Playing in a party was usually the better way, because bandages worked better when one was "Resting". You would also have to take part in part-time jobs for the priests and priestesses so that you could earn Holy water and bless your equipment.
If you died in a dungeon, you have a chance of dropping your equipment on death. If you exited a dungeon, you would have to pay a fee to get it back. Blessing your equipment prevents it from falling off...but the enchantment almost always wears off from everything on a single knock out.
The music score for the game, composed mostly by HanStone, is spectacular. Every single NPC has their own musical theme. The graphics may look dated, but they were pretty and fit very well for the kind of game it was. You could become very proficient with any weapon and apply one of eight Ego spirits depending on your weapon type, which could be upgraded and grant you a special attack.
You could learn skills by talking to NPCs and then by using those skills, get them to a point you could level them up. Perfectly learning a rank of a skill would grant you some bonus EXP on it's raising. You used AP that you gain by aging in game, leveling up, and reading books to rank these skills up.
The transformation system was a very huge, very cool touch to the game, especially after you go through the uber-long story quest to even get it. The Paladin is the servant of Morrighan, the Knight of Light. The Dark Knight is a fallen paladin who gave into Fomor powers, and should you choose to fall as a Dark Knight, you cannot go back. There are two other races in the game each with their own transformations, but these races, the Elves and Giants, have no bearing on the ultimate story, only humans do (And only humans can be Paladins or Dark Knights).
To go over everything in the game would take up this whole review, so instead I'll just list a few gripes and be done with it.
The combat system for Mabinogi is excellent, but there are many monsters in the harder dungeons that can completely wipe the floor with you simply because they all have passive skills like "Heavy Stander", "Natural Reflection" or "Mana Refractor". These skills are basically passives that only the enemies have. Heavy Stander is a red shield that will sometimes proc if you hit a monster with melee, and when it does, it acts as if they had Defense active, so they immediately parry your attacks, reduce the damage you caused, and get free hits, and these free hits would be the end of you 99% of the time.
Natural Reflection was the archery equivalent, but since Magnum Shot always knocks down the enemy, it is not as big a problem. Mana Refractor is just the mana version, however, Firebolt always knocks enemies down, Lightning does not and can only hit once, meaning you could be boned. Ice bolts can be charged to 5 shots, so you would be fine assuming you had some left.
It was an extremely cheap tactic that would taunt and kill the players constantly, forcing them to lose their entire run or waste money on buying cash shop items that let them revive in the dungeon. There were some revive options. You could restart from the beginning and have to run all the way back to where you fell, or you could revive on the spot and lose a lot of EXP. Either way, you lost a lot of EXP, and in some cases would take health damage.
Not only that, you can and will be ganged up on by multiple monsters, and it is very difficult to combat them without a high ranked Windmill skill. The key is to stay in corners and keep your distance of course. There are also numerous skills you can use, such as "Play Dead", to help you solo a bit better.
What's worse is that every combat form except Archery is underpowered. The bow can keep a constant rate of fire compared to everything else and constantly stun, wound, and royally screw the enemy. With high Ranged Combat Mastery, and perhaps Arrow Revolver(A valued troll skill in the world of Mabi), you don't really need melee. It's by far the most fun way to fight though, using a bow and arrow.
It's a game remarkably difficult despite having a cute facade. The difficulty is most likely in place just to force people to buy things.
Now that you have a feeling what the first was like, we can talk about Mabinogi Heroes.
Imagine all of what I just explained does not exist for the most part. Mabinogi Heroes is an Action RPG that takes heavily from Capcom's Monster Hunter series, a move which really hurts the game.
Mabinogi Heroes is played in instanced dungeons that you once had to pay tokens for, which is the fatigue system still used in the other versions. It was taken out of U.S. version because the game is so dead and lifeless here, they had to do what they could to keep players.
You have a town hub where all the NPCs are this time, all hidden away behind little doors. There is no multitude of large towns to explore anymore. All you get in this game are gritty looking portraits and a small text box, no more world interaction. One of the bigger differences is this game is not free roaming, there is nothing to do outside of the dungeon save for learning an expertise, which just means you can craft items at a lower material cost and give it a chance to be three stars instead of two, granting it a very tiny stat boost. Big whoop. Most players think that gives them the right to vastly overprice their hand-made items though, oddly enough. Must be a case unwarranted self importance.
The biggest insult is that there is very little music in the game.
The game's story is based as a "prequel" of sorts before Mabinogi, you do not play as a Milletian, but as a mercenary in a small-town club. Your character apparently wants to join the Royal army, so that's basically all the story you get. You're just trying to join the Royal army. Not once in the story do you feel that you are ever making a change, which is mind-numbing.
Hold on, I need a better place to start with this.
Ok, combat first, this will be easier.
The combat is pretty typical for an ARPG. It's better than monster hunter that's for sure. There are four characters to play as, each with their own weapons and skills to bring to the table. You can no longer learn every skill like in Mabinogi and choose to specialize, you just have to pick a pre-set gender and class.
Fiona, Evy, and Lethita (Evie and Lann for U.S.)and most recently released, Karok, are the ones you can play.
Fiona is the sword and shield character. She can also upgrade to the superior Long Hammer later. Her shield allows her to perform heavy stander and counter-attacks, meaning she can completely negate damage done to her and return hefty amounts.
She is easily the best character because of her ability to use Large Shields and Heavy Stander, because Heavy Stander will completely negate any damage you could take, and large shields halve the stamina lost while also preventing your knock back.
With the new hammer revamp, hammers are incredibly powerful and make short work of any boss.
She doesn't even have to wear armor, she just needs a shield. She deals the most damage to both bosses and the dungeon at large, and really is the main character.
Lann is basically a gender-swapped Fiona but he wields two swords, and could possibly dual wield spears later(They just look like swords anyway, they aren't very distinguishable. They don't even thrust like spears). The worst of the bunch easily, and by far. He may attack the fastest, but all he can do is fight trash mobs and clean out the dungeon, which ruins the fun of the other players.
Lann is the character for unskilled players to use, because he later gains a skill that lets him spin around by holding a button and he can just easily kill every single non-boss monster before the other characters can even attack. It's an auto-win button that needs to be taken out. In fact, Lann should just be removed altogether and replaced with Kai, the archer they are working on still.
Lann also dies the fastest at the bosses, and the only reason he might survive is because other players are taking the aggro and actually doing work. Overall, utter crap and serves only to piss the rest of the players off.
Evy is the Magician character, a flat chested wizard still going through puberty that can learn all sorts of things if using the staff. She can later use a scythe, but it is horribly underpowered compared to the staff and rarely does anybody actually use one.
Staff Evy can use magic like Ice Spear, which freezes all monsters, including bosses which allows the rest of the group to wail on them. Her attacks all come with cool down, and her magic missile normal attack costs stamina. She is mostly a support character, because she can also use alchemy to create health erg crystals which heal other plays, revive incapacitated players, and cast a spell that sets up a stationary healing area that can only heal once every two minutes.
Both Scythe and Staff Evys can use Alchemy, which range from setting up a Mana Turret, to summoning a Golem.
Finally, there is the big man, Karok, obviously a throwback to the Giant race of Mabinogi. He carries a giant pillar into combat and beats monsters over the head with it. He can also master grappling attacks and can grab bosses and other monsters the other characters cannot. Great for stunning bosses with his Boss Bash and Clash skills, but not exactly the tank that Fiona is. He can throw his pillar down and engage in hand-to-hand combat as well, serving a monk-like purpose I suppose. Kind of reminds me of Dungeon & Fighter actually. The Monk class had to throw his weapon down before he could use his Infighter abilities.
Combat is handled in a four string attack system. At the end of every attack you can perform a smash attack, which is the combo finisher. There is no way to string combos, so you just repeat this process.
The different types of weapons Fiona gets, for example, change what smashes she will use. All of the smash skills used by the sword can be specialized in and ranked up, but they are kind of weak. Hammer skills are fewer, and most don't need to be ranked up but they are stronger than the sword is.
You can also grapple enemies and smash them against walls, which heals the entire party. Kicking them off cliffs and throwing them into objects also heals the party and provides an instant kill. You can also pick up the objects you will find conveniently placed across the field of battle and bash monsters with those. Often a good tactic, because using Smash with an object does more damage than any combo.
Also, unlike the original mabinogi, your skills don't feel that special anymore. They just feel like generic things you put points into now, there is no impact to it. It hurts to see, because there was so much put into it before, that it's a total disgrace this has to be the direction it takes. Getting your first skill to Rank 9(Skills in Mabinogi follow a rank from F to A, then 9 to 1, 1 being the highest rank possible) was a serious accomplishment early on, and the more you did it, it just felt better. So there goes the magic of having real depth in your skill customization.
That's basically it. Typical ARPG.
The dungeons are unforgiveable. This game's dungeons are very definition of one word: Repetitive.
Three entire dungeons are just copy pastes of each other with different daylight settings, which is the ruins setting. Two dungeons are the same, just one is darker than the other. The Cavern of Ice dungeons. Same with another one....the barren prairie where the Fomorian base is. There are only three unique dungeons as it stands. Ainle, a town ravaged by dimensional vampires, the Sewers, a shoe-horned story episode, and Ortel Castle which is the upcoming Episode 8 dungeon.
The enemies aren't even that distinctive either, unlike Mabinogi. They constantly reuse the same type. You fight Gnolls first, then kobolds. Then you fight vampires and possessed goblins. Cool. Then you fight different gnolls, and then different kobolds. Then you fight some unpossessed goblins and a few ogres, then you fight some mutated rat men and crazy lizards. This is all spiced up by adding critters like eight different kinds of spiders, two variants of toads, digging creatures that only serve to piss you off and slimes with them as well, all of which have no different attacks they just look different between the dungeons.
The only thing different and yet the same about every single dungeon is the boss. At the end of each entire dungeon area, you will usually find a boss that drops a bunch of materials so you can make armor based off their appearance, a la Monster Hunter. This is an extremely long, convoluted process that will drive sane people to pure insanity, because some materials are so ridiculous to obtain and make no sense in the crafting process that you'll just rage and buy it from someone else.
Seriously, how does getting a dozen Wild Berries, that have a super rare drop rate and story wise only help cure someone's shock and fear, from some forest ruins help you craft armor? Is the mere process of trying to craft that specific armor so maddening you just need a little snack?
One small thing to note is that once you die, there is no respawning unless someone revives you. That, or buy a cash shop item that auto revives you in the dungeon. So if you die solo, I've got one initialism for you: GG.
There are secondary weapons in this game that you can equip, but the mechanic is made irritating because you can only use one. You are forced to pick one and you can't switch while in the dungeon, meaning you bring spears or flashbangs for your boss, or you bring tiny mining bombs to get ore, which you desperately need. Especially later on for crafting Exquisite Iron ores to make the best armor and weapons.
The one-weapon limit is, putting it humbly, crap, and doesn't belong. It should be two spear types, and two bomb types you can bring, because there are a lot of bombs. You have spears and chain hooks for physical attacks. The hand bombs for killing, the mining bombs, the flashbangs, and the unreleased sticky bombs. The bombs don't even look that big in game, and this game is definitely going on the realism route, so this is just nonsense that encourages people to hack and find the console hack that lets them bind their keys to console commands that let them switch to other weapons during the run.
I forgot to mention that these bombs bounce around a LOT and you'll almost never hit what you want with them.
Almost every single area of the dungeon you will recognize after a while. There is no real variety to them, which is unacceptable in a third-person ARPG like this in this day and age. I mean, we're not talking repetition you can excuse, this is real copy-paste. The same thing as the Final Fantasy 14 debacle. That is plain lazy and I can't believe nobody has called it out for this yet. The fact all the dungeon terrains up until the freaking sewer level have been re-used is bad enough, but they can't even complete a few numerous areas to bind the dungeons together.
You know, I act like the unique dungeons themselves are special. They aren't, trust me. Still three or four areas per run all the same thing.
All the boss rooms look the same too, they just drop different layers of crap in it and change the enemy layout.
Most recently, this game was made extremely easy by a nerf from the wonderful team at Nexon NA. All the dungeons currently are nerfed to the extreme. Bosses attack less, there are fewer enemies, there are some bosses that are taken out, and the routines for spawning are longer or have new conditions.
So it's really impossible to die now, there is no challenge.
But there was one huge side effect. Enchant Scrolls are impossible to get now. They are holy grail status, all the good scrolls have been rendered attainable only by aspies. So high level players can no longer look forward to getting their much needed enchants to combat the soon-to-come hardcore dungeons with bosses that can easily wipe out the strongest parties.
It doesn't help matters that Nexon NA has rigged the RNG(Random Number Generator) for the enhancement and enchantment systems, and enchants with decent rates more often than not fail. And for some of these good enchants which happen to be Rank 9 level, they could possibly destroy your hard earned item. They only rigged it to force people to buy expensive cash shop items that will protect them only up to a certain level.
Obviously.
Did I mention that the crafting system really sucks? The amount of materials you need are extortion level. There are some materials in this game, the Heavy Warrior Hammer Fragment and Bloody Thorn are easily the best examples, that have a non-existant drop rate. The hammer fragments drop from a random boss who only drops one evil core each time he is defeated, the evil cores being the random item you'll get based on where you are.
But the enemies that drop bloody thorns, that are in the sewers, don't even appear half the time, and they are the type of enemy that almost never drops a single thing, and I know this from two full play throughs as Evy and Fiona: The hemdrills, the digger worm enemies.
Of course...it's not like it really matters. Armor is mostly an aesthetic with passive stat boosts, and this is true for everyone, not just Fiona. There isn't a single set of armor in this game that distinguishes itself from any other. The best armor in the game is plate armor, so if you can wear that, there is no reason to wear anything else. Unless of course, you're staff Evy and need INT boost from cloth.
But regardless, light and heavy armor serves absolutely no purpose. They are just weaker, unnecessary alternatives to Plate armor. This is horrible, as you can tell. How can there be not one single unique set in this game, an armor or weapon that sets itself apart? This is a huge folly in any RPG and deserves to be mentioned. There's nothing unique, there is no reason to mix and match your armor except to look like a weeaboo or obsessive autist. This further hurts the sense of character development.
By truly unique armor, I'm talking about stuff that you would risk wearing for certain boosts alone just to put some strategy into your game. This game plays out like your typical JRPG, you just make the next best thing when you can to be competitive in combat for your level. That's it. No depth, no strategy, just tedious grinding for materials to make the armor.
All the weapons are crafted using similar materials too, often times even more than any one piece of armor. Most of the endgame weapons have mildly different stats than each other, again I go back to the argument there is nothing appealing or unique about these weapons, and that is BS!
It's like Mass Effect's loot system all over again too! It's all just generically named trash you constantly get that you don't feel has any weight, worth, or sentimental value because of how quickly you throw it all away.
We've been there, we've done that. This isn't new, this is just sugar coated feces. That's what really depresses me about it. The potential for an extraordinary leap into the real-time gaming scene completely ruined because they had to rip off an equally boring and tedious title.
Now, let's recap:
Mabinogi:
- Great Soundtrack
- A deep story telling to follow
- Long dungeons packed to the brim with monsters and consisting of long periods of tactical and strategic turn-based combat
- Unique monsters and bosses based on the difficulty of your dungeon, often times gimmicky but fun and completely unscripted
- An incredible skill system to manage and train.
- Open world, large amounts of exploration.
- NPCs you could actually get to know and form relationships with (albeit limiting because it's an MMO....hint hint)
Mabinogi Heroes:
- Barely any music.
- Horrible story, with only one interesting quest in the entire game
- Short dungeons consisting of only two to three areas before the fourth boss room, very few enemies, lots of downtime and running around.
- Copy pasted monsters, lazy design.
- Generic skill system
- Instanced
- No sense of NPC involvement. You rarely see ANY NPC in game for that matter. The Crimson Blades appear in a few dungeons, but thats it. And there are barely any cutscenes. This game has only FOUR cutscenes compared to Mabinogi having much more for every single story mission. The first being the prologue, the second being where you defend Colhen from attack, the third being Keaghan and Gwynn having a conversation before Shakarr attacks them, and the fourth being some little overlook of Tieve walking to Rocheste.
This all proves that devCat should have just stuck with Mabinogi, they've proved they cannot enter the world of the ARPG or real-time gaming in general for that matter.
devCat once announced something with this game, that it was an experiment, they wanted to see if it would succeed. They are planning to take it up to 10 episodes, and go from there. Hey, if you're going to experiment, at least make an effort. Crapping bricks right near the end and then suddenly trying to create unique dungeons isn't going to help your cause now is it?
I'm serious. Everything past the Sewer, which is Episode 7, is going to be unique, but the amount of effort required to start seeing some really cool stuff is baffling, it's ridiculous. It's all Level 60+ stuff.
The pacing of this game is seriously off too. The experience tables reek of modification, and you'll constantly get tons of quests for dungeons you can't even visit yet. Not only that, but for some reason, you are required to constantly re-do the dungeons so you can earn Battle Points and get these little achievement points that do absolutely "nothing" for you, except unlock the next dungeon, which is just lame.
You get these points by completing the Oaths of Honor and other really hackneyed bonus missions inside a dungeon. Like getting really lucky and getting copper ore to come out of an ore deposit, or even worse, trying to find Blessed Magic Powder. The drop rates are horrendous and what actually drops these items only spawns once the entire run, and it only consists of three enemies like the Wisps.
If you hover over the little ? help symbol on the battle menu, it says you can earn items or a title by fully completing these dungeons. This is a bald-faced lie. It's a waste of time that only wastes the player's time if they happen to be a completionist like me.
There are three difficulties, only one is ever predominantly played by the users by the way. Normal(Easy) - Hard(Normal) - Hero(Hard)
Everyone is always playing on Normal, they never go for Hard. I could say some things about that, but why state the obvious am I right?
Hero mode is available only to players Level 50 or higher. The bosses will drop tons of items, and even have a chance at the now non-existant enchant scrolls. However, the dungeons grow some huge balls and become real challenges.
No wait, they don't, because devCat's sense of adding challenge is just by adding in an RNG that randomly assigns titles to monsters that take away their hit stun and add special effects like inflicting poison or fire! Haha, I almost gave the illusion that there was actually content in this game!
These "champion" monsters don't even drop any items. They never do. Even if they did, it'd just be some lame crap like magic powder, an enhancement stone, or a material for "crafting". Again....
You're just putting more effort into a still pathetically easy game and not getting anything for it. The Hero mode bosses just grab the nearest bottle of steroids and move even faster, making them much more of a pain. It's not challenging it's just stupid. There is no sense of accomplishment for beating a boss solo, because this entire game is an unbalanced wank-fest.
And this story makes no sense, it's like Crysis' story, it opens all these plot points and goes nowhere with them. For example, the whole point leading up to the big Titan Cyclops fight is by collecting these mirror fragments then fighting this hellish demonic looking goblin. No explanation, and they just quietly drop it afterwards.
And you know, when the most interesting quest in the game is right at the end, that's pretty sad.
And this quest, oh yes, this is about the only thing someone would remember. The quest is the only interesting thing in the entire game, but it is pretty stupid. Basically what is happening when you get to be a Royal Army Cadet, you go to Rocheste and explore the town. You find out that the dragon pet that Keaghan has is causing some civil uproar, that it keeps crapping on their homes, and it eats a medieval truckload of food, being a major nuisance. Even horses that your quest-giver says were pretty good for military purposes (although you never see a single horse being used in this game).
So what he asks you to do is find this ore that looks like Renos ore. Renos is a gold ore basically, but this fake ore is silver in color. So you find it, and all he wanted it for was to feed this to the dragon so that when it craps, it basically showers everyone with fake money and that would make them happy...I guess.
It makes no sense, but it was the one good unique quest to stand out.
That dragon never helps out though, even when Colhen is under attack. Colhen is just a two minute walk from Rocheste too. Go figure. God I feel like the story telling is Final Fantasy 8 bad. THAT bad. Jesus. And Keaghan never does anything, nor does anyone else. It's always you, and they act like they're doing something. That kind of story telling really gets under my skin and it's amazing it's still being used today.
What's worse is how unappealing and lame the Transformation quest was. In Mabinogi, the entirety of G2 (The second biggest patch and story line) was all about becoming a paladin. You had to go and collect mithril ore in a special dungeon, get it made into the armor, then you had to seek out this fairy who will magically enchant it, then you have to pass a few tests along the way and earn your right to be a Paladin.
And at the end when you finally get your power, it just feels so amazing.
In Heroes? Yeah, no. What? You thought even something that cool was going to make it through the dumbing down process? Think again.
Here, all you get is a little quest line that feels like it was written by the lead writer of Gundam Seed. It's the most dreary and dull thing ever. "OMG! Is it right to kill for the goddess?" And they just push this fact, it's so painful to even acknowledge this was given the green light.
That's what it is. Just your character's personal inner conflict about this childish notion of fighting. "STOP FIGHTING!" But I am fighting! Oh wait, "I WILL FIGHT"!
It's this kind of trope that was a running joke in children's TV shows for crying out loud.
Well, yeah, that's basically it. After you pass a few dumb quests, you get a very simple choice: Spare or Kill.
Of course, it does nothing. You don't actually kill the person in question. And like with the Legend of Zelda, they so helpfully highlight all of the text in this quest and contradict themselves. Man, I can't even write about how bad this is, you'd have to look on the Vindictus Wiki to read this and see how asinine it is. I warn you, you will lose ten IQ points for doing so.
And that's it. They just let you become a Paladin or Dark Knight based on this alone. You just magically get the armor and strength of nature, and nobody "ever" comments on this. Oh, and Paladins and Dark Knights are BOTH servants of Morrighan now. Apparently Paladins don't believe in killing for the Oracle, the person who will lead the Humans(Tuatha de Danaan) to Erinn, the paradise, and Dark Knights just want to fight. Yeah. Great.
This kind of fifteen-year old's fanfic writing needs to be abolished from video gaming.
And that's it. There's nothing else to say. There is no story here. All you are doing is being everybody's personal red-headed step child and fighting the fomors. You never get any respect for your actions in the story until the very end when you get promoted at the end of Episode 7, then NPCs will start kissing your battered posterior
This won't last though. As was the same with Mabinogi's storyline, now that you've risen to the highest point, you will be betrayed soon.
There's only one thing left to talk about: The graphics.
It's a modified and slightly upgraded version of the Source Engine. That's it.
All in all, this game isn't even trying, nor are the developers. It's a grind-fest that will make even Asian RPG enthusiasts cringe in pain. Nobody should play this game unless somewhere down the road a Private server gets released, because that's the only possible way this game could be made long-term playable outside of devCat completely overhauling the game and re-releasing it as a full SP game.
It's an uninspired, derivative, knock off piece of garbage. I hate saying this about this kind of game because of how desperately we need an answer to all the plain vanilla shooters out there constantly being rehashed and re-released in our market, but I am not going to sit back and watch others potentially delude themselves into liking this. I needed to get the facts out. I tried to like this game, I really did, but with something this bad it's just not possible. It does not hold up to the standards set before it, and it has failed miserably.
devCat should just stick with slower games, because they have shown they cannot handle the demanding, fast paced genre of gaming.