Crimecraft isn’t an MMO in the sense that Tabula Rasa was an open world, but more along the lines of Guild Wars: Public lobbies, while the action takes place in instanced matches. Crimecraft is a third person shooter, one of the first MMO’s to be built off of the Unreal 3 engine, next to TERA Online, Huxley, Global Agenda, Mortal Online, and more. You have a choice of PvP and PvE.
Please remember: Crimecraft is in open beta. It is not a finished product.
At 3.3 gigabytes, Crimecraft comes in at one of the smaller MMO’s on the market, and respectively didn’t take long to download, helped by the fact that the client was hosted through Fileplanet. I got my key, went to sleep, and the next morning I was ready and rearing to go.
Creating your thug in Crimecraft is relatively easy, if not somewhat restrictive. When creating my character, I chose from about eight faces, six hairstyles, and a lot of pallette swipes of the same style of clothing in a variety of sickly-looking colors.
You are only afforded one name in Crimecraft and, because I’m not the best name-chooser, I decided to do a quick scan of my shelf to find the best copyright infringing, thuggish sounding name I could think of. Barring the inability to have a space in your name, I might have picked Phoenix Wright, but I decided to swing for Nintendogs instead. An intimidating name, to say the least.
The game controls as you would expect, similar to any other 3rd person shooter. I was dropped immediately into the “lobby” where I approached the first person with a red exclamation mark over his head. Sgt. Corbett is his name, and kicking ass is his game.
One issue I found immediately with Crimecraft was how awkward it was to talk to people when in the lobby, and interact. Occasionally, it took a few times hitting the interact button to get a response. Nothing earth-shattering or game altering, but a note nonetheless. Sgt. Corbett had me move on to a garrison that represented the game’s invisible walls to keep you in the lobby. I was then given my first real mission; I had to kill any member of gang in the LXM Port Complex. This is where I got a taste of the game’s instanced combat.
The first time I attempted to enter an instance, I’ll admit it was somewhat confusing. You had to click on the instance name in the menu, hit join, then a menu in the lower left hand corner would appear giving you a list of lobbies that were open. You had to then click on that, wait for the lobby to turn red (indicating that it was ready) and then double click on it again to join in. Hopefully this system will change before the game fully launches, but then again it is a beta.
The instance loaded quickly enough, and I found myself in one of the game’s PvE instances, where players compete to kill the most enemies to rack up points, gain experience, get loot, and avoid dying. You gain points by killing enemies, however you’ll also gain extra points by obtaining headshots, achieving multi-kills, and grabbing various loot piles strewn throughout the map (You stand on them, and after a quick progress bar, you’ll pick them up automatically). Dying results in a loss of some points, and pushing you back to the front of the map where enemies quickly respawn. The aim of the game is that, the further through the map you get, the more points you’ll receive, and at the end is a boss that gives you a good amount of points if you manage to kill him.
After I finished the mission (the time ran out and I’d managed to kill the one NPC thug I needed to complete the mission) I ended in last place and gained a paltry 80 dollars for my feeble attempt, although I also exited as level 2.
My first true Player Vs Player attempt was to jump into a random map, without paying any attention to game-mode, etc. What I found was a game of domination, where players are thrown into a map of five control points, and must fight for control of the majority. After a brief black and white warmup round, I was ready to go with my starter weapons; only to be immediately killed. For some reason, from then on out, when I start any PvP game, it decides that the teams need to be balanced, and Nintendogs is just the guy to balance it out. So I start out every game with a fresh death, and a new set of friends.
In games like World of Warcraft, Warhammer, etc, there are tier systems to ensure that players who are, say, level 60, aren’t being paired up with players who are just starting the game. In Crimecraft, no such tiering system exists, and I was thrust into the game with players who were over twenty levels above me. After playing my first few games on the PvP spectrum, I found that the tiering system in Crimecraft is not actually needed, as the levels did not give you that great of an advantage over lower levels. They did have more weapons than I did, such as high powered sniper rifles, and more powerful guns, but I was able to rack up quite a few kills by utilizing tactics, and stealing kills from other people.
Higher level players did have an upper hand against me, but the game never felt overly unbalanced, nor did I have much of an issue racking up kills as the game progressed.
Crimecraft is a pretty game, no doubt, and the visual effects from the Unreal 3.0 Engine are rendered impressivley with the overlay effects, lighting, etc (Because a game is nothing nowadays without its lighting). The physics, on the other hand, became unintentional points of hilarity, as my character had a habit of losing all the bones in his neck upon death, leaving him in very awkward positions; incredibly painful were he not, you know, dead.
I was not able to do much crafting in-game, but it is similar to that of Tabula Rasa, finding crafting parts and using them at designated stations to implement modifications.
CrimeCraft is shaping up to be a great game, hopefully one that rises in users after the beta period is over (I noted 300 players on the test server while I was playing today). As of currently, I am level 7 on the beta, and continuing to stockpile gold chains I’ve been receiving off of enemies.
Look for Crimecraft to hit the live servers on August 25th. You can check out the beta here:
http://www.fileplanet.com/promotions/crimecraft/beta/ (US and Canada only)
And as I promised: More neck snapping frivolity.
MMO Fallout 