I needed a bit of a break from the slightly monotonous space combat of Star Trek Online, so I’ve been checking out a few free online games. Today I had a bash at Warrior Epic.
Warrior Epic is a sort of Diablo-esque affair, though using a 3D engine for both world and characters. I picked it because it was described as you having a Hall of warriors that you could send on missions. I was expecting to be able to take a team of characters with me, but it turns out you can only take one character on any given mission, though inventory is shared between all your characters. Being an online game you can team up with other players if you choose.
There are a similar selection of classes, and Warrior Epic is guilty of one of my major Diablo annoyances: That each class is restricted to one sex or the other. All but one are human. I must admit I quite like the non-human Pangolans, perhaps because they remind me a little of Red XIII from Final Fantasy 7, so I decided to try one first. Each class has a choice of two paths. Meet Paco of the Green, a tamer. Tamers are a ranged class with some handy pets of both mobile and static varieties.
Paco of the Green, a Warrior Epic Pangolan Tamer.
While you pick missions from a list of what is available to you, the dungeon layout is different each time, though with less variety than you might be accustomed to. The mission selection screen actually tells you what possible rewards can be found at the end of each dungeon, and the equipment rewards shown there grey out once you find them, as you’ll only ever need one of them. Alongside with equipment, another loot option is monster souls, which you can use to enhance your existing gear.
Seeing what the random item generator would bring forth for me was one of the great joys of Diablo, but in Warrior Epic you only receive a single non-random loot item at the very end of a mission, in a relic chest. (If you’re grouped, every player gets their own item.) When creatures die, they look like they’re dropping a shower of money, and occasionally items, but they’re not. It’s just xp. Some folks are wired up to love getting xp, but I’m not one of them. As that seems the only reward for doing the subquests, I can pretty much just skip them to get to the relic chest faster. So far as I can tell, you receive the same amount of prestige whether you do the subquests or not.
Prestige is a sort of currency you receive for completing missions, mostly used to buy more warriors for your hall. Most shop items and hall upgrades cost gold, which you cannot earn ingame. That must be bought with real world cash. According to the FAQ, you can also get them by filling in surveys and offers from “preferred partners”, in a similar way to how the Facebook game Mafia Wars used to do, before they got busted for offering godfather points for signing a petition opposing US healthcare reform. Warrior Epic may have taken down its offers for the same reason.
As you level, you gain skillpoints which you can put into a number of paths. Pretty standard stuff.
One thing that certainly isn’t standard though, is how Warrior Epic deals with death. When you’re in a mission, you have three lives. The first two times you die, you get back up on full health. The third time you die, that’s the end of the mission. You might think “Bah! Now I’ll have to start the mission again.”. Afraid not. You’re dead. Or at least that warrior is. You can buy more with Prestige, and have a little stable of them, so you can afford to lose a few. Don’t worry though, you can still hang out!
Your dead warrior’s spirit will come with you, and can be brought out with much fanfare to kick arse once per adventure. You *could* also spend prestige to raise him, but frankly, having them around to call forth as vengeful spirits is far more interesting. The exact effects summoning a spirit will have seems to depend on it’s class and level at the time of the unfortunate incident.
Warrior Epic - Sometimes they come back.
That’s a bit of a rubbish screenshot. My undead barbarian (Oh sorry. I mean Pit Fighter!) pal has just squashed all my foes, and is in the process of departing. Apparently, when you die you also become huge. You can bring up to three dead friends along with you. Mr Muscles there kindly volunteered to get deaded so Paco could use him as an emergency button. There are not many games where you deliberately kill off your own characters! I formally request this feature in every MMO.
All in all, it’s not a bad little game. I’m not sure I’d spend money on it, but as free games go it’s quite polished, and good fun. Warrior Epic is certainly capable of entertaining you for an occasional hour or two when your regular MMO’s server has gone down for “unplanned maintenance”. The Warrior Epic website is here. It was about a 1.2 Gigabyte download.