MythForce Review

MythForce seems like the videogame version of all those cartoons you loved as a kid, like He-Man or She-Ra. The game even has its own animated intro and theme song! I was so excited to start playing once I saw this. It was apparent that a lot of time and love went into this intro, so they must have put this much work in, but can it live up?

This roguelite has a team of four different mythic characters to play as they feel like they have walked right out of a round of Dungeons & Dragons. Each hero has three different special attacks that they can do besides their basic attack. In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, you will see icons denoting these and what buttons to hit to use them. If you are playing with a controller, the shoulder buttons will be used for these. If you are more of a keyboard person, you can use the keys along with the mouse.

• Victoria — Knight — her main weapon is a mace. Like Captain America, she can throw her shield at enemies, bouncing it off to hit the next target. 
• Hawkins — Hunter — he is an archer who can shoot arrows that corrupt all targets or arrows that pull the enemies in before exploding. 
• Rico — Rogue — he has the ability to teleport, popping up behind the enemy and dealing a powerful slash attack that they didn’t see coming.
• Maggie — Mage — she uses powerful magic against the enemies, and she also has the ability to summon a familiar that can help battle with you. 

You don’t unlock any new abilities as you play; instead, you will just find boosts and upgrades to improve the weapons that you already have. However, it is annoying when most of these upgrades are for your secondary weapon, which is way weaker than your main.

The gameplay in MythForce is a very simple loop; all you do is select a character, click embark, and then you are put into a randomly generated selection of rooms. Destroy all the enemies that you can find to unlock the gate, then repeat. You will be able to upgrade your abilities as you explore to increase your stamina recovery or add health regen. At some point, you will run into a boss if you haven’t already fallen to an enemy, and if you successfully defeat them, you will move to the next world. Or if you die, you will have to start all over again from the beginning. 

It didn’t take too long for the game to feel very repetitive. Even with the randomly generated rooms, it felt like you were always doing the same few actions. I was hoping for a lot more, especially after seeing that awesome introduction, but somehow, MythForce just feels like it’s missing personality. The “rooms” that you explore aren’t super detailed, but they get the job done, and because of the first-person view, the only thing you see of your character is their arms and any weapons that they are holding. When you get to select the hero that you want to play, you will see the cool-looking ‘80s cartoon characters hanging out, getting ready for battle. It’s just too bad we don’t get to see more than just the arms for the rest of the game. You will get to see a lot of enemies, though: goblins, ogres, mushroom-men (I’m not joking; these enemies look like they are made up of long, skinny shrooms), and tons of skeletons will constantly be hunting you down.

You can go on this journey alone, or you can play with a friend or other person online. Having a partner — or partners — in crime definitely adds to the fun, otherwise, you feel quite alone in this world as it’s only you and the enemies coming to attack you. The other bonus is when you fall in battle, your friends can bring you back to life, and if you are a good partner, you will do the same for them. Besides other players, the only character you meet in the game is a travelling merchant that you may come across, but he doesn’t talk, so besides that, it’s only you… and tons of skeletons. By the way, how do skeletons who have no muscles carry around freaking huge swords like that? 

Hearing Victoria constantly saying, “This forest is teeming with death” or “I need assistance”, gets old very fast! If each character only has a couple of things to say, then why bother having them talk at all? Besides the minimal talking, you will hear your hero grunt when attacking the enemy or when they take damage. I had turned on the subtitles in the options menu so that I wouldn’t miss any of the dialogue, instead, I just saw the word “grunt” constantly whenever I swung my weapon. There isn’t much for music at all, you don’t even get to hear variations of the intro theme song. The game’s sound effects are alright, though, I do have to say that the clunk you hear when you hit a skeleton in the head is incredibly satisfying!

In the end, MythForce isn’t necessarily a bad game, it just doesn’t feel like it lives up to its potential to make it stand out from the other roguelike titles out there. If you do check it out, I highly recommend playing with a friend or jumping online to play with others. However, from the few online rounds I played, I did have connection issues and got kicked off. I’m not totally sure if it’s a game issue or because of my internet, but hopefully, you will have better results if you try it out. 

If you are a fan of roguelike games with D&D-influenced characters, MythForce will be a fun way to kill some time; just don’t expect something totally different and revolutionary here.