I’m not sure Age of Heroes is really the first true VR MMO like it wants to be, but it certainly shares some of the traits of one. You’ve got the hyper-fantasy setting, introduced in an epic opening montage with characters and creatures that wouldn’t look out of place in a Lord of the Rings movie. There’s also the various character classes that deal with the usual tropes like minion-spawning warlocks, quick fire archers, and powerful mages. You also have an abundance of well-endowed women that developer Omnigames makes like of with Kojima-style smut.
Wait, what?
I don’t want to preach about this, but when I reached out to select a female warlock in the game’s opening moments and felt the controller vibrate as the girl’s breasts swayed from side to side I was more than a little creeped out. This thing is bound to happen, sadly, and it’s made by a developer from a country that clearly takes a different point of view from US/UK audiences. It’s a quick black mark that I was eager to forget and dive into what really makes Age of Heroes tick.
Based on the demo I played this week, though, the game is more concerned with looking like an MMO than it is actually being one. The beta is really just an arena combat game, not boasting the mechanics you’d expect to find in true PC time-killers. It’s trying to get some crowd-sourced funds to continue development, so there’s every chance that the fully realised product is closer to what you’d expect out of an MMO, but it’s got some ways to go if that’s the plan.
Still, what I played of Age of Heroes was polished, if lacking the kind of mechanical spark that so many VR games seem to be in search of right now. I played as a Warlock and, in a simple arena in which generic skeleton soldiers marched in from two staircases I couldn’t transcend, I found some surprisingly accessible gameplay. Holding one trigger would summon a minion that could fight by my side. Squeezing the trigger would then swap to one of two other attacks. The first would drain life from a target as I built up a devastating energy blast, while the second would cause my minion to self-destruct, resulting in huge amounts of damage.
For the most part my enemies focused on my minion. That made things a little boring for me, as I was able to just sit at the back and pick stragglers off with my ranged attack. In fact I was only targeted maybe twice in the entire demo, and escaping an enemy’s sword was as simple as teleporting away from them. The same was true of a boss encounter of the king of the army.
He’s worth bringing up because his voice acting and dialogue was laughably bad in its current state. I was laughing at the utter drivel that was spouted; it honestly sounded like something the voice actor rushed out over a lunch break.
Age of Heroes needs more than a little work if it’s to deliver on its goal of becoming a true VR MMO. There are some basic systems in place to deliver a fun game but it’ll be a while until we find out if that’s the case.
