A hack-n-slash Adventure that falls into the trap of pay-to-win - Should you play Undecember?
It may be October, but these days, I can’t stop thinking about December. Or rather Undecember. (I know it’s corny, but I couldn’t resist.) This game has reached the top fifty most played games on Steam just two days after its release, not to mention hitting over a hundred thousand downloads on Google Play. But is it any good?
THE STORY
In Undecember, you take on the role of a Rune Hunter, a hero destined to stop the thirteenth god of this world – one predetermined to be evil – from being born. Your ultimate goal is to become the best Rune Hunter possible and find the powers and gifts shared with Rune Hunters by the twelve other gods to give humanity a fighting chance against unlucky number thirteen.
PLATFORMS
For this playthrough, I used my iPhone 13, which ran Undecember smoothly, despite the long download time and almost 7GB worth of data taken up on my phone. The game is also available on Android and PC.
TIME PLAYED
I played for about four hours. In this time, I made it through the opening tutorial, unlocked my skill tree, and earned 100% completion rate in several of the game’s early areas, including the Yellow Wastelands, Empty Hills, and Sunrise Hill.
WHAT’S AWESOME
• The visuals. Hands down, the first thing I noticed about this game is the impressive graphics, including the cinematics, environments, and characters. The game put me into epic set pieces right from the start, such as fighting off attackers on the back of a huge Sand Walker, a sort of massive dinosaur creature carrying a ship on its back across the desert. Undecember looks incredible, and when you add in the strong voice acting, it just feels like a high-quality product.
• The combat. From the first moment of the game, Undedecember is fast, fluid, and filled with hack-n-slash badassery. The skill animations are pretty cool, and there's really no cooldown on fight skills, so you can just blast your way through opponents so long as you have the mana. Even better, the game employs a classless system, which means you can reset your skill tree and change your playstyle as you see fit.
• The mobile controls. The developers really made sure that Undecember feels right on mobile. The game features two entirely different interfaces between PC and mobile, so the controls feel like they were meant for my IOS device, but if you opt for the PC version, that should still feel natural as well.
WHAT SUCKS
• Microtransactions. I didn’t buy anything yet in my time with the game. With that said, there is a currency shop where you can exchange real cash for virtual diamonds, which can be used to purchase almost anything in the game. In other words, Undecember is pretty much the definition of pay-to-win. What's worse is how the game implements many little tricks that are meant to bug players until they’re tempted to make a purchase just to stop being annoyed. For example, I was annoyed to discover that the only way to expand your bag space was to pay real money. In a game where loot piles up at a nonstop rate, that frustration alone may be enough to turn some people away.
SHOULD YOU PLAY IT?
If you’re a big fan of hack-n-slash, you should absolutely download and try out the early hours of Undecember. The impressive opening gives you a sense of the high production values that went into the game. From there, you can decide whether it’s worth sticking with the game or not. If you're a patient person that doesn't mind grinding for items, you can probably stay on the free path of Undecember, but it's only a matter of time until you’ll notice how annoying that path is.
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