The only revelation here is just how bad a mobile MMO can be

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SHOULD I PLAY REVELATION M?

At least in its current test form, no, absolutely not. Revelation M is one of the most generic, janky auto-play MMOs I’ve ever spent time with, and on top of that, it runs poorly even on fairly hefty hardware like my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. Unless it goes through some major revisions between now and the full launch, this one is doomed to be forgotten in a sea of samey power-grinder MMOs that it does nothing to set itself apart from.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve spent around six hours with Revelation M’s closed beta test over the last week. In that time I’ve completed the introductory tutorial quests, ran my first dungeon and some other group content, and got my character up to level 50. Don’t be too impressed though; at least three-fourths of that level grind was taken care of without any input from me through the game’s auto-questing and auto-combat features.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT REVELATION M?

• It looks pretty good sometimes. Considering that the game Revelation M is spinning off from, Revelation Online, came out way back in 2015, this mobile adaptation has pretty strong visuals. Both characters and in-game environments have a nice amount of detail, and I enjoyed some of the creature design, especially the cute little cat dudes. Now whether the visual quality is worth the trade-off in performance, that’s another story entirely.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN REVELATION M?

• A messy, confusing opening. Revelation M introduced me to its vast fantasy world quickly and in a fashion that left me dizzy. The player character is on a boat to Sulan City, where he or she intends to join something called the Adventurer’s Association. Simple enough. But the game continued throwing new characters and fantasy terms at me at a breakneck speed, leaving me too exhausted to really follow along. Awkward translation doesn’t help matters either.

• I can’t tell if the voice-acting is done by AI or just terrible, but either way it’s astoundingly bad. Like sometimes the characters just straight-up switch voices. Sometimes they talk at different speeds. And it all sounds robotic and emotionless, which could be just really, really awful voice-acting, or it could be because it’s literally robots. It’s also possible that AI voice-over is being used as a placeholder during the beta until real voice-overs are recorded. If I wanted to be extremely generous, that would be my greatest hope. But if they’re planning to keep the current voices, just know that it’s some of the most egregiously bad voice-work I’ve ever heard in a video game.

• It’s all just boring auto-play. If you’ve played one mobile auto-play MMO, you’ve played them all...and I’ve played dozens. Revelation M is the same old thing. I accepted and completed dozens of generic quests with minimal story. My character auto-pathed to objectives and did auto-combat against HP sponge enemies that didn’t pose much of a threat but took a ton of time to die because of their high health. Occasionally I took over the combat, but there was no real reason to do so—nothing to be gained by taking control and no satisfaction to be found in mashing the same handful of attacks over and over. And everything is just in service of seeing the character power number go up endlessly.

• Garbage performance. If a game like this is going to try to pull me in despite being generic in almost every way, it at least needs to run smoothly, but Revelation M cannot even offer that. The game regularly stuttered, hitched up, and had massive framerate drops, especially during group content. I probably would have been even more annoyed by the performance issues if I wasn’t expected to just let the game auto-clear everything for me. Hopefully the final release version will run better.

PLATFORM TESTED

Android via Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G phone

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