Gear up, find and capture your own creatures in WeMade’s Riders of Icarus
It’s hard for an MMO to stand out these days because of the various titles available and the decline in players within the genre. Despite World of Warcraft losing players over the years, it’s still one of the biggest MMOs today and are still pushing out expansions. I haven’t properly played an MMO in many years but recently I’ve been playing WeMade’s Riders of Icarus before it hits the open beta. The game while still retains the usual MMO flavour has something very different in its stables and that’s mounts.
Riders of Icarus is big on mounts and that’s the main takeaway from investing my time with it. From the start, entering the world of Hakanas felt so similar to other MMOs. I was struggling to feel anything unique apart from its character designs but that’s until you hit the open world and noticed what the game is truly about.
Most MMOs have mounts, pets etc. but Riders of Icarus takes this mechanic one step further. The game has lots of mounts you can acquire, while easier at the start can be quite a challenge down the track. It feels somewhat Pokemon-like with another gameplay layer allowing you to capture and claim your own mounts. From unicorns to dragons and higher legendary creatures – there’s lots of variety to keep the gameplay momentum up.
Mounts not only provide your character with a ride like most MMOs, they can be utilised in combat with their own buffs, debuffs and attacks. Your mounts will also gain XP and level up alongside you. You can also turn your mount into a pet which creates a ‘chibi’ version of the creature to follow alongside you. Once your creatures enter pet mode, it will have its own set of statistics and attacks which adds to the combat scenarios.
The game is running on the CryEngine and while it retains the engine’s highly detailed environments and models – it was significantly un-optimized. I experienced a few heavy drops in framerates on my laptop rig running an Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM and GTX 960 especially when dropping the settings to low.
The game doesn’t work perfectly and it took me time to get it into a setting than ran somewhat smoothly. The inconsistent framerates really made the game hard to enjoy which is probably why they’re hitting open beta with it – so they can find the faults and fix it. It’s in a rough state right now but once the issues have been fixed, I could see myself enjoying this game even further.
While Riders of Icarus is fun and provides quite a massive amounts of mounts to capture and train, the game suffers from performance issues which hopefully should be fixed soon. It’s currently in open beta for free right now on Steam, so if you’re keen to check out – click here.