MEARTH is an action adventure game where you play Asteria, a princess who returned to her kingdom only to see your town folks dead and the city overrun by enemies under the command of Drago. As you fight to Drago to restore back what was lost, you fail and are captured and sent to the Conselia Continent for imprisonment. Fight your way out and defeat Drago to restore your kingdom.
Flashy But…
Being a game made on Unreal Engine, MEARTH has that typical flashy Unreal game look. With high fidelity and realistic lighting and all that jazz. So if the assets aren’t well made, you’ll see it clearly. And that is where MEARTH suffers at times, the environment looks well made when you aren’t close and not moving, however when you are close to a stone wall for instance, it looks as if the wall has high fidelity wallpaper pasted on it. Sure it’s clear but the textures aren’t there.
A rock or a mountain?
Everything you see looks fantastic when you’re still and not up close, the screenshots will show you that. However in truth it feels like just a coat of paint on some blocks and boulders that have hit boxes that don’t match them. This is consistent for everything in the game, a stone that’s a few centimeters higher than your feet? Jump a meter high to get over it.
Just the Two of Us
Enemy variants are so small, with just 2 types of enemies and a boss in the first area. What doesn’t help is the path finding for them isn’t that good, stand a meter in front of them and they won’t aggro. If you aggro them, moving back a bit and having that centimeter high stone in their way will stop them from being aggro-ed.
Teleportation?
First boss fight difficult? Bring him to the edge of the bridge and when he does his attack, he will somehow step on the slight curb and be stuck there. Then you can go to town on him with your throwing axe attack till he dies. Other bugs include check points not activating, so you’ll need to reload but do save before that as reloading does not necessarily mean things will work. I reloaded the boss fight only to have him spawn and be stuck in his spawn bubble. Other loading issues also had me falling from the level and hitting restart level brought me back to the start of the game even though I’m at later levels.
Final Thoughts
In all, MEARTH plays like an alpha for a fully released game. Menu and text in game looks jarring, bugs aplenty, gameplay feels rough and the lack of feedback when hitting enemies makes it even more of a downer. Even with its flashy coat of paint, you can feel that maybe Drago took out the spirit of the game as well and left bugs sprawling from the bodies of your people with everything hollowed and lifeless. Wait for the big update and hopefully things improve as MEARTH feels way too early to be released.
Hailing from a small Island. Huge football fan. Drinks too much tea.
Survival, Roguelikes, Turn-based or Indie games in general are my go to genres but I like to dabble in all kinds of genres. I tend to have a soft spot for Shmups and Hidden Object Games once in a while.
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