Mythforce Demo Impressions: Saturday Morning Magic?

We covered Mythforce‘s announcement over a year ago. Since then, it totally fell off the radar. It wasn’t until I was browsing Steam that I noticed the game had a demo.

Mythforce’s Next Fest demo period has ended recently, and we spent about two hours in the game. During that time, we checked out all four heroes and returned hopeful with only a few reservations.

The multiplayer 1980s-themed Dungeons & Dragons-like slaughter-fest has a lot going for it. The first thing that caught my eye was the beautiful visuals. Each level/stage is made to look like the background art you’d see in a cartoon from four decades ago. Everything from the stones, architecture, vines, and vegetation looks like it was done in watercolors.

The scenery is almost so inviting that you forget you’re about to be swarmed by skeletons, goblins, and other beasties. I found myself more times than not being reminded of Don Bluth’s Dragon’s Lair. The novelty of the visual disarmed me long enough that I was taking damage before I realized it.

Sadly, the game trailers, regardless of whether they’re for the PC, PS5, Switch, or XBOX, don’t really show off the appealing surroundings you encounter in the game.

The gameplay is somewhat generic for this type of first-person title. Attacks are split up between melee combat with swords, shields, maces, and daggers to bows, arrows, and spells. Each character has a different primary weapon and three special abilities. Two focus on up-close combat, while the other two have strengths centered around long-range weaponry.

Thankfully, most arenas you enter in Mythforce allow for varied attack styles. However, this isn’t a run-and-gun … er, run-and-swing type of game. The levels are littered with exploding plants, pitfalls, fire-spewing gargoyles, and deviously disguised rolling bombs.

Ranged combat, at least for me, felt like it was the most rewarding, partially because of the number of exploding plantlife I could use to pick off enemies who spawned halfway across the map.

However, Mythforce does not leave you high and dry if you get in a pinch, like being cornered by a mob. Every hero comes with a secondary weapon in case they find themselves needing to change playstyles temporarily.

Enemies aren’t that diverse, and the variety you face appears to be very random. Some adventures saw us only taking on various skeletons, only for one goblin to pop in close to the end of the level. Other times, we’d encounter loads of spell-casting fungus dudes.

What struck me as odd was the sparse number of pickups found along the way. You don’t loot new weapons from fallen enemies; you do get new stat-altering trinkets and buffs from chests and statues. Due to the game being rogue-like, there were times when I’d find nothing but gold through an entire level. Sometimes I couldn’t even find a health potion and had to rely on selecting a buff to boost my health.

Another issue we saw in Mythforce was with the placement of pots. These usually contain gold, something you’ll need to buy potions, tickets, and new weapons between adventures. On multiple occasions, pots would spawn inside level geometry. There were times when five pots spawned in the same spot, right on top of each other.

Notice how I didn’t mention much about the heroes? That’s because I forgot that they were each character with separate personalities. The game’s art style incorporates cel-shading for the heroes and enemies, but it is its most significant negative.

While the designs are unmistakably nostalgic, there’s nothing truly unique about the cast. They’re all generic if you take away the voice acting. When I look at them, I don’t see standout characters like I do with the cast of Borderlands or Left 4 Dead. It’s hard to explain.

However, the lack of uniqueness of the four mains may not matter when you’re teaming up with three other people. With a little more polish and hammering out the bugs we encountered with random item placement, this could be one hell of a fun time.

Mythforce’s PC requirements are not terrible, but you will need to have EOS installed and at least a GTX 1080 or AMD RX 5600 XT for the recommended specs: