Anime style arcade action go!

Lately I’ve been putting a lot of hours into Rusty Hearts. For those that are unfamiliar, Rusty Hearts is a free to play action MMO. Basically, it’s a dungeon crawling arcade-style button masher with levels and loot. In addition, you can team up with other players to take on increasingly difficult content for fun and profit. Not real profit of course, but you know what I mean.  The controls go from simple move, attack, jump, and dodge to a variety of special abilities bound to hotkeys for each of the playable characters. It’s for this action and accessibility that it ranked #10 in MMOVault’s Top 10 Free MMOs.

Natasha in motion with her pistols and giant purple hair. It wouldn’t be anime without one purple-haired character.

Aesthetically, Rusty Hearts delivers a solidly cartoony anime experience. The playable characters are exactly what you would want if you happen to go looking for an anime based MMO. Perhaps that’s a pretty specific thing, but it’s hard to ignore the over-the-top hair and weapon styles. For people that like a certain look to their characters, the costume system is likely to be exactly what they’ve always dreamed of. Instead of equipped items making horrible aesthetic changes (I’m looking at you, green drops in every new WoW expansion), the only changes you’ll ever see on your character are purposefully equipped costume pieces. However, I’m also starting to see the downside of that as the only thing outside of costumes that can be changed is your weapon. So by the time you hit end game content with crazy epic armor, you still don’t look like it – you may still have a cat-like cardboard box on your head.

Completing dungeons rewards you with a grade for your performance as well as a chance for some bonus loot.

The gameplay here is really the standout for this game. Fast paced kinetic action reminiscent of arcade games of old is overflowing in this game. Dungeons are broken down into enemy packed sections that must be cleared before moving on to the next one. Attacking and killing monsters causes items to pop out for collection. Later in the game, a roulette-like bonus system is introduced to add even more fun by stacking random buffs or bonuses. This game does a knockout job of pressing all of my hack and slash buttons. Adding an equipment system and quests to an already entertaining button-mashing experience was brilliant. Beyond that, this title is excellent for the casual gamer as most dungeon content can be done solo and in well under 30 minutes. Great for people that want an MMO but can’t spend hours at a time doing a single instance.

The only things that may detract from the game for the casual person are the storage limitations in place from the start and the inability to easily acquire items to customize characters in the completely free version. Personal inventory works great for at least the first 10 levels, but eventually there are so many crafting components in the world that you need to put them someplace and that someplace is a personal chest that has only 6 slots to start. Of course, this is the model for free to play games in general. Content that is convenient, but not strictly necessary (such as additional storage space) is available for a fee. The same holds true for certain purely aesthetic costume items to enhance the appearance of a character. However, I have to say that if you’re enjoying a free game long enough to be worried about these things, perhaps the creators deserve a bit of monetary support in the form of your purchase of digital goods.

One last note – the first expansion, Rusty Hearts: Reborn, is due out on July 24^th. The expansion promises new areas to explore, weapons to acquire, and bosses to smack down. See the trailer below for a look at the shiny new stuff.