Rusty Hearts: Arcade Greatness Goes Online

By Remko Molenaar (Proxzor), OnRPG Journalist

Rusty Hearts is a free to play MMORPG that is currently published by Perfect World. Perfect World is currently upholding servers for both Europe and North America to divide the players into the best servers with the best possible ping. The game hasn’t been on the market here for even a year so I decided to check out this awesome looking game known for its action combat system. Rusty Hearts brings the arcade genre to the MMORPG scene and this in particular really got my attention.

Classes

At the time I checked the game out there were 4 playable characters available in the game. These 4 classes all play an important role in the story that develops in Rusty Heart. You will follow the story of four adventurers in Rusty Hearts so choose your character wisely. All these classes have some sort of particular weapon specialization. Frantz is specialized in swords while Angela uses a modified Scythe type weapon that launches magic.. Tude uses a Gauntlet or Claw to smash through his enemies and Natasha has her choice of rifles and pistols. A fifth character named Meilin Chen was recently revealed in the US and EU version who specializes in martial arts but I was unable to test her out in time for this review.

Tutorial

After creating your character in the somewhat dramatic character creation screen where the only thing you can change is your name, you get the option to do the tutorial. As every wise new player does I went to do the tutorial since this game plays quite differently from the typical point and click MMO. Immediately you get into a cut scene where you get introduced to the important characters that you can choose from. You are running away from a terrible big monster and you are trying to escape what looks like some sort of dungeon or keep. After killing off a few monsters and after a small introduction to the base mechanics of the game you will get into the following cut scene that shows you this terrifying monster that you are running off. After running outside the monster crashed down on top of me and…

Gameplay

What just happened? What was this madness?! Was this a nightmare? Was I day dreaming? Elma wakes me up and I receive my first quest to meet Vincent. I quickly noticed the movement in town is different than the dungeons you will visit, you will have to point and click your way through town instead of moving with the arrow keys; you can also hold right click to change the camera view to look around. For those who fear this might be a bit disorienting, Rusty Hearts has implemented a green directional arrow that will direct you to your next quest objective.

After receiving a new quest from Vincent I was sent to my first dungeon portal. This portal shows you a small map of locations where you can teleport to with minor details such as difficulty level and level required to enter. For those familiar with Dragon Nest and Vindictus, this system will seem quite familiar. The difficulties include Normal, Hard and Very Hard, giving you a wide variety of challenges if you think Normal is too easy. As the requirement for the hard dungeon was level 2, I went with the only choice I had.

Every level is divided into checkpoints; once you reach a checkpoint you can breathe a sigh of relief as you will teleport back to them instead of the very beginning should you fall in combat. This function not only saves time but keeps your teammates from raging since they won’t have to wait for your defeated person to run all the way through the dungeon. Each dungeon is divided up into multiple sections. In typical arcade fashion, you become locked in each section until you can defeat all the monsters present. A nice twist to Rusty Hearts is that there are multiple exits to each section, leading to some interesting mazes and puzzle elements not often found in this genre. In the last section there is always a powerful boss awaiting you. Though early on you can usually button mash through them, the later bosses require quite a bit of finesse and tricky maneuvers to get out alive. The action combat is very fluid and makes returning to the same dungeons on harder difficulties feel more like an adventure than a chore.

Rusty Hearts also offers some fun solo and team based PvP modes. All I can say about this is expect to get trounced as the learning curve is high and some of the players are already true masters of their arts. Be sure to pick up some decent equipment before rushing in or you’ll cringe as your special abilities bounce off higher level players like water on a duck's back.

System Requirements

To play this beauty of an action game you are required to have at least the following hardware:

Windows® XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7

Intel® Pentium® 4 at 1GHz, (Mid to High Range Dual-Core 2.5GHz CPU or better recommended.)

1GB of RAM (2GB or more recommended for XP, 3GB or more for Windows Vista and Windows 7)

5GB of Hard Drive Space or more (14GB or more preferred)

Minimum - nVidia GeForce FX5200 ATI Radeon9550

Recommended - GeForce 6600 256M Pixel Shader, Vertex Shader Ver 3.0

DirectX 9.0c compatible sound chip or onboard audio capability with the latest sound drivers

Broadband Internet connection required

If you’re not really familiar with computers or simply just don’t pay attention to the wide variety of choices you have to make once purchasing a computer then let me tell you this: If you have a computer that has been purchases in the last 4 to 5 years you are easily able to play this game just fine, unless its secondhand of course hehe.

Conclusion

Rusty Hearts is a really fun game to play alone or with your friends. Because of the wide variety of gamestyles each class has the game is able to keep you entertained for quite a while. After trying the first class on the tutorial I went back again and again to test the other classes and was not disappointed with the unique gameplay each brought to the table. This game also brought me back to the arcade style games so popular in the 90s. If you are fan of these hack ‘n slash type of MMORPG’s I would strongly advise you to check out Rusty Hearts because few games on the market can match its action combat.