Funcom are best known publicly for their blood and gore MMO “Age of Conan” which delves into the realms of barbarians, spell casters and mythical creatures. So, after finding out that they were embarking on releasing an MMO for the 8-12 year old bracket I was certainly intrigued to see what the game had to offer. Considering this games target audience it would only be fair and right to review it from that perspective to a certain extent, which is what I shall do.
Pets Vs. Monsters (from now on referred to as PvM) is a free-to-play MMO with an optional subscription package being developed by Sweet Robot, a Norwegian subsidiary of Funcom. PvM sets players out on an epic journey across a land riddled with enemy infestations ranging from fire throwing monkeys to giant skeletal bats. The world itself offers some graphically appetising treats which come in the form of such locations as forests, sea beds, rugged volcanic terrains, mysterious temples and much more. This journey is carried out by your character and a pet of your choosing, be it a bear, dog or cat. Throughout the game you are pitted against quests which have the player defeating monsters, gathering items or hunting down other npcs.
Upon entering the game you are greeted with the usual character creation screen giving you a few customizable options as well as being able to choose your first pet. I went with the bear, which although looking a little slothful, it also looked rather more ferocious than the cat or dog. After a brief loading period it was time for us to get going and the first thing that struck me, as an older gamer anyway was that there was no tutorial. Now to an older gamer confronted by such a thing I was quite surprised, but actually after playing the game for 5-10 minutes the controls are easily manageable as is the user interface, as the specific icons for each action are rather obvious. Your pets are armed with the standard melee and ranged attack, which have a different graphic output for each type of pet. Anyway moving along with the quests they seemed like the basic “defeat 5 monkeys and return to..” or “collect 10 crates and return to..” until I got to one quest that I rather enjoyed the design of, especially when considering the 8-12 year old market. Up until this point you could quite easily use your melee attack without care about your ranged attack, and whilst the quest still held the basic concept of “defeat 5 monkeys and return to..” I believe the designers of the game realised this and added a quest which you were only able to finish by utilizing your ranged attack without mentioning it in the quest description. I was rather entertained by the prospect of tackling this quest as my former 10 year old self and imagined I’d have got a sense of accomplishment out of figuring it out.
Moving along to the game design itself, it all feels rather experimental. Whilst the levels are of linear design there are some quirky instance designs for quest monsters which would otherwise be swamped by other players on other MMOs, relieving the frustration of having to wait for one specific target. The levels do stay pretty much “on tracks” up until the frozen seabed level, where the terrain opens up into a typical MMO style quest hub and field area. As much as this works in other games, it just didn’t work here as you’d find yourself running back and forth past countless monsters time and time again, it was just frustrating and felt like a chore rather than fun, especially considering you can only have one quest any given time. The environments and character models are nicely designed and have a cartoony feel to them. The items and skills which you pick up throughout your journey are portrayed as cards, which in a way reinforces the whole idea of collecting them all for a younger generation. There were quite a few bugs and glitches throughout, but that’s what a beta is about so they are of course forgiven. The soundtracks to the game is vibrant and enjoyable as were the sounds in the world themselves. I haven't grown tired of the delightful noise you hear when you collect and earn experience points. The current in game chat system is very kid friendly and allows for pre-determined phrases to be said to one another, and whilst it protects the younger player from the obvious dangers of the Internet, it doesn’t leave much room for making new friends, which I suppose is the price you pay. There were a few things which I felt the game design currently lacked though. One is the implementation of a sprint system. There were countless times where I felt that there was a lot of needless running that could be sped up by this. The second was the need for a stat comparison system when equipping new gear, however I’ve been assured that this is in the pipeline and is being implemented.
It has the obvious feeling of Diablo and even more so Torchlight about it, but so do a lot of games nowadays. However whilst other game designers were thinking about how they could tap into the success of such games directly it seems that the Funcom guys have asked more “how can we take that formula and apply it to an entirely new market”. The game is obviously never going to rival the likes of the big MMOs out there but that’s not the reason for this games design. It also seems obvious that Funcom are looking to reach out to new customers for an MMO experience which, as I’m writing this, seems to have little to no proper competition. I'm fully looking forward to future builds of this beta regardless of target audience as it was still quite enjoyable being a fan of such games.
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