What Rusty Hearts does right is realize what type of game it is, a fasted paced action beat-em-up. With that in mind you won’t find any real world to explore, other than the towns you travel to as you progress through the game. All the quests and missions are accessed through Dungeon portals which are scattered throughout the towns, from which you will choose what dungeon you want to go to. While this means everything in the game is instanced, it also means you can jump right into the action without having to follow some quest marker.
Above is the first dungeon you’ll come across which you can see is separated into four sections, with each section having a level range, meaning you cannot access it until your character is at the minimum level. You can also see that all the dungeon sections have 4 difficulty settings. In the image above you’ll only see three, Normal, Hard and Very Hard, but there’s a forth called Blood, which is the hardest difficulty level and available in all dungeons past the intro one, however requires tokens to access as the drops are epic.
While Rusty Hearts allows players to group, up to four players, you’ll really never need to unless you want to. I’ve only really had minor issues with some Very Hard levels, but nothing a few health potions or resurrection scrolls couldn’t fix.
Combat is what you would expect, fast and furious. Your character gets a lot of spells and moves, so you can can pull off some crazy attack combos reminiscent of those Marvel vs Capcom games. While initially I was having a blast doing quests and completing dungeons, as you progress it does get a little grindy. The main issue comes from quests that have you going to the same dungeons over and over again to kill this, collect that, find this, so it does get boring from time to time.
Crafting is very simply in Rusty Hearts, you basically go to various vendors who all have their own crafting lists and you see what you can make. For someone that doesn’t enjoy crafting and just wants to get back into the action, this crafting system fits in perfection with Rusty Hearts’ fast paced style.
Aside from crafting, players can also upgrade their weapons and gear by visiting the blacksmith. All you need is some in-game money and things called Wiseman Stones. While you can upgrade your items multiple times, the risk of failure goes up with each upgrade and if it fails, you lose all previous upgrades.
While for the most part I enjoyed my time with Rusty Hearts, it wasn’t all good. My biggest issue, although minor, did cause me quite a bit of frustration. When I started out I was using my mouse and keyboard, but due to the awkwardness I quickly switched to my Xbox gamepad, which worked great, except I was constantly scrolling though my skill rows accidentally. I’d pull of some combos, move away real quick, then would trying casing again only to realize nothing was working. It seems I was pulling off an unknown combo that would scroll my skill bar from row one to two and I couldn’t figure it out, so I would have to grab my mouse and click the scroll button to get back to row one. I eventually figured it out, but was still constantly doing it so I had to make row 2 a duplicate of row 1 so I wouldn’t lose any time switching back. I was dying for a lock feature.
While PvE is fun, at least early on, it does become grindy and boring. What I’d like to see is more player interaction for PvE content in term of competing for scores or times. There are already quests that have you completing dungeons under a certain amount of time, with a certain score or other requirement, so why not setup some sort of system to allow players to compete with each other? Or even a dungeon achievement list.
Rusty Hearts also gives off the feeling you’re playing a single-player game because you really don’t need anyone’s help to complete dungeons, so there’s no need in joining groups. There need to be dungeons specifically designed for groups, maybe some that require players to split up or complete tasks simultaneously or are just plain harder where you need to group.
Overall Rusty Hearts has a lot of things going for it, it just needs to adjust some of them to turn it from a good game to a great game.
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