Review - Wanderlust: Rebirth (PC)

Wanderlust: Rebirth is an action adventure game built around co-op play.  You choose one of 4 different classes: Fighter, Elementalist, Cleric and Alchemist.  The classes do play quite differently from one another, and there is a decent amount of depth in terms of speccing your character to excel in different aspects.  I played mostly as an elementalist though I did end up making a character of each class to mess around with and find out just how varied the different classes are.

Gameplay:

The combat is fast paced, with high scoring combos and damage markers flying up all over the screen.  While this sounds nice, it just ends up cluttering your view, and you will often lose your character amidst the chaos.  In addition to that, while you can potentially spec into dozens of abilities, you can only use a few at a time, and the game forces you to open a menu to swap in different abilities.  As an elementalist, this is important because certain monsters are resilient to certain elements, so to maximize your effectiveness, you need to use the correct abilities.  This actually makes changing out the abilities to be a bit of a chore, to the point where I stopped bothering and used two abilities from beginning to end.

Like the combat, the pacing of the game is extremely fast as well.  While you're traversing areas, you start off in a world map type of area, moving from one dot on a map to the next to load the next zone.  However, each zone is extremely small and often only has one group of monsters in it.  So you'll spend 2 minutes fighting, then its back to the world map to go to the next zone.  This wouldn't even be so bad if there were some diversity in where you could go, but throughout the entire campaign, the world map never gives you additional paths, the next zone is the only zone.  This ends up leaving me feeling quite disconnected, like the entire game is just a series of mini-battles followed by a boss fight at the end of each chapter.  There's a decent amount of diversity in the look of the monsters, but not a lot of diversity in how you tackle each fight.  Only bosses seem to require anything other than brute force.

Story:

I hesitate to refer to this game as an RPG, simply because I feel RPG's are characterized by immersion and story.  This game has neither.  The story is unmemorable to say the least, and halfway through the campaign I just started skipping through all the NPC text.  In addition to the weak story, the quests are often rehashes of each other.  For some reason, in a game with only 10 chapters, the game decides that multiple people need water to be fetched for them.  The game is also ridiculously short, with each chapter only taking 15 minutes or so to complete.  It should take the average player 3 hours or so to finish the game.

Solo/Co-op:

As a solo experience, Wanderlust is fairly mediocre.  The game provides you with three AI teammates that do a decent job on the average battles but then fail pretty hard when it comes to boss fights.  I was unable to complete the campaign in single player because my teammates would run in and get killed immediately, forcing me to kite the boss around as an elementalist who should not be tanking hits.  Co-op play redeems the game a bit, and I enjoyed playing the game to some degree when done in a group of friends.  This frankly has more to do with the company you're with than what you're doing, though it is entertaining to compare scores at the end of a chapter and see how you did compared to your friends.

Overview:

Wanderlust is by no means a terrible game.  It is enjoyable enough for the few hours you'll put into it, but there's really not much here to leave a lasting impression, or want you to play more.  The fast paced combat can be comparable to Dungeonland, though in all aspects Dungeonland is a superior game.  The pacing of the battles feels a bit reminiscient of Half Minute Hero, in that every aspect feels like it's on turbo mode.  I could probably list each aspect of the game and then name off a game that simply does what Wanderlust does, but better.  I was quite disappointed since I've had this game on my wishlist for some time and really wanted it to be great.

Final Score: 5/10