Soul Guardians: Age of Midgard

The barrier of entry and the required commitment involved to play it can make or break an MMO experience. Thankfully, Soul Guardians: Age of Midgard makes it surprisingly easy. New adventurers will be introduced to a bustling hub town where they can toil over a myriad of pursuits in order to be the Soul-iest Soul Guardian there is - and considering that it’s conducted all in 2D, navigating between tasks and ventures helps establish a seamless sense of direction.

Aside from the world map, the town also houses other landmarks integral to the gameplay. From the left, there’s the in-game store, a mission task master who assigns appropriate conditions and side-quest modifiers, a card workshop for building and enhancement (more on that later), and finally there’s the PvP arena where players can duke it out with all of they’ve got. The roles of each of these facets offer a slew of depth and palate cleansers to character growth that in-turn vindicate the insanely simple but adequately engaging fighting system that hinges on a single gimmick: cards.

Players will encounter several cards through various means like monster drops or hidden cache locations, and like your prototypical trading-card game, the variety of ranks and associated rarities to the stronger cards drive the main incentive to constant grind as you customize and experiment with every new card. Working with five slots at first before earning more, players can arrange and assign hundreds of different cards that jive better with specific classes over others, which can also be unlocked with in-game currency. Aside from the card combo attack, battling consists of standard attacks and class-specific abilities with their own respective cooldowns, offering a plethora of strategy that caters a wide range of play-styles.

Soul Guardians is fundamentally enjoyable and has plenty of potential, but it’s somewhat squandered through inconsistent pacing that cranks the introductory levels of the game from a 4 to an 11 by the time you reach the second collection of dungeons. The hike in challenge isn’t totally geared towards bullying players to reach for their credit card spending comfort of stat boosts or perks, though. Players can grind and naturally grow their characters to be able to challenge the increased adversity - it just takes a very long time to do. Recycling the same level runs and loot raids on beaten levels will become a mundane chore before you’re even half as strong as you need to be for the second world, and the same trend ensues on the next world after that.

For a free MMO with an impressively sized player base, you can’t go to wrong with Soul Guardians: Age of Midgard. Just make sure you have the time and money for it if you plan on staying for the long haul.