Realm of the Mad God

Earlier this month I was browsing the past entries in the IndieGames blog and I came across a game called "Realm of the Mad God." Reading about the game I saw it was a top down roguelike RPG. Being a big fan of any Roguelike I decided to try it out but it was not yet to be. I forgot all about it until a few days ago. A friend showed me a list of the top downloadable indie games of 2010 and there was the Realm of the Mad God and according to this list it had online play! I was not aware of that when I first saw the article from back in January of 2010. Yeah it says it's online in the post on the IndieGames blog but I totally missed.

I decided to finally try this game out and I am really glad I did. It's a fantastic little browser game and I cannot recommend it enough.

Realm of the Mad God tasks you with defeating the mad god Oryx having been summoned to his realm to be killed by his army of monsters. You start the game with selecting from classes which make up the standard RPG stuff, Rogues, Wizards, Warriors and a few others. Some of the classes are locked and to unlock them you need to get the starter classes up to the level cap which is 20. Once in the game you show up in a hub world which leads to various different realms. Each realm has the same content but they're at different levels of completion depending on the amount of killing done by the players.

As mentioned above this game falls into the roguelike category of games. When you die you're done, you lose everything, forced to restart and begin the level grind all over again. One thing that takes away some of the pain of losing your progress are none of the gear has level requirements. Meaning if you fall in battle and a friend can grab your stuff your new level one guy can use all your old gear. This makes starting over easier as you have more power at a lower level. I've had several characters die some at the level cap and I've only wanted to jump right back in and do it all again but I like the whole roguelike thing so your mileage may vary with this as to the amount of starting over you can take. Though at 20 you can take a good amount of punishment and if you're in a group you should be good to go.

The game is very simple to play, it's a lot like the various twin stick shooters we've seen in the past like Robotron, Geometry Wars or Smash TV but this uses the keyboard and mouse. WASD move you around and the mouse aims the direction of your shots. It works really well but I would love to eventually see support for a controller to be able to play this like a twin stick shooter but only time will tell about this.

Each class has a four equipment slots, main weapon, special ability, armor and a ring. Each class has only one type of weapon they can use and they all have unique special items they can find. Such as the Priest finding a better healing Tome and the Rogue acquiring a new clock to make his stealth move better. It's all very simple and this makes the game very enjoyable.

Like many RPG's this game has you gaining experience to level and as you go along you fight stronger and stronger enemies until you get to the end but the monster killing this is handled in a different way. When the realm starts fresh there are 25,000 monsters that need to be killed. These are a mix of trash mobs and bosses or as they're known in this game Gods. Arrows will point you in the direction of level appropriate gods for you to kill so you never intentionally go to the place you can't survive in. Mindless wandering can get you jammed up but that's another story. So in the end it's the entire realm of people working together to kill all 25,000 monsters to summon Oryx The Mad God. When the enemy count is reached everyone in the server is summoned to fight Oryx regardless of level or what you're doing. I like this but it seems a little unfair if you're just starting out and all of a sudden you're in this fight with something you have no chance of beating, if you survive you stand to get some good loot but it can confuse you at first if you don't know exactly what's happening.

That's the game in a nutshell and I have to say it's a lot of fun. It plays in the browser and is free to play. I believe it has some microtransactions for gold and some other stuff but I haven't seen anything about it so I'm not 100 percent sure on that.

I'm going to share some thoughts I have to improve this game and that will be in the below video that will accompany this article so you can check that out as well.

Link to play this game, also has the link to the forums and the wiki -

http://www.realmofthemadgod.com