Corepunk‘s a game I’ve had on my radar for many years. It’s suffered through many delays as its then-Ukrainian-based developers faced a level of hardship most of us can’t imagine, but now it’s finally available in a paid early access build, and the devs at Artificial Core were kind enough to give us a code to check it out.
It took me longer than I would have liked as I was distracted by pressing news from other games I cover and then a protracted respiratory illness, but now I’ve finally had a chance to take this isometric MMORPG for a spin. I’ve found a beautiful game that’s brimming with personality but also heavily burdened by clunky old school design.
Let’s start at the beginning: character creation.
Classes in Corepunk feel somewhere between the pre-made characters of something like a MOBA and the more customizable characters of a traditional MMORPG. Each archetype is race-locked (but not gender-locked) and has only limited visual character customization. It looks as if there’s going to be quite a lot of these eventually, but right now most are locked out, including to my great pain what looked like to be Elves and a demonfolk race. Currently there are just two human archetypes and one Orc option.
Archetypes are further divided into three subclasses each (two each are currently playable, with the third options to come later), and these are your real class, potentially having wildly different playstyles from the other subclasses within an archetype. I decided to pick a Blast Medic, an aggressive support subclass of the human Bomber archetype.
The game then begins with your character arrived into a new world via a portal. A frustrated bureaucrat assigned to greeting newcomers informs you you’ve fallen into in what amounts to a dumping ground for the refuse of the multiverse, which is a pretty fun way to explain Corepunk‘s eclectic mix of sci-fi and fantasy elements. Then you’re sent off on the usual MMO newbie experience of doing quests, learning to craft, meeting the townsfolk, and so forth.
Something that struck me immediately is that this game is absolutely gorgeous. The colourful Warcraft-esque art style has always been one of the main appeals of Corepunk to me, but the previews didn’t do it anywhere near justice. The colours are luscious, grass blows in the wind, water ripples realistically as you swim. It’s such a great mix of stylization and realism. Early on I transitioned into a snowy area, and it was so incredibly natural. The flurries began to fall, and the snow slowly got thicker on the ground and plants as I pushed farther north.
The player character doesn’t get full bespoke dialogue for every conversation like Star Wars: The Old Republic, but even having a few canned “yes,” no,” and “I’ll do it,” type responses helps make them feel a lot more like a real person than the voiceless drones most MMO player characters are.
The game’s dialogue has a somewhat raunchy tongue-in-cheek style that at times seemed as if it was trying too hard to be edgy, but most of the time I found it more endearing than not. I won’t say it was laugh-out-loud funny, but it got a smile or two out of me. My favourite bit was meeting a skeevy businessman who was convinced he could revolutionize agriculture with his de-centralized “blockgrain” technology.
The early quests have you killing rats — no, seriously, actual rats — and it’s here that the problems with Corepunk begin to rear their heads. I really hate the killing rats trope for a variety of reasons, but this implementation felt especially unpleasant.
Early on, I could not beat the rats. I’m not kidding. They come in packs of four, and I could kill maybe one before being forced to flee for my life. It doesn’t help that I misclicked and picked a mobility skill instead of a damage button for my first ability, but even if I hadn’t done that, I’m not sure I could have defeated the rats on my own at level one.
I feel very torn here because I’ve spent a lot of time saying MMO quests — especially low-level ones — need to be a lot more challenging, but while I still hold true to that opinion, I will acknowledge that this is can be a harder problem to solve than I’m often willing to admit.
Difficulty on its own isn’t interesting. Difficulty is just a way to encourage interactivity and skill expression. And the lack of that is the problem here. Corepunk uses combat more like that of a MOBA than a traditional MMO. You have an auto-attack and a small selection of active abilities with long cooldowns (10+ seconds).
At level one, when you have just one skill with a long cooldown, there’s nothing to do but watch the fight play out and hope your numbers are higher than theirs. I tried kiting a bit, but it didn’t help much. This isn’t interesting difficulty; there’s no potential for skill expression.
Eventually I managed to stumble my way to level two through a combination of completing some quests that didn’t require combat and defeating a few rat packs with the help of other players who happened to be walking by. Once I had a proper damage ability, I was able to win against the rats solo, though only just barely. I still ended most fights at only about 10% HP.
That brings me to the other problem with Corepunk‘s difficulty. It is very old school when it comes to recovery, and you can expect to spend a full minute sitting by a campfire to regain your full HP. Eating food can speed things up, but not by that much. I spent more time healing from fights than actually fighting.
Again, I like the idea of an MMO where even low-level fights are a struggle. If they gave us more than one ability to start and drastically increased the speed of healing between fights, I think I’d genuinely enjoy questing in Corepunk, but right now it’s just a slog.
The game is unpleasantly old school in other ways, too. One quest tasked me with collecting rat tails, but of course not all rats drop tails because reasons. Another quest had me collecting rat corpses, but the ones I killed didn’t drop any. I’m not sure if I was killing the wrong rats or if I needed to find some “rat corpse” interactables in the world, but either way it feels dumb.
I know some people do want this kind of old school hardship, but I don’t think it’s a very large segment of players, and I suspect most of those old school fans don’t want the kind of actiony MOBA-inspired combat Corepunk uses. I’m concerned this game is too modern for old school gamers and too old school for modern gamers.
I didn’t get far enough to be introduced to the game’s open world PvP, but it is my understanding that free-for-all PvP is still required for progression later on. I know the devs had talked about possibly adding PvE servers at some point, but so far those haven’t materialized.
I think there’s the potential for a good game here. A lot of love and creativity clearly went into the world, and it’s a setting I’d like to explore more of. I like the more punishing difficulty Artificial Core is going for – in theory. It’s a charming game, and after all the developers have been through, it would be a beautiful underdog story if Corepunk went on to be a success.
But I worry it’s not on track for that right now. I believe Corepunk needs massive quality-of-life overhauls and less emphasis on forced PvP if it’s to have the wide appeal it needs to survive.
