It has been almost a full year since we had any major reports arrive about Mad World, the grimdark isometric multiplayer ARPG from developer Jandisoft. Readers will recall that the game was supposed to launch on Steam in 2018, but then the delays began to pile up, starting with a planned 2019 alpha test, a wholesale delay attributed to a publishing deal with Netmarble, and then hopes to make a summer 2020 launch. After that, the game effectively went quiet on its official forums and on Twitter, with the last peep out of the game being a gameplay video from December of last year.
It would seem that the last major bastion of news out of the game is Facebook, where the devs announced this past Tuesday that the game was running an alpha test between now and Friday, September 17th. On top of that, anyone can play simply by firing up a browser and going to this link.
We took a few seconds to go through the initial character creation process and a couple of quick tutorial steps, and we can report that Mad World is indeed functional. Combat works, questing is a thing, and there are a number of character advancement systems in place, such as stat improvements per level, skill unlocks that are earned by using weapon types, and a Mastery tree that wasn’t available in our brief few moments of play. The game does show some of those early alpha wrinkles as well, like UI element weirdness and extremely rough English translations. That said, for all intents and purposes, Mad World is an actually playable thing for a little bit of time.
