Melting World Online

First of all, I'd like to point out that I technically got this game for free - my dad gave me $56 in Steam wallet funds on the condition that I spend $6 on this game so we could play it together. (it was on sale for 40% off) Hillarioiusly he ended up refunding his copy of the game after about 20 minutes of play thanks to the crappy UI making it unplayable for a 60+ year-old man, and it feezing up and needing to be reloaded 3 times. (yes, the game actually failed to load on him 3 times in 20 minutes, and he has a hardcore gaming laptop for playing LoL and HotS) As for me, I have a lot of experience playing crappy F2P browser games (I'm a Kongpanion addict :P), so I was more patient and managed to sink a couple of hours into it before getting bored. Because yes, that's basically what this game is - a browser-quality game that constantly needs to be "refreshed" whenever it stops loading (and I have a sneaking suspicion that this is an actual free-2-play browser game in Russia, due to pop up adds showing up in Russian and the ingame text looking like it was wrung through Google Translate) In other words, this game is actually worth $0 - Or should I say zero rubles? Yet it costs TEN dollars to purchase on Steam <_< And yes, it has MICROTRANSACTIONS on top of that! Oddly enough, the microtransactions in this game are actually surpisingly cost-efficient for a p2w game - $2.50, the smallest amount, gets you 5,000 units of premium currency, which is enough to completely SHATTER the difficulty curve of this game into a billion tiny pieces. Maybe the devs felt bad because they already suckered you out of $10 to begin with? (and yes, I sunk $2.50 of my "own" money to test this out - with the 5000 premium currency I bought an Officer Beast, an Officer Hawk, $200,000 of standard currency, and stomped the s*** out of the early game content with zero effort - which snowballed as I was able to challange more difficult areas way before I would normally would be able to, leading to even better equipment and more Exp) As for actual gameplay, it really isn't anything special - combat is basically an [i]extremely watered-down[/i] version of Front Mission, but with browser-quality graphics and sound. Move into firing range - shoot the enemy. MAYBE aim at a specific part, provided you have a weapon that can do that. Even then, there's no point aiming at anything other than the cockpit. (or brain, if you're fighting a monster) That's literally all there is to it. - And yet it requires WAY more clicking than it reasonably should - there's no way to expend all of your AP on one attack - you need to click the enemy you want to shoot, click the weapon & firemode you want to use, select the part of the enemy you want to shoot at [i](which can be hard to do, because the UI for aimed shots is TINY)[/i], then wait for the attack animation to finish, then repreat the process 4-5 times per turn, [i]per mech[/i] if you want to spend all of your AP. - player turns have a time limit, even when playing by yourself. This is what killed it for my dad - you need to fight the crappy UI AND the clock, otherwise your turn will end before you can even spend all of your AP performing actions. - navigating the game world is a pain in the ass; yes there's a world map, and no you can NOT use it to fast travel between locations. You need to move from area to area by clicking on an "exit" and then wait for the next area to load, and there's always the chance that it will fail to load and force you to "refresh" the game. - IMO the most interesting part of the game was inventory management; mechs use one of those Resident Evil-style grid-based inventories for their loadouts, where different pieces of equipment come in different sizes and shapes, and you get to have fun playing tetris trying to optimize the loadout of your mechs. So yeah do yourself a favor and don't spend your hard earned money on this game - I'm sure you could find a free-to-play browser-based tactics game that's just as good or even better on Kongregate, Newgrounds, or Armorgames.