Minions of Mirth has some interesting ideas that could have used a little more work.
I’ve hopped MMO’s quite a bit. It all started with Everquest, five years of it, and still the top of my list. After that, it was a constant hopping trying to find “home” again, from Dark Age of Camelot to Final Fantasy XI, passing through The Sims Online, a very short and disappointing experience with EQ Online Adventures, Anarchy Online, R.O.S.E. Online, the social Oz World, Thang and more recently World of Warcraft. The transition from one to another is always a little difficult, since there are always new interfaces and new controls to learn, and actually getting into each game takes quite a while.
Minions of Mirth was no exception. I started playing it blindly not knowing what to expect, and the first thing that hit me was the lack of help in the character creation process. You have 12 races to pick from and a total of 16 classes (classes eventually branch out), which is a good thing, variety is always a strong point and Mirth has some original races in its portfolio. However, you get no description about each race or class. The same goes for the attributes of your character, since you have to distribute a bunch of points into several attributes, but you don’t really know which are the most important for each class. I just defaulted everything since I didn’t know what to do with the points.
What I found a bit redundant was the character portrait, since it will only show as an icon for your party member (where the health and magic bars are), and doesn’t really look like the character you are creating. Maybe if we could actually pick the character’s face that would have made more sense.
Once in the actual game, there are several menus with tons of text to read through about different topics, but I found myself scrolling through all the dialog boxes reading info about things I still had no idea about. A tutorial of sorts would have been perfect to get players acquainted with the interface and the commands.
I think the most important aspect of Minons of Mirth is the choice of gameplay options. You can play online, offline, single-player, multiplayer, PVP or PVE. You can even create your own party of up to 6 characters and adventure with your own little “army”. Unfortunately, you will only see one avatarrepresenting the party, but you can pick the appearance of any of your party members to switch who you view while fighting or adventuring. That is, if you play in third person view, since you can also use first person.
You also get a choice of worlds to play in, Fellowship of Light (the “good” fation), Minions of Darkness (the evil faction) and Monster (which lets you play as the creatures you have killed). Depending on the world, you will get different races, classes and skill sets. Additionally, everyone can create their own world for a solo adventure. Minions of Mirth allows players to mod the game to their liking, from quests to new zones.
Once you actually start killing things, everyone in the party gets experience. It takes a bit getting used to, but once you get the hang of it and set everyone with their spells and abilities (they will have them in their inventories, you have to memorize them to the spellbook) on the hotkeys, you’ll start having some fun. Leveling up grants you some points that you can distribute into whichever bonuses you want, giving you full control of your character’s advancement, and here the game actually does a good job at explaining what each bonus does.
Since each character has its own inventory, sometimes finding items gets a bit complicated, but you can swap them around to someone else. Browse through their belongings, since they all will have a sort of initiation quest.
Graphically, Minions of Mirth is not the most incredible game ever, but the environments and characters are well rendered, the spell effects are quite nice and the world has dynamic day/night and weather cycles. A little bit of work could have been done in the animations, as sometimes they seem a bit stiff (especially the jumping motion).
The sound effects are appropriate and I found the music quite pleasant, although sometimes a bit out of place or non-existing.
I feel that this review might be a bit unfair since I haven’t experienced nearly enough of the game worlds. However, if you are trying to get away from the hacker-populated free Asian MMO’s but don’t really want to get into any of the current mainstream MMORPG’s with their expensive monthly fees, you should consider giving Minions of Mirth a try. It’s affordable and there’s no monthly fee.
The demo is available at the official site for either PC or Mac, and it should be enough to give you a good idea of how much the World of Mirth has to offer.
Review text part of Grrlgamer.com Original text and screenshots at:
http://www.grrlgamer.com/review.php?g=minionsofmirth