Mage Knight Apocalypse Updated Impressions - Five Characters, Six Areas, Tons of Hack-and-Slash

We recently caught up with publisher Namco Hometek to take an updated look at Mage Knight Apocalypse, its online hack-and-slash game based on hobby publisher Wizkids' Mage Knight tabletop game. The game has made tremendous progress since we last saw it in May at E3, as it now features four of the five playable characters and five of the game's six main regions. The playable characters will include the dwarf warrior and female vampire we saw at E3, as well as an amazon warrior, an elf guardian (a holy warrior not unlike a high-fantasy paladin), and a wizard of the "draconum" race (a species of humanoid, human-sized flying dragons).

In the single-player game, you'll choose to play as any one of these characters, and you'll explore the game's six different realms, which will include your character's hometown. For instance, the amazon calls a jungle region filled with ruins that recall Mayan architecture her home, while the dwarf lives in a tranquil mountain village. Each character's hometown will eventually come to be a home area, which can be revisited instantly using a magic runestone that can be activated every 15 to 20 minutes. Hometowns will feature merchants to sell off the loot you've acquired from hacking and slashing through your enemies, and from which to buy unique items. You'll also be able to use your hometown's forge to socket magical gems, known as "magestone shards," into your weapons and items. These shards will have immediate effects on your inventory (a sword equipped with a red shard may deal fire-based damage, for instance), but they'll also trigger hidden abilities when used in the right combinations (such as planting a red and a green shard in the same weapon to create an all-new effect).

Over the course of the game, you'll develop your character in one of three major skills (each character will have a unique trio of skills). For instance, the amazon uses three different combat stances: a bear stance for hand-to-hand fighting, an eagle stance for fighting with a bow and arrows, and a jaguar stance to perform stealth attacks. You'll advance through each set of skills simply by using those skills repeatedly, which will eventually cause your character to increase in rank in that line of skills, as well as unlock additional new abilities tied to that set of skills.

Fortunately, the single-player game should offer about 25 hours of play, during which you can hack your way through armies of monsters, whose power will be automatically adjusted to correspond to your character's strength. And interestingly, throughout the single-player game, you'll never be alone, since, as you visit at least five of the different areas (which correspond to the homelands of the five different characters), you'll always be joined by a character you didn't choose to play as in that character's home area. Your companion will be controlled by the game, for the most part, though you can issue orders and set behaviors, such as instructing your elf-guardian buddy to toss a healing spell your way when you become severely injured.

Exactly how multiplayer will shape up remains to be seen, though Namco is currently planning to allow up to five different players, each playing a different class, in an individual online game at once. The publisher is even considering adding in a player-versus-player mode that will let you challenge other teams of players, but that may or may not make it into the final game. From what we can tell, Mage Knight Apocalypse will offer loads of colorful, easy-to-learn hack-and-slash gameplay, both online and off. The game is scheduled for release in the spring of 2006.