Staff Writer Paul "LockeColeMA" Cleveland gets his hands dirty in this Diablo-esque free-to-play hack 'n' slash MMO.

Back in 2008, Mythos was put on hiatus indefinitely after Flagship Studios shut its doors and the team went on to develop Torchlight. Well, indefinitely has come and gone; the European version of Mythos is currently in closed beta testing under Frogster and HanbitSoft, and will enter open beta on April 12 before officially launching on April 28.

In case you haven't heard of Mythos before, picture a Diablo-esque random dungeon game set in an MMO universe. Players can travel into instanced dungeons to explore, complete quest objectives, down bosses and gather loot, then travel back to common areas holding NPCs and players to craft, sell off treasure or pick up quests. I had a chance to dive into the closed beta, so read on for my impressions!

ZAM has a review from 2008 that talks about the general gameplay mechanics of the game and, while it seems little has changed in the past three years, I'll review my experiences briefly here. There are four basic races: humans, satyrs, gremlins and cyclops. Kudos to the team for reaching outside the “human, dwarf, elf” triad, but the new races aren't all that different from the traditional fare. For example, I made a satyr named “Draenei,” and honestly she was a dead-ringer for a certain horned, cloven, blue-colored race from another MMO. The options were standard fare; no sliders, meaning there will likely be multiple clones of your character.

The next step was picking a class. Mythos has three of them: Pyromancer, your typical mage class; Bloodletter, your typical warrior; and Gadgeteer, a cross between a rogue and an engineering class. I chose Pyromancer because it seemed that mage would be the most interesting. Each class has three skill trees in which to place points, which you earn as you level. Pyromancers can specialize in close combat with Cinderblade; long-range with Flamecaster; or minions with Coalsmasher. I placed my points in Flamecaster, receiving a nice long-range spell called Meteor.

Putting more points into a spell increases the damage but also ups the mana consumption, making it a bit of a double-edged sword. Furthermore, points need to be invested in the tree itself (not in specific abilities) in order to unlock deeper tiers. Spending points in this way made me feel a bit like I was throwing away points, but at least there was a bit of worth in the investment as the points increased certain stats, depending on the tree.

As for leveling itself, each level gives a player 5 points to invest in basic stats. Many equipment items require a certain stat level to use, but outside of that a player could easily focus on their HP or their attack points, allowing a good deal of customization.

Logging into the game, I found myself in a tutorial zone with some simple instructions on how quests work. Similar to other MMOs, Mythos uses the “yellow exclamation point over the head” to show quests (although the color can vary, based on whether it is repeatable or not). Quests are very much the best way to level, as enemy kills give minimal experience. The tutorial zone also introduced crafting, which seemed like a surprisingly deep system encompassing skill trees similar to the combat ability trees.

One of the first things I noticed was the “Beta-ness” of the quest dialogue – much of it seemed freshly translated for English speaking audiences and needs fine-tuning before release. Spelling and grammar errors were frequent and, while the speech was appropriate for the quests itself (“The town is burning, HELP!”) it usually came out sounding a bit corny (“Much help are needed for the burning of the town, noble satyr Draenei'). It's worth noting that last week's latest closed beta update introduced multiple language versions of the game, such as German, French, Polish and Turkish.

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