Wakfu Review

Wakfu Review

By: Ed Beers

PC/Mac

Mating Sheep. Now that I have your attention, this game has mating sheep, but I'm getting ahead of myself. This is a Free-to-play MMO from Square Enix, and while it's not going to replace WoW or SWTOR anytime soon in terms of lore or story, fans of the strategy classic Final Fantasy Tactics should give this at least your first 10 levels. I believe you'll be pleasantly surprised, as well as just plain surprised, say by the mating sheep-fine, fine getting back on topic.

This is not a serious game, or at least this series does not take itself serious, so do not let the long explanation of what your classes do make you think otherwise. This is a goofy game, and it's goofiness does it credit. You start off by, after making a free account and choosing your server group based on where you want to be, choosing between 13 different classes, which is a fair amount of variety by itself. Each class plays differently enough, you've got archers, thieves, assassins, summoners, fighters, healers, plenty of character types to choose from. But also each class has 3 of four different 'element' spells and specials, Earth Fire Water and Air, to follow which help make how you want to play a character special to you as well.

As you start playing, if you're used to turn based strategy RPGs, such as either the Final Fantasy Tactics or Disaea series, you'll notice how similar the fight systems work. You move through the map by clicking on the square you want to get to, as long as you can  get there without opening some gate or door of course. The fights are, surprisingly enough turned based, and thankfully not random encounters. You and your enemies are given 30 seconds to move or attack, a helpful counter on the side. Course it wouldn't be very fun if you could just attack endlessly for 30 seconds. Instead you're given a certain amount of movement, action, and 'Wakfu' points, which are used up by spells attacks and movements of course. The more you use your spells from the three element paths, the strong the spells become of course but the further down those paths you go, learning more powerful and costly spells, or spells with more interesting effects like swapping places with an opponent, or strengthening a summon, or other such effects. When one gets into the flow of the fight system it can get very fun and fast pace.

An interesting aspect of this game is the eco/political system within the game. You'll start learning early on, among the first 10 levels, of the ecosystem in the Wakfu world. How you can go out and kill monsters chop down trees and the like, or even create more, to balance out the forces of the world. Will you be a ruthless logger? A tree huger? A poacher, or a shepard? And that's not even entering into the political system... Mainly cause since I'm playing this for free I cannot enter fully into it. From what I understand, once you join a nation you can actual start working FOR the nation, working within the system to make your nation the best. There's even elections to choose leaders, which even non-paying members can take part in.

Right enough of that helpful information about gameplay and variety and the like, this game is SILLY, and that's a good thing. If this game was serious it would be an interesting system but I doubt it would have pulled me in so much. But it's silly, it's goofy, from it's cartoony 2-D style artwork, to it's major NPCs such as a golden flying TV, to it's in game history of the world being nearly drowned by an ogre crying over being rejected, all the way down to the sheep like creatures bouncing on top of each other with very pleased happy panting looks on their cartoony expressive faces, and it's wonderful because of it. I know that a lot of games try to have a silly aspect or two to it, but how can one really take a world flooding monster serious, when it's flooding with world with it's tears over a bad relationship? Is it bad that it's a silly game, of course not, in fact I feel that it does itself a favor by it, but I do believe I'm repeating myself.

This game, being free to play, is worth looking into, especially if you're a fan of FF Tactics and other such games. Once you find a class and play style you might find yourself look for battles. And even when fighting gets dull you'll have plenty to get into with crafting items, harvesting or hunting, mining or planting. It's all fun, and it barely takes any time really.