I managed to get myself a 15 day trial to Fallen Earth – a game that numerous bloggers in our tight knit community have been talking about for the past few months, but I had not found the time to play. Actually this is my 2nd 15 day trial as I didn’t even manage to log in for the first one. Thankfully I didn’t have too long of a patch to get back up to speed, and within the hour I was in game at the character selection screen.
A few things to keep in mind as I write about this game. First of all, the genre is completely new to me. I’m not a fan of zombies, or anything post-apocalyptic. In fact you could go as far as to say that it scares me pretty bad. I’ve also never played a first person shooter before, or in fact ANY shooter game besides duck hunt for the nintendo, and I’m not even sure that counts. I do love using ranged attacks in my ‘general’ MMO choices, rangers, casters, healers who stand at range, etc but for ‘most’ of my MMO choices there’s no aiming involved. Nor do a great many of them have complex weapons, and I certainly don’t have to (typically) swap out my crossbow for a two handed wooden board. Until today.
There were a few commands I wanted to learn right off the bat. No, not how to attack – but me being me, I wanted to know how to free the mouse so I could view the face of my character for screen shots. Turns out that command is alt + holding down the right mouse button. Want to get rid of the UI? Alt + F10 will do that for you. These are things I couldn’t figure out right away, as the tutorial was trying to explain to me that I would need to swap weapons, scavenge corpses, and – oh hey is that a dead body over there? I wonder if they were carrying anything.
Some people break for shinies, I now break for corpses. Plant, animal, person, it matters not. If it’s not moving (and some times even if it is) chances are I’m there trying to glean something off of it.
The story line was great, and once I got through it and started watching the ‘lifenet’ video that your ‘clone’ (character) starts watching once they’ve revived I just about had an accident I was laughing so hard. I loved the humor in such a dark themed video game. If you’re not a fan of blood, guts, rotting things and gross icky stuff then this game probably isn’t for you. If you can look past that (which I am currently doing) you’ll find out just how much of a gem it is. As an example the first thing you’re sent to do is grab an axe out of some corpses head to use. Hey, he’s not going to be using it after all.
I’m still level 1, but again this is ‘one of those’ games where you don’t want to pay attention to what level you are. Exploring quickly became a big deal to me as I was sent out after chickens and ended up.. well I’m not quite sure where. The community was great and friendly, and it wasn’t THAT crowded when I was wandering around, which probably helped. I’ve played barely two hours into the game, and I’m already loving crafting (more about that later, I haven’t even really started and I know I love it). Will I play past the 15 day trial? Not sure yet. It’s a money and time thing more then a unsure about the game thing at this point.
Playing? Let me know who your character is and I’ll add to my friends list. You can find me there as Ellithia, and no doubt I’ll have a LOT more questions as time goes on.