Browser games have a bad reputation, and you know what? For the most part they deserve it. For every one of them that tries something daring and different (like Might & Magic Heroes Kingdoms for instance) you have a half-a-dozen sloppily put together efforts which are nothing more than thinly veiled money extractors.
Thankfully City of Steam belongs in the former camp not the latter, and for a game that you can play entirely in your browser it looks pretty solid. Boasting a fantasy world which has experienced an industrial revolution much like our own, with sleek Harley’s and long trains which look as though they've stepped out of a substantially more bad-ass version of Back to the Future III, means this online-only game is set to get a lot of attention. And best of all, beneath this impressively different and sleek-looking exterior is still a fully fledged MMORPG. We had the pleasure of being the first journalist on the planet to step foot in the town of Refuge and we have to admit it felt pretty good. From the start we created our character, a simple Goblin Gunner who specialized in chemical weaponry from a wealth of different race, class and combat specification options. As the product of just 30 developers, a bunch of ex-pats mostly located in China, this hack-n-slash MMO follows a familiar structure.
TROUBLE WITH TECH
There’s no need to download a client of any size or pre-load any software like most browser games (we’re looking at you F1 Online and Auto Club Revolution), instead you simply log into your account and the game’s main menu is waiting for you. All the content is streamed in, including cut-scenes, gear choices, randomized dungeons, environments and everything else you can think of. City of Steam follows a heavily instanced format, with all the commonly corridor-like dungeons entirely separate entities to the town locations which link them all together.
During the hands-on we didn't really get a sense of the overarching story, which involves the titular city being invaded by a massive skyscraper-sized technological construct, but there was plenty of humor inherent in the game’s design, with our NPC uncle telling us to rush into the next area while not addressing the army of Clockroaches amassing around our embattled avatar. Terrible puns aside, it seems the story and the overall atmosphere doesn't take itself too seriously.
Every fantasy staple seems to have been given a Steampunk lick of paint, with the skill tree resembling gears and piping and weapons which are able to be modded in real-time, with your in-world offering resembling exactly the same customizable construct that you've fiddled around with in menus.
Another cool feature was the ability for players to auto-pathfind their way around big settlements simply by clicking on interactive icons on city billboards, and before we forget, there were also challenge quests for players to test themselves, with goals ranging from clearing a dungeon full of monsters to taking out liberally sprinkled boxes emptied around an area of the game.
It’s hard to judge the overall quality of City of Steam, as a lot of its core systems were still being tinkered with during our hands-on, but Machinist Games certainly has big plans. Each race in the game will have their own storyline and with each update the ‘Epic Questline’ (not LOTRO-related before you ask) will be extended on with the developers taking feedback from the players in accordance to judge where to stir the plot.
That kind of openness is brave and refreshing in the often closed-off world of big budget MMO development, but then City of Steam isn't your typical MMO and it certainly isn't big budget.
This most impressive part of City of Steam is the browser-based technology behind it and how economical and efficient Mechanist have been when it comes to world design and data usage. The opening tutorial area only clocks in at a couple of megs, yet the environment still seems varied and welcoming. We suspect that this is this game’s most important strength at the moment, the rest is clearly still in development, but seeing as City of Steam is still just finding its feet – still months away from a proper launch – Mechanist has plenty of time to add more content and polish up their efforts.
