TLDR: Terracore and Metalcore. Weekend of cores!
The first surprise about this game: it's on the Epic Games app?! I didn't think I'd see crypto-enabled games here or on Steam, but that's nice.
Sign up was easy and I got an email almost immediately with access to this week's playtest event.
When I got in game, I realized why it was so easy: the game felt pretty dead. The game I joined had 6 players in it. The saving grace is that the game has PvE going on all the time and then a PvP event will start.
The gameplay itself was decent. I mainly focused on PvE due to low pop. The AI was pretty bad. I'm imagining how it's supposed to work is that the PvE just gives you a place to grind mats that you then use to make vehicles/mechs that you take to the main event: PvP. As mentioned, this loop was a bit broken.
I've put in 100s of hours into Planetside 2 (and even more in Planetside 1 back in the day). If I squint pretty hard, I can see the promise of another Planetside-type game. Mixing in PvE seamlessly would be quite the feat.
What's particularly interesting about this game is how they plan to integrate NFTs to build an economy. I planetside, you spawn a tank, ride off, get blown up, and repeat until your credits ran out. In Metalcore, that tank is an NFT. You can use it, sell it, or rent it out. As with seemingly all NFT-enabled games, you can also buy land and mine resources.
I didn't see enough in the game to really drive sustained interest. I played two sessions for ~20 minutes each before logging out. As with Planetside, the key is lots of players. If they can build a great game, the players will come. Including me.
A hive game! #terracore
https://www.terracoregame.com/?ref=kstreet (ref link)
This one's a browser idler. You buy into the game with $10 worth of Hive and then you passively earn $SCRAP (or you can buy it). You use this scrap to level up your stats.
For the love of god don't neglect defense! Most important stat. After a 24-our grace period, you'll start getting attacked. The higher your defense, the fewer people that can attack you.
You can buy items to further enhance your stats, but when starting out, your best bet is to just upgrade your stats (defense first). My defense is actually low and will be my next upgrade.
My biggest draw to the game at the moment is that a bunch of people I know on Hive are playing it. Plus, an idler to help kill downtime at work never hurt anyone. The discord is super active and even with everyone there constantly attacking each other, it's surprisingly friendly!
There's also ships to earn, planets to explore, and bosses to kill. I'm too new to do any of that, but I can't wait to figure it out.
I'm going to spend more time with this game over the next week or so before doing an in-depth write-up on it and my experience. I'm excited to see this game grow, though, and if you like idle games, you should definitely check it out.
