I’m reviewing Liberated Pixel Cup games, one by one. There’s 48 games.
Disclaimer: I am also competing in the contest.
Song of Blood [Download me!]
This is a Java / HTML5 MMORPG. Sorry, there isn’t a ‘Play me’ link available for now. To run this game, you need to set up an Apache Tomcat server, run the Java Server, then point your browser to your tomcat server (In my case, I pointed it at localhost:8080). The developer has kindly put together a script that helps setting everything up locally. You need to place the script in the same place where you uncompressed the actual downloaded project (From the Download me link)
Once I set things up, I created a character: There are 3 classes available, an Archer (Highly recommended!), an Orator and a Swordsman.
A brief tutorial shows up and explains movement and combat. To move, you can use either Arrows or WASD keys. Combat requires clicking an enemy, then pressing the skill button (Shown below), so in the Archer’s case, 1 to shoot, 2 to use the invisible sword. The reason I recommended the Archer over the Orator and Swordsman is because I couldn’t figure out how to get other skills, so they’re both stuck using Melee moves, without any Ranged moves.
There is an NPC nearby that makes you do a couple of quests, like gathering some nearby coins, or hunting the ghosts that show up nearby. The last quest it has you do involves killing Apple Cultists. After the first wave, a second wave spawns, and there’s just too many to kill single-player.
Luckily, the game allows multiple players at once. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to reset some of the quests, so I couldn’t kill the already-dead ghosts / zombies with the new players, and the Apple Cultists wouldn’t attack the players that hadn’t received the quest.
The movement feels kind of laggy, I guess the server is processing collisions to check if the movement is valid and is slowing down the movement threads while it checks. The map is pretty small, and without respawning enemies, there isn’t much to do other than keep on trying to defeat those evil Cultists.
As a final note, The game does have a built-in chat system which shows up as speech bubbles over the player’s head. The presentation (Login / Register) is fantastic, it looks very polished.
