I was accepted into the third closed beta to test out Trion Worlds and developers Bluehole Ginno’s new AMMORPG, Devilian. In this article I will give my initial thoughts for what the game is like.

Devilian is an isometric action massive multiplayer online game that lets you play a half human, half demon with the ability to transform and use your demonic powers for a strength boost. When you start off you can choose to play between four characters, that sadly are gender locked with their class.

There is a Male warrior, male assassin class, female mage, and a female Cannoneer that is a little lolicon girl. This annoys me for modern day games that still gender-lock classes because it means you can’t have a big guy with a cannon, or a female that uses a sword.

On top of this, the story isn’t even like character specific where it has to be this set group of characters. With today’s technology it is nothing more than laziness on the developer’s end. Regardless, Path Of Exile is the same way, so I chose a character and moved on to see if the game was still any fun.

Classes and Character creation
The character creation screen is decent, but nothing special, and the graphics for the game looks pretty nice on the highest settings. Even on a lower end laptop the game ran smoothly, so it is also pretty well optimized. You get a color palette with a slider to customize and choose the color for your skin, hair, lips and eyes, but your face you simply pick one out of a list of about 8 or 9 faces or so. The hair variety is about the same with about 9 options to choose from, and you also get the choices to choose you eye type and face tattoos. There are also a few options in the cash shop for you to purchase as well, but because this was still the closed beta the cash shop was very limited with items.

I want to point out something important before moving on to the main gameplay elements for Devilian:You get 2 free character slots, not character CARDS. This is actually a very good thing. I will quickly explain the difference. Mabinogi and Phantasy Star Online 2 have character cards, after you use the card it is gone, even if you delete the character that card is used and just gone, forever until you buy a new one. But a character slot is permanent, even if you delete the character you can still use that slot. So having said that, I was able to test out all four characters using the character slots by deleting my older characters.

The classes to me are too restricted and limited though. In comparison to Rift and Path Of Exile, you really don’t have much choice here. You get three paths to choose from with each class that pretty much boils down to long range, close combat, and DPS, from there you can further branch your skills out to choose what you want to invest points in. In sounds like a lot of options, but when you get in the game there is very little difference in player variety and combat. If the game isn’t going to unlock the gender from the classes (which I seriously doubt they will do), they need to seriously add more classes for more diversity and class builds.

Diving into Combat
The gameplay combat is all in real time. You can move around using the mouse to click around or use the WASD keys to run. The number 1 on your keyboard is your main attack button, with skills being the following escalating numbers after it. If you hold your main attack button down you will continuously attack, even if you are a wizard or a Cannoneer. Your special attack can be performed by Right clicking your mouse, but at any time these buttons can easily be changed.

You can also easily dodge attacks by pressing the Space key. Attacks and dodging will always go in the direction that you aim your mouse, meaning that you can run in one direction while directing your attacks in the opposite direction, or dodge by moving your mouse where you want to go and then pressing Space.

Combat is similar to Diablo and Path Of Exile, but in my opinion it isn’t as interesting as either game. The combat for Devilian is slower in pace. However, based on the comments in the chat this wasn’t such a bad thing for some of the players, I didn’t mind it too much but I will explain why the combat didn’t win me over in a little bit.

The game also takes a few elements from Rift, where spirit callers or other portals will constantly summon monsters until you either destroy the object creating the portals or find a way to close it. This can be challenging if you don’t focus your attention on the portals or if there is a boss standing in your way stopping you from getting there. As for your Devilian transformation abilities, you get them early on and it mostly works as a speed and damage booster that lasts for a set amount of time.

The main downside to the combat is that it is so darn easy. I mean, I blazed through the first few hours of the game at lightning speed and everything died so fast. The game was actually so easy that I was able to Alt-Tab the game and write parts of this article during solo boss fights without dying. I hope they drastically increase the difficulty level for Open Beta.

Pay To Win
First, I want to say that I like the PVP for Devilian a little bit better than Path Of Exile for the simple fact that you can run around with WASD and you have the option to dodge, this gives a bit more freedom and skill to survive, especially if your team mates help you out and back you up… but only to a certain degree. When fighting environment enemies I only had to dodge the boss’ main powerful skill, otherwise I would just stand there and click away. PVP combat I had to move around and dodge more, but I ran into a problem.

I didn’t spend a dime on this game because I have played enough Alpha and Beta tests to know that everything will be wiped on the public Open Beta, and I didn’t want to throw money at Trion due to their past track record.

When I made it to the PVP zone I noticed that there is a bit of a difference in power between players that have pets (which grant minor stat boosts) and cash shop buffs and the players that don’t. At first I didn’t see the problem and I didn’t think it made much difference, but the more I played I could see that the stat boosts did affect the gameplay.

Players that spend money on the game have a combat advantage which takes away from the game. The chat was full of players complaining about the cash shop pay-to-win system, so hopefully the developers were reading it and will take note.

Player skill and dodging doesn’t make much of a difference if the current system stays in place, because the stronger buffed character will always win in a one on one fight. Hopefully these items will either be refined or removed on open beta.

Overall thoughts
The game has potential, but it feels like a copy-pasta game to me. They tried to take all the elements from other games and combine them together, but it all fell flat and had that “Been there, done that” feel to it.

The quests are the cliche “Kill X amount of enemies and bring back their item” style quests that you grind over and over again, and the Devilian transformation ability isn’t all that special or exciting.

You don’t have any excitement for unlocking these abilities because you get them early on and there isn’t much of a challenge to unlock them, making the ability a bit underwhelming. It reminds me a lot of the MMORPG Eudaemon from 2006.

For example, in the game Mabinogi you had to earn the Paladin through a series of challenging quests that progressively became more difficult, and sometimes would take weeks to complete. After that, you then had the option to complete more quests to switch to become a Dark Knight. To make it even more challenging, you had to level up your transformation to make it stronger. So when you saw a high ranking top tier Paladin walk into town, you knew they had to put a lot of work and effort into earning it, and when a guild of them stood together, most players were in awe as they all transformed together.

Devilian doesn’t have that effect because a low level 12 character can transform near the start of the game, and all you had to do was defeat a weak boss to get it.

For now the game seems to be a free-to-play title, so if you want to test it out during Open Beta you can try it out. Devilian’s download size is fairly small so you can download it in a single afternoon.

If you decide to pass on playing Devilian you won’t be missing out on much. If you are already playing Trion’s Rift, Defiance, or similar games like Path of Exile, Guild Wars 2, or Diablo 3, you do better sticking with those games instead because they all do the action RPG thing better.

Author: Nick