Fallen Earth: First Impressions

Forget everything you think you know about the Hoover Dam. In the future, the Hoover Dam is not just a dam, it’s a massive cloning facility, and right now it’s under attack by mutants. Yep, it’s the post-apocalypse all right. In Icarus Studio’s MMO, Fallen Earth, humanity has splintered into diverse factions, warring over limited resources. In a broken world it’s up to you, a recently reborn clone, to carve out your own destiny among the wreckage that remains after the bombs have fallen.

After a bit of experimentation in the character creator, I am spawned. My clone looks a bit like Don from Mad Men, but instead of a sharp suit I’m clothed in dull fatigues, and instead of sipping whiskey and being a dick to women I’m axing a man in the back to steal his gun. It seems that a small war has broken out in the dam and I’m going to have to fight my way out. My first action is to scavenge the aforementioned axe, which I find buried in a corpse’s head. I kill the first man I see and trade up to a machine gun. Moments later I’m thrust into a massive gunfight aiding invading Lightbearers in their fight against the pleasantly named Clone Dissectors. I’m pretty sure I’m on the side of good in this one.

Combat in Fallen Earth makes an attempt to move away from the traditional MMO sequence of ‘activate attack A, watch animation, activate attack B, wait until attack A has recharged’ by adding a targeting reticle that lets you actually aim at your foes. Having to actually track your opponent and keep them in your sights does add an extra layer of involvement, but we are still firmly in RPG territory. The amount of damage you do, and whether you actually hit your target properly is still decided by some behind the scenes dice rolling. The result feels loose and a little unpredictable, with unreactive enemies bleeding numbers for a bit and then falling over once their health bar is depleted.

Nevertheless, the fight for the dam is a dramatic and impressive opening given the fact that it starts with a huge battle in the bowels of the Hoover Dam and escalates from there. In fact, moments later, without entirely knowing how, I somehow find myself driving a bomb-laden buggy at top speed out of the area. The bomb promptly explodes. I die. Awesome.

It’s okay. Clone, remember?

I’m born again some time later, but the explosion that killed me damaged the database dedicated to resconstructing my DNA. This means, I’m told, that I’m no longer immortal. It’s a bad start to the day, but I’m determined to bounce back. I choose a starting city and head out into the big bad world. I step outside just in time to catch the sun rising over the red desert. I’m surrounded by small dome shaped iron shelters, in the distance I can see a military encampment and an upended plane wrecked on an airstrip. A man gallops past on a horse.

It’s hard to avoid referring to a certain blockbuster single player RPG at this stage because the wasteland that stretches out before me, while not as detailed as Fallout 3′s landscape, evokes a similar cocktail of awe and melancholy. It’s a huge place, and I suddenly understand the need for a mount. I’m eager to get started and head out to my first quest giver, a cheerfully arrogant chap who, like many of the NPC characters in Fallen Earth, is incredibly nice and helpful. All they want to do is teach me stuff and give me money. I’m only too happy to accept their charity and their missions. So what will it be, my first quest, my first foray into in this world?

Lizards. Find three. Make them dead.

Fallen Earth certainly isn’t the only MMO to fall into the ‘Kill X numer of X’ trap but it’s a painful come down from the ambitious opening.  Though, if I was to think about it too much, I’d say that your first task is a good indication of how far humanity has fallen. Gone are the traffic jams and 24 hour news. Gone is the healthcare system, the cities, the Ford Mondeos. There’s no red light districts or burger joints. Garish neon signs. Movies. Cocktails with rude names. Gucci handbags. All gone, blown away by a hot nuclear wind. There’s just me, in an endless desert, braining lizards with a plank.

It should be said that this mild case of existential angst is hugely favourable to the boredom I feel when confronted with yet another cardboard cutout fantasy land of Elves and Orcs. The future setting is welcome, and the slight downer of wandering a post apocalyptic wasteland is tempered by a healthy dose of dark humour, though I can’t shake the feeling that the joke’s on me when one of my missions involves crafting some relish for some bloke’s sandwich. I have to buy a training book first though and, to my horror, I see that there’s a huge list of training books for cooking alone. A book for boiling things, a book for frying things, a book for cold food preperation. And that’s before ingredients have been scavenged from the local wildlife. Then there’s the process of actually crafting your item which, in this case, meant two minutes and fifteen seconds of standing still waiting for a timer to expire (UPDATE: You can in fact queue up crafting tasks and have them running in the background while you do other stuff, which means I needlessly stood there for two minutes like a plonker).

Unfortunately it looks as though crafting is an integral part of Fallen Earth. I’m told that the best items in the game must be crafted. That’s a shame, because crafting is remarkably unexciting, and the opposite of the kind of adventures I want to be having in a post apocalyptic world. But In spite of this there’s some promise here. You can choose a faction to support and this affects the missions you will receive, and whether other groups will view you as friend or foe. I’m also keen to get involved with the community, and see what’s going on in the PvP scene, so I’ll keep up my fight for survival and report back with my conclusions. Now, where did I park my horse?