Mara's Gaming Corner - July

People have been waiting for Cube World's release for two years now. An endless journey on unknown land with action-based combat makes people wait for a reason. However, nobody expected Cube World to suddenly come out on the start of July as alpha version. Does Cube World live with promises or will the alpha version kill all hope for this game?

Cube World (PC) Developed by Picroma

Minimum System Requirements

• Windows XP SP2 or newer
• Intel® Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, Core i3 OR AMD Athlon 64 X2
• NVIDIA® GeForce® 7800, ATI X1800, Intel HD 3000 (256 MB of video RAM and shader model 3.0)
• 2 GB RAM

Hello, gamers! Today I will tell you about an amazing game. It's an experience that people have awaited for the last two years. It's an action-packed adventure with voxels and has surprisingly good gameplay for an alpha! Guess what game it is! Minecraft, perhaps? Good guess, but the correct answer is Cube World, which just got released on PC recently. Speaking of Minecraft, people tend to claim that Cube World is just a massive rip-off of Minecraft. The truth is that the only similarity with Minecraft are the voxels. Cube World focuses on completely different elements.

Cube World is developed by a married German couple, Wolfram von Funck and his wife Sarah. They face a huge challenge: making a dream game which involves infinite adventures, with you in control as a hero. Even after multiple people have offered to help with powerful servers, the couple has chosen to work alone on this project, for unexplained reasons. Will they really be able to do it themselves? I hope this doesn't crash the project!

The developers had no idea just how quickly this game would get immensely popular. Alpha was released in early July, but the servers got overloaded right away. The shop for buying the game was down for two days and, even as I write this article, the shop is still closed. Fortunately, things are getting more stable as time goes on.

But enough of the backstory, let's talk about the game itself. What is Cube World, exactly? It's a world made of cubes and you are there to save the day. Worlds are endless and can be shared with other players via seed number. This also means if you play single player with, say, seed 5037, and then go in multiplayer with the same seed, you spawn in the same area where you left off. This adds more playability to the game, since there are tons of seeds with weird and awesome stuff.

The game also supports infinite levels. However, this doesn't mean that you can become insanely powerful. Your character is balanced by power level, which determines how powerful the gear you equip can be. It increases fast at first, but as you level up more and more, the power level increases more slowly. To get the power level 100, you have to be level 1990. You think that is hard? Try to get power level 101 - have fun grinding to level 671088535. Even though power level increases slower, it is good to level up, as your health points continue to increase.

Cube World has a combat that focuses on player skill and free movement. Of course, you are not able to defeat insanely high level bosses at level 3, but in most cases you are able to dodge enemy attacks and strike at the right moment. This is one of the reasons why I like this game; the game rewards you for being a skillful player. It feels great to take down an incredibly difficult boss who throws high damage boomerangs at you all by yourself. I wish enemies wouldn't be so simple though. Bosses would be much better if there would be more special attacks that are deadly if not avoided. I also noticed that only a few enemies actually try to dodge your attacks. Enemies that dodge add more intensity to the battle, and I wish it would be a norm for more difficult enemies.

You are able to defeat most monsters in the world if you are skilled enough.

The game also supports crafting, even though there aren't too many things to craft yet. You can craft potions, armor, amulets and other stuff that will come in handy later on. Not only that, but you can customize your weapon with special cubes you can find in caves. You can place the cubes on your weapon freely, leading to your own interesting designs. I hope this feature will also be added on other gear in the future.

For now, there are four different classes; Warrior, Mage, Ranger and Rogue. Warriors are heavily armored melee fighters, mages can cast powerful spells, rangers can fight from great distances and rogues are agile melee fighters. All classes have two subclasses, but currently the only difference is the third skill in the class tree. In addition, there are other skills that everyone can use that are not related to combat. However, they are all useful skills. For example, there is a skill where you can ride a pet. This will make you faster and the extra speed is useful, as traveling long distances is not uncommon in this game. At first, spending points on skills will make a huge difference, but as you put more points in the same skill, improvement gets much slower. Eventually, it gets so slow that you don't gain anything from spending a single point!

Speaking of riding, one of the features I like are the pets. There are all kinds of animals you can obtain, that do many different things. Some do melee damage, some do ranged damage, some are ridden and there is even one that can heal you! To get a pet in Cube World, first you have to find out what food each animal likes. Then you have to obtain the food and then offer it to the animal. This is really simple but also insanely addicting. It's almost like playing Pokémon all over again; especially along with the fact that they are able to level up!

Multiplayer is great fun if you get the right people to play with you.

Cube World already has 4 player multiplayer support both online and LAN, but it's been a buggy ride so far. The biggest issue with multiplayer is that all players get experience points from completing a quest. This means that everyone else can just stay in town while one player goes and completes a quest. I have encountered some players who have been asking for powerleveling and I find this really sad. I also heard from a friend that one of his friends went to a modded server which had about 100 players and then came back with level 800 without doing anything. I hope this will be fixed, so only the people doing hard work are getting rewarded. Not only that, but servers like to crash when someone disconnects.

It is difficult for me to describe visuals of this game. After all, it's just a world of cubes! There are two things I'd like to mention though regarding visuals. The first one are the landscapes. I have stopped multiple times on a mountain and just looked at the world. It's really stunning and it's simply surreal to traverse these beautiful terrains. The second thing I'd like to mention are the choice of colors. The color palette is amazing! There are all kinds of bright and happy colors in peaceful places, but in dangerous places the colors reflect an atmosphere of darkness and fear.

The game's audio is also great, but there are some issues when it comes to volume balance. For example, going to the inn and talking to the guy behind the desk will break your ears if you have your audio on high volume. I hope this will get fixed before people become seriously deaf. There isn't any music so far in the game itself, but I found a track that is going to be added to the game later on. If all tracks will be as good as the one I found, then you don't need to worry about music at all.

Overall, Cube World is really fun even though the game is in alpha and there isn't much content. With the right people, you can make multiplayer an enjoyable experience, but playing alone is already fun itself. I can't wait to see how Cube World has progressed when it goes into the beta stage!

Mara Rating: PLAY IT LOUD!

—Mara