Alongside weapons, mutations are key in this dog-eat-dog world. Each available mutation is grouped into one of three categories: Augmentation (primarily for personal buffs, or sometimes to debuff the enemy), Restoration (focuses on telepathy and healing abilities), and Destruction (used to unleash pain upon your enemies). When you first begin the game you have mutations from the “Alpha Path,” providing a handful of buffs for your character, as well as basic attacks. As you progress through the game you have the ability to learn new mutations to further enhance your play style, as well as learn entirely new mutation paths depending on which factions you align with.
Alright, so I said this was an RPG, so where is the character progression? You gain experience by fighting monsters, completing missions, or harvesting and crafting items, and you gain additional ranks (sublevels), and eventually full levels (ten ranks per level). Each time you gain a rank you are awarded two advancement points, which can be spent on increasing specific stats or skills.
There are eight statistics you are able to improve: Charisma, Coordination, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Perception, Strength, and Willpower. Each stat affects the player in some way, such as boosting skills or affecting how far you can progress through trade skills. There are also additional Derived Attributes which cannot be altered directly, but are instead based off of the main stats “" these are Gamma, Body, Health, Mind, and Stamina. During the beginner tutorial a brief explanation is given for certain stats and how to spend AP and the rest are fully described in the help tab.
I’m going to pause here to just point out that Fallen Earth‘s help section is extremely useful and extremely user friendly, providing all the information that you need to plan out what to increase for your character as well as further explain every other detail of the game very simplistically.
Now for skills, the nine areas that directly affect how proficient your character is in a certain area. First and foremost you have your four defensive skills, Armor Use, Dodge, First Aid, and Group Tactics. As you increase your skill in Armor Use your character is able to wear progressively stronger armor as well as obtain better defensive stats through that armor, and Dodge improves player-defense versus ranged attacks. First Aid is extremely important as it provides a few abilities that are able to heal players, but also because a certain level requirement is needed for different Medicine and Mutagenics skills. Finally, higher levels of Group Tactics provide progressively stronger buffs for your character and teammates.
There are three offensive skills affecting each type of combat; Melee, Pistol, and Rifle. Increasing Melee provides a two-for-one deal, as it boosts both the damage you do in melee combat as well as increase your melee defense. The Pistol and Rifle skills determine the power of the weapons your character can use, as well as the damage you are able to do with them.
Finally, there is the Social skill, which is more of a quirk. A higher skill in Social gives you an edge with merchants, providing lower costs for items and better deals when you sell items. It also eventually gives you special abilities to hide from others what factions you are allied to.
During the tutorial you are shown how to raise your rifle skills, and then in turn are able to proceed and tear some guards apart. Once the actual game begins and I got my starter weapons, I found it was much more beneficial to raise Melee versus weapons at lower levels due to not yet having access to more powerful guns. I was happy to see that increasing appropriate skills did actually have an impact on gameplay, and I began to adapt the “smash the enemy to bits” tactic instead of running around with guns blazing.
Fallen Earth takes a new approach on the crafting system. There are ten trade skills available to perfect: Armor Crafting, Ballistics (forging firearms and ammunition), Cooking, Geology (mining), Medicine, Mutagenics (mutation enhancing drugs), Nature (resource gathering from nature), Scavenging (resource gathering from junk piles), Science (computer and battery crafting), and Weaponry (melee weapon construction). You become better at each trade skill simply by crafting more items, which you learn from books you find or buy in your travels.
Each item takes a certain period of time to craft, and you may only craft one item at a time. This prevents “power-leveling” a trade skill as seen in other MMOs, but there is a positive side! No matter what you are doing, in-game or out, your character continues to craft items that are queued to be made. This is one of the better features of the game, I believe, simply because it lets you create a bunch of items while enjoying the other aspects of the game.
There are many ways to travel through the world, ranging from horses to crafted ATVs and motorcycles. This is a good thing, because the game is massive and traveling by foot simply isn’t plausible. These mounts aren’t just for riding either, as you can use certain weapons while mounted!
While beta testing I was running Fallen Earth at all maximum graphic settings while maintaining an okay frame rate, sometimes getting mild lag. However, I believe most of this lag came from un-optimized game coding, as it was still in the beta stage, and this is normal. The game wasn’t graphically stunning, but it definitely was not an eye sore. Your character render is the most detailed and the most visually pleasing object in the game-world, followed by the other game characters (players and NPCs). The few towns I played in seemed unpolished, but have a lot of potential.
Though still in the closed beta stage, Fallen Earth already is a very fun and exciting game to play, providing new and unique features, and will only get better the closer it gets to release. As a new competitor in the MMO market and taking elements from both the RPG and FPS genres, this is definitely one game you will want to keep your eyes on.
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