A few days ago a mind-virus infected all of my play2earn friends.
I woke up and everybody was playing MIR4. I tried to hang out in Discord voice chat during my usual Lost Relics grind... it was hard, because all they were doing was talking about this other game! It sounded like a whole lot of fun too.
I resisted. I want to grind Relics, after all a big new update is on the horizon. New info and leaks have been dropping daily.
Well, I made it about 24 hours. Then the virus entered my brain.
Playing MIR4: The First 10 Hours
I'll be honest, the first ten hours of MIR4 I barely had to do anything. This game is a free-to-play MMORPG designed for both mobile and PC. It definitely has an appeal to casual players, particularly in the early game.
Mind you, you CAN control it all manually. Outside of cutscenes, nothing has to be automatic. Furthermore, as I learned, doing things manually tends to be more effective than doing them automatically. This means you have to pick: Efficiency or convenience?
The process of leveling from 1-20 is basically pure Dopamine Rush Simulator. Ding! Ding! Ding! Level up, skill up, new quest completed, new mission unlocked, new system revealed! Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine!
It's a lot of fun even if the gameplay experience is a bit thin and you have no idea what's going on.
MIR4: 10-25 hours in
After about 10 hours, the game started to make more sense and develop more depth of gameplay.
While autobattling is an option, somewhere between level 20-25 I found that I would die if I left my character to fight while I did something else. Manual battles became necessary.
There were some tough boss fights. One in particular, in the Demon Bull Zone, really kicked my ass. It took at least three tries and some sidequests to level up my character before I got through.
It makes sense, since I am only level 32 as of writing this blog post and the Demon Bull area is for "Lvl 31-35"
Something fun I noticed while leaving my character to auto-farm a low level area: There's an automatic screensaver! Your character keeps battling even when this goes up.
Raids
I have done the lowest level raid in the game with a few of my friends. You unlock this around level 20.
It was pretty fun, but honestly very easy. Some of my guildmates are higher level than me and they pretty much carry us through it... I am looking forward to leveling up more (I'm catching up!) and being able to test some harder raids without being carried.
I'll talk more about raids in this game in a future post, as well as another mode called "Magic Square" -- these are both very interesting and will take time to discuss.
Should You Play MIR4?
I am just barely scratching the surface of what MIR4 offers.
This is the first Play2Earn game that has reached anything close to full release -- and it is glorious! Honestly it's a huge breath of fresh air to play a game with tons of content and some actual polish and hi-fidelity graphics.... it's a nice change of pace.
I am still super excited about lots of the more organic and home-grown projects, I've been onboarding people into Splinterlands daily and still playing some Axie, Lost Relics, and keeping an eye on the new Gods Unchained set. MIR4 doesn't erase any of that. It does definitely put a challenge to those games though -- you have some more serious competition now!
MIR4 is free to play on Steam. If you have some time to try it, you really should. This one might be a big deal.
P.S. -- because I know people will ask -- the cryptocurrency marketplace is unlocked at level 40, there is an in-game token called DRACO that can be exchanged for a token called WEMIX. I think one DRACO is equal to about four WEMIX, but I am not totally sure how that works. More info on the crypto side of this game coming soon once I unlock it and can start engaging with it.