Heva Clonia Beta Impressions

By Taylor Lux (DeerTayorKay)

Heva Clonia, the Korean inspired game from OGPlanet, introduces something that’s generally lacking or only for specific classes in other MMOs, the use of pets. Want to play a Warrior? Great, have a little bouncy blue guy to follow you and heal your wounds. Playing the squishy mage? That’s alright; clone a little blue hermit crab to follow you and tank oncoming enemies while you blast them with spells. These are the perks of the upcoming Heva Clonia.

These Aren’t Your Dolly the Sheep

Remember playing various games where you go “That enemy would be awesome for my character to have.” Sure some titles eventually made a small effort to let you live the dream… except it was only for a select few enemies that are expensive or hard to obtain. Then when you finally had the epic monster by your side, most often you would be disappointed to see your little critter standing around doing nothing but offering moral support while you fight solo. Heva Clonia pushes this feature without limitations. Not only can you have any defeated enemies you come against follow you around, but they actually serve a purpose other than cosmetics. How it works is there’s a chance for each enemy defeated to drop a DNA strand. Once the DNA is in the palm of your head, simply grab a life scroll, find the creepy tree guy, and next thing you know you can have your own clone of that defeated enemy!

Each clone fills a specific role, such as Healer, Guardian, or Attacker. Clones also get a bit more customizable because they have different skills and grades. You can evolve your clone to obtain a better grade of Clone as well, so obtaining duplicate DNA isn’t actually a hardship. Also, they have a collection book where you can place clones to obtain mechanical benefits, so clones that exhaust their usefulness still offer one last gasp of utility by joining your collection.

Platforming Is Alive

In several of the zones along with the instanced missions, there’s actually some platform gaming involved. I found the basic combat and platform-based puzzles and adventuring refreshing compared to the usual MMO where jumping is either extremely limited or nonexistent. Heva Clonia’s combat and platforming will offer a familiar experience to Kingdom Hearts and similarly styled games. Though that’s not to say it plays quite as smoothly.

The most glaring issue was the camera angle and automatic adjustments it makes. You might attempt to run in a straight path by holding down the W key, only to find yourself slowly drifting off course as the camera readjusts automatically to best fit the background of the level. As one would expect, this is the last frustration you need when trying to line up platforming jumps.

Prospects of the Future

While I know I only tested Heva Clonia’s initial beta test, the content on offer here was severely lacking. The number of interesting quests feels sub-par and, to make matters worse, “Coming Soon” pops up while attempting to explore outside the hand-guided regions. Hopefully Coming Soon signifies “Cool Quests and Innovative Content Coming Soon” rather than the continuous barrage of Kill X of Y and Gather A item from B creatures that fills the beta version at every turn. However, if those “Coming Soon” notices decide to stick around or reveal more of the same, then we have a serious critique against this game.

What we have been promised for the future is PvP and another playable class. With their heavy emphasis on platforming and pets, this game’s PvP stands to offer some longevity to the game. However much remains to be seen, though I’m optimistic that a few post-launch updates will add the polish this game needs to really shine.

Dialogue the Epilogue

Since OGPlanet has Korean influence, there are no problems with the character dialogue not being in English. What rubbed me the wrong way though was how fairly dull the NPCs were. The enemies even more so than their actionless counterparts. It seemed as if there were only two or three different pieces of dialogue on enemies. It wasn’t that each enemy or class of enemy had a few phrases that they said, but all enemies had the same few dialogue boxes, nearly all of them containing “lawl” or other leet speak, which was rather distracting when attempting to get engrossed in the game. Hopefully this is simply a Beta test to ensure that the text is working properly and that they will place the real text for the enemies as it gets closer to launch, but this was something that took away from the veil of belief that the player was in the game and just pointed out the fact that it was indeed simply a game.

Current Verdict: Good

There’s always some polishing that needs to be done when you bring out your Beta for the world to tinker with before you actually launch the game. However, for each strong point, such as an emphasis on platforming, you get a negative, such as camera angles constantly changing, which ultimately starts to undo the strong that was brought to the table. They did a decent job with their pet system and making it a centric role in the game while allowing it to be utilized and beneficial to all classes. Hopefully they will revise their enemies’ speech to allow for better immersion in their game. Otherwise each enemy is going to just be a bad joke that shatters the veil separating their fantasy world from the Internet culture.