Mythos

"Seeing Leordo's blueprints made me realize what I was doing wrong. My design was perfect, but the fuel I was using was wrong. This device needs Strange Excrement.

"Will you do me one more favor? I heard that the Strange Excrement can be found in Moaby Hangout. The Mans there apparently live on the Strange Excrement. Would you be able to get some of the Strange Excrement from them?"

Can you guess what happens next? If you guessed 'You go running over to Moaby Hangout and punch Mans until enough Strange Excrement falls out,' you'd be right. If you guessed 'You quit the game,' well, that depends how demanding an online gamer you are.

If you're easily pleased, then the moreish, unmistakably Torchlight core might just hold your attention, in the way an old lady might let a cat sleep on her lap. You can crush great-looking monsters and watch their pantomime death animations, collect improbably-named loot ("Legendary Great Scimitar of the Bog!" etc.), level up and progress down three skill trees unique to each class, and despite the game feeling slower and more demanding than Flagship might have intended, it never goes as far as hassling you or expecting you to grind.

The biggest problem here is the drunken lack of balance. My melee-focused Bloodletter was struggling to deal enough damage with melee attacks, something I'd sunk some 18 skill points into, but the moment I dropped a couple of points into summoning Bloodlings, I found the little freaks were capable of ripping their way through a dungeon with such hellish speed that I simply needed to lag behind and hoover up loot. It was a fun discovery, but it made me feel that much more removed from my character and the game's mechanics.

So, Mythos is almost competent as an action game. But if you come here expecting an MMO, and you like your MMOs to have a sense of purpose – whether it comes from innovative design, a world worth falling in love with or a certain awe-inspiring breadth – then this game is a bit of a wasteland.

I've heard Eve Online's learning curve compared to an icy cliff before. Mythos is more like a frozen lake. It's almost supernaturally slippery, with nothing that might grip you and nothing that stands out. Its player-base just slides back and forth between town and dungeon portal, between dungeon portal and boss, between PC and toilet, collecting Strange Excrement and producing ordinary excrement, the towns always similar and the bosses always standing in the same place in the same square room, waiting patiently for a protracted fight and then death.

Wow, I'm depressing myself now. Imagine someone who commutes to an office, then comes home at the end of a long day, each of these days longer than the last, to travel back and forth between dungeons in Mythos, a game which shouldn't even exist, having been first killed off by cruel financial reality and then resurrected in the hope of a fast buck.

Mind you, the best thing about Mythos is that it is free, and you don't have to give them that fast buck. Then again, you'd probably get more hours of play out of a free trial for almost any other MMO – and if you're willing to go as far as to spend money for your entertainment, then Torchlight II is only a couple of months away. Getting involved with this would probably be a mythtake.