The Repopulation First Look Gameplay Video

This time we'll be taking a look at a very ambitious game called The Repopulation (early access alpha), an open world sandbox survival MMORPG published and developed by Above and Beyond technologies. As usual, we'll go through the game and show you a bit of what it has to offer. The game is currently in early access alpha on steam, so don't expect much.

Watcha Playin'? is a FreeMMOStation show where we give you a first look with commentary on the most popular free-to-play MMO games available.

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The Repopulation is VERY ambitious. Allow me to reiterate: VERY AMBITIOUS! This game has so many amazing sounding features it almost makes the game sound too good to be true! A dynamically generated world, players can build their own cities complete with vendors and everything! Customizable vehicles – if you want a car that shoots bananas out of its tailpipe, then what's stopping you? Well, unfortunately I'm unable to show you any of this stuff, mostly because I'm assuming it'd take a very long time to actually get footage of these features, but more importantly, I spent about three hours running around the starting area trying to figure out what I was supposed to do! The game offers little in the way of direction, which wouldn't be so bad if this base wasn't laid out so confusingly! I'm all for games that throw their players into a world and leave everything up to their imagination, but PLEASE, PLEASE put a huge exit sign somewhere on the map so I can get the hell out of dodge! So unfortunately, most of the footage in this video is mostly just running around.

The character creator was pretty in depth, you don't pick a starting class or anything, you just create your character and go! There's plenty in the way of customization as well, you can do just about anything you want with your character, tons and tons of sliders to mess around with. After you've created your character you will build as you go, the game has a skill advancement system rather than specified classes, so you're free to do whatever you like! I'll probably turn my character into some sort of magic gun toting shaman, I don't know if it's possible. But it sounds pretty fun!

One thing I'd like to nit-pick here, is the combat. The game has tab-targeted combat. I once got in to a comment war about tab-targeted combat and whether or not it has a place in MMORPGs, and it does. It very much does. But not in this game. Not in this kind of game. A sandbox survival MMORPG with tab-targeted combat is a no-no. That does not offer the depth and freedom I'd like to have with my open world games. Now, in it's defense, the game does say there's a way to switch between action and RPG style combat, which I'm assuming since it says the action combat plays like a shooter, that's the combat type I want. I wasn't able to find any kind of option that changed the combat style though, so I'm not sure if this is a feature that is already implemented or being planned. The Repopulation also has a three faction PVP system in which you can even set up alliances with other factions, I won't go in depth with this feature though as I was unable to experience it. You know, the whole getting lost in the starter area thing.

Like any great game in alpha, the game is riddled with bugs and glitches, I literally got stuck in a shelf not even five minutes after getting in to the game. The controls are iffy, the animations are awful and everything is just very rough and unpolished. I can't say this enough though, it's in alpha. I didn't expect a shining gem. The game is actually in remarkably good shape for an alpha, it's playable, it's not the best experience by any means, but it is playable. It doesn't feel very well optimised. I have a pretty decent rig and I was getting choppy framerates for most of my playthrough. This is part of their planned fixes though, among with many others, optimization is coming.

It's hard to see where The Repopulation stands currently as far as MMORPGs go, I think there's a lot of really great and ambitious ideas behind it and I'd really like to see this game go far, but currently I can't make any sort of judgement on it as my experience was pretty limited. I'll let you guys jump in and decide for yourselves what you think, just don't go in with high expectations. The game has a long way to go before it's a good playable experience.

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