Choose My Adventure: Villagers and Heroes starts to click and become routine at the same time

Now I should point out before we begin that a game becoming routine isn’t really a bad thing – I’d argue that it’s precisely the point when a game becomes something you like or not. And I’m kind of at the point where Villagers & Heroes has ultimately played its hand and shown me all that it has to offer.

Of course, I could be wrong, but something tells me that’s not the case. Mostly because the last major hurdle was cleared in this playthrough.

I speak about the extremely limited number of buttons I had access to in last week’s run of the MMORPG. As I mentioned before, the buttons the player gets to press are tied to the weapon he’s using, which will provide a couple of abilities associated with his class. As it turns out, though, that’s not the be-all end-all, as some loading screen tips and helpful reader comments pointed out that Gnogmentation is a thing.

Now I do remember the tutorial quest that introduced this system to me, and I also remember having stumbled into the system purely by accident as I was rifling through my character’s inventory. However, neither of those explained that that was how you add more abilities to your bar, and all I had assumed was that it was something like a power-up system like other MMOs I’ve played that had one item eat another to make it grow stronger. But no, I actually Gnogmented an earth axe and a water axe together and got access to multiple earth and water spells!

It’s a good thing I figured this out ahead of time too because the main story quests that I was following next (as instructed by the polling public) started to get a little tougher. Nothing that I’d call extremely challenging, but at the same time it wasn’t quite as faceroll-y as it had been before. I even had to use a healing potion at one point! Tragedy of tragedies!

Ultimately my combination of shields and strikes at range and melee helped me see through a lot of fights. It was pretty clear that my single earth spec idea was not exactly wise in this configuration, but the water abilities I had were less about the focus of my build and ended up feeling like augments or accompaniments to my character’s rotation. I figured things out in practically no time at all.

As for the questing itself, it was all pretty routine here too. Most of what I was doing involved tracing the steps of a group of people who were tasked with bringing a MacGuffin of Evil to safety that ran afoul of some skullduggery. Honestly, it was just a little bit annoying as I was led around the zones I visited by my nose.

Still it wound up being a worthwhile trip simply because it helped me make sure that my rotation and skill choices were locked down. I probably could have been a bit more careful in a couple of places, but overall things were still falling over to me. Even some of the sterner bounty monsters that I was facing in an underground crypt wound up being little match for the Shama that I had created, which is either a testament to the Shaman itself or just my dumb luck in finding the right combination of weapons and items to Gnogment. Probably a little bit of both.

By the time I got through the quest and was being aimed at the next quest hub, I started to just not really rouse a lot of interest in V&H. Again, not because this is a bad game, but because the routine I had fallen into had once again become rut-shaped. I wasn’t about to call myself a master at the title, but I also didn’t really think there was more to squeeze out of the MMO, and the story that was being told didn’t interest me, even if the NPC dialogue and interactions I was having were amusing.

Also I admit that I was mightily distracted by an unexpected event for our genre.

In spite of how blase I might be feeling about V&H on a personal level, I still can absolutely understand why it’s gotten the fanbase it has. While the game is pretty by-the-numbers, it’s still done with confidence and solid gameplay that can appeal to a certain type of MMORPG fan. But as MOP’s Tyler pointed out in one of his most recent columns, games being just OK isn’t a bad thing. And V&H is just OK. Wonderfully OK. It’s not going to blaze trails, but it doesn’t really seem to want to, and it appears to have taken the right lessons from the contemporaries it no doubt parrots. It’s a solid and sturdy and stable little bit of MMORPG gaming that happens to work on mobile too (PC is what I was doing for this run).

Perhaps in my spare time I’ll dip back in and out of this one, especially to see if the housing features it has are absolutely worthy of earning our Housing of the Year award for 2023. Heck, I might even just play it on mobile one time or two just to see what it’s like on a smaller device versus a “traditional” one. But I’m going to basically put a fork in this one, call it done, and appreciate what it’s doing. And also wish the game and its players the best because they deserve it.

So where does that leave the rest of this month’s column? You guessed it: heading back to the beginning and zeroing in on what mobile title to hop in to next. You probably saw this coming; if you did, have a cookie, and if you didn’t have a cookie anyway. Everyone gets cookies.

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Polling will close up like always at 1:00 p.m. EST on Friday, January 12th. For now, I’m going to ponder the orb that is V&H. As well as give in to that earlier mentioned distraction for a few days. Seriously, I’m an addict all over again. Someone help me.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.