Yay: Undecember is not quite as greedy as Diablo Immortal. The action role-playing game is not yet an alternative, as our disillusioned tester reveals.
45,000 people on Steam are currently playing a game that less than half (41 percent) would recommend. The questionable success of Undecember impressively shows how great the desire is for a new action role-playing game à la Diablo. And how high the hurdle that new hack & slays have to jump.
But it is also proof that developers no longer know any shame when it comes to Free2Play and ingame shops. After all, even Blizzard lent a helping hand with Diablo Immortal – and things don”t look much better with Diablo 4.
To be fair, Undecember is not as brazen as Diablo Immortal or as unplayable as some user tests make it out to be. You don”t suffer any permanent damage while playing. However, it doesn”t get much more positive than that here. It”s a smartphone game with a Steam port, real-money auction house and built-in rootkit.
At the beginning everything is still quite nice
Undecember starts off with a few quite nice cutscenes and a confusedly translated story. The entire game takes up a modest seven gigabytes on your computer, many enemies are correspondingly low in polygon, the audio quality of the voice output is weak and the predominantly brown landscapes look quite nice here and there, but do not have particularly detailed textures.
The first tutorial enemy dutifully drops a sword, a bow and a wand, a short time later there are three active skills for combat, then a few upgrades that you link to that skill (more speed, damage effect, elemental damage and so on), similar to Path of Exile, only not tied to equipment sockets.
As you level up, you now distribute points to Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence, which among other things affects what equipment you can wear, plus there are passive points that you can use to increase things like melee and spell damage or the power of summoned Minions.
This allows for some build variety without preset classes and is less overwhelmingly structured like in Path of Exile. Those who always found this too complicated might enjoy Undecember”s system. The game starts out easy as pie, everything dies after one or two hits, but the difficulty level gradually rises to brutal heights. This is intentional, the developers want your money after all.
Fun first, then shop
The battles play passably, the progress comes rapidly in the beginning. As the game progresses, you are pushed more and more towards the in-game shop. The game bombards you with upgrade materials in dozens of quality levels, in tradable and soul-bound form and in fragments, stackable up to 30 pieces.
This may work for 30 or 40 levels, but at some point your inventory will overflow. Additional inventory spaces and compartments for the storage chest cost real money. If you wish, a pet will collect your loot, sell it or dismantle it. This luxury costs around a tenner per month, in addition to the optional Season Pass, which gives you more sales slots in the real-money auction house alongside special rewards.
Yes, you can trade items in the auction house for so-called rubies, which are most easily obtained in exchange for the real-money currency diamonds. Theoretically, you also get rubies if you successfully sell something in the auction house, but if you don”t grind end-game content full-time, you shouldn”t hope for any significant sales.
The loot is junk and provides zero motivation. Unique items drop once a leap year, magic and rare items pop up far too often with empty enchantment slots that you can randomly populate with stats in exchange for upgrade materials.
Ew! A nasty reader has just pointed out to me that the error devil has crept into the Undecember test. Following paragraph:
The chapter bosses, which are quite easy at the beginning, become extremely difficult later on. If you bite the dust, you either wake up in the city and have to run back into the dungeon to the boss and start the fight all over again, or you can resurrect yourself on the spot without resetting the boss. This resurrection also costs money.
The chapter bosses, which are quite easy at the beginning, become extremely difficult later on. If you bite the dust, you have to start the fight again from scratch or you can revive yourself directly and without losses without resetting the boss. This resurrection also costs money.
Double buzzkill
Later in the game, you can”t help but brew tons of healing potions before venturing into dungeons and bosses. You make them via an alchemy system, which takes away several minutes of your life time. However, progress can be accelerated for real money, as it should be otherwise.
You can pimp your skill runes and thus become stronger, the corresponding materials can also be obtained most easily for cash. Instant healing potions, even identification scrolls can be obtained most reliably against premium currency anyway. Of course, you don”t really need any of that, but play until the end game, when you wait half an hour for potions before every boss and your inventory is constantly overflowing.
Whether with or without investing your hard-earned Euros, however, the experience gain drops rapidly from the second half of the game onwards. Later, you”ll play through areas half a dozen times before the boss is no longer ten levels higher than you and effortlessly knocks you down with one blow.
After around 20 hours, you”ll finally have seen all ten story chapters and be heading into chaos dungeons and void rift challenges with crunchy boss fights as the endgame, raiding up to three eight-player raid bosses per week, or brawling in PvP with people who play 20 hours a day and regularly leave a small fortune in the real-money auction house.
Autopilot and spam bots
If you don”t like to concentrate on games, there”s also the function to automatically execute certain attacks as soon as enemies are in range. You can also have the game activate up to four potions at the same time if you meet certain criteria.
For example, if your mana falls below a certain value, you lose half your life or at regular intervals. So all you have to do is walk across the map, your hero will attack and heal on its own, and the pet will collect the loot.
The fact that hardly any human input is necessary here fits in perfectly with the global chat, in which every second some bots spam links to dubious websites that offer rubies at a lower price than the operators of the game. Now and then a few human players talk, but then without exception in Cyrillic characters. Which is not bad if you understand the Russian language. Otherwise it is rather suboptimal.
Editorial conclusion
“I”ve had X hours of fun without spending any money,” some players boast on the Steam forums, as if they”ve now somehow tricked the greedy manufacturer or won something. Great, great job, you just spent a few days of your life in an unspectacular, discreetly boring clone of a better game, didn”t find any interesting loot and are now too weak for the endgame. You can do it, in the end we”re all just kind of killing time while waiting for the inevitable end of our utterly pointless existence.
To me, it”s not worth the eternal wait at the alchemy table. I don”t find the dull brown on brown of the game world interesting enough for that. I also have no interest at the moment in learning extra Russian to communicate with the community and filter out the endless flood of spam bots. Undecember may not be as brazenly monetised as Diablo Immortal, but “other games rip you off too” is just not a winning selling point for me.
