Divine Souls

The past few years have been kind to the online video game (or MMO). The sheer amount of interest in playing video games online has stirred a deep sense of diversity within the bowels of this particular brand of beast, and as such, each passing day holds the promise of a new style game entirely. Today, that MMO is Divine Souls. Its style? Fast-paced, action-packed combat.

There are many reasons to play an MMO; you could be looking for a place to make new friends, a place to prove your glory and honour, or you could simply be looking for a new world to discover and explore. But if you’re looking for a place to fight; to overwhelm your opponent with fast-paced combos and limitless combat ability, then Divine Souls could very well be your dream come true.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Divine Souls offers everything you could expect from an MMO; there are countless quests, enormous cities to explore, hundreds of items to collect and equip and thousands of enemies to fight and destroy. But the focus here is on combat, and more importantly, on doing it differently.

This isn’t the kind of game where you push one button and wait for your enemy to fall over and die. In Divine Souls, combat is much more involved. In fact, it’s much more similar to an offline action game at the core; whereby in order to fight you must press keys in quick succession to form combo, and perform special abilities to maximise your damage. However, combat requires first that you choose character which will determine your fighting style. You can choose to play as a Fighter, Slasher or Mage, and their styles reflect their titles accordingly.

Once you’ve selected your class, you’ll then need to choose your combat configuration. This means that you’ll need to choose to play with wither the keyboard or mouse, and the short tutorial at the beginning of the game will offer you a chance to experience both, and make your choice at the end. Then, you’re ready to fight.

As mentioned earlier, Divine Souls is a fully-fledged MMO, in the sense that when you defeat an enemy you’ll be rewarded with money and items to help make your character stronger. You’ll also be able to explore towns, craft items and accept quests that will send you off to ‘instanced’ areas to fight against dangerous enemies. Instance areas are basically sections of the game that are segregated specifically for you; in that before you enter them you can decide whether to attempt them alone, with your friends, or to open them up to the public allowing you to meet and fight alongside other players and make new friends.

Of course, a combat-centric game does have limitations, such as a lack in story progression and overall design. Divine Souls is a game created for a purpose: allowing players to fight with skill in fast-paced environments against hundreds of enemies alongside plenty of friends. And that’s exactly what it allows you to do. Only one question remains: have you got what it takes to survive?