Published: Updated On – 06:15 PM, Sun – 7 August 22
By Aditya Deshbandhu
Noah’s Heart is a just released open world role playing game that has been designed as a massively online experience. In a similar mold as games like Genshin Impact, and Diablo Immortal, Noah’s Heart tries to narrate a compelling story using some incredible visuals and music. This is one of the best sounding background scores in a free2play game that I have had the pleasure of listening to and it is nearly as haunting as the score from the acclaimed Japanese RPG I am Setsuna.
In terms of gameplay, the game’s avatar design process is wonderfully detailed and intuitive. The character design systems don’t seem like a chore and I spent quite a bit of time fine tuning my characters’ looks and physical attributes. The game also has a small tutorial to help guide new players and then it slowly opens up its world layer by layer. With a mix of weapon classes, gadgets, and skills the RPG dimensions of Noah’s Ark are well developed.
However, the experience of playing Noah’s Heart is anything but smooth. I played it on my Android phone and my iPad pro and on both platforms the game stuttered, froze and glitched out. I couldn’t tap the buttons in the tutorial on my phone and I had to skip it entirely.
Similarly, on the iPad the game would freeze up during combat and there were several times I would have to wait for things to unfreeze to know what happened. The game’s dialogues and translations are also riddled with errors and these things need to be polished in future updates. It almost seems criminal to see a game this good-looking and well-developed to be hampered by such issues.
The game’s combat mechanics are quite well designed too and I played with a dual wielding class as it was the closest to impersonating Kirito from the anime Sword Art Online. My character could perform similar moves but the combat left a lot to be desired due to the glitches and hangs.
The leveling up was also a little too simple for the first twenty levels and the rewards seemed unnecessary. Despite the game’s singular focus on the plot, the story seemed disjointed and incomplete to me.
However, when I crossed level 20, the open world that emerged was quite exciting and I enjoyed the options to explore quite a bit. The open world is large and diverse and the game also offers players a unique set of interactions depending on the terrain. For example, striking your weapon in the grass will allow you to collect hay for your horse and engaging with stone will allow you to mine for resources. Swimming in the water will allow you to catch fish and so on and so forth the attention to detail is quite high in the open world dynamics. It’s the quests that I found were a little too bare.
A mixed bag this one, please only consider giving Noah’s Heart a try if you like to explore the limits of RPG games, otherwise, it’s a bit too unpolished for my liking.
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