Review | Love
At first sight…
Format: PC | Genre: MMO | Publisher: Quel Solaar | Developer: Quel Solaar | Release date: 26/03/10 | RRP: €10/m
Continued…
So it continued, our settlement growing ever larger, and ever more disorganised as we all returned from our one-man expeditions with some token or another, from a pavement tool to binoculars. Somebody had figured out how to build walls, which sounds great, until we realised he’d also managed to cover our settlement in cavernous holes which you couldn’t climb out of. Eventually, somebody else built a door, which frankly should be an essential addition to any budding fortress. Another lucky pioneer had returned with the Config token, which allowed us to reroute power from the Power Wells that littered the landscape, and begin powering myriad tools, from a force-field to a health dispenser and a zip-line.
It’s about then that I realised I really liked Love. We were pioneers, wanderers, settling on an alien landscape with unknown tools and a great deal of difficulty, and I was having an absolutely brilliant time. It was slightly crazy, and hugely confusing, starkly different, and about as intuitive as quantum physics – but damn, this is what gaming should be about.
Until the artillery hit. We hadn’t really been expecting it – we’d spotted some mysterious looking characters wandering the virtual landscape, and a few of our number had exchanged fire with some nefarious AI, but we hadn’t anticipated fire and brimstone from the sky. Within minutes, our base lay in tatters, our once pristine if messy field now littered with potholes, craters, and a few remaining structures – the final remnants of our once proud city.
No love lost
The AI in Love is not nice. Frankly, it’s about as evil as it gets: not only will foes do their utmost to reduce your settlement to rubble with alarming regularity, they’re also the guardians of Love’s most powerful and rarest tokens. If you intend to turn your shoddy village into an urban metropolis, complete with automated teleporters, sentry guns and trip mines, you’ll have to make a brave foray into enemy territory – assuming they don’t atomise you first. When our dishevelled band of explorers finally discovered the enemy city, it was a sight to behold – while our grim collection of hovels had been a disjointed mess, the AI had built a fully functioning city, complete with ramparts, turrets, and citizens milling around like some well-oiled ant colony.
That eternal struggle is at the heart of Love – you’ll build, and the AI will destroy, and if you’re to defend your struggling base, you’ll have to wander ever further into the heart of the enemy city to grasp the rarest of tools. In the future, I can’t help but imagine gargantuan player metropolises duking it out against staggering AI cityscapes – but for now, Love’s settlements are still struggling colonies on foreign lands, sheltering a valiant group of brave pioneers attempting to settle in a world more alien than that of any other game you’ll ever play.
That’s why, no matter how broken Love might be – and believe me, it’s still very much broken, with bugs galore – it’s mind-bogglingly good fun, very much playable, and worth the admission price a hundred times over. It’s a faraway world built by one man – Eskil Steenberg – an amazingly brilliant piece of code, and it’s your task to conquer it.
As long as you’re willing to brave the downtime, the glitches, and all the other hassles you’re bound to encounter in an indie MMO – Eskil’s Twitter feed is a good indication of how much tweaking he’s still having to make to the game – if you’re willing to try out new things for those thrills that make gaming so worthwhile, Love deserves to be played.
What saddens me most about Love is that I suspect it isn’t going to last. In a couple of months, when we’ve written the Wikis, set up the fansites and discovered every nook and cranny that makes this world so magical, I’m not sure it’ll still be the game I’ve become so enthralled with. For now, though, this is beautiful, untouched, and its secrets are still waiting to be uncovered. For the tiny price of €10 monthly, it’s definitely worth falling in Love with.
8/10
Moreso even than other MMOs, Love looks set to be a constantly evolving experience. As such, we intend to return to and re-evaluate the game at a later date. For now, it is strongly suggested that you download Teamspeak and connect to the Quel Solaar server to be able to chat to other players and the developer. The port number is 9987.
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Thanks for the write-up, I’ve been interested in this for a while due to how goddamn weird it looks. I’ll probably sign up for it in a few months or so when the bugs have hopefully been ironed out.
Also, I find it slightly strange that there’s an actual numeric score attached to this review, but I suppose we can’t treat it any differently than any other MMO.
Trust me, I felt absolutely the same way – reviewing Love as a conventional game is a lot like reviewing Dear Esther as a game. Or the Mona Lisa as a book. You can probably pull it off, but it feels vaguely blasphemous.
[...] If you only know the usual big$ MMO’s of the mainstream corporations and gave up hope regarding different and intelligent MMO’s look no further. Check out Love. You can also read a little review here. [...]