Rise of Incarnates is a free to play game currently in early access but releasing soon (hopefully). It’s essentially a 2v2 brawler with a combat system kind of similar to the Dissidia franchise, twisted by the way lives work in each fight. Basically there are three tiers of fighters and each tier takes 1, 2, or 3 bars of life when they die. It’s an interesting concept that my friend and I experimented with over the last week, figuring out a bunch of cool combinations along the way.
For those of you who haven’t played Dissidia, it’s kind of a combination of floating and dashing around before striking your enemy with a melee or ranged attack that can then combo into something else. Each character has a number of aerial dashes and jumps they can perform before needing to touch the ground again, which can make for some cool and stylized fights. You also might find yourself switching targets fairly often since anyone can become invulnerable for a few seconds after they take enough hits. Players can also perform combos on their teammates attacks for extra damage. This causes a very fast paced and dynamic duel that tends to be a lot of fun and rather hectic.
Unlike Dissidia, everyone has a standard health bar that is linked to the overall 6 life bars that teams start with. I actually really enjoyed this system as it caused myself and my teammate to constantly change strategy depending on the match-up. We usually found it was best to try to just take out the higher tiered enemy as fast as possible, but sometimes that’s not an option if you keep getting harassed by Lillith. Overall I’d say the combat is pretty solid and the developers have come up with something pretty fun.
As for Rise of Incarnates being free to play, it unfortunately does suffer a tad from pay to win microtransactions. Players can choose to pay to expand their skill grid using currency you can grind for, or by paying a small fee of about one dollar. These purchases allow you to use more of the fighter upgrades like increased melee damage. It’s not the end of the world and the rest of the transactions are cosmetic skins or full unlocks of specific fighters, but the grind for the same one dollar upgrade is a bit ridiculous and will take you ages. As for actually purchasing all the fighters, this is totally optional as there are two characters unlocked each week. You also start with everyone unlocked for your first week, and completing a few objectives doubles that time. Characters are a little expensive so it’s a good way to try before you buy.
The cast is pretty interesting, and I myself am partial to either Fenrir or Ares. I tend to use Fenrir’s wolf form more than anything, then switch to Ares when I want to play with a bit more range. Everyone feels rather different and they all have a very unique look that brings some great diversity. To be fair, there are only six fighters right now so overlap would be incredibly disappointing. My partner tended to be a big fan of the ranged characters and generally stuck with playing Odin, an old war veteran seated atop a badass mechanical spider. There seem to be a few characters coming in later; playing against bots you’ll soon run into unfamiliar faces. Spots are open on the roster, so I’m interested in seeing what comes out once Rise of Incarnates is no longer in early access.
There are currently only two maps as well, and this gets boring kind of fast. There isn’t much interaction with the environment aside from using it to escape from your opponent and I’d really like to see some maps with destructible objects or more dynamic elements. I think it would really suit the entire look and feel of the game, and could bring some interesting elements to the combat. I’ll be satisfied with just a few more maps on release but they’re pretty much just cosmetic right now anyway.
Overall it’s a pretty cool game. Playing with a friend over Skype was a blast, and we always found ourselves learning something new about how to play our characters or fight our enemies. There can definitely be a lot of strategy involved and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes fighting games or other brawlers. I likely won’t get too involved simply because of the cost down the road, but it’s a great game to boot up and play a few matches each week with a friend. It’s probably worth it to at least unlock a main fighter you can fall back on if the weekly pick really isn’t your cup of tea, but I’m going to wait patiently in hopes of a sale.
