Mistfall Hunter Review – Narrowly Targeted Fun

Mistfall Hunter Review

When it comes to art and entertainment, originality is in short supply. “There is nothing new under the sun” was already obvious several millennia ago. After all, there are only so many plots and ways of creating drama. Action games long ago sorted themselves into a few genres, and Mistfall Hunter doesn’t try to re-invent any of them. Instead, it tosses a number of well-known tropes and mechanics into a blender. That the result has any kind of distinct identity is surprising, but it does. Which doesn’t always translate into fun.

In a nutshell, Mistfall Hunter marries an extraction shooter (think Escape from Tarkov) to a third-person fantasy ARPG (think Elden Ring, at least aesthetically). It’s a pretty cool concept, really. It focuses on PvPvE — with a strong emphasis on PvP — and even adds a (mostly unnecessary) shrinking battlefield/battle royale twist.

Stop. You’ve Heard this One

Mistfall Hunter’s story premise starts with a genuinely interesting idea: what happens the day after Ragnarok. Unfortunately, the brain trust apparently ran out of gas after that. The death of the world’s deities created a supernatural corrosive fog called the Gyldenmist, which (OMG, another corrupted world story) turns everything into evil monsters. As a resurrected Gyldhunter, your task is to fight the monsters, rid the land of Gyldenmist, and restore the land of Weavereach to order.

At Windrest camp, your expandable home base, you meet a cast of NPCs on loan from other ARPGs. There’s the bargain basement Fire Maiden, I mean Fate Goddess Dew, who lets you level up your Talents and Skills. There’s a blacksmith, a vendor, an auction house, a cash shop, and a tavern maid, who in addition to spilling out of her blouse gives you power-up drinks. Most of the NPCs have quests of one kind or another, and most of the vendors’ stations can be upgraded. In fact, upgrading your camp is one of the critical motivations for heading out to gather materials in battle.

In terms of art design and overall vibe, Mistfall Hunter borrows heavily from the usual Celtic/Norse/Teutonic catalogue of motifs. From the character creator to the world to the monsters, Mistfall Hunter looks quite good, if not anywhere near the current best standard. In the heat of battle you’re never going to be distracted by the game’s beauty nor disappointed by its visuals.

Me Versus You Versus the World

Mistfall Hunters embraces most of the extraction shooter’s core mechanics. There’s a map, with quest markers and other points of interest, and extraction points on timers. The loop is: get in, try to complete some quest objectives, gather loot, and get out without dying. If you die to a monster, you can resurrect and retrieve your body and loot. If you die to another player, it’s game over and you lose everything. Then it’s back to camp and the loop starts again.

Mistfall Hunter is a PvPvE game and strongly leans into three-person teams facing off against each other. There is a solo mode, which really comes down to not requiring the player to group up. In practice, this usually results in a solo player being ambushed or ganked by squads or over-leveled solo players. Now and then, solo players will encounter a fair, 1v1 fight with relatively equal gear or skills and these are a lot of fun. But that is the exception. At this time, there are only two maps in the game, and solo players only have access to one of them. Since the map doesn’t change and enemies are always in the same locations, solo players might find the loop getting stale, when they’re not getting killed.

Like every multiplayer game ever made, grouping with random players is a crapshoot. There’s no loot sharing mechanic, so it’s entirely possible for one team member to swoop in and take everything. The ideal group remains three friends who are communicating and have a balance of character types. Anything else is sub-optimal from the game’s design standpoint.

Hefty Swings

Other considerations aside, the Soulslike combat in Mistfall Hunter feels good and is definitely the game’s strongest element. Both light and heavy attacks have weight, and landing a hit or well-timed magic spell is rewarding. One divisive decision is not to have a lock-on mechanic. I get it. In a multiplayer game having freedom of movement and positioning is important. However, players coming from virtually every other Soulslike or ARPG will sorely miss it, and their well-honed muscle memory will complain. This is especially true for spellcasters.

There are six classes in Mistfall Hunter and they stick to very familiar fantasy ARPG archetypes: mage, assassin, ranged fighter, etc. There are no real hybrid classes, but some classes like the Withered Knight feature something close. One class can’t use the armor from another. Players can only have three characters, and unfortunately, those three characters level up separately. There are a pair of skill and talent upgrade paths for each class, and they can be re-configured freely. It isn’t the deepest system in the world but the skills help add variety and nuance to combat, especially against other players.

As fun as combat can be, there is a certain amount of jank and imprecision in movement, too, and some bugs. There is a decent range of enemy types but their AI is pretty basic and it’s pretty easy to exploit their issues with the environment.

Checks and Imbalances

When it comes to level design, it’s clearly aimed at PvP.  There are a large number of doors and magical barriers with the purpose of creating choke points and slowing players down so the game doesn’t turn into an endless chase. At least until they become over-familiar, the maps are interesting to explore, with lots of vertical variety and tucked away treasure. Again, here’s the familiar refrain: it’s all optimized for PvP groups.

I have a few other gripes. The home base camp feels like something transposed from a mobile game or Monster Hunter, and there are way too many NPCs to visit and busywork tasks to attend to after each run. The encroaching Gyldenmist mechanic that funnels players towards a climatic battle feels unnecessary, especially in solo play.

Finally, the classes are seriously in need of rebalancing now that play is live. Speaking of which, there have been some pretty egregious server issues and crashes.

Beginning with an optimized and bespoke solo mode, there are lots of things that Mistfall Hunter could do to make it a better game for players like me. But there’s nothing wrong with a game whose concept by definition excludes some players. Not every game needs to appeal to everyone. For solo or 1v1 PvP fans, Mistfall Hunter has some real limitations, but for like-minded groups, the game rises above its copycat patchwork. The devs seem responsive to player feedback, so I’m selfishly hoping that the game will eventually cater more authentically to single players down the line.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***