Star Seeds are important because they are the only currency you can use on the in-game market. But even there this feels too restrictive, especially for a currency that it really doesn’t feel you can earn any other way. Star Seeds themselves aren’t hard to come by – you can actually trade in-game gold to an NPC once a day, and the amount you can trade for is dependent on your level. You can also visit a master enhancer and spend Star Seeds – probably Bless’s most valuable resource – to enhance your equipment, but it’s expensive. This entire system felt convoluted, as if you didn’t have the repair hammer you were basically out of luck until you could obtain one – using one of Bless Unleashed’s various in-game currencies. Once you hit certain rarities this could actually fail, sometimes requiring you to repair your weapons before you can try upgrading them again. You’ll visit various crafting NPCs in the major settlements and using crafting items such as Armor and Weapon upgrades you can improve your weapons over time. This is where enhancement comes into play. More often than not I found myself killing world bosses – giant monsters that players take on together in the world – hoping for an epic drop, only to have better gear on already. Indeed, sometimes I was on level with the content but having a low gear score prevented me from being able to adequately tackle it – something made worse by the simple fact that the rewards you get for quests and daily activities don’t seem to scale very well with your progression.
Finding gear at varying rarities and upgrading them in the MMO’s crafting system is integral to moving along in the story. Gear Score in Bless Unleashed is just as important – if not moreso – than your actual character level. Bless Unleashed has you grinding not just for levels, but also experience to level up your skills and, most importantly, gear. But if the systems that surround the gameplay grind are as unpolished as Bless Unleashed is, that grind can truly be grating. Grinding can be fun, and it’s a part of every major MMO out there. The major issue, though, is that Bless Unleashed has one of the worst grinds in any MMO I’ve played to date.
Some fights could be exciting, such as facing down a Faceless wizard and his summoned beast in one encounter, but more often than not the combat felt entirely too dull and repetitive for my taste. More often than not, in boss encounters I felt I was fighting the combat just as much as the boss themselves. Delays could be felt when moving from attack to attack, sometimes with the maneuver never actually being registered server-side. So I switched to a 1MS Freesync monitor which didn’t solve the issue. At first I thought maybe it was my display – I was playing this on a 4K television in game mode, but latency can still be a problem. It’s dreadfully dull, but made worse by some of the worst input lag I’ve ever suffered in a game. Instead Bless Unleashed is rigid, causing you to repeat the same presses of RB or RT in a sequence, and then when finished repeat. It’s not as fluid as, say, Black Desert where you have variation to those combos. It’s based on a combo system where you string together attacks in a predefined pattern to do maximum damage. Combat is a chore, something that should never suffer in any game, let alone an MMO where combat is one of the key things you’ll spend the bulk of your time doing. The problem is that Bless Unleashed is extremely unpolished. It really made me want to learn more about the world itself – even if the main story wasn’t all that exciting to get into. I remember coming finally to the city of Sperios, a city that reminded me of the canals of Amsterdam with its water ways and tall, European-esque buildings rising from the water. There are some interesting characters you’ll meet along the way that do make me want to learn more about their stories, such as the assassin Marco, as well as the House Sorza representative Don Diego who is with you from the very beginning.Īnd indeed, the world around you is a sight to behold in some cases. It’s definitely serviceable as a premise – though it’s not that original in the grand scheme of things. You are the Pyreborn, a hero who must destroy an evil goddess to save the world around you. And unfortunately, while it does improve on things over its predecessor, the overall experience is one that brought me more frustration than enjoyment – particularly where the leveling and combat is involved. Developed by Round 8 Studio and NEOWIZ, it’s essentially a reboot of the now defunct Bless Online.
Bless Unleashed is a free-to-play MMORPG on the Xbox One.
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