Your character starts out in the cute town of Alpen. A cute and peppy track plays in the background and the cute mapsystem will help you find some cute NPC's that will send you on various tasks to help the villagers out.
Yes I realize that paragraph contains the word cute a lot. But only because it's true! The first impression of this game is that it's, well.. cute, and that doesn't need to be a problem at all. GamesCampus very obviously targets a certain demographic with this game and in a world where companies are often trying to stick to the safe middle ground it's refreshing to see that Asda is taking the risk and introducing an outlier.
An interesting feature to go along with the casual feel of Asda 2 (Asda2 Gold)is the autopilot function. I was taken aback by it at first but I now realize it's a great little tool to stave off boredom. Who wants to simply navigate their character through a village themselves? Only scrubs control their own character while the real men (and women) just point their destination on the map and sit back! This is ideal for multi-tasking homework and gaming.
It may come off as sarcasm but I'm actually quite serious and the quest system takes it a step further. In the quest window there is a convenient button that, when clicked, runs you straight to the waypoint of the quest. And when you've completed the step the button changes to take you straight back to the NPC where you need to turn the quest in to claim your reward.
I bet lots of people will jump to the conclusion that this is a step too casual for them but think about it. What is the part of a quest that is fun? Is it "finding the right monsters" or is it "Where was that NPC again that I have to claim my reward from?" I say it's neither of them, I say it's bashing the skulls in of the monsters and then getting phat lewt for it and the game doesn't automate either of those! It just makes it easier for you to focus on the fun stuff while the boring walking to and from tasks gets conveniently handled for you!
Another easy way to navigate the game is by simply clicking in the game world but full WASD and mouselook controls are possible too. So if you really dislike the autopathing feature you can just... not use it! All very cute so far but now it's time to stab some monsters.
Combat starts out simple; my low level character has a sword and a bow to choose from and has one ability for each of them. Even with such a limited array of starting abilities combat still feels and looks dynamic. The monsters die easily at this level, and when they die they drop cute little stacks of gold.
At first I hated this kind of looting. The little stacks of gold are sometimes hard to click and it quickly gets tedious to try and pick them up especially where there are many other players or monsters around. But don't fret, Asda 2 already has the solution to this. By default the F key on your keyboard will pick items off the floor for us. Rejoice!
