Back in September of 2023, I played a few dozen hours of the Saturday morning cartoon-inspired roguelike Mythforce and found it to be a game of great potential but limited execution. It was a first-person dungeon-crawler that worked much better with friends, and while this is still very true, the tweaks and additions that Beamdog have included in the latest “1.2 Update” elevate it to something more.
Some quick backstory first: Mythforce is heavily inspired by 80s and 90s cartoon serials like He-Man, Thundercats, and Dungeons & Dragons. It puts you in the boots of four atypical adventurers, and then unleashes on you procedurally-generated dungeons to slay enemies and collect loot. In its original iteration it lacked any real progression, featured 2-dimensional characters, and was just a little samey throughout.
The 1.2 update has added a ton of stuff, so much so that, while it doesn’t feel like a whole new game, what’s here is now much more robust. Characters have three sub-classes, for example, denoted by a trio of skill trees that can be permanently unlocked through acquiring XP and skill points. I went with Hawkins the archer primarily, and his Warden skill tree is based heavily on defence and crowd control, whereas if you spec into Quickshot he’s more DPS-focused.
This brings much-needed build diversity to the characters, and makes strapping in for “one more run” all the more enticing and rewarding. Likewise you can now upgrade and customise weapons, even swapping them out for different archetypes with varied stats. I also dabbled a bit with sword-and-board tank Victoria, and found having multiple loadouts and different weapons gave me a lot of facility within the different mission areas.
Between quests you can spend gold and other currencies with various merchants, buying trinkets and artefacts to confer permanent buffs, or unlock whole new abilities rather than being constrained to just your starting set. It not only gives you something to spend your gold on (which is always nice), but leans heavily into the build-crafting side of things. Because you can now layer elemental effects with your party members in multiplayer, speccing down different paths is more viable than ever.
The core loop of Mythforce remains the same though. You jump into missions, kills waves of enemies, beat a boss, and continue until you die or complete the whole area. There’s a wide variety of different biomes with their own monsters and challenges, though enemy AI rarely feels too sophisticated. Enemies will run at you and repeat the same tactics, and they always appear in easy-to-manage waves. You can of course up the difficulty if you want to (there are six levels, three of which you must unlock), but I found the difficulty a bit wobbly throughout. Environmental hazards are the greatest enemy besides falling off ledges.
Combat is decent, though it won’t blow you away. While it’s nice to have such a diverse range of spells, abilities, and attacks, I didn’t always feel satisfying feedback on what I was hitting or shooting. And some of the areas spawn one too many waves that start to feel like a bit of a chore. Thankfully 1.2 peppers in new objectives to add variety.
These are nothing new, such as guarding a crystal or destroying a set of wall-mounted targets, but they add something to think about beyond endlessly hacking and slashing. It adds much-needed randomness to each mission that keeps you on your toes, at least.
Overall Mythforce comes recommended for groups who want a fun roguelike with a cool aesthetic and plenty to do. The grainy art style is pretty appealing, though the novelty wears off quickly. And the same can be said about the dialogue, which is repeated an awful lot throughout each mission.
But this is a definite improvement on what Mythforce was at launch, and offers a great slice of first-person action that plays much better with others – especially people you know. There’s a lot to dig into and it features a really solid progression system that feels much more like a traditional RPG than a roguelike, and Beamdog should be commended for the work they’ve done in the last 2 years.