Glitch

"Explore and experience a world imagined by 11 giants that comes with quality humor and tons of likeliness."

 

Developer(s): Tiny Speck
Designer(s): Stewart Butterfield
Platform(s): PC (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)
Release: date(s) Late 2011
Genre(s): MMO

 

Try to portrait a world imagined by a peculiarly imaginative Giant! I can tell you that it’s not going to be anything near tidy. Now, how about 11 giants! Fortunately though; not in the world of Glitch. A place where these 11 giants live only to image things and a blending of their thoughts give what the game needs to live with, where you and the other characters of this game are called Glitches.

 

Glitch is an enormous online 2D game which can provide you limitless fun during your leisure time. And since we are talking about an MMO here, there are tons of things you can do, from petting a pig to finishing a variety of quests. But unlike most MMO games, there isn’t anything to kill other than your time. You explore, build, take part in quests, chat, make friends, worship giants for favors, and do several other activities. The game is also very rich in social interaction both inside and outside the game, which comes in handy during the quests and makes you learn the game faster. You can spend hours exploring the maps and doing quests, or you can team up with friends for additional activities such as trading or simply hang out with them.

 

Trading spots will appear this was during the game.

 

The game starts with a good tutorial that covers most of the basics and also provides volunteer stuff to help members get used to the game’s world. I must give them an A+ for providing such friendly environment for newbies, though Glitch’s starting block can be a little off the edge with not much to do, save for certain things. This can be a crucial spot where most new players will give up on the game. As a character you must obtain certain levels to enjoy all of the game’s features. Levels can be earned by doing anything that the game offers. Completing a quest gives you a handful of points and coins; using them can acquire you tools adequate for other types of quests. If you earn favors from the giants you can speed up your learning ability. You’ll cry for these favors because leveling up is a very time consuming thing in Glitch. It can take from 10 minutes to several hours just to learn a single skill. You can, however, pick the specific skill you want to learn and keep playing or you can even take a quick nap or sleep, while your magical talking rock will learn the skill on your behalf. Then again, it’s not easy to learn all the skills as one skill leads to another and new skills will continue to come.

 

Besides learning the skills, you’ll mostly be exploring, crafting, gaining achievements and finishing quests. Every action costs either energy or mood, and can award you experience points and materials. You must pay attention both to your energy level and mood to stay alive in the game. There are varieties of food and drinks to keep both stats steady. Once you’ve acquired the necessary skills you can also prepare meals that give you more energy and mood points than the usual food available. But according to my experience so far, the best way to get your energy level filled is by completing quests. Just make sure to have enough to pass through the quest.

 

The magical talking stone is about to start learning a skill.

 

While there are plenty of things to praise about Glitch, there are a few mishaps as well. For one, Adobe Flash Player is a prerequisite for playing the game and many mobile devices won’t support the application. If I ever want to continue playing this game, I would really wish to play it during my ride to office everyday and while coming back home. Or perhaps during a long journey when I need to kill some time other than surfing the Internet.  It has been stated though, that there will be third party involvements and the game will have branches in the near future. Another point to be taken by the developers is their number of subscribers. I assume they haven’t reached the half a million mark yet and when the time comes where million+ characters are playing at the same time, I wonder how messy the environment is going to be. Glitch offers a large map but I’m afraid it won’t be enough to provide rooms for a hefty amount of players. We can hope that they are well aware of this issue, and take our suggestion as feedback.

 

Then again, Glitch is still on beta mode and it has yet to cover certain grounds. Anyone who’s already spent a few hours with the game will be impressed with what Tiny Speck has done so far. It can initiate a revolution bringing together a large amount of Facebook apps users who play games like FarmVille. Before I forget, there’s another part of the game worth mentioning, and that is the level of humor poured into it. Even if you aren’t necessarily enjoying the playing part of it, you certainly will enjoy reading the notes and any text that pops up every now and then. They are not only amusing, they’ll make you want to hear more.

 

 

In the end I can frankly say that Glitch isn’t really for the hardcore gamers, but I still recommend you to sign up and apply for the beta. Spend some time to explore the game and experience the vastness it offers. It gives the gaming industry a very high hope when a new company like Tiny Speak can make or at least dream something this big.

 

Sarwar Ron, NoobFeed.