Dec 17, 2007

There’s no place for moonlight walks on the beach in Earth’s far future, because the planet’s celestial satellite is no more. An unidentified object has demolished the moon, causing earthquakes and tidal waves that ravage the Earth’s surface. In the wake of these apocalyptic natural disasters, mankind’s struggle for survival splits the species into two rival factions - the “normal” Sapiens and the mutated Alternatives. The war between the estranged sides is the story behind Huxley, Korean developer Webzen’s upcoming MMO shooter. We got a chance to playtest both the RPG and shooter elements of Huxley, exploring the massive digital cities and battling both human and AI opponents in deathmatch dungeons.

Siding with the Sapiens faction, we started off by customizing our avatar. The Sapiens are split into two physical groups, the ONE and the SYN, which only differ in their visual traits (the ONE are pure humans and the SYNs have slight mutations). After tweaking our facial structure and hair - typical MMO avatar features - we picked one of three play classes, which determine your fighting style and what weapons or armor you can utilize. As the Phantom class, we were a ranged attacker, with lots of energy abilities but weak armor capacity. Huxley will offer players nine weapon categories (Rocket launcher, shotgun, etc.) with hundreds of statistical permutations that you can purchase of loot.

In addition to weapons, we equipped our character with skills, which are both passive and active combat abilities that are used in the real-time deathmatches. Huxley’s skills seem fairly typical and offer expected bonuses, such as faster sprint or improved vision. Picking your skills will be an important part of giving yourself an edge in combat. Each piece of armor has a one to three skill slots; we geared up with infrared, sprint and double jump. Other options available included cloaking, tackle, clone decoys and others that will be unlocked as you level up.