Ahead of the Game: Mistland Saga is a fantasy aRPG from the publishers of War Machines

• An aRPG with a few modern conveniences
• The latest game from Tennis Clash sreators Wildlife Studios
• Features extra challenges throughout to liven things up

Hello and welcome to Ahead of the Game, a series where we tell you all about an upcoming game that, despite not being out yet, is available for you to play at the time of publishing. Through this series, you can grab a chance to play games well ahead of their release date, be that through Soft Launch, Open Beta, Demos, or more.

Tennis Clash, Sky Warriors and War Machines are all Wildlife Studios games that you might have heard of, but you likely haven’t heard of today’s topic: Mistland Saga. That’s because it’s only available through Soft Launch in limited markets.

Mistland Saga, as it says in it’s slightly prolonged AppStore name, is an RPG. Very specifically its the kinda of semi-auto aRPG that we’ve seen creep up in popularity over recent years. Being that its designed for mobile, each mission or task is made up of bitesized instances that whisk you away to one of its regions to run through a dozen-or-so ‘rooms’ as you locate keys, find mission items and defeat bosses.

It’s incredibly pure, if you will. And, by that I don’t mean its simple, simply that they’ve stripped back a lot of the noise that you might associate with the cluttered menus and UI of other aRPGs. Streamlined, then, might have been a better pick. 

There is, of course, currently still the issue of item gore. In a genre that’s all about getting bigger weapons so that you can hit bigger enemies to get bigger weapons to… there’s always going to be a lot of item purging; thankfully, from the couple of hours that I’ve played of it so far, the tighter inventory size and shorter missions lends well to the genre – you’ve just got to remember to visit a shop before heading out most times.

Missions aren’t just run and murder, that said. There are chests, fountains and doors – as well as other objects – most of which can be interacted with in multiple ways. I’ve been rushing, low on health, failed a dice-roll check on a fountain and still taken the gamble drinking from it knowing it could kill me. It’s a fun addition that shows that a little bit more thought has gone into it than others might have.

I think that, for me, the two things that really stand out in Mistland Saga is the writing and the bright art-style. This isn’t some doom-and-gloom end of the world scenario, and so the world is brighter and more cheerful – that said, it’s not so cheerful as to simply be a numb fantasy world. Finally, while a lot of the quests were vapid A-B dashes, it was great that they took the effort to have characters with goals, introduced and interlinked. Hopefully they’ll develop this out further as it moves through Soft Launch.

So, how do you play Mistland Saga?

Mistland Saga is currently available in the following regions: Canada, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Finland, Norway, Ireland, Brazil, Turkey and The Philippines.