Love

Once you and your cohabitants get into the swing of things, though, Love enters its golden days. It's hugely satisfying to build and then input the coordinates of power relays or edit the landscape into protective walls, and exploration becomes less frustrating and more satisfying when you have a home to go back to. That said, I'm not sold on the Man vs. Cliff "puzzle" element of traversing the landscape that Eskil considers so very integral to the game that he refuses to put in climbing gear.

The algorithm which creates the world very much likes its impassable ravines and sheer cliff-faces. Love being designed to make travelling engaging and challenging is fine, but in practice you end up wasting a lot of time on dead ends. If you're an impatient bugger like me this also means you always end up attempting a jump you know you'll never make and begin drowning yourself in ponds on a regular basis.

In my game, I found myself getting sick of token-hunting for such a disorganised settlement. The final straw was the coming of what the Love community is calling Armageddon, a huge flood which happens every six hours or so. The good news is, if you have a Dive Gear token, everyone in your settlement can go swimming up to areas that were previously inaccessible. But we didn't have a Dive Gear token. We were just a bunch of jerks living in a building site when our shady forest suddenly transformed into a deadly marsh. Worse, my computer has the relatively common problem of being incompatible with Love's high-end mode, and in low-end mode it's really difficult to make out the surface of any water. Hardly ideal when you can't swim.

So, yeah, I ended up leaving those bastards to their plight. They're probably still out there, trying and failing to rig up a teleporter and still accidentally knocking down their own walls.

My second home was more successful, though it had the opposite problem. Carved into a rockface on a snowy, featureless plain, it was too organised. The groundwork was already in place, as was the power, plenty of the tokens and even cosmetic things like stairs and pavements.

I wandered the cold battlements, embarrassed that I wasn't helping my new friends but at a loss of how to do so without interfering. Instead, I did some thinking. What would these people do when they'd perfected their palace? I've read on the wiki that the more developed your settlement gets and the higher you build, the more likely it is that the AI will attack in force. Advanced settlements eventually find themselves under artillery fire, and even island sanctuaries will see bridges being extended towards them. Players in Love are only ever capable of building what amount to giant sandcastles that require constant care and attention to keep the Monolith from being destroyed.

Yet somehow, developing these settlements still feels like a worthy endeavour. Tearing great holes in the landscape, laying minefields, placing a radar you found and brought home yourself, setting up cable transports and then riding them up to distant mesas. You're making a home. Sod the graphics engine everyone talks about, there's something far more beautiful in that.

What it's missing is an endgame, or some kind of story or substance. The way the AI gets angrier and the game gets harder the more you build isn't enough, and I think it might even be counter-productive to the warmth of the game's title and message. The current system leads to the experienced players locking themselves away in ivory towers where the AI and griefers can't get at them.

There's certainly no shortage of roads Eskil could lead Love down. The beta as it stands is an almost perfect framework for a base-building PvP MMO, but as Eskil's stated before, that's not his goal. I just wish I had a better idea what is.

The beta's also unquestionably worth playing if you've an interest in MMOs, game design, cliffs, drowning, or, from a technical standpoint, what you can squeeze into a six (six!) megabyte download. There's absolutely nothing like Love available today, and 3 Euros is pittance. Besides, you'll be contributing to Eskil's continued, fevered development of this curious project, and while nobody has much of an idea where he intends to take his game, you can be sure it's going to be somewhere fascinating.