Afterglow lets you build a survivor even while you're away from the MMORPG
Turns out the wasteland can keep itself busy for a while
- Progress continues while you're offline
- Classless skills grow through use
- Player-driven economy shapes the world
The bomb went off in 1988, at least in this version of events, which means anything anyone in the American Southwest has built since then has been cobbled together from cassette decks, CRT screens and whatever else made it through the Reagan years. Afterglow picks things up 77 years after all that. Synthwave, urban legends, mutated things in the dust, all of it hand drawn.
Underneath the neon there is a sandbox MMORPG built around sessions of ten to fifteen minutes. You queue up actions for gathering, crafting, travelling and fighting, and your character carries on with them while you are off doing something else. Come back when you can, see what got done.
Stephen wrote about the open beta back in June and came away fairly taken with the idea, and I can see why. The MMO problem has always been the hours it demands before it gives you anything back and shifting that load onto a queue is a reasonable fix.
Combat is turn-based and your character will handle it without supervision, though you can step in when a fight is going badly or you fancy squeezing more out of it. Weapon choice does matter. Mutated creatures and other survivors are the usual company out there.
Progression skips classes entirely. You learn skills by using them, so a trader who keeps getting jumped on the road will slowly stop being a bad fighter. The economy runs on you and everybody else too, with blueprints, production chains and trade between whoever has specialised in what.
Then there is the money side, and Shadow Council has made a bold call with it. A subscription unlocks full skill progression and that is the extent of it. No energy meters, no premium currency, no daily chores nagging at you from a notification.
I am aware that convincing mobile audiences to pay monthly for anything is a mountain most developers do not attempt, so I will be curious to see how that lands.
If you want something with more people in it while you wait, our list of the best MMOs on Android has plenty to be getting on with.
