After all is said and done, City of Steam is a decent, if unexciting, foray into a steampunk universe. It's a game to spend an hour or so on every now and again and will likely be worth visiting from time to time. But in the end, City of Steam is buried under its own lack of inspiration to be something more.
This game shows promise, and I personally love steampunk, but the auto-combat system basically means that the game doesn't even require input from a player (is it even a game if it plays itself?), it has boring combat, very little in the way of a story, and it's incredibly linear unless you just stop doing the main quest. I haven't had any bad experiences with it being pay to win as a lot of people have, I haven't spent anything on the game at all. The in game shop does however feature prominently and can be annoying sometimes. It is worth playing if you like steampunk or rpg games, and it is a fun little MMO, but I wouldn't recommend putting money into the game or having huge expectations of it.
This seems to be a WoW clone with a lot of things to do. If I had this much time to waste, I would explore this game further, but for now it seems to be just an ordinary MMO - run around, use abilities from a hotbar, deal damage to enemes.
Unlike WoW, this game seems to have way too many flashy effects, which I swear may give some players epilepsy, there's so much white flashing on screen. The combat appears to be a frantic mashing of buttons, since I have no idea what's going on screen half the time - it's just a mess of health bars and pretty visual effects that all get blended together into one big blob of swirling stuff.
The game seems to progress quite exponentially, with a new character having 500 hp, while some health potions I saw in store heal 500,000. I think I saw some screenshots on steam with damage numbers in 100,000s.
One thing that seemed weird is that the game goes far beyond the typical ! and ? quest marks - the game can almost play itself - clicking on a quest objective moves your character there. Zones are transfered automatically, loot except rares is auto picked up.
The steampunk art style is nice though, but this is clearly not a game for me.
This game has recently been relaunched with huge changes, which are heavily influenced by Chinese browser games, both in game-play and micro-transactions. The result is one of the most deplorable pay-to-win games I have ever come across, even worse than publisher R2. The game is deliberately designed so that you "accidently" use in game currency without meaning to and the grinding is extreme after you hit late 30 levels.
It used to be a very good game in its original form and the first 20 levels are enjoyable, but the changes have made it into a money grabbing grind fest.
It can be enjoyable to an extent as a free player but avoid at all costs if you tend to put money into your browser games.
If you want an RPG that will make you care about your characters and engage you; avoid this insipid offering. It's not much better than an "Idle" game .... click and forget.
SummarySo what is City of Steam? It's a 3D industrial age fantasy MMORPG. The debut Unity3D-based MMO from Mechanist Games, it transports players to a world where clockworks, steam power, and arcane technologies suffuse every aspect of existence, from the half-organic, half-mechanical dwarves to the giant gears of the World Machine itself.