Fighting Legends: Explore the World of Fighting Legends Company: Maximum Charisma Studios I recently got a chance to sit down with a copy of Fighting Legends Beta 3, a massively multiplayer online real-time-strategy game being put out by Maximum Charisma Studios. Unlike the recently-released Shattered Galaxy, which utilizes a 2D engine akin to StarCraft, Fighting Legends uses a fully 3D engine to display the world and your units. Indeed, the game looks more like, say, Anarchy Online at first blush, with its over-the-shoulder camera view. Look a little deeper and you?ll find a character design method that is borderline insane, definitely putting the game in a class of its own. Indeed, like the many MMORPGs out there today, Fighting Legends takes a few cues from the long-standing RPG tradition. Your Hero, who is one of nine different races -- three from the sky realm, three from the surface of Exisle, and three in the underground -- and one of five different classes -- melee warrior, Mpow (spell-caster), ranged attacker, Techniq (healer), and speed-based -- gains levels in a rather traditional way: the wholesale slaughtering of enemies. At the beginning of the game, you?ll mostly be offing flies and the like, with the beasts you defeat getting more interesting as you gain levels. Unlike MMORPGs, however, you also have a portable ?base.? When out, the base constantly collects the basic resource of your world, which you use to generate new units and build new structures. However, when your base is out, you cannot move too far away from it. By a simple key press, the base will disappear and you?re given free reign to run anywhere on the map. It?s a neat mechanic, and one I think will have more subtleties as the game progresses. Building your base up is already necessary, as at the beginning you can only build units that are identical to yours. You can always only build units of your race, but you can trade units with other people to ?mix it up.? Unfortunately, once one of your units dies, they never come back. You, on the other hand, are reincarnated by your base. So it?s a good idea to keep your units safe, especially if you?ve spent a few hours raising their abilities. As stated before, Fighting Legends is still very much beta software, and there are a number of glaring interface and control bugs that need to be worked out. (Hint: don?t press Caps Lock. Ever.) The team is well aware of these, and indeed one of them, going by the name of [MCS]SnowFalcon, came up to me and answered many of my questions. (Yes, enemies can attack bases, but rarely do; the game starts you at a safe location in your current zone whenever you come back to the game; and so on.) They seemed actively willing to help me, and indeed said that the team is available for any questions that people may have. Of course, seeing as there are only a handful of people on the servers at the moment, one can only wonder how it?ll be once the game goes more full-scale. Nonetheless, they were very helpful and courteous, and I appreciated the help they gave. While at the moment the world looks vast and empty, undoubtedly once the game gets going full-swing there?ll be a lot more excitement. And count on us letting you know just how it is when that happens. -Sunfall to-Ennien, GameVortex Communications AKA Phil Bordelon