Illuvium Overworld Blends Open World Adventure With Pokémon-Style Battling—And It’s Beautiful

Illuvium is an upcoming sci-fi fantasy online game franchise that may span a number of sport experiences, and the builders just lately launched a second personal beta for the Illuvium Overworld open-world journey mode. 

Illuvium Overworld combines components of third-person 3D world exploration and card-based “auto battler” area gameplay inside a single-player, role-playing strategy, as you navigate by way of the colourful, colourful world with a robotic drone known as M0z4rt that may extract supplies. Your character additionally comes with a visor that may spotlight harvestable vegetation and objects close by.

The motion on this sport’s open world is arguably the most effective a part of the expertise. Your boots permit for “tremendous bounce” strikes and double and triple jumps, and allow you to actually fly by way of the air.

The graphics and sport environments are additionally extremely detailed and resemble a AAA title when performed on a PC at max settings with a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 GPU. The person interface or in-game HUD can also be minimalistic, clear, and well-designed.

Whereas Decrypt examined the personal beta as a degree zero character in a restricted free-to-play mode with out NFTs or crypto components, it was nonetheless a really pleasant expertise and felt just like the beginnings of a ravishing world.

The aim of Illuvium Overworld is to discover the map, harvest and forge supplies, and catch Illuvials, that are the sport’s model of Pokémon-like characters.

Exploring and harvesting is a calming expertise that feels enjoyable and thrilling at first, however might not entertain gamers for lengthy as soon as they’ve totally explored the world. That mentioned, exploration is extremely enjoyable and can take you a lot, many hours to completely full.

As you discover, it’s also possible to observe Illuvials. Illuvials may be captured through floating, buzzing bubbles that seem randomly on the planet. As soon as shot at and interacted with, gamers shall be teleported to a digital battle area the place they must play in opposition to AI opponents in a card-based auto battler area mode.

Every Illuvial exists as a collectible card in addition to an in-game character, and possesses distinctive stats and elemental talents. As in Pokémon, water-type creatures do nicely in opposition to hearth sorts however are weak in opposition to earth sorts, and so forth, so gamers might want to take the time to change into acquainted with the vary of various Illuvials and their talents. 

Illuvium remains to be in growth on Immutable X, however has already launched numerous NFTs. To this point, the official OpenSea assortment on Ethereum features a few totally different beauty pores and skin choices for M0z4rt in addition to “holos,” emotes, and badges.

Illuvium’s ERC-20 token ILV has existed since 2021 and stays within the high 150 cryptocurrencies by market cap, in keeping with CoinGecko information. Nevertheless, the token is down 84% prior to now 12 months and at the moment sits at a value of roughly $46. ILV is used to assist handle and run Illuvium’s DAO, a decentralized governance neighborhood that participates within the sport growth course of, which calls itself the “Illuvinati.”

This week, the Illuvium workforce has already introduced plans for its subsequent playtest, sharing on Twitter that it’ll launch a primary season alpha take a look at for its constructing technique sport, Illuvium Zero, later this month.