Ahead of its publicly available beta on June 20th, MassivelyOP was granted an early peak at Chrono Odyssey‘s current by the folks Kakao Games, and I got to take it for a spin.

Now, I haven’t followed this upcoming MMORPG from Kakao developer Chrono Studio very closely, but I had heard some mutterings that it was looking to have similar gameplay to New World. New World isn’t in the best state right now, so it would be great to have another game that scratches the same itch. Indeed, I found that Chrono Odyssey does in fact resemble New World quite a bit, but unfortunately it feels like an inferior imitation in most ways.

Let’s start with character creation. Visual customization is a strong point of CO, as it’s yet another Korean game that seems to be raising the bar for the power of a character creator.

Every body part can be tweaked with a plethora of sliders, you can set tone two hair using pretty much any colours imaginable through an RGB picker, and tattoos can be fully tweaked in size and placement such that the same tattoo could be a tiny glyph on your character’s cheek or a full body pattern.

Unfortunately, this is another game with only one playable species, which appears to be human, but you can shape your character’s ears into something resembling elf ears if you prefer (and I do).

The finished game will feature six classes, but only three are available in the beta: Berserker, Ranger, and Swordsman. Despite the name of that last one, it’s important to note that classes in CO are not gender-locked. As an aside, as someone who writes a lot of fantasy fiction and is trying to use more inclusive language, I can tell you it is infuriatingly difficult to find a good gender-neutral term for “soldier who fights with a sword.” At least with spears I can call them lancers…

Each class has access to three exclusive weapon types, two of which can be equipped at a time, and you can swap between those weapons at at will. This is one of the first areas where CO feels like NW. Each weapon has its own strengths and weaknesses, so like NW, swapping seems like it will be more about situational utility rather than constantly going back and forth for optimal DPS.

Also like NW, each weapon has its own skill tree you level up by killing enemies with that weapon. The skill trees feel relatively deep, and there’s definitely meaningful choices to be made within each weapon. While different weapons are clearly geared towards specific roles and niches, you’re not going to be a carbon copy of everyone else using the same weapon.

One difference compared to NW is that you do get a little more active abilities. Each weapon can equip up to four, and later you can also unlock some weapon-agnostic “class mastery” abilities. Some abilities have cooldowns, while others can be spammed as long as you have resources, which I thought was a fun balance.

You also get additional active abilities from a “Chronotector” artifact with the ability to manipulate time, but looking through its potential upgrades, I was disappointed to find them mostly just standard abilities you’d find in any MMO, like an AoE stun or the ability to glide down from heights. It’s got to be hard to implement time manipulation in a shared world game, but I was hoping for more creative mechanics.

I picked the Ranger class initially. Their weapon choices are the longbow, the rapier, and rapid firing dual wield hand crossbows (think Diablo III‘s demon hunter).

I found the class very complicated, and the longbow especially was almost incomprehensibly complex. A ranger can be juggling up to three different resources to fuel their abilities. Every class has stamina, which is used for dodging, sprinting, and blocking (where applicable), but Rangers also use stamina for aimed longbow shots and rapier heavy attacks. Rangers also have a rapidly regenerating resource called vigor, which is used to fuel all active abilities as well as “hip fire” longbow shots and all hand crossbow shots.

Finally, the longbow has a third resource called arrows, which is needed to fire basic attacks and regenerates quite slowly, with a maximum pool of up to four. You can also change your arrow type to add different elemental effects to your shots, but switching types doesn’t refresh your arrow pool.

Does your head hurt? Because mine does.

While I enjoyed the fast and agile play of hand crossbows, I found the longbow painfully awkward to use and the rapier too much of a glass cannon playstyle, so I ended up rerolling as a Swordsman. It uses a much simpler resource system where basic attacks build up rage, which is then spent on abilities, and I found it a much more enjoyable class.

As the name would imply, they’re all about swords. You can go sword and shield for a tanky build (though it looks like it can also be built as a DPS weapon), greatsword for a slow but hard-hitting glass cannon build, or dual blades for a mix of offensive and defensive power coupled with rapid attack speed. The last one proved my favourite.

Another similarity to New World (or how New World used to be) is that the open world mobs in CO are actually quite dangerous. They don’t seem to stagger you as much as NW‘s NPCs once did, but they hit hard. Expect your dodge, block, and health potion hotkeys to all get a serious workout.

In theory I like this, but similar to Corepunk (though not as severely), it didn’t feel like CO gives me enough tools to effectively defend myself. I found it quite frustrating that most weapons can’t block (only sword and shield and dual swords had the option in the classes I played), and even when they can blocking only lowers incoming damage rather than preventing it entirely, so it mostly just feels like a trap. That leaves constant dodging as the only realistic way to stay alive, and that drains your stamina fast.

Another thing that prevents CO‘s combat from equaling NW‘s is that the animations and general polish aren’t there. Run animations look more like the character is floating across the ground like a figure skater, and while I wouldn’t say attack animations are bad per se, they have a sort of arcadey feel that puts me in mind of older action combat MMOs like Neverwinter.

Interaction with objects also doesn’t quite work right; you seem to need to be pixel-perfect on aiming at the interaction point, leading to a lot of fussing with the camera while spamming the interact key.

Something else making the game feel a bit dated is that there isn’t much voiced dialogue outside of the occasional cutscene. As for the story… well, it exists. Fans of RIFT may have some flashbacks as the tutorial takes place in an apocalyptic future before sending you back in time to try to prevent the end of everything.

Later you’ll be ushered into some kind of transdimensional team of heroes devoted to protecting the multiverse, which seems cool in theory but in practice felt a bit uninspired, probably because it’s treated so perfunctorily by the dialogue. “Hey, by the way, your destiny is to protect all of time, now go back to questing.”

Around this time, I was tasked with defeating a boss in a mini-dungeon, and it promptly massacred me. This felt eerily reminiscent of my recent struggles in Vindictus: Defying Fate, but whereas the boss that crushed me there still felt beatable for someone with better skills than I had, CO‘s boss just felt numerically impossible to defeat. I never got it much below 90% HP.

I eventually left the dungeon, thinking maybe I was under-leveled and missed some side quests. I couldn’t find any side quests, but to my surprise, the main quest updated and sent me back to the NPC from the Transdimensional Avengers, so apparently I was supposed to lose? Would have been nice for that to be more clearly telegraphed, especially since the same trope had already been used in the tutorial.

My confusion grew as the NPC then sent me straight back to the same boss again. I thought maybe it would be less powerful now, but no, I just got curbstomped all over again. As best as I can tell, the intention is for me to just spend a few hours grinding mobs and maybe crafting until I’m powerful enough to beat this boss and advance the story, but by then I was starting to feel maybe life is too short.

On the subject of crafting, life skills are another area where CO seems to be borrowing from NW‘s playbook. I didn’t get super far into crafting, but as in NW, nearly everything in the world is gatherable, and the interaction icons even look nearly identical to NW‘s. I also found random crates of supplies littering the world, which again looked like they could have been lifted straight from NW.

It’s hard not to come to the conclusion Chrono Odyssey was built as a direct competitor to New Word, which is a little strange. Even as a fan of the game, I never really took New World as successful enough to inspire copycats. Unfortunately, it feels much less polished than New World, so there seems little reason to choose it over its inspiration.

I’m sure a lot of you are currently rushing to the comments to say something like, “But Tyler, New World is already super unpolished!”

Yes and no. The thing is that New World is prone to breaking often, but when it works, it works beautifully. Its animations are snappy and satisfying, its sound design immaculate, its overall feel second to none. Chrono Odyssey doesn’t have that; it just feels kind of messy from the ground up.

The big unanswered question here is how much of the current issues are because the game being unfinished – and whether the launch build will feel much different. A reported launch window in 2025 doesn’t give me a lot of confidence, though. I think Chrono Odyssey has some potential, but it needs a lot more time to cook.