First Impressions of Undecember, the much-anticipated RPG for Mobile and PC

Good looks will get you far in life. Just ask Undecember. LINE Games’ Diablo-esque hack-and-slasher set tongues wagging last year when the first trailer went live.

It showcased some unexpectedly brilliant visuals for an unknown mobile RPG, and ever since then, the game has been highly anticipated by a whole lot of gamers.

Now it’s out, we’ve taken a quick peek at the first couple of hours of the campaign to help you decide if you fancy it.

What Undecember is all about

Playable cross-platform on mobile and PC, Undecember has the looks of a high-end PC game, but the gameplay of a mobile RPG, right down to the controls.

Rather than steering your character around with the WASD keys, you have to click on a point to run in that direction. The mouse cursor is basically standing in for the tip of your finger on a touchscreen. Fortunately, it works great. Wiping out waves of monsters and goons is an absolute blast.

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To attack an enemy - or, as you'll usually find, a whole horde of enemies - you just need to tap the mouse. To unleash your various skills, tap Q, W, E, and R. There's also the option to use a physical controller with its own bespoke control scheme.

A classless society

Among the USPs that LINE Games has been keen to tout over the last few months is Undecember’s unique classless growth system. Rather than picking a class at the outset, you’re free to develop your character in any direction you please. Plus, you can wield any weapon, and equip any skill.

At the start of the game, you’ll have both a bow and a sword, along with a selection of skills, some offensive and some evasive. This leaves you free to combine weapons and skills to find your perfect loadout. The only restriction you need to contend with is the fact that some skills only work with certain weapons, so there's still a level of strategy in Undecember.

Another aspect of this classless growth system is Zodiac, the character progression mechanism that sees you assign Trait Points to your character’s Strength, Skill, and Intelligence levels in whatever proportions you like. You can use Skill Runes to give yourself unique abilities, too.

So, how do Skill Runes work? To use a hexagonal Skill Rune, you have to place it somewhere on a hex grid. Each rune has colour-coded sides, and bringing a side into contact with a Link Rune of the same colour gives that Skill Rune a little boost. It’s possible to connect multiple Skill Runes to a single Link Rune, too. Working out the arrangement that will give you the best possible modifications is a fun little game in itself.

The campaign

Story-wise, Undecember begins with a prologue. During this brief section, your character is thrillingly souped-up, and you cut through enemies like a hot knife through butter. But this is just a glimpse of your possible future if you stick with the game and level yourself up.

Immediately after that, you find yourself on a large, multistory platform being carried through the desert by an even larger creature called a Sand Walker, which looks like something out of Lord of the Rings.

It’s a brilliant set piece, showcasing exactly what Undecember can pull off in terms of sheer spectacle, and it ends with a suitably spectacular disaster.

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Finally, you arrive in Malo Front, a frontier settlement perched over a massive ravine that falls away in the background like the Grand Canyon.

Malo Front is the game’s main hub. It’s where you’ll find the Peddler, the Blacksmith, and the Storage chest. There are other players milling around, and you’re free to interact with them. You can interact with other NPCs, too, or just watch them chuntering on about bandits and Sand Walkers.

There’s also a checkpoint, which takes you to the map screen and lets you head out on quests or grinding exercises.

Traum is a vast place, and you’re free to explore great swathes of it right from the get-go, starting with the Yellow Wasteland. This treacherous desert environment is full of scorpions, spiders, wolves, dragons, bandits, and bosses. And for some reason, they all want to kill you.

Undecember also celebrates Halloween from October 26th - November 23rd. This would be a great time to jump into the world of Undecember - there'll be some pretty sweet loot given out. More information can be found on the official Discord or Website. You can grab it on the App Store or Play Store.

There’s a real sense of exploration in the first few hours of Undecember, as you head out into the Yellow Wastelands, kill lots of enemies, gather lots of loot, and return to Malo Front to gird yourself for the next assault.

We can’t tell you whether it holds up over the long haul, but in the early stages, Undecember looks like a solid, graphically impressive Diablo-like with some clever new ideas.