Riders of Icarus Is Like A Pokemon MMO But Also Not
How To Train Your Dragon
At first glance, Riders of Icarus [official site] reminds me of a time when painting fantasy art on the side of vans was a thing. It also looks like another action MMO teeming with fantastical landscapes and even more fantastical creatures that wander around them in small clumps waiting to be converted into experience points. And, to be honest, it's probably still got a lot of that. But one thing has caught my eye: Riders of Icarus lets you tame those beasties instead and turn them into your faithful pets or ride them into battle. If you don't want to wait until July 6th when Riders of Icarus enters open beta, you can satiate your need to enslave monsters with the newly released trailer.
Developed by WeMade Entertainment and published by Nexon, Riders of Icarus lets you do all the MMO-y things you would normally do but with the extra layer of taming mythical beasts to aid in your adventures. While you might start out reasonable humble, maybe just a bear or a horse, eventually you'll be riding dragons or wolves made of diamonds. Hell, looking at a few of the videos you can even ride a gorilla. Making monsters your minions, however, isn't an easy task. You'll need to fight the thing first, weakening it before jumping on and engaging in a quicktime minigame in order to successfully tame it. If you want, I found a video which shows the process below. Don't worry, though it's in Korean it's pretty easy to follow along.
Monsters can be more than your mounts too. You can turn them into pets who fight alongside you in combat or, if you're a cruel bastard, absorb their souls to enhance your weapons and equipment. It all sounds pretty cool to me, so hopefully the whole thing is actually fun to play.
Sadly, despite being free-to-play, I haven't heard the best news about the state of the cash shop. Looking at the founders access items, the highest tier doles out some pretty massive buffs including an item that grants a sizeable increase in health and defense, making you much tougher. No idea how that'll unbalance the game, but giving away stat boosts as a reward probably isn't the best sign. That's my opinion of it at least.
However you feel, Riders of Icarus will be in open beta on July 6th. You can register on its website and it'll be on Steam too.