MythForce is a first-person action videogame that wants to make me feel like I am embodying a main character in the high fantasy animated television shows that were popular in the 1980s. I choose to play as one of the four members of MythForce, a team of elite warriors assembled to combat the evil vampire lord Deadalus and foil his plot to conquer the kingdom of Eldryth. Playing solo or with up to three other players online, my chosen MythForce member infiltrates a magically randomized castle and battles through Deadalus’ armies of mushroommen, lizardmen, and undead before the vampire can seize control of Eldryth’s magic and become unstoppably powerful.

MythForce models itself after the toy-driven animated shows that are emblematic of the 1980s, especially He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Thundercats. Before the videogame begins, a traditionally animated title sequence plays, depicting MythForce violently and bloodlessly vanquishing Deadalus’s monster soldiers in a stony red void. A rocking theme song plays over this sequence, its chorus declaring that “every day people become heroes.” There’s a fun homophone to consider here: is it every day? Is it everyday? Is it both? In any case, the wordplay is nonsensical. All four MythForce members are accomplished heroes and were recruited for that reason. In keeping with the 1980s aesthetics the lyrics imitate, the MythForce theme song has little relation to its source, as though it were written by a mercenary composer who was provided with a contract, an outline, and a deadline.

The trio of supervillains MythForce battles evoke familiar antagonists. Deadalus’s desire to wield all forms of magic is reminiscent of Thundercats’ Mumm-Ra. His two lieutenants, the wild beastman Beastor and the dark sorceress Hexstar, recall Masters of the Universe’s Beastman and Evilyn. Their personalities feel plucked from the decade their designs are borrowed from. Deadalus hammily vows his revenge after his inevitable defeat, setting up his reappearance in next week’s exciting episode. When Hexstar is defeated, she sneeringly taunts the team as “MythNerds” as she escapes through a portal, recalling an era when “nerd” was the most grievous insult possible on an all-ages television show, to the point it was iconoclastic to cast one as a hero.

MythForce’s visual design does just as much to sell its aesthetic as its opening cinematic and writing. Player characters, non-player characters, and interactable objects have their shapes accentuated by thick, appealing black outlines and filled by cel-shaded coloring. This is a familiar visual trick to grant polygonal, 3D animation an appearance akin to flat, cel-based animation. It’s familiar because it works well. The environments contrast these bold outlines and simple colors with rich textures on finely detailed polygons. In an overgrown castle ruin, the lush greens of grass and moss fade naturally into the rustic browns and reds of the crumbling stonework, while a dank crypt is lit with moody blues and greys highlighted by caustic green rivers of acid. When the two effects are combined, it looks like a cel-animated character pops against a static matte painting—the exact technique used in 1980s television animation.

The faithful aesthetic even carries over to the animated cutscenes that introduce and conclude each play session. MythForce’s title sequence has smooth and detailed animation to fully capture the team’s prowess and draw me into the story. Once I am actually playing the videogame—once I am actually watching individual episodes—the animation becomes crude. Pre- and post-level cutscenes have much less action than the bombastic title sequence would lead me to believe. MythForce stands in a room and talks about the situation, the camera frame often locked above their shoulders to hide their motionless bodies. Their heads barely shift as they speak and their faces are animated at a lower frame rate than the rest of the videogame. 

These are tricks that older television animation used to maximize their budget: Spend big on high quality animations that can be reused in every episode, like the title and transformation sequences, while using more limited animation to tell each episode’s actual story. It’s deceptive but it gets the job done. MythForce borrows these methods and employs them to double the effect, mimicking the contrast between high- and low-quality animations in 1980s cartoons while also benefiting from the resultant cost-saving. Animating MythForce’s cutscenes can’t have been cheap. It also could have been much more expensive.

Before I can do anything else in MythForce, I choose which team member I play as. Each has a unique playstyle built from their distinct abilities and weapon sets. 

Victoria is the founder and leader of the group. In almost every cutscene, she is the one summarizing MythForce’s situation and directing them towards their next goal. In battle, her role is reflected with abilities that put her on the frontlines, charging into melee range while knocking Deadalus’ minions to the ground, roaring to draw their attacks to her, then fending them off with a heavy mace. Victoria is most notable for her shield, the only team member to carry one, which lets her block melee attacks and projectiles the other team members must dodge or use precise weapon parries to interrupt.

Victoria’s counterpart is Rico. A former lieutenant of Deadalus, Rico defected to MythForce for unexplained reasons that cause the rest of the team to be suspicious of his motives. He rebuffs their accusations with a roguish demeanor and teasing humor. Like Victoria, he fights primarily in melee combat. Unlike Victoria, he relies on speed and trickery to combat Deadalus’ forces. He can lunge forward to strike with his dagger or teleport behind an enemy and backstab them for critical damage, then throw the sand he keeps in his pockets into the eyes of any survivors as he retreats to safety.

Hawkins is a taciturn hunter who lived a solitary life before joining MythForce, making him its most untrusting and antisocial member. He specializes in the bow and arrow and his abilities emphasize his own safety. He can fire a magical arrow that generates a tiny black hole where it lands, pulling enemies towards it, and also shift into an ethereal state that lets him run right through enemies’ bodies. Whenever Hawkins is in danger, he doesn’t remain there for long.

Where Hawkins supplements his ordinary bow with magical abilities, Maggie focuses her offense entirely on her magical toolkit. She is a mage and, as she constantly reminds the rest of the team, a talented one. Her specialized class abilities are surprisingly limited. She can teleport a short distance with a snap from her fingers, summon a clockwork owl that behaves like a magic-spitting turret, and generate a magical barrier that deflects enemy projectiles. For bringing down real shock and awe, she carries a spellbook instead of a weapon, using it to conjure elemental storms as casually as Victoria swings a mace and Hawkins fires an arrow.

Once I have chosen my player character and they enter a level, MythForce is a heavily combat-focused videogame. Daedalus’ castle is explored one room at a time. Most rooms contain multiple floors, narrow corridors, broad halls, and hidden passages, all filled with explosive plants, traps that spew clouds of fire or poison, portcullises locked by nearby levers and switches, and pits lined with sharpened stakes. Somewhere in this space is a hallway that leads to the next room. It remains sealed until every monster in the current room is defeated. These begin to spawn in waves and bear down on the team as soon as they enter.

No matter which MythForce team member I play as, their actions in combat are ruled and limited by their energy point meter. The player characters are controlled by a traditional first-person movement system and basic actions like walking and jumping may be performed for no energy cost. Their special abilites may also be used at no cost. Every other action, from running to dodging to attacking with a weapon, requires some expenditure of energy.

This energy system smartly controls the flow of battle. I always have the option to rush the player character forward, wildly flailing with their weapon, lashing indiscriminately at Deadalus’ monsters as they swarm around the team. As their energy drains, the image becomes fuzzier, fills with static, and every action they take causes them to wheeze. When their energy bottoms out, they become unable to take any action until it fully regenerates. If I don’t moderate the player character’s actions by taking frequent breaks mid-combat, they can become helpless while surrounded by monsters. This is punished with a severe hit to their remaining health, if not death.

The monsters lurking in Deadalus’ castle come in a handful of themed varieties. Early on, MythForce faces reanimated skeletons. They are weak and crumble beneath basic weapon attacks, befitting enemies faced early in a hero’s adventure. As the team progresses through the campaign’s nine episodes, skeletons are slowly phased out in favor of overgrown, man-shaped mushrooms, lithe and muscular lizard people, and finally acolytes, a zombie army made by Hexstar from the corpses interred in the crypt of Deadalus’ castle. Each group is more powerful than the last. By the campaign’s final episode, skeletons are rare while lizardmen and acolytes overwhelm the invading heroes.

The different monster groups are further subdivided into specialized classes. Each class mirrors a MythForce member’s weapon choice and group role, as though both player characters and non-player characters have chosen professions in a tabletop RPG. Thankfully, monsters do not also benefit from MythForce’s specialized abilities. 

Tank-type monsters bear heavy shields that absorb attacks from MythForce’s weapons. They try to press this advantage and protect their allies by crowding around the team. The remaining classes focus on damage dealing. Rogues poke at the team with daggers. Archers fire arrows from afar. Mages conjure bursts of elemental magic. With care and concentration, all these assaults may be dodged or parried. Melee attackers have dramatic telegraphed buildups before they swing their weapons. Archers’ arrows glisten with sharpness before they are launched from their bows. Mage spells charge for several seconds before they fire and leave large circles on the ground marking where they will take effect, giving me warning and time to move the player character out of their influence. MythForce’s combat demands I stay on reactive alert at all times.

MythForce occasionally battles boss monsters in Deadalus’ castle. Most are buffed up versions of basic enemies with one or two new mechanics tossed in. They take much more punishment before falling but do not demand much extra skill. More exceptional are Beastor, Hexstar, and Deadalus. Their fights capstone each area of the castle and have unique and elaborate mechanics. Beastor suffers in comparison to the other two—I find that circling him at melee range while attacking rapidly confounds his programmed responses, leaving him standing motionless until his death—but Hexstar and Deadalus are both worthy encounters that require equal amounts of skill at wielding MythForce’s powers and avoiding the boss’ powerful telegraphed attacks. Their two encounters are MythForce at its best.

As the team explores each room, they discover pickups which upgrade their abilities. Trinkets that augment the player character’s statistics and potions that empower their special abilities can drop from enemies, be found in lootable chests, acquired from a friendly skeleton merchant, or even found lying on shelves. These appear at random and it’s possible to go an entire episode without finding one.

More reliable are the artifacts that improve the player character’s weapon or provide them with a useful performance perk. It’s usually obvious which perk favors which character. The frontline warrior Victoria benefits from perks like Combat Veteran, which increases her hit point total by a small amount for every three monsters she kills. The mage Maggie gets more use from Glass Cannon, which raises her damage and lowers her hit point total by large percentages; her higher damage output and lower hit point total gives her the most benefit and the least cost compared to the more well-rounded Hawkins. Smartly combining synergizing perks lets me develop the player character from a formidable hero to a monster-annihilating god. This feels good on lower difficulty levels and is mandatory on higher ones. 

The player character is guaranteed to find a perk-upgrading artifact at the exit from every room, allowing them to slowly accumulate power as they finish more rooms and approach the next boss. These upgrades do have a time limit. When the current episode is finished, the player character enters the next returned to their default state.

MythForce’s campaign is built across nine episodes in three acts. Each trio of three episodes follows the team as they infiltrate Deadalus’ castle, culminating in a confrontation with Deadalus or one of his lieutenants in an environment tailored to their personality. Beastor is fought in a jungle ruin that hides a secret entrance into Deadalus’ castle. Hexstar performs necromantic experiments on the corpses in the dungeon beneath the castle. Deadalus himself lounges on a throne at the castle’s heart, and unlike the crumbling and decrepit state of the first six episode, his fortress is an opulent and ostentatious monument to his own ego.

More than anywhere else, it is in this campaign design where I feel MythForce’s limitations. With only three bosses in three environments across nine episodes, it feels tiny next to similar randomly generated videogames. In a single play through the campaign, I have seen every boss and discovered every secret. If I were to hope to see something new my next time playing, I would be disappointed.

More frustrating is that I will see something repeated even in a current play session. Each episode takes place across eleven or more randomly selected rooms in Deadalus’ castle. These rooms are randomly selected from a pool of pre-built rooms unique to each environment. This pool is so small that the team is guaranteed to visit the same room at least twice in a single episode. As the number of rooms in an episode grows longer, the likelihood they will encounter the same room three or more times increases. 

There’s always a moment in a randomized videogame when the player character enters a room and I realize I’ve seen it before. This is the first time I recognize its limitations. Generally, the longer I go without seeing a repeated room, the better that videogame fares. In MythForce, this moment arrives before I’ve completed the first episode. If this videogame has a single, defining problem, the limited number of rooms in too few episodes is it.

While MythForce explores Deadalus’ castle, they find piles of gold and valuable artifacts stashed away in treasure chests, inside tombs, and piled on shelves and railings. Any riches still in their possession when they finish a level, either successfully or unsuccessfully, they take back with them to Eldryth’s capital and spend on upgrades.

Unlike the fully explorable environments in Deadalus’ castle, Eldryth is represented by a simple image. It’s an upgrade menu, not a community or quest hub, so this representation is serviceable. As a way to communicate what MythForce is trying to protect from Deadalus’ schemes, it disappoints. 

Clickable icons around the castle and its outlying village take the player character to the different merchants, artisans, and scholars who service MythForce. Sylvia in the Conclave sells upgrades for the perks they receive at the end of each room. Keaton in the Emporium offers a similar service for the trinkets that drop from the castle’s monsters and chests. The most important services are offered by Queen Ancilla in the Sun Disc and Captain Lucien in the Armory. Ancilla helps MythForce bind stat-boosting star shards to a constellation unique to each team member. Lucien permanently upgrades their weapons.

It is through these vendors, especially the last two, where I get the best sense of how big MythForce wants to be. By playing through all nine episodes once with Victoria, she earns barely enough gold to buy a handful of weapon upgrades from Lucien. It takes many more episodes to loot the hundreds of thousands of gold needed to buy the final upgrade for her default weapon. That doesn’t include the alternate weapon loadouts Lucien sells for each character, the upgrades to Ancilla’s star shards, or the dozens of trinket and perk upgrades sold by Sylvia and Keaton. There are potentially millions of gold worth in upgrades to purchase for just one character. In a single run of the campaign with Victoria, she earns less than two hundred thousand. 

MythForce wants to be played and replayed, developing a player character through a huge number of upgrades and several ascendant difficulty levels. I find a single playthrough of the campaign on the default difficulty to be satisfactorily challenging and fulfilling. The grind needed to drive even one team member into the highest difficulty levels is immediately unappealing, both through the sheer quantity of gold required and the repetition of exploring the same tiny pool of rooms in the same nine episodes for dozens of hours.

The saving grace for a daunting grind in a videogame can be online play, and with its team of diverse player characters, MythForce is clearly designed with multiplayer in mind. This is lamentably not a practical option.

According to SteamDB, MythForce’s Steam version peaked during its 2023 launch at 430 active players. That is a grave number for an online videogame community. As I write this review, there are a grand total of five active players in total. I could describe MythForce’s online community as being dead. It would be more accurate to say it was never alive. The best someone can hope from MythForce’s online components is to form a group in advance and schedule regular sessions. Unless its players are especially passionate, I predict even this plan will have difficulty enduring the hours of grind needed to reach MythForce’s upper echelons. The achievement completion percentages for the highest difficulty levels speak for themselves.

MythForce is most successful at its aesthetic premise. It looks and plays too much like a contemporary videogame to fool me into believing I’m playing a relic, but that isn’t really its intention. If MythForce wanted to be an 8-bit retro platformer, it would have been one. Instead, it chooses to recreate the tone and values of a 1980s animated television show. It succeeds, only missing out on an accompanying toyline. Its character and combat mechanics also acquit themselves well. I see them being successful in a much larger videogame. That is where MythForce falls short. There are too few episodes and too few unique rooms to explore. I enjoy playing its campaign once then exploring its greater possibilities for another week for this review. If I were to keep on, grinding out to the best upgrades and reaching for the highest difficulties, the limitations would grate on me. I would accuse it of being repetitive and boring. It’s a shame MythForce didn’t attract a community to support it. It might have gotten the improvements it needed to its lacking content. What’s here has great potential, but potential does not make a great videogame.