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If the mobile app stores have shown us anything, it’s that originality really isn’t that important. There are countless spins on every genre, and what matters isn’t which game came first but which ones are most fun.

Fortnite is a good example. Having taken its inspiration from battle royale forerunner PUBG, it has spawned its own legions of imitators. Creative Destruction is one of them.

That means it sees you parachuting onto a large island and duking it out with 99 other players to be the last person standing. There’s only one island, but many different terrains, and the chances of spending more than one game out of 100 in the same area are miniscule.

Reducing those chances even further is the fact that the playable area on the map shrinks during each match as an unsurvivable cloud gradually closes in. This diminishing circle of territory is different every time, meaning Creative Destruction always feels fresh.

You start each match with a Destructor – an impressive looking rifle that nevertheless is only good for demolishing and constructing buildings. To get anywhere you’ll need to find weapons in buildings, chests, through supply drops, and by killing other players and looting the stuff they leave behind.

There are the usual classes of weapons, including pistols, SMGs, assault rifles, sniper rifles, bazookas, and grenades. You move with the right of the screen and look with the right, as per every shooter on a touchscreen.

On top of the default solo mode – the iconic battle royale – you can play in Duo, Squad, and Fireteam modes, and for the next few weeks (until the end of April) there’s a Duo driving mode too.

This sees you either driving a vehicle around the island or hanging out the back of it with a gun. The prize? Bumblebee. Yep – in conjunction with Hasbro, developer NetEase has added everybody’s favorite first gen Transformer to Creative Destruction, and if you play your cards right (i.e. kill everyone) you can even drive him.

The Good

Creative Destruction is a surprizingly robust Fortnite competitor, with vibrant graphics, silky smooth performance, and well-balanced gameplay.

The building mechanic in particular stands out. To build a structure, you first need to assemble material by destroying houses, cars, trees, and anything else that will succumb to your Destructor’s rays.

Then you can immediately create a number of different structures, including a floor, a wall, a share shelter, and ramps going either up or down, with the tap of a button.

These buildings aren’t intended to be permanent. Instead, they affect the way you fight, giving you ready platforms to scale and shields to erect to improve your odds in battle. You can almost think of them like Elsa’s magical ice powers in Frozen – your Destructor gives you a means to change the shape of the battlefield on the fly.

But the structures you create are easy to destroy – much easier than in Fortnite – so shootouts are fluid, dynamic affairs in which you’re constantly balancing cover and elevation with the need to remove your opponent’s cover and actually shoot them.

Fortunately, thanks to the shrinking map and the inclusion of landmarks that naturally attract players, you’ll always see action in Creative Destruction, and the final shootouts are often tense affairs.

The Bad

For all that Creative Destruction is a fun addition to the battle royale genre, it doesn’t much that’s original to the table. If you’ve played Fortnite or PUBG, you’ve pretty much played this too.

Of course, that’s not necessarily a problem. It’s a new map, a new setting, and a new experience. The addition of Bumblebee helps elevate things, too, giving you something extra to chase beyond loot and glory.

But given the level of polish we’d have liked to see some more character and innovation too. Check out the game for yourself here if you live in Europe and Japan, and here if you’re based elsewhere.

The Verdict

Creative Destruction is a slick, polished, playable take on the battle royale genre, and if you’re tired of Fortnite and PUBG but still up for a spot of battle royale action this should fit the bill – as long as you’re not looking for something that’s radically different.

8.2

OVERALL

Replayability 8.5

Game Controls 8.3

Graphics 8.1

Sound/Music 8.2

Gameplay 8

FREE

Creative Destruction

NetEase Games

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It’s a wonder the coders at Webzen find time to sleep. Over the last couple of years they’ve rolled out an impressive number of content updates for RPG MU Origin, taking it all the way up to version 7, and yet they’ve somehow found time to make MU Origin 2 as well.

This latest addition to the MU franchise – which started life as a web game back in 2001 – doesn’t take any major risks. In fact, its overriding priority is to give you the smoothest, easiest RPG experience possible. How you’ll feel about that depends on what kind of gamer you are.

The word that best describes MU Origin 2 is “streamlined”. In that spirit, you get just three character types to choose from at the outset: Dark Knight, Dark Wizard, and Elf. And it’s just a short hop from picking an avatar to taking on story quests.

These are dispensed by NPCs with an endless supply of odd jobs to dish out, normally involving the killing of monsters. Once you accept a story quest, by simply tapping a prompt on the left of the screen, you automatically towards the action.

You automatically kill the enemies you find there, too, though returning to the quest-giver to receive your reward seemingly constitutes a new quest.

Naturally, there are non-story quests too. These are designed to keep you moving in the right direction, progress-wise, by encouraging you to make use of modes and features as they become available, such as the Guild, the dungeons, and the Auction.

There are also daily quests, and innumerable kill quests. Interestingly, these involve not only killing ten of X monsters, but killing waves of monsters by travelling around and finding them on the location map. A single quest can see you terminating over a hundred monsters, all without touching the screen.

MU Origin 2 has a definite autopilot vibe, and that partly extends to the RPG admin. For instance, when you pick up an item a button appears allowing you to equip it right away, without going into your inventory, and you can transfer an item’s enhancement level to a new one too.

The Good

However, MU Origin 2 is not entirely an autopilot affair. While the opening few hours are more than usually streamlined, eventually you’ll need to start paying close attention if you want to get anywhere.

That point comes at around level 150. The first 100 levels fly past in a haze, as you romp invincibly through all the battles the game has to throw at you. Your Zen (the game’s most abundant currency) is seemingly never-ending, and you level-up at breakneck speed.

But things start slowing down after that. Upgrading your skills gets more expensive as the level gets higher, and you acquire more skills to boot, so you start running out of Zen. And the pace of your levelling up slows too, which often means you can’t take on story quests until you’ve scraped together some more XP.

This in turn forces you to make some decisions – about how to spend your limited Zen, and which activities to engage in to help you progress the fastest. Do you jump into an event like the EXP Dungeon or the Guild Battlefield, or do you take on a simple single-player dungeon or Infinite Tower instead?

Or you can throw off the shackles entirely and just explore the areas of the MU continent that you’ve unlocked so far. Movement is handled with a virtual stick on the left while your skills are arrayed on the right. Using these inputs you can maraud around Atlans, killing fishy things, or Devias, killing yetis.

There’s a rich variety of monsters to kill and environments to kill them in, and while technically the visuals are only so-so the designs are interesting and varied.

The Bad

Presentation is not a generally strong point for the game, with tiny, poorly localized text and ropey voice audio leaving a bad taste. As stated previously the game can feel like it’s on auto-pilot at times.

The Verdict

MU Origin 2 is not revolutionary, but it’s worthy of the MU license. While there’s plenty to keep you busy, and all the staples of the mobile RPG genre are here, you’ll enjoy it most if you like your RPGs fairly lightweight.

8.6

OVERALL

Replayability 8.6

Game Controls 8.4

Graphics 8.8

Sound/Music 8.4

Gameplay 8.6

FREE

MU ORIGIN 2 -WEBZEN Officially

GAMENOW TECHNOLOGY LIMITED

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