Light Of Motiram is an online, multiplayer survival game from Polaris Quest, a Tencent backed studio and this is likely their first title as there aren’t any other releases on their steam page. There is no official release date as of yet but people are already up in arms due to the lets say “interesting” designs that were shown.
The Setting Of The Game
The setting of the game isn’t anything new, set in a vast land inhabited by different tribes all of them having different cultures and such and their own unique ways of doing things. The land is also inhabited by metal beasts, each being a reference to a real world animal that we may find in the wild.
We are tasked with surviving this land by gathering resources to build our home base. We can take on enemy camps and loot treasures from there or take on mechanical beasts to loot their bodies for parts to use or sell.
We can also ride some of the creatures as a mount, all of these features make it sound like Palworld and it has been well documented how everything from game mechanics and design is under the shade of copyright and recent lawsuits by Nintendo.
With Palworld, the base building and a truly open world setting brought something new to the table which Nintendo failed to execute on their games which is why it was more welcome and slowly grew a player base and eventually released for the PS5.
In Light of Motiram however, due to how similar the designs look it feels like it’s bordering on pure laziness. Not just the beasts felt copied though, the design of the clothes that the player character wears are extremely similar to the clothes Aloy and alot of the characters from the Horizon Games wear which is another place where the feeling of laziness strikes again.
They Even Copied The Combat
While there is the standard loop of harvesting and mining metals and rocks to improve one’s base. The main combat also feels like it has been copied from Horizon and even that feels like a lazy copy with innovation or new mechanics in sight.
Their stealth play is just like in Horizon where we can one shot certain enemies by sneaking up behind them but if they are special enemies we just lower their health by a significant amount, we even wield a spear which is the signature melee weapon of Aloy in the Horizon games.
The main bulk of the combat is against the machines, where we use our bow to target certain weak points on these creatures, hitting these critical areas inflicts extra damage on the beasts and also extracts materials which are required to improve our bases.
All of the above mentioned are core gameplay mechanics of the Horizon games, every single aspect other than base building. Copying game mechanics or core gameplay is fine as long as a developer is willing to add their own ideas to the mix but here this again just feels lazy.
This Couldn’t Be Anymore Shameless
The only thing left to copy from the masterpieces of Guerilla games is the compelling and intense story. At this point it would be surprising if they manage some sort of plot where we have to find the origin of these metal animals, who makes them and the purpose behind their creation.
It certainly won’t be alarming if in a future content drop there are superhumans who appear and state that they are ones who created these machines to sustain the earth, because at this point it seems they are willing to copy it all if they can.
If it is set to be free to play it may grow a player base that may play it just to witness more of the blatant ripoff that Polaris Quest is doing. Overall we can see the two drastically different sides of the chinese gaming industry, one side produced an absolute masterpiece Black Myth:Wukong, based on the epic “Journey To the West” with amazing gameplay and flawless visuals and on the other side we have Horizon Zero Dawn from Temu.
