A refined system for many different styles of combat.

Congratulations, you've won an all-expense-paid ticket to the greatest details of a lifetime for Snail Games' new MMO, Black Gold Online. Sit back, relax and take in the vast glory of mechanized battle beasts facing off against glittery, fantastical behemoths. Relive moments never lived before as the dark skies of a polluted empire war against clouds, castles and wizardry.

First stop along our journey through the combat system: combat maneuverability! Often, battles for other games can be static, where one character sits and repeats a given set of actions until either achieving a win or a sad, unfortunate defeat. Black Gold's combat system requires a lot of dodging on the player's part, so standing in place will surely provide the path of least resistance towards the next respawn point. If a player wants to stay in the game, movement is the key to dodging magic missiles and lightning bolts from a faction's foes. 

Feast your eyes upon our next stop aboard the combat trail: hitboxes! While this is nothing new to games by any stretch of the imagination, Black Gold uses hitboxes to accurately gauge the level of damage one skill might inflict upon a puny enemy. Skills affect hitboxes by their range of influence and whether the range be conical, linear or area of effect.

Our last stop on our short trip around the combative world of Montel involves everyone's favorite pastime: vehicular battle! One jump onto a weaponized beast switches the player's field of view to first-person, so tracking down the least favorite player and pummelling them into oblivion is easier than slicing hot butter with a samurai's blade of choice. A few lethal projectiles that the battle mounts use are incendiary rounds or even acidic war axes!

We hope you've enjoyed this brief romp through Black Gold's battle basics! Stay out of the path of one of these battle mechs, we've heard they're known to spontaneously explode.

 Follow Jeffery Wright on Twitter @WrightJeffD