Review: MO.CO is Supercell's latest bold proposal

Supercell is a well-renowned developer in the mobile gaming scene. With several globally successful titles such as Clash of Clans, Clash Royale and Brawl Stars, the company has decided to take a step further with their newest game, MO.CO!

With RPG elements, this title aims to be more independent of the others and innovate on the Supercell concept that we all know up until now. In this review, you‘ll learn more about MO.CO's gameplay, as well as its positive and negative points. Check it out!

Performance and graphics issues will be mentioned! Therefore, below are the specifications of the cell phone used for this review:

Operating System: Android 14

Processor: 2x 2.2 GHz Cortex-A78 + 6x 2.0 GHz Cortex-A55

RAM: 8GB

MO.CO brings several Action RPG features, its main gameplay is about entering a world or a dungeon to vanquish monsters and bosses, alongside other players or even your friends.

To do that, you'll need to equip your character with weapons as well as passive and active skills, very similar to titles like Albion Online and Diablo. The idea is that you can build the combination that most pleases you, and that makes sense when you're playing with your friends. There are several builds to act as a healer, tank or DPS available right after finishing the game's - long - tutorial.

Unlike other Supercell game experiences, here we create our own character. There’s a reasonable number of faces and hairstyles options, and we can change them whenever we want, but there are still clothing options “missing”, since most of the cosmetics are paid for through microtransactions.

Is MO.CO Pay-To-Win?

Since we mentioned the famous microtransactions, it’s valid entering this debate about whether MO.CO is Pay-To-Win. The company's most famous games have a similar format, Pay-To-Fast, where the user spends money to evolve their characters or village quicker.

But it’s worth mentioning that in MO.CO, so far, all items made available with paid features are exclusively cosmetics. It’s not currently possible to improve your weapons or anything like that by inserting money in the game.

Despite being a game that focuses heavily on action, building skills and strategies, similar to Brawl Stars, I think MO.CO strays a bit from the audience that follows Supercell's games.

There’s one thing that this company's greatest hits all have in common: competitiveness from start to finish. We start our journeys searching for winning over other players and accumulating as many trophies as possible. MO.CO, on the other hand, encourages you to act cooperatively in a world against NPC monsters that don't reward you with a rank or trophy.

There’s a Versus mode, where you can enter PvP matches, but you need to reach level 15 to enter it, which takes a few hours. Another issue is that this mode follows a more similar line to Squad Busters, another title from the same company, but one that wasn’t fully appreciated by the public, where the focus was also on defeating monsters and bosses, but with the possibility of eliminating players.

Still on the subject of competitiveness, we have access to a sort of Ranking (Leaderboard) within MO.CO, which ranks the best players in the world and in the region in which you’re playing. However, the criteria for this positioning is XP, something that’ll highlight the user who has more active hours in the game over the actual best.

I believe that with some redesigns and new modes, MO.CO will be able to embrace Supercell's audience that’s used to real-time strategy and action. But currently, I believe it fits better with Squad Busters’s fanbase.

My first impression when I entered MO.CO was that the game didn't seem to have a purpose. I didn't spot a rank or trophy system for you to evolve, or above-average social interaction, such as in Albion Online, to create an economy or exchange items.

Your first few hours of gameplay will be defined by: Killing monsters to get resources and improve your items, and with this, you’ll be able to defeat bigger monsters and get even more resources...

Your biggest goal or purpose can be to complete the game's Rifts (dungeons). If you don't feel challenged and motivated by this, you’ll probably get bored with the game quickly. When we unlock the Versus mode, we have a small revamp in the gameplay, but until then, get used to this cycle of just eliminating monsters and evolving items.

If in Brawl Stars, a simpler and more direct game, working with random teammates with no communication was already a problem, in MO.CO this is even more pronounced.

In the "Double Hop" Rift, from the Prologue, your team faces two powerful bosses, one positioned at the top of the area and the other at the bottom. Ideally, everyone would focus on eliminating one first, before facing the other. However, in all six attempts I made, the team always split up, attracting both bosses at the same time to us. And since we don't have enough strength to face the two together, we end up being defeated.

A logically simple problem turns into frustration because we don't have fast and effective communication within MO.CO. We can only use emotes or send messages to our clan, not to our Rift teammates.

Perhaps MO.CO's strongest point. The game's graphics and artistic style are excellent, especially considering it's a mobile title. The soundtrack and skill effects in the gameplay are also satisfactory.

MO.CO overall has good performance, although some specific maps don't load on weaker devices. I didn't experience this myself with the configuration I used - mentioned in the article's introduction.

One particular error that happened to me was some pixels on the screen flashing during part of the gameplay. It didn't affect the game's or the device's performance, but it’s a little frustrating. See it in the video below:

Pros