Is CLOSERS Worth Playing in 2022? | An MMO Review

Closers is one of 2 South Korean MMOs I actually brought attention to before they were licensed for distribution within North America and Europe.
I did “let’s play” style videos documenting my and my little sister, Wiggy’s slow progress throughout not only the Korean version, but also private servers for the game, before En Masse finally licensed it and allowed for me to officially play the game translated legally into English.
And after years away, I’ve finally come back to see if the game is worth investing time into in 2022.

Hey, my name is Stix and welcome back to another episode of “Is it worth playing?” A series where we analyze every facet of an MMORPG and come up with as objective of an opinion as we can on whether the title is worth playing in 2022.
Today, we’re taking a look at Closers.

Now I last played Closers back in.. 2018. Oh, wow, it’s been almost 4 years. I guess that explains a few things.
Back then, there were tens of thousands of active players, towns were filled with clones of your character, local chat was spammed with gold sellers, you had to actually work towards obtaining gear. Ahhh, what a time to be alive.
Upon my return, I created a brand new character – and there are a lot of characters to choose from now.
Each character has their own faction affiliation, however, it really doesn’t serve any purpose in my opinion.
Character creation is non-existent, thus my comment about all the clones running around the towns. There is customization, however. There are outfits, hairstyles.
You gotta make money somehow, and cosmetic items are one of the most popular methods with which to drain every last cent out of your cultured playerbase.
Each character has their own unique story, and their own unique starting area. Although admittedly some of those zones are shared.

So there I was, jumping into the game for the first time in 4 years, not knowing what anything did or that I actually had an entire set of gear that allowed me to 1-shot every single monster, including bosses, for the hours I spent streaming this.
Yes, don’t be like me. Make sure to click all the notifications when starting a new game. More often than not, you’ll be gifted with gear so powerful, it’ll actually make you quit due to a lack of meaningful progression.
And that’s actually what kind of happened here. I spent over 3 hours doing nothing but clicking my abilities once each, and massacring entire hordes of monsters. There was absolutely no challenge present whatsoever.
You can see the drained look I have on my face. The sheer utter disappointment I had having learned that the fun, action combat I had once loved so much was now utterly pointless until much later through the game.

And I mean, don’t get me wrong. I understand the bulk of the game takes place at endgame. But Closers is the type of game that requires you re-run the same content in a vicious, repetitious cycle that is entirely unfulfilling, and just.. not at all fun.
Closers is a hub-MMO. Meaning that there are towns, cities, central “hubs” that players can co-exist within. You can see players, you can interact with them, and you can group up with them so you don’t have to push through content alone.
Progression takes the form of running dungeons. There’s no world to explore. You run instances. These instances consist of a couple different rooms with the same monster type, complete with a boss encounter towards the end.
These instances take a few minutes to complete each. Now imagine completing dungeons for hours where you do nothing but hold your right arrow key to move horizontally, and cycle through a few AoEs bound to your WASD keys.
If the dungeons were varied, that wouldn’t be so bad. But here? They send you through the same dungeons repeatedly, across several difficulty levels, where the only difference is how long the dungeons take because they increase the bosses HP’ exponentially, drawing out the encounters.
So in essence, you’re re-running the same dungeons repetitiously, engaging the same single monster type for hours at a time, all by yourself. For a new player, this isn’t the experience you want, and is likely not the experience to grip you. To retain your attention long enough to get to the better content.

Thankfully, the combat is a saving grace. To a degree. Since you spend roughly 95% of your time in combat, and the other 5% skipping all the text the game is so cluttered with, it’s a good thing it’s not only highly fluid, but also incredibly flashy.
Interestingly, you move your character with your arrow keys, as opposed to your WASD keys or your left mouse button. This is something I don’t really see done in the MMO scene, and I understand why. It’s clunky moving your right hand between arrow keys and your mouse.
There are plenty of abilities you can learn, giving you a little in terms of individual class identity, and you’re capable of leveling every ability up. Honestly, I never have any idea what I’m doing so I always end up YOLOing it and hoping for the best. It hasn’t let me down yet.

Graphically, Closers utilizes an Anime aesthetic. Character models look stunning – they always have. They honestly possess some of the best looking characters you’ll find in an Anime MMO – better than PSO2, better than Aura Kingdom, better than SoulWorker.
These characters are incredibly well endow-er, developed- oh god, there’s no way of saying that without it coming off as… Ahem. Unfortunately, the rest of the game is pretty basic.
When you have characters that look as good as these characters do, and you have combat that is as stunning as is present within this game, and then everything else just looks so plain – ordinary – bland, you’re left with this sense that they really didn’t care about the world itself.
And again, I’m well aware the world isn’t the focal point of the game, but it wouldn’t have hurt them to put a little more effort into it – both inside and outside of the instanced dungeons.

Unfortunately, outside of the intro to the game I felt as though the narrative was pretty empty. “You’re an agent, go do this, kill that, talk to them.” It’s about what you’d expect out of a side-quest in an MMO – not the main scenario.
I attempted to read some of it but I felt it was just so unimportant and pointless that I ultimately ended up skipping it. And I’m a massive fan of story in my games. If there’s no story, typically I skip the game. I need to feel a sense of connection – to become enthralled in what’s going on so I remain interested and playing.
That’s something that Final Fantasy XIV has done for years that no other MMO has.

In terms of content, there’s – well, a plethora of dungeons to run. The entire game is just one large dungeon-adventure. There are raids, although I’ve never actually participated in one. I don’t believe the population was ever large enough to support raids of this scale.
There’s PvP, although I never participated in it because… well I didn’t know it ever existed. I had to Google this to verify it did, and apparently it does. But given there are 70 people online right now.. I’m gonna speculate it isn’t popular enough to warrant even investigating.

At the end of the day, Closers has changed quite significantly from what it once was. And not in a good way.
This used to be filled with players, and while it’s impossible for any game to truly weather the test of time, it’s sad to see everywhere I went completely empty.
I found it awkward being thrust directly into the game at almost level 70, with no understanding of where I was, what my abilities did, and what gear I had. I wasn’t instructed to equip my gear – I had to manually redeem it from the mail. Something I honestly forget to check when starting new games, because I never anticipate anything being there.
Seriously, who’s gonna be mailing me? Having to grind the same monsters within the same instances over and over was something I wouldn’t wish upon any new player. It’s unenjoyable. Unintuitive. Uninspired. Unbelievably boring.
There isn’t a single thing, outside of the waifu-bait that I would say truly stands out about Closers anymore. When it was released 6 years ago? Sure, maybe. But there is no question in my mind as to why this game is dead. And yes, with 100 people logged in.. this game is officially dead.
I don’t think any amount of work could save this from being worth it when there are just better alternatives out there like Dungeon Fighter Online, Elsword, MapleStory, PSO2 or SoulWorker.

Is this the greatest MMO? No. Not even close to being a contender for that title.

Combat – 5/10 Honestly, for an Anime MMO this game has some pretty damn fun action combat.
Graphics – 4/10 Graphically, the character models were incredible to look at but everything else was flat and uninspired.
Narrative – 1/10 The narrative.. started off strong, and just.. disappeared. Even though I’m sure there’ll be the odd person in the comments section that argues that point.
World – 2/10 The world is.. small, and empty. There’s no reason for it. You might as well just queue for content from a small overview of zones.
Content – 5/10 It has about what every MMO has. Dungeons, raids, PvP. A lot of dungeons, though. Almost to a ridiculous level. I just wish so many of them weren’t copy/pasted.
Overall – 17/50 Honestly, I ended up rating this a little higher than I had originally thought I would. But that is mostly due to the character models and the combat.

Admittedly, Closers is a very basic hub-MMO. It doesn’t really provide anything worth playing – there are alternatives that offer everything this game does, but better. Better combat. Better graphics. Better worlds.
I loved this game. This was one of the games that really put our channel on the map, and it’s a shame to see it end up where it is now. But every good thing eventually comes to an end, and with Closers’ population as low as it is, it’s only a matter of time before it sunsets as well.
I guess this might genuinely be my last time ever playing it.