Overview: LevynLight is the direct successor of the old Mafia Wars-influenced text RPGs. (And boy, does it feel weird to refer to any Facebook game as “old.”) It uses an action system that’s fairly simple – one action every fifteen minutes, with a max of four, and one automatic action taken per hour. You spend energy to take those actions, and there are different types of energy that attract different kinds of opponents. (Clearly based on the MouseHunt cheese system, and it’s a clever reuse of the mechanic.) You travel from region to region, accepting quests that require you to either kill a certain number of a particular foe, or collect a certain number of random drops.

The quests are well-written, for the most part, and there are a ton of them. The overarching story is only hinted at in the beginning, but the shape of it starts to become clear, and the individual adventures are entertaining. The art is fantastic – lush and detailed, and the fact that it’s static allows way more freedom than animated sprites usually have. All the monsters have descriptions, and every attack, defense, or special skill has a line of description worth reading.

The downside is, you’ll be reading them a LOT. The combat system is a series of random rolls – every item you equip may have one or several possible special effects, and most monsters have a few special moves as well. Combat takes place when you hit the “Play” button and spend an action point – then a foe is selected, all of the chances for special moves are rolled, and the totals are compared to find out the victor. [Thanks to Alexander in the comments, I found the "skip" button! This changes everything.] This works fine, particularly with the option to skip, but it’s still basically a well-implemented cover for a non-interactive system. That’s not a bad thing, but it does place this firmly in the old-school Facebook RPG camp.

The automatic actions are right in line with this – as long as you log in once a day, you keep running combats once an hour as long as you have energy equipped. It takes very little maintenance to keep progressing, albeit slowly. And the team is very much on the ball with creating regular seasonal and special events to generate interesting – these are the people that have run the highly-successful MouseHunt, and they know what they’re doing.

So while I’m somewhat ambivalent about the game – I love the idea, love the artwork, and enjoy the story, but don’t care to spend my time playing it – it’s structured very well to be a “check in occasionally”-type game. It’s good fun for a very small time investment, and if you like role-playing games but get frustrated feeling like you need to log in every five minutes to keep up, or need a million friends to progress, LevynLight is an excellent low-investment solo-play antidote.