Avatar Review: 1st Act Mesh Werewolf

By Xymbers Slade

In thinking along the lines of "Go Mesh or Go Home", I decided to go through my old landmarks and see if any other of my favorite avatar makers had also gone mesh. Cue 1st Act, makers of werewolves. I've spent quite a lot of $L on their werewolves (their originals --- the "big buff wolf" in my pictures --- cost 1950 $L per color of wolf and I have over a dozen) and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they too had "gone mesh" with a new variety of werewolf.

The starting werewolf comes in three flavors (each for 1250 $L) --- Timber, Shadow and Arctic. Off to one side, there's also a vendor for re-skinning (at 650 $L a skin) where you buy a little hud that you click to change the basic color of the body. Simple and easy. There's a shop next to the vendor that has basic mesh clothes to fit the body (I settled on a dress for 450). The hud for controlling the wolf allows you to control the expression of the wolf (there's about a dozen programmed expressions, and five different hand positions) as well as controls for the ears, eyes and mouth.

Missing from the hud is a howl or snarl sound effect gesture like from their originals as well as an option for coloring eyes (those are now human-esque and need to be bought separately (at 150 $L per variety, coming in black background with "rich color", natural, evil eyes or cybernetical), but I think that's just a minor nitpick as the mesh is really well done. My only real nitpick is that the mesh isn't easily editable; in an effort to make my female wolf a bit bustier, nothing changes from the "edit my shape" menu when I go to edit (well, the shape changes but is hidden by an alpha layer; the mesh doesn't change with the avatar shape as the two are different things).

So that's that. A short and sweet write up on the new 1st Act mesh werewolves which I am going to rate at 4 dragon hoards out of 5 --- I think the skins and the clothing could be a bit cheaper, and I would have liked to see a few more gestures like snarling, scratching, tail-flicking, etc. It's a good choice if you want to upgrade your avatar to a mesh skin (that and it's hard to find clothes  for the female bigger buff original versions that -aren't- harem wear, so I was looking for something new). These new mesh wolves can be found at the 1st Act Main Store.

Xymbers Slade