Sol Survivor is a tower defense game.

For those not familiar with tower defense (since you’re reading this, I’m not sure how that’s actually possible), the mighty Wikipedia proclaims: The goal of tower defense games is to try to stop enemies from crossing a map by building towers which shoot at them as they pass. Enemies and towers usually have varied abilities, costs, and ability costs. When an enemy is defeated, the player earns money or points, which are used to buy or upgrade towers, or upgrade the number of money or points that are earned, or even upgrade the rate at which they upgrade.   …  this cycle often causes the player to enter a state of rapturous addiction, ignoring bathing, spouses, food and sleep.

Okay, that last addition was mine, I admit it.

It possibly flew under your radar, and if so, that is a shame – one that needs to be rectified. To be clear, it’s not just any tower defense game. It is one that offers variety, challenge, and achievements galore. It isn’t necessarily a complete break from the genre, but the sheer number of ways you can succeed at this game begs you to play it, over and over and over again.

It is also perhaps the most polished tower defense game I’ve ever played – the graphics, sound, effects, and UI are all top-notch. The obvious comparison here would be to Defense Grid which is in all respects, its equal.

So let me tell you about Sol Survivor.

Before I wax oh-so-poetically, have a gander at this video, showing the game in all its addictive glory.

Sol Survivor, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

1. Steam tells me I’ve played Sol Survivor for 172 hours

I hope my wife doesn’t read this. I think she knows already, to be honest. And Steam doesn’t count the hours I’ve played on the XBLIG version, which I also bought. It rocks as much as the PC version, so whatever your platform, you really should buy this game. The reason I’ve played this game for more than any other on Steam is simply due to how incredibly addictive it is. I think we’ve all experienced this, either with something like Angry Birds or other Tower Defense games. For me, though, Sol Survivor simply adds to that base level of addiction with varied maps, co-op play, and truly different and varied characters to play with.

2. In Sol Survivor, I can call down (frickin’) lasers and roast my enemies

And if I lasers just don’t do it for me, I can firebomb the little f*ckers. Or perhaps I feel more like noxious gas. No problem. If things are really going sideways, the last resort is always the nuke. That’s covered here as well.

See, Sol Survivor features different commanders, each of which can place a variety of towers. Pretty standard stuff, except here, each commander has a different focus, with the towers they have access to. Some are area of effect gods. Some do damage over time. Some prefer to deal massive amounts of injury to a couple of creeps at once. And that variety is fantastic – repeating a mission with a different commander makes it an all-new puzzle that you have to solve.

So, calling down the lasers. Or firebombs… that is the other capability of your commanders. Each of the 10 commanders has access to a variety of the 19 different Orbital Support options. And it’s not just  for show either – you get massive bonuses for using upgrades throughout the mission.

3. The massive variety of gameplay styles and maps

There’s 4 different Multiplayer gameplay types alone, including Co-op. 20 different maps, with 3 different difficulty levels for each. And if that bores you, see how long you can last in Survival mode. Trust me, it’s hard.

The different maps are spread across 4 different planets, each with a different style of terrain, from ice to desert to lava.

4. I love me some achievements and the Steam cloud

This is probably why I bought both the Steam version and the Xbox 360 version. For each game, there’s a bunch of achievements for doing particular things, such as defeating a particular map using only one tower type. This in itself is addicting, as if the game wasn’t already bad enough. To add ice cream to this delicious pie, all your progress is saved to the Steam so don’t worry about backing up your saves so much.

Nothing gives me a fix quite as much as seeing that little achievement notification pop up.

5. Fabulous camera, UI and graphics

If you’re an FPS player, Sol Survivor probably isn’t going to make you a strategy gamer by wowing you with the graphics. But for a Tower Defense game, this is la creme de la creme. It looks awesome and runs great on almost all hardware.

The UI can be shrunk or enlarged to your preference. The cameras controls – on both PC and Xbox 360 – are smooth, simple, and functional, letting you get your nose right in the action or zoom way out to oversee the battlefield from on high. This is fabulous, especially when you’ve dropped a nuke and you want to watch the destruction. It simply draws you into the game that much more.

6. Subtle and beautifully layered soundtrack

I would call it eerie and ethereal. It suits the game to a T. You notice that it’s there, but it never grows wearisome or annoying. It’s just the right mixture of sci-fi and ambient to complement the gameplay. Kudos to the composer.

7. It’s got a built in encyclopedia!

This might not be your thing. I find it awesome. Basically, everything you uncover as you play – the creeps (enemies), new towers, new orbital support options, new Commanders, new gameplay modes – they’re all listed in the in-game encyclopedia with more information, listing their strengths, weaknesses and abilities. This makes my reference nerd very happy.

If I had to give Sol Survivor a score, I’d give it a 9 out of 10. The only complaint I could really levy against it is that I want more maps, more gameplay modes, more achievements. So I don’t really think that that counts as a knock against it, but since no game is perfect, a 9 it is.

Thank you, Cadenza Interactive, for helping me cheerfully give up 7 full days of my life to this game. It’s been wonderful.

And to those who might be wondering – I paid for Sol Survivor, twice. Yes, I’m gushing, but at least it’s sincere.

Buy Sol Survivor below if I’ve tweaked your interest.

Smash! Grab. Identify. Ooooo pretty colors! Smash! Click click click click. Health potion. Click click click click. 4am.

The Chronicles of Spellborn

State: Final
Website: http://spellborn.acclaim.com/
Developer/Publisher: Acclaim
The Pitch: The Chronicles of Spellborn is an amazing MMORPG where players take the role of heroes in a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting and a vast adventure unfolds in an authentic living world.

I don’t know what post-apocaplyptic fantasy is. Perhaps a nuclear fireball? Maybe the dwarves had WMDs. I dunno. Nonetheless, it still looks like pretty much every fantasy MMO I’ve seen except almost everyone has WAY longer legs.

Please note: As of April 23rd, 2009, there is now a “regular” $15/month (+ discount for multiple months) subscription option available. Also, all new subscribers get two weeks free with no limitations. This makes the game much more attractive IMO, as the ‘coins’ system is far too convoluted for its own good.

The Caveat

The Chronicles of Spellborn is free to download and play, but you can’t level past level 7 unless you pay. I played right up until the ‘ding’ at 7.9. You can continue to play as long as you want, but unless you pay, your character won’t level any further. So how much is it?

Go to their website to learn how the ‘coins’ system works – it gives you the option to pay for the game without a credit card. If you do have a credit card, the cost is your standard fare – $15/month, $14/month if you buy a 3-month subscription.

Performance

Spellborn ran great on my machine; everything was maxed and it was smooth as silk.

Unique to The Chronicles of Spellborn

Combat System. This is really Spellborn’s ace in the hole. Without their unique combat system, it’s more or less like all other MMOs. So for those that don’t know about it, here’s how it works.

Basically, instead of getting your standard skill bars like most other MMOs, you get a skill cylinder. Each side of the cylinder has a skill bar on it, that can hold a various number of skills. The number of skills that you can have is dictated by your level; as you go higher in level, the more skills you can hold per side. When you use a skill, the cylinder rotates, showing a new selection of skills. Managing this rotating skill ‘deck’ is one of the strategic aspects of the game – you try to make it so that your skills combo with the previous skill you used. The tricky bit about this is the cooldowns. Since all skills have different cooldowns, it’s possible to set up your skill deck so that you end up with a skill bar where all your skills are cooling down, thus rendering you useless in battle.

And this is the critical bit: all battle is in real-time. That’s the fighting, the dodging, the spellcasting. On top of that, your opponent’s AI is one step up compared to most MMOs. They’ll try to flank you and even run away if their morale starts to get low. If you think you can stand in one spot, hitting your hotkeys, get prepared to die. A lot.

The massive change that this introduces to the MMO standard playing field puts it into a completely different category than other MMOs and thus, it’s hard to really compare it directly, especially since combat is the cornerstone of all MMOs. The combat is Spellborn is fluid and tense. Not something you see very much in these games – and for this reason alone, it’s definitely worth trying.

Armor and weapons look cool.Yeah, I know they look cool in other games too. But here, they have no stats. Zilch. Nada. What this does is effectively eliminates gear lust. None of the gear you have or can get in the game affects your damage dealt in combat. So it’s all about looking good. The only thing they’ve added to your gear to make it more useful than just for appearances is sigil slots. These are slots, kind of like rune slots in D2 or Runes of Magic. So you can get sigils that will give you a buff to put into your armor or weapons. I really like this system, but seeing as how I’m a bit of a loot-happy MMOer, I kinda missed getting a sword with slightly better +crit or whatever.

The Good

Audio. The soundtrack is phenomenal. That’s not surprising, considering it’s done by world-renowned game soundtrack auteur, Jesper Kyd. Even if you don’t try the game, I urge you strongly to head over to Kyd’s site to listen to the music he created for this game. It’s haunting, beautiful, and at times, hopeful. Simply fantastic.

Environment design. Although it’s similar in visual style to WoW, Spellborn has some downright amazing vistas in it. I very much liked the art style and more importantly, the architecture and world design. It’s downright fantastic – very often I’d find myself just looking up at the shards in the sky and the various structures in the world. Really cool. I’d basically say the game looks like WoW if Tim Burton had a hand in the visual design.

Graphics. I’m adding this section after the review’s gone live, mostly because I went back into the game (after getting 2 weeks for free!) and I’m simply impressed at how gorgeous this game is. The textures are crisp and well-done, without obvious tiling. It’s fantastic-looking and unlike many MMOs, it has an incredibly strong sense of ambience. You feel a sense of awe when you’re meant to; you feel cozy (like in the pubs) when you’re meant to. The design and the graphics go hand-in-hand, and both are stellar.

Equal playing field. If you’re tired of raiding for loot or grinding to level 80 just to get the best gear, this might be the game for you. Because the loot is more or less meaningless, stats-wise, it becomes all about the gameplay. And the gameplay is a lot of fun.

New ideas. Maybe you’re not so keen on this, but I like that Spellborn is shaking up the MMO field, by daring to do something different. Even after 7.9 levels, I’m not entirely sure how keen I am on what they’ve done – with respect to combat – but at least it’s not like any of the other 25 MMOs I played, that’s for sure. So I’ll give them kudos for that. I do like the real-time aspects of it, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily better than the systems in other games. You may disagree.

Fame and PeP. This is a great idea – I’m surprised no one’s thought of it before. Basically, you get two kinds of points in Spellborn when you kill monsters. Fame and PeP (Personal experience Points). First off, you gain Fame when questing and killing all monsters – this is your standard XP like in other MMOs. You only gain PeP when you kill mobs. So what’s the difference? Well, your Fame goes towards levelling up, which then gives you different skills. PeP, on the other hand, increases your PeP level. And it’s not easy to do as you need lots of it to level. When you do get enough, an increase in your PeP level gives you bonuses. All characters, on top of having Health, have 3 attributes – Physique, Morale, and Concentration. When you’re at level 1 PeP, these are all increased, effectively giving you bonuses to movement, damage dealt, and the speed that your skill deck rotates and your attack speed (respectively). Further levels of PeP continues to increase these. That’s all well and good, but so what??? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Here’s the cool part – if you die, you lose one PeP level. No fame, no XP to make up, no damage to your armor. You lose your bonuses. And trust me, this hurts. So your incentive to stay alive – especially with highly leveled PeP – is huge.

The Bad

No quest tracker? Not only is there no quest tracker, there’s NO assistance whatsoever, outside of the quest descriptions. So you’ll likely find yourself bringing your quest log up a lot as you’re trying to find a person/mob for a quest.

UI inflexibility. This really needs some work. Overall, it’s decent, and reasonably polished-looking. However, a big issue for me is that there’s no way to resize fonts – and they don’t scale up as your resolution gets higher. I was playing at 1920 x 1200 and I have reasonably poor eyesight – so I had to lean close to the monitor every time I had to read dialog/quest text. Pretty annoying. This will likely be patched, mind you. In addition, this issue makes the minimap pretty much useless as it shrinks down to the size of a quarter.

Summary

The Chronicles of Spellborn is a unique and interesting MMO. It boasts real-time combat and non-gear oriented gameplay. It’s a lot of fun, once you get the hang of the combat system. It is reasonably polished and is currently in open beta now final. It’s free, so what have you got to lose? Go download it!

Download value: [rating:8.5] (8.5)

State: Final
Website: http://everquest2.station.sony.com/
Developer/Publisher: Sony Online Entertainment
The Pitch: EverQuest^® II is the next generation of massively multiplayer gaming, a huge online world where friends have come together for adventure and community. Featuring breathtaking graphics and a vast, beautiful and dangerous game world to explore, EverQuest II sets the standard for graphical realism as players are immersed in the game’s exciting locales and mysterious lands.

EverQuest II (EQ2) was a game I nearly didn’t try. Not because the pitch didn’t draw me in; the pitch is pretty bland but I can ignore that. For whatever reason, I had low expectations of it and didn’t figure it would come close to today’s ‘AAA’ MMOs like Warcraft or Warhammer.. or anything with ‘War’ in the title, I suppose. But I figured if I was going to try 25 MMOs, I should try 26. After all EverQuest was the so-called grandaddy of current MMOs, so what did I have to lose other than my social life? I think a wee bit of me was terrified of the ‘EverCrack’ label that was applied to the original game after players found themselves addicted. But I tried it anyway.

Unique to EverQuest II

Races. The most obvious thing when creating your character is that you’ve got 19 Races to choose from right off. 19!! Runes of Magic has… um, 1. That is 19x the amount of races! Hot diggety! Even cooler than that, the races are broken up into 3 main categories; Good, Evil and Neutral. This classification will determine the type of Class you can choose. For instance, Ratongas (rat people) are evil, so they can only choose evil-based Classes. In addition, it affects your starting zone/city. What this offers the game is a competely different starting set of quests and areas to explore if you have alt-itis, like me. Lots of fun to be had with this. Especially when you can choose from Frogs, Lizard-people, Cat-people, Ogres, Trolls, Dwarves, Faeries… It’s fantastically diverse.

Classes. As for Classes, there are 24 in the game. Twenty-freaking-FOUR! This sounds like an MMOers wet dream. And it is. But to simplify things, the classes all fall within the 4 aforementioned archetypes: Scout, Mage, Priest and Fighter. They are further subdivided within each archetype into 3 sub-types. And then within those, they are split into good and evil mirrors. So of the 24 available, 8 are Good, 8 are Evil, and 8 are Neutral. No matter which alignment your character is, you have 16 Classes available to you at the beginning of the game. Still very impressive; it’s impossible to not find a class where you’ll enjoy the play style if you try a few.

Voice Acting. I had no idea this had been implemented, so I was in awe after starting my first character – a High Elf Wizard. Pretty much ALL text in the game is voice-acted. It’s absolutely incredible. Not only that, the vast majority of it is well done. I loved the Goblins’ Quests (Grexx etc) in the Queen’s colony. Superbly animated and well voice-acted. It really drew me into the game. If this can be done, why isn’t it, by other MMOs? This is one feature that make the game feel more real and alive than any other MMO out there, to me. Yeah, the characters still all stand around in one spot for hours on end… but the fact that they talk to you makes it feel more like I’m in Oblivion or something. And that’s a good thing.

Performance

EQ2 is the only MMO I tried where I couldn’t run it at max settings. Well, I could, but I didn’t get a framerate I was happy with. It would dip into the 20s far more often than I liked at Extreme High Quality. I set it at Very High Quality, and it seemed to run better. I couldn’t really notice much of a difference between the two anyway except for a bit of fancier lighting and shadow effects. It runs very well on that setting.

The Good

Heroic Opportunities. A very interesting addition to your standard 1-4-6-3-4-2 (insert your sequence here) hotkey presses for combat. What Heroic Opportunities are skills that you use during combat. After they are triggered, you are prompted (by your icons glowing) to perform certain skills in sequence. Completing the Starter Chain will then trigger a Finishing Chain. If these are completed, various effects will occur, from beneficial buffs and heals, to direct damage or damage over time. The outcome will vary, depending on your Class and which Heroic Opportunity you choose to complete. This is a great addition to combat, as if you become proficient at them, they can greatly add to your effectiveness in battle. Plus, they’re loads of fun to pull off.

Alternate appearances. When Sony introduced EQ2 to Eastern audiences (Japan, China, Korea), they created new models for all of the Races in game. Since that time, they’ve incorporated the models into all player’s games with a patch. So if for some reason, you just don’t like how you look, you can change your appearance to the alternate model, from the Login screen. Then, in game, you can choose to view the alternate models from the Options menu. You can do this for all races, or just one, as you wish. This is a cool idea as I wasn’t overly thrilled with the look of the Elves when I first started the game. I much prefer the alternate models for them.

Appearance slots. Another great idea. Sometimes, you get a hat with some great stats. So you put it on and think ‘Awesome!’. Then you look at yourself. And you look like an idiot. (LotRO, I’m talking about YOU here). So what are your options? Well, you can turn off the visibility of that item, in most games – usually if it is a hat or cape, you can. In EQ2, you can put on an entirely different set, just for looks. I love this. So I get some awesome looking gear, but it has crap stats… no problem! Put it into your Appearance slots and enjoy. It doesn’t affect your stats at all, it only makes you look cooler Since you’re going to spend every second playing this game and looking at your character… well, you’d better like what you see.

Tweaks to usability and UI. I’m lumping these into one. I could go on and on about how EQ2 does things smarter than in most MMOs. But instead of writing an enormous paragraph on it, I’m going to try to summarize. Keep in mind, I’ve only played for about 6 hours total, so I might even be missing other stuff. In no particular order:

• • Your characters turn their head to look at stuff. Dumb, hey? Nope. This makes sure you don’t miss something while you’re running through the world. Like a quest-giver, or just something of interest. It also draws you into the game, as your character acts like something smarter than a mannequin.
  • Import UI. Best. Idea. Ever. Why don’t all games do this? Seriously. Once again LotRO, I love ya, but take a tip here. I don’t know about you, but when I start a new character, I usually spend about my first 5 minutes customizing things onscreen to get ‘em just the way I like ‘em. Not with EQ2. A handy little box pops up, asking you which character you’d like to import the UI from. Well damn. That saves me a ton of time. Love it.
  • Windows on a grid. You may not be a Type A person. (some say OCD) I am. I like my stuff to line UP, dammit! EQ2 is the first MMO that makes me happy to play around with my toolbar arranging. Or my popup windows. It’s all good – I can make them line up on a 20px grid and it soothes my inner OCD freak. Ahhhh… it feels good.
  • Launch straight to character. Man, here’s another one I don’t know why more MMOs don’t adopt. From the launcher, I can just choose the character I want to play and it bypasses the Login screen altogether. Way to feed my addiction faster, Sony!
  • Best minimap ever. First off, it’s square. I love square minimaps – they just make much more sense to me. Secondly, the minimap has cursor-sensitive zooming. Right off, you don’t have to click the stupid +/- buttons to zoom in or out. Who’s great idea was that, anyway?? Wow, someone way back failed in UI school. Nope, you just hover your cursor where you’d like to zoom in, and scroll the mousewheel – the map zooms in on the location of your cursor. Exactly like how it works in Black & White 2 or other strategy games. I love it.
  • General UI and notification smarts. Like being able to un/lock any UI element individually. The ability to resize pretty much any UI window. Remembering UI window positions on a per-character basis. Automatically fading in or out when you mouseover elements; AND the opacity is defined by you. ‘Mini-dings’ tell you audibly every time you hit a multiplier of 10% towards your current levelup. On top of that, it indicates you’ve been returned to full health and mana, without you having to stare at your XP bar.

You feel like a Hero. Capital ‘H’. In EQ2, the combat is visceral and interesting. I don’t mean later on at level 20 or maybe level 45 or when you get 1337 gear. I mean in the starting zone. I got a wicked lightning spell as a newb Mage that really kicked ass. Okay, it’s not really that powerful, but hot DAMN does it look cool. Cause seriously, if you want me to keep playing your game, make me feel cool right off and you’ve got my dollar. Immediately after trying out the mage in EQ2, I went out and bought the Shadow Odyssey bundle pack. Immediately. Because not only did I feel wicked cool throwing around lightning and giant glowing hammers and stuff, but I was fighting enormous wolves, larger than myself. I truly felt like a hero, even though deep inside, I knew it was just the starting zone. But I didn’t care.

Side note here. WoW, here’s why I will likely never sub with you, even though I dally with you occasionally. All games have starter zones. But frankly, yours are LAME. I’m bored out of my skull. Why? The quests make me feel like a newb. They monsters aren’t exciting and I know I won’t even feel like I’m competent for at least 15 or 20 levels. That’s a long slog for me. I want to jump in, have fun, jump out. And you make me feel like a slowly evolving newb. Too slowly. /end rant

Interesting quests, excellent tracker. Yes, there’s your typical fetch quests. And there’s the ‘discover the evil behind X’ quests. Aaaand there’s the ‘kill me X number of Y quests’. But, there’s also the interesting quests – and I’m talking about the starter area here – like the one where you have to lure the ghosts to the priest. And the one where you have to defend the gnome that’s hiding in the tree from the giant wolves. I thought for the most part, though similar to what you’ll find in other games, there was a bit more imagination put into these quests. It didn’t hurt at all that they were voiced as well, making me actually pay attention to what I was supposed to do, not just hitting ‘next’, ‘next’, ‘accept’, like I do in some games. And then once you’ve accepted the quest, the tracker is fantastic. You only track one quest at a time, but it’s always clearly marked, both on your main map and your minimap, making it a snap to find where you’re supposed to go. Good job on this. BTW, you can change which quest you’re tracking at any time by simply choosing it in your Quests window.

Fast levelling, easy gameplay. Yep, I had those preconceptions too. EQ2 is for t3h h4rdc0r3. It’ll take you ages to level. Nuh uh. I was very wrong. I’ve played a few hours on my mage, levelling her leisurely, doing lots of quests, sometimes just running around exploring and gathering stuff. I’m level 11. This is not the EQ2 you may have played at the end of 2004 (so I heard).

Graphics and Animations. I figured it would go without saying when I said I couldn’t run it at the highest settings, but I’ll mention it here just in case. The graphics are phenomenal. If they aren’t the best of any MMO I’ve played, they are at least the equivalent. No other MMO has water like this that I’ve played. LotRO’s is close, but since you can go underwater, this wins. I could go on and on, gushing about how amazing they are, but I won’t bother – just play the game with a good video card and you’ll see. I probably shouldn’t lump the animations in with the graphics, but they are equally exceptional. From the goblin’s insane dancing to my mage swiftly flipping her staff behind her back, to the trotting little deer or the insidiously slithering snakes. They are all exceptional.

Sound and music. Let’s just put it this way. I sometimes find myself humming the song on the way to work.

The Bad

Well now, what can I tell you that’s bad? Hmm. Well… Um. Hmph. Okay.

The intros are kinda choppy. I like the camera gliding in and settling on your character while the disembodied voice tells me the history up until now.. but if it didn’t shift and jerk all the way through, it’d keep me from just hitting escape. What else?? Hm. I can’t complain about the community – I was invited to someone’s guild within about 4 minutes of playtime on one character and without request, teamed up with others to chop through some baddies on another. Um.. High system specs maybe? Addiction? That would be bad. I dunno. I’m stumped. Oh wait, I’ve got one!

9-ish GB trial download. I knew I could come up with one! Yeah, it’s big. And it takes a long time. But man, oh man, it’s worth it.

Summary

A completely unexpected treat for me. I’m still going to be playing LotRO as my friends love it.. and I like it a lot. But EQ2 is the game I’ll be playing in my spare time. Now to find a group. I play on Oasis if anyone is interested, but I’ll happily start a new alt on a new server. Just email me.

Download value: [rating: 10] (10)

You must think I’m nuts. I downloaded 67 GIGABYTES worth of MMOGs to test. 26 of the suckers, 10 of which I’m focussing on here. As for the other 16? Well, they’re listed at the bottom of the article. If and when I get around to discussing them, they’ll be linked here as well. Let’s just say they weren’t worth my time to review, for one reason or another. Not necessarily because they were bad (although some were beyond bad)… just that I had to choose a sample that would be the games that I’d be most interested in trying out. Besides, it’s not as if one MMO isn’t enough already for most people that actually want a social life. Like you know, a social life that doesn’t involve hitting / or ENTER first.  And I had to pick and choose. So these are the ones I chose:

Dungeon Runners (overview forthcoming)

Guild Wars (overview forthcoming)

Pirates of the Caribbean Online

Everquest II

World of Warcraft (overview forthcoming)

City of Heroes/Villains

Lord of the Rings Online

Runes of Magic

Ryzom

The Chronicles of Spellborn

Happily, I can say that I managed thus far (knock on wood) to avoid severe addiction to any of them. Well, mostly.

The Scope

Before I even get started, I should mention something: I’m a PvEer. I don’t play PvP and it’s not my focus, nor interest. So I didn’t test out any PvP while playing these games. If that’s your thing, these articles may still be of interest to you, but they are talking only in terms of the PvE component of these games. Just thought I’d mention that up front.

I’m not going to be writing hard-core, in-depth reviews of each of these games. If you want reviews of them, the vast majority of these games (perhaps excepting a lot of the free to play ones) have been reviewed ad nauseum elsewhere on the web. What I’m going to do is tell you which ones I think are worth the time downloading and testing. I’ll tell you what I liked, what annoyed me, and what I thought stood out – both in a good and bad way. If you are a newbie, this might be a good place to start before you get your download on.

Just FYI, I don’t really get into that whole ‘role-playing’ business very much. I play these games to get sweet loot. I play to kill monsters.. of some sort or another. I suppose leveling and assign skills or stats has become synonymous with role-playing, which I don’t entirely buy, or take part in. But whatever, that’s for another article.

NEWB!

First and foremost, the difference between a ‘newbie/newb’ and a ‘noob/n00b’. The Urban Dictionary breaks it down like this: Newbs are those who are new to some task* and are very beginner at it, possibly a little overconfident about it, but they are willing to learn and fix their errors to move out of that stage. n00bs, on the other hand, know little and have no will to learn any more.

Read more here: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=noob.

The Breakdown

The articles are broken up into 3 main categories, as I see them:  Free to play games with cash shops (Part 1), Free to play games with caveats (Part 2), and Pay to play games (Part 3).

For each game, I’ve tried to give it an honest shot. Really. Even if it sucked and I swore at myself for doing this while playing, I pushed on. I put myself through the torture so you wouldn’t have to. For the greater good, right? That’s not to say that I played each of these games up to level 30 or anything. Heck, I doubt I broke level 10 in more than a handful. But that wasn’t really the point of these articles; if you want guides, go elsewhere. These articles are intended to give you first impressions of the games and to summarize whether or not it’s worth your while to wait several days (for anything over 3gb) to download and play.

The System

I’ll be talking a bit about how the games perform, so I should give you some context about what I’m running them all on. It’s not a dream rig, but it isn’t bad. I put it together about 6 months ago for a modest $1700 or so. You should be able to build a similar machine now for much less. Nothing’s overclocked, it’s all running at defaults.

Here’s the specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad 2.83Ghz
4 GB RAM
BFG GTX 260 896MB
Built-in Realtek sound
640 GB HDD
Windows XP SP3
26″ LCD running at 1920×1200

I attempted to run every game at full screen and at my default resolution. If possible, I cranked the graphics to the max. I’ll let you know how each game performed at those settings.

The Games

These overviews focus on three main types of MMORPGs: Free to Play games with Cash Shops, Free to Play games with Caveats, and Pay to Play games.

For the uninitiated, the first type listed are games that are (and this is loudly screamed at you on pretty much EVERY game’s site) – Free to Sign Up (no credit card necessary), Free to Download, and Free to Play. So what’s a Cash Shop? That’s how these games make their money. They offer bits & bobs for you to buy via RMT or MT – short for Real Money Transactions or Micro-Transactions – which allow you to enhance your character or overall playing experience. Whether or not you buy anything is completely up to you. So theoretically, you could play each and every one of the following games without every spending a dime.

The second type are Free to Play, but have caveats that adjust your gameplay experience. So what are the caveats? Well, that’s different for each game. I’ll outline what the limitations are on a game-by-game basis.

The final type are Pay to Play games. Clearly, if you want to play them beyond the trial, you have to pay monthly to do so. In some cases, you’ll also have to pay for the game before you can play them, on top of the monthly fee.

I’ve downloaded and tested the following games:

Free to Play games with Cash Shops
Runes of Magic

Free to Play games with Caveats

The Chronicles of Spellborn
Dungeon Runners
Guild Wars
Pirates of the Caribbean Online
Ryzom (formerly the Saga of Ryzom and Ryzom Ring)

Pay to Play games

City of Heroes/Villains

Everquest II

Lord of the Rings Online

World of Warcraft

All right, enough precursor, click on the links below to read what I thought about these games.

Other games I tried in the name of science:

2 Moons

9 Dragons

Air Rivals

Archlord

Atlantica Online

Ether Saga Online

Florensia

Rohan Online

Perfect World International

Pirates of the Burning Sea

Shaiya

Star Wars Galaxies

Talisman Online (shudder)

Vanguard

Warhammer Online

World of Kung Fu

State: Final
Website: http://www.lotro.com
Developer/Publisher: Turbine
The Pitch: You need a pitch? It’s the Lord of the freaking Rings! You know.. ‘my preciousss’ and ‘one ring to rule them all’ and ‘second breakfastses’. If you seriously expected a pitch, then you should just move on to another game.

Performance

The Lord of the Rings ran much better than I expected. Why? Because this game is freaking gorgeous. I fully expected it to run like a bag of crap. But it didn’t. I maxed out the settings, turned on AA and it runs smooth like silk. No hiccups or stalls. Just hawt Middle-Earthy vistas. Speaking of Vista.. I’m running this in XP. Although it apparently looks in better in DirectX 10, (of course only available in Vista), I’d rather shave my head than install that POS on my computer. Here’s hoping Windows 7 is better. (listens closely to hear the distant sound of MS shareholders cheering)

Unique to The Lord of the Rings Online

Middle Earth. What can I say about this that hasn’t been said already? They’ve reproduced it perfectly. Well, maybe not as perfectly as an anal-retentive Lord of the Rings nerd might want, but that’s not me. I liked the books and the movies.. and as far as I can tell, this is exactly what I figured it would feel like to kill wolves and boars in Middle Earth. And the occasional goblin as well.

The Good

Polish, polish, polish. That’s “pahhlish”, not “poeelish”. From the starter area to the quests to the graphics and animations, LotRO simply shines. It’s intuitive and easy to use, even for those who’ve played few online games. The UI is enhanced with attractive flourishes, further infusing the game with a Lord of the Rings feel.

Lore. Many people who compare this game to World of Warcraft will discuss how well written LotRO is, from the quests to the dialog. And they’re right; it is exceptionally well-written. From the comments that NPCs will often blurt out while standing next to them, to the quest text, to the description of a new Deed or Trait you’ve earned; it all works to draw you into the world.

Exploring the world. Playing LotRO compared to some of the other MMOs I discuss, the difference I feel is immediate. This isn’t a game that urges you to “Level up! Find loot! Be uber!”. Yes, you can do all three of those things here. But more than anything when I’m playing, I just like to explore. Not necessarily to complete a quest, but those things do often go hand-in-hand.. but just because you turn around and see a cool ruin in the distance on the top of a mountain next to a waterfall.. and you say ‘Hey. I want to go check out those ruins. Cool.” Oftentimes, Chris and I will remark on what we feel like doing while in game. And frequently, we’ll just say ‘let’s head off towards that quest marker and see what we find’. The hallmark of a good game is where you find yourself immersed in the world, and not in the game.

Titles/Deeds/Traits. Yes, it’s been done before. Compare them to XBox Live Achievements or Warhammer’s Tome of Knowledge or Warcraft’s Talents. Yes, they aren’t always implemented well – for instance, to complete one Deed (and the subsequent Trait), I’m required to kill I think 1300 wolves. Seriously? Not awesome. But those aren’t the ones that I like so much. The ones I find intriguing are the ones that are offered on completion of a quest tree in a particular city or town or ones that I earn after using a skill a certain number of times. These are much more natural and reward me for doing things I’m likely already to be doing. I really enjoy the ones that award me for exploration. It’s the type of addition to the game that makes me think… ‘oh I’ll just head over that ridge and see if there’s another part of the elf ruins over there..’. It’s dangerous (to my sleep patterns, that is), but exciting.

Cutscenes in instances. This is done by some other games as well (CoH/V), and it works equally well here. It helps to get you involved in the storyline as well as the instance that you’re in.

Music. Music permeates LotRO. Not only are there bards throughout the world, the minstrel is a playable class. Beyond that, everyone who plays has the capability of learning and playing an instrument. Even more interestingly, you can form a ‘band’ with your fellowship to make music together. Very cool idea. See here on YouTube for a various selection of Middle-Earth hits.

Combat. Even though I bemoan the lack of flashiness in it, the combat is exceptionally well done. It’s very visceral, with excellent animations and lots of audio cues; clangs of sword on shields and grunts of the dwarves and bellowing minstrels galore. This helps to raise it to a level beyond most MMOs. It makes you feel a part of the combat, beyond just mashing at the hotkeys.

The Bad

Wolves and boars and flies, oh my! Okay, so the enemies at lower levels could use something of an overhaul. Yeah, I know I’ve just started the game and it’s all new to me and everything, so maybe a cave troll is right out. But seriously, how many wolves and board do I need to kill? It would be fine if I didn’t aggro them while running by, I could ignore them. Maybe farm them if I need a bit of cash. But no, I have to run all over the place just to try to avoid inciting aggro on every freaking wolf, boar, and fly in the freaking game. ARGGH. Apparently they figure they can take a level 13 Hunter, no prob, even if they’re a level 5 fly. Nothing is less heroic than fighting your 800th wolf whilst attempting to thwart Sauron’s plans.

Face target/too far away. Get used to reading those messages. Why? Because there’s no built-in way to face your target or run to attack. Hm. Not a game-breaker, by any means. I’d really love a way to turn the visual messages off, though. The ‘bing’ sound is okay and that’d be enough for me.

Iconography. Maybe it’s just me. I dunno. But for whatever reason, I find the iconography in LotRO is just harder to figure out than in other games. In most MMOs, I can look at a skill icon and say ‘okay, that’s likely a lightning attack’… or whatever. In LotRO, even after playing for a while, I still have to mouseover some of the skills I’ve had since level 4 to remember what one does. They just aren’t visually very distinguishable from the rest. In addition to that, many of the icons are red, and the ‘unusable’ indicator for your skills is a red icon, overlaid in the top right corner. I prefer it when skills are dark, indicating they can’t be used, but this is how LotRO does it. So you’ll often have to squint to be able to tell if you can use that skill or not – kind of a pain if you’re a distance-oriented damage dealer.

Not very flashy skills. This is one thing that bugs me quite a bit. If I’m going to involve myself in this big, beautiful world and become it’s biggest hero, I want to feel like a hero. I know that early on, I’m just an apprectice hero. Or a hero-in-training, if you will. But so what? If I’m the one to ultimately rise to notoriety (okay, maybe not as much as say, Frodo, but whatever), I want to feel like I’ve got some appropriately mad skillz up my sleeves. I never quite felt that way in LotRO. I feel competent, sure. And possibly a little bit badass now and then. But never flashy and uber-heroic. I think I’m just a little bit partial to big ol’ light effects and particles when playing as a magic user. And but for the Rune Keeper, there’s precious little fancy heroic effects going on here. If your skills deal with sword use and such, expect exactly that – lots of sword swipes and things. Not overmuch in the way of particles and light displays. Of course, they did this to stick to the lore of the world .. which is good. But I still likes me some flashy.

Summary

The Lord of the Rings Online is a simply fantastic, immersive experience. It’s  interesting to explore, it’s entertaining to discover new areas, deeds and traits, and more than anything else, it’s fun to play. I highly recommend it.

Download value: [rating:9] (9)

State: Final
Website: http://www.cityofheroes.com
Developer/Publisher: Cryptic/NCSoft
The Pitch: City of Heroes® brings the world of comic books alive in this massively multiplayer 3D online universe.

Performance

City of Heroes ran pretty much exactly how you’d expect a 4 year old MMO to run on current hardware; very well. I was able to run it with everything maxed out and with Antialiasing on. It was smooth and responsive, with no noticeable framerate dips.

Unique to City of Heroes/Villains

Theme.This is pretty obvious. Currently, it is the only MMO available that puts you in the cape and cowl of a superhero or villain. Not only that, it makes you feel heroic or villainous.

Character customization. Still the leader in the market in offering you the ability to tweak and customize your character in a near-limitless way. Seriously, I think I spent nearly as much time creating characters as I did playing them. It offers a truly stunning array of options, enough to guarantee that you will never see a clone of yourself running around the world – if you spend some time working at it and if you don’t choose from one of the presets.

The Good

Heroic / Villainous! I mentioned how the theme is different from your standard fare. However, this extends beyond simply a re-skin of all the characters and the area. The game does a great job at making you feel like you’re playing a superhero or villain from a comic book. You get to watch cutscenes in some of the instanced areas and many of the NPCs you encounter will have a comic-book style text bubble over their heads, telling you their thoughts… in very comic book fashion, no less. They’ll utter things like “Fresh Meat!” or “For Justice!” It puts you in the mood (if you like that sort of thing) of playing a caped avenger.

Enhancements and Inspirations. Enhancements are permanent upgrades to your powers. Inspirations are temporary buffs that you collect as you adventure. These, for me, are the driving force for exploration and discovery in the game. They’re the ‘loot’, so to speak. Discovering new ones and finding out how they enhance your abilities was great fun.

Excellent map/radar/quest tracking. This was super-easy to use, out of the gate. As soon as you’ve taken a quest, it shows up on your radar. On top of that, it shows up right onscreen in yellow text, displaying your distance to the target. It’s pretty much impossible to not know where you’re supposed to go to meet a contact or to complete a quest.

The Bad

No loot. For me, this is a pretty big deal. Some people might argue that that’s what the Enhancments and Inspirations are. I suppose that’s true.. but I like finding new gear, be it a cloak or sword.. or possibly in this case, if it were a cape or cowl or new glaives. A ring of power, say. Nope, there’s none of that. Perhaps there’s stuff similar to your regular loot in the upper levels, but there’s definitely none that you’ll run across as a newb.

Flying. I know, this should be under ‘The Good’, right? Well, not so fast. I know you can fly in this game, which is pretty cool. And very heroic and all. But you’re going to have to play it for a while before you can. Apparently around level 14 or so – which to be fair, isn’t that high – you learn how. That’s not awful, but I was hoping to be able to fly right off.. So I was disappointed.

Summary

City of Heroes is a polished, unique MMO. If you are tired of bashing rats or killing just one more Dire Bat of Evilness, check this game out. Besides having no elves, you can be a hybrid zombie robot ninja (yes, you can). And who hasn’t dreamed of that?
Download value: [rating: 7.5] (7.5)

State: Final (x3… it is the third publisher and re-release for this game)
Website: http://www.ryzom.com
Developer/Publisher: Spiderweb
The Pitch: Ryzom is a wholly original MMORPG fusing science fiction and fantasy. Ryzom Ring (R²), Ryzom’s first and free expansion, evolves the Saga introducing the first ever MMO scenario editor!

Okay, that is pretty cool. I’m way too lazy to bother with editing scenarios, but it’s still cool that some players might do that. I’d probably have to read forums for a week to figure out how to actually enter a player’s scenario though.

The Caveat

Pay to play outside of the trial zone. Similar to how The Chronicles of Spellborn works, you can download and play the game for free, but only in the trial zone. Which is a reasonably large island, floating in the sky. The ups and downs for this game have been many; it is currently with it’s third publisher, having been shut down and resurrected twice before in the past. The game has been (completely) free for the last little while, as the most recent publisher gets their billing arrangements and such in order. Just a few days ago, the new cost structure was announced on the official forums. Thankfully, it’s nowhere near as complex as TCoS, with the cost being $11 USD, with lowered costs for a longer contract.

Performance

Ryzom ran great. All settings were at their max. However, I should note that I bought this game at launch.. or shortly thereafter. How could I not? I found it in a bargain bin for $2. A bad omen, to be sure. This was back in 2005 or so. Since that time, I oft tried to hop back into the game. The trouble was, I often couldn’t get it to play. It would load up and that stall on the last bar of the loading screen. Apparently, this was a common issue, but for whatever reason was neverly properly addressed. It continued to dog me – and Ryzom – for several years. You can search for posts by user ‘oliverh72′ on those boards to see what I went through to get the game to run properly. Eventually I gave up completely. Nonetheless, being the obstinate person I am, I tried it again when writing these articles. Somehow in the process, be it my hardware or theirs, the game ran without a hiccup. Not once did I have a problem logging in. I can only hope that your experience is as good.

One other thing. You’ll notice in my screenshots that the camera is much farther away from my character than it allows in game. I found the in-game camera to be claustrophic and constricting. Yuck. So, I learned how to adjust it. FYI, this is against the company’s ToE, I assume for PVP reasons. Whatever. The fix is simple:

- close all instances of Ryzom-related programs
- locate ../Ryzom/client.cfg
- open with your favorite text editor
- append the following line to the bottom of the text file (must have ten trailing zeros!): CameraDistMax = 10.0000000000;
- save the text file and load Ryzom, enjoy!

Hope that helps.

Unique to Ryzom

Setting. Science-fantasy isn’t something that’s been done much before in games, let alone MMOs. I suppose you could almost call it ‘steampunk’, but it doesn’t quite go that far. Instead, the ‘science’ part is a little more sci-fi than that.
Ryzom Ring. So you like MMOs but figure you can do better than the devs? Well, now’s your chance. As far as I know (and I didn’t look very hard), it’s the only MMO where you can develop your own custom scenarios. This is a great idea, but I have no idea if it’s used very much. Nonetheless, if you’d like to see what sort of questline you can come up with, now’s your chance.
Seasons. This is incredible to witness in game. Well, to me it is. You’ll log in over the course of a few days and the world will slowly transition from fall to winter, with everything covered in snow. Soon, it will be spring again. The weather is realistically portrayed, with ominously advancing storms accompanied by the rumbling sound of  rain or snowfall. On top of that, apparently, this weather affects the in-game crafting. When the seasons are right, you’ll find an abundance of whatever grows during that season.
Creature’s behavior. Another unique little thing to Ryzom.I scoffed when I first heard about this, but it works flawlessly in-game. Different animals and wildlife have different types of behaviour. Some are herd animals, some forage alone. Some are inquisitive, some aggressive. Often, you’ll be running along and an animal will see you (an eye icon appears by their name) and they’ll run up to you to investigate. If they’re pack animals, this will sometimes spur the entire herd to do the same. The same AI is applied to aggro, so if you’re attacking a herd animal that is aggressive, very often, you’ll soon be fighting the whole herd. Many animals in the lower-level areas are non-aggressive, so this isn’t too much of a concern. This behaviour of the animals really sets Ryzom apart from most other games out there.

Crafting. It’s ALL crafting. I’d put this under ‘The Good’ but it’s just so unique, it’s got to go here. You can learn some skills from trainers, much like in all MMO games. However, many things you will learn can be applied to the Modular Action System. So here’s basically how it works: All your skills are made up of components called Stanzas. As you learn more skills, you can ‘dismantle’ your skills to their stanzas.. and then reassemble them as whatever you wish. So for instance, if you’ve learned something that has a healing component and another damage-oriented skill, you could take those parts and create something that does both things at once. The drawback of course, is that it may not be as strong as something that only does damage, or only does healing, but you get the gist. It’s very flexible, but also subsequently more complex than what you might be accustomed to.

In addition to your skills, the majority of the gameplay is oriented around crafting as well. When you kill a creature, you don’t loot it; you quarter it for it’s parts. So I might get some eyes or possibly a leg bone. With those parts you can build things like weapons or possibly gear. If you like crafting in games, try Ryzom.

The Good

Skill-based advancement. I like this style of advancement the best; it works the same as Everquest II or Runes of Magic; the more you use something, be it spells or weapons, the faster you advance in that item’s level. The advantage to this is that if you simply want to become a very adept magician in Ryzom, you simply need to focus on using magic all the time.

Immersive world. Because of the things I mentioned above – the crafting, the weather and seasons, the animal’s behaviour – Ryzom is incredibly immersive. It constantly makes you believe that the world is alive, from the abundance of sap on the ground in the spring, to the flocks of birds flying overhead, or the enormous roots that cover the sky.

The Bad

Hello! Goodbye…..Hello again? Ryzom has been canned and resurrected more times than any other MMO. Be aware of that fact before you purchase a 1-year subscription option. But then, if you don’t, maybe it won’t survive?!

Population. Like a lot of lesser-known MMOs, Ryzom’s population is well, light. At least in the free training area, there was rarely any other players around when I was playing. I don’t mean less than a few dozen, I mean nobody. This is certainly something to think about.

Complexity. Although it’s easy to play – standard-ish UI, comprehensive customization option for gameplay – Ryzom requires some dedication for Joe Player to be able to figure out how they’re supposed to do things that they want to do. From the crafting to the magic, it’s .. well, different. And different is good, right? Yes and no. If it’s a barrier to playing, then no. I don’t believe it’s a barrier here, but if you do end up trying Ryzom, be prepared to read a bit to understand how it all works together.

Pre-mapped WASD? Although it’s not a huge deal, for whatever reason, Ryzom starts with only the arrowkeys mapped to movement. It’s easy enough to change to your control scheme of choice, but nonetheless, it’s worth noting.   I’ve been informed in the comments that this is an option that you choose on character creation. I had created both my characters ages ago and completely forgot that you could do this. Somehow between then and now, my keymappings go reset to default, so I had to set them over again. So scratch this as a negative. Thanks for the tips, posters.

Summary

Ryzom is a gorgeous and unique MMO.Its slightly higher level of complexity and uniqueness may well be its own downfall. It’s definitely worth your download and the time you might invest learning its intricacies.

Download value: [rating:8] (8)

State: Final
Website: http://www.piratesonline.com
Developer/Publisher: Disney.com Games
The Pitch: Set sail on the vast blue waters of the Caribbean in search of adventure, fortune, and fame in the world of the infamous Jack Sparrow and the evil Jolly Roger.

That’s reasonably accurate. If you liked the movie and you enjoy playing with stuffed animals, this is likely your game… because this game is targeted squarely at kids, even though there may be enough to like here for adults as well.

The Caveat

The free version of the game limits you in a variety of ways. First and foremost, you must play the game in a window and you are subjected to ads. The maximum resolution for your windowed experience is 1024×768. The game window runs at 1280×1024, with the ads included, but your viewport stays at 1024×768.

In addition, you are exempt from the following:

Unlimited access to all weapons and skills
Create and lead a Pirate guild
Access to advanced ships
Customize your Pirate with clothing, tattoos and more
Create up to 4 avatars
Access to all game chapters and quests
Engage in Boss battle
Access to all the Caribbean islands
Ad-free gameplay

That’s a pretty substantial list of limitations on top of the windowed, ad-riddled game window. A membership will run you $5 for your first month and $10 for every month after that.

Unique to Pirates of the Caribbean Online

Theme. No elves or dwarves here, no sir. This is chock-full of Pirate-y goodness, with lots of Yarrrr and swabbing of the deck, matey! Of course it’s not completely unique; there’s also Pirates of the Burning Sea, with which it shares the theme. But in the vast sea of Elf-peppered MMOs, a Pirate theme certainly stands out.

Voodoo magic. Well they couldn’t leave magic out entirely, right? That would just be madness! MADNESS! So they threw in a pseudo-hot Voodoo witch doctor to train you up but quick on how to destroy your enemies (which is to say nearly everyone) with glowing balls of voodoo.

Ship combat. Once again, done in Burning Sea. I know. Just ignore that for a moment. Whereas in PotBS Ship combat is its own little strategy game, here it’s more like a car race with guns. There’s not a lot of depth to it, but it’s hella fun when you sink a Galleon 4 levels above you. It’s not super-fast, mind you, but that’s a good thing when you’ve got no crew and you have to shoot the guns yourself.

Performance

Considering the graphics are far from what you’d call state of the art, the performance was disappointing, to say the least. Even in a 1024×768 window, it didn’t run great. I even paid the $5 fee to sub for a month to see if it got better fullscreen (there’s logic for ya). It didn’t. So… where’s all the horsepower under my hood (so to speak) going? We’ve got flat textures, uber-block models and poor animations. Surely it should run better than this?! Sorry to tell you this but it doesn’t.

The Good

Fun. So if you just read the Performance and The Bad sections, you’d probably think I hated this game. You’d think that I was saying it was another crap MMO cashing in on a license. Half of that statement is true. The part about cashing in on a license. But it isn’t a crap MMO. Not by a long shot. I was all set to hate this game. Not that I wanted to, but my initial impressions with the performance issues were bad ones. I was ready to give up and write a scathing overview slinging around words like ‘shiver-me-timbers!’ and ‘Crikey!’. But … well, I kept playing. And I found that I was having fun. A lot of fun. They did some interesting things here which make this game interesting. There’s active targeting with handguns. You have to click to slash with your sword and click in rhythym to get a combo going. It’s not much but it at least feels a bit more like actual combat than just slapping at number keys. Well, you do that here too, but there’s also the clicking.

Ship combat.I mentioned this under Unique to.. but I’m saying it again because it’s just fun. You pilot your own ship around the Caribbean. You can leave the wheel while in combat and grab one of the cannons and lay into your opponents. This is awesome. If you have a crew on board with you (your party), you can have them take care of that and you can just steer and pick up the loot. I loved this part of the game. It’s easy, noisy, and entertaining.

Well-implemented questing. The quests aren’t deep. But there’s quite a few to do and they are implemented well with your radar and in game. Any quest that you’ve chosen to track shows up in two places: on your radar as an arrow that points to your destination around the outer rim, and in the game world as an enormous shaft of light that streams down from the sky. If you’re in the zone, you’ll see it. It’s well done; you’re never wondering where you’re supposed to go to kill 3 Scorpions. Just look up, swivel.. Ah there it is.

Incredibly fast download. This is likely streamed or something, I’m not sure. But the amount of time between when I clicked ‘Download’ and when I was playing was somewhere around 10 minutes. That is fantastic, and it makes trying it out just that much easier, especially when some of these trials are upwards of 9GB. (Everquest II, I’m looking at you.)

The Bad

Disney: Nothing quite says ‘kid’s game’ quite as much as a Disney-branded MMO. You can’t even shoot people… only when they’ve been transformed into zombie pirates. Seriously? Yep. You have to hold a ‘cursed coin’ to get transformed and then you’re fair game.

I’m not turned off too much by the Disney logo. If the theme interests me, I’ll give it a shot. In my opinion, I’m more likely to enjoy this than an anime-themed MMO, but that’s just me. Your mileage may vary.

Cartoony Graphics. Hand in hand with the above, the graphics are cartoony. Some people hate this, some people love it. I’m ambivalent. I’d be more enthusiastic about them if the game just ran smoother.

Community. I’m not trying to come down hard on the community that exists. I’m sure they’re great. There does seem to be a community, so that’s something, right? However, since the game was developed with a teen – or possibly younger, with supervision – audience in mind, you have to expect that you’re going to be playing with teenaged players a lot of the time. This may or may not be a bad thing, but I suspect most people are going to view it with a certain amount of apprehension no matter what.

Performance. I’ve got to say it again.. this game should perform WAY better on my rig.

Summary

As I mentioned before, I had a lot of fun with this game. I suspect it’s not on a lot of people’s radar, and that’s a shame. For what it is, it’s entertaining and most of all, different from what you might be accustomed to. I won’t likely subscribe to this, but I’m definitely going to be keeping it installed for a while.

Download value: [rating: 6.5] (6.5)

State: Final
Website: http://us.runesofmagic.com
Developer/Publisher: Frogster Interactive/Runewaker Entertainment
The Pitch: Enter Taborea, a mystical world full of wonders and ancient secrets. Meet mysterious and dangerous creatures and solve the enigmas of old kingdoms long-lost in the mists of time.

That pitch is SO marketing-speak for ‘Kill things. Run a lot.’ I played this game for a couple months in beta and those are things I did. Not ONCE did I solve an enigma. Not once.

Performance

It ran pretty much flawlessly. I experienced no crashes. I ran it in fullscreen, at the highest resolution, with all the graphical settings maxed. My average framerate was in the 20s in cities, but 40+ everywhere else.

Unique to Runes of Magic

Dual-class system. This is quasi-unique. There’s other games that have it, like Guild Wars, but it’s done differently here. The way it works is this: when your chosen character hits level 10, you may train a secondary class. So I could become a Mage/Priest, for instance. The tradeoff is two things: your classes don’t level simultaneously and you can only use your current secondary class’s secondary skills. So you need to switch back and forth (and only at your house or at your skills trainer) to level each. And once you do switch, only a subset of that class’s skills are available to you.

The Good

Attractive, stylized visuals. Clearly, it’s an homage (okay, pretty much direct rip) of World of Warcraft, visually. This is a Good Thing(tm). Why is that? It allows people with computers of all levels of spec to be able to play it and it still looks reasonably attractive visually as it has an art style that doesn’t degrade overly with lower graphics settings. This is good for a further reason: the more people that can run it will correlate loosely with the number of people playing. For many people, the more that play an MMORPG, the more fun they’re going to have. So that’s a plus.

Decent Character Creation. RoM offers the standard character creation options: you can be male or female and start as one of 6 classes: Mage, Priest, Rogue, Scout, Warrior, and Knight. Pretty bland, if you ask me. The difference to this comes in the Dual-class system which I discuss later. As for customization of your character, you have a reasonably range of tweaking available to you via quite a few sliders. I still found that most people looked very similar in the game, but it’s not as limited as World of Warcraft, say.

Inspired by many. Lots of people may argue about whether or not RoM copies WoW. I’m not going to get into that beyond the visuals, but it is apparent that RoM is taking inspiration from many other games here, from Lord of the Rings online to City of Heroes. What this means to you the player, is that if you’ve ever played a mainstream MMO, you’re likely to feel pretty much at home here with little, if any, transition shock.
Easy Gameplay. Runes of Magic plays smoothly and easily. They start you out, like every other MMO, in a tutorial/training area and move you on from there. You start off fighting mushrooms. Fungi. Truly. Don’t worry, it gets better. Happily you can use WASD for movement and it is mapped for you. Using your skills is straightforward – hit the # on your keybaord that corresponds to the skill you want to use on your skill bar. You can run using the Right+Left mousebutton combination we all know and love. Auto-run is mapped to the NumLock. Sound familiar?

UI. The User Interface (UI) is fantastic. Immediately upon install, you can move a lot of things around and hide some elements to allow you to customize it how you like. On top of that, a user base has quickly grown around the game, and has developed hundreds of addons to tweak your experience. I list some of my favorites at the end of the article. Additionally, Tooltips are ubiquitous and responsive and also show equpped items, where applicable.

Lots and lots of Quests. I’m not sure if this is ‘good’, per se. There’s a lot of ‘em, for sure. They’re reasonably imaginative and well-chained.

The Bad

Dual-Class System. I like it in theory, but the fact that not even a little teensy-tiny bit of your XP from your main level gets allocated to your secondary drove me nutso. So I’m playing away and I’m level 10. Hooray! I get my new class and guess what? Now I’m level 1 again. Great… back to the fungi. The developers have thoughtfully added a second low-level area that you can teleport to to level up your secondary class, but so what? Can you say GRIND? And even once I manage to level up my secondary to the same as my primary, well you then have to switch back. Why? Because you can’t level your secondary class higher than your primary class. The way they’ve implemented this system is, in my opinion, asinine. I get that they want you to have to play the game twice as long in the hopes that you’re spending twice as much on the cash shop. But I sure as heck didn’t like it. If they had allowed you to allocate a percentage of your primary class’s XP to your secondary class, it would have been great. As it stands, it just feels like you’re playing all the same areas and quests repeatedly. Because you ARE.

Sounds. The music is really nicely done. When it’s there. A huge portion of the time you’ll run around the world and hear NOTHING. I don’t mean just ambient noises. I mean squat. Zip. Nada. Footsteps are there (I think) as are some ambient noises, but they’re so quiet even with the sound up as to be nonexistant. The music rarely makes an appearance; seemingly only in cities or dungeons and then it fades away pretty much for no reason at all that I could fathom. On top of that, there’s many sounds that are still just flat-out missing. Like a bunch of my Mages’ spells. All crafting sounds – yes, ALL. So chopping, pickaxing, harvesting… Yes, all completely silent. It’s eerie. There’s also no noise at all when you’re running through water, swimming, or by the waterfall. Also eerie.

Click-to-move. If you want auto-move to attack turned on, (which is a nice feature for melee characters, imo) it comes bundled with Click to move. Yeah, it’s one option. And it’s really annoying when you’re in the middle of combat and you accidentally click your mouse and your character starts running off to the horizon, pulling aggro all the way. Wheeeeee.

Non-removable popups. There’s a ton of annoying, scrolling banner messages that tells you not to buy diamonds from one of the annoying spam sellers in your general chat. (see below) Or the annoying message that tells you you have to face your target to attack. Yeah, I KNOW. Thanks for the tip. So why doesn’t the game just auto-face target? No clue. These messages can be removed with an addon called Streamline.

Spam. Yep, there’s gold sellers. Lots of ‘em. But there’s also addons to block ‘em. This is pretty much in all games, so although it IS a negative, it’s pretty much defacto, I guess.

Summary

Runes of Magic is worth your time to download. If you’re interested in playing something for free, this would be my first choice. You don’t have to use the cash shop to play the game, although it certainly comes in handy, if only because you get a bucketload of stuff when you’re out fighting mobs and only 2 bags to put all that crap into. I played it for a few months, more than any other cash shop free to play game. For that specific category, it’s the best option out there right now. Is it better than all of the big AAA Pay to Play MMOs? No. But it does put some of them to shame. And for a free game, that’s awfully impressive.

Download value: [rating:8] (8)

Addons:

pbInfo – A tooltip info addon
XBar - Replacement bar for stats and info
WoWMap – Makes the worldmap of RoM feel like you may know it from WoW
yBag - Replacement of the default backpack, bank and house chest
yGather – Records resource stacks locations and displays them on Worldmap and minimap