Recently I have been given the opportunity to tackle the rather sizable task of reviewing one of the most expansive games on the market today.

Make no mistake, EVE Online takes the massive from MMORPG and runs with it like Forrest Gump.

I would like to make it clear that I certainly did my best to experience as much of the game as possible, but there was a great deal that was simply not possible with my relatively limited time with the game.

I suppose a reasonable place to start would be the technical aspects of the game, and the most noticeable part of that is the visuals. EVE Online, being set in space which doesn’t require an extensive amount of environment detail, instead places that detail in the ship and station visuals.

The graphics are impressive to say the least, the four races each have a visually distinct style for their ships from the practical and industrial looking Caldari, to a much more sci-fi theme with the Amarr.

While the ships and stations do look quite breathtaking flying past bright stars and nebulae one aspect of the visuals that I personally would have liked to see a little more detail was in combat. There is very little visual indication of your ship’s “health” while fighting.

Hardly a game-breaking problem to be sure, but something that I imagine would improve the character of the game, even something as simple as some shield flash on impact would draw me into the space combat a great deal.

The other half of the presentation equation, the sound, is in my humble opinion, the weakest part of the game. Now we all know that in space no one can hear you scream, but a little bit of audio can be a very powerful aspect of a games presentation, and EVE is a very quiet game compared to many.

All of the sound design that is there is very well done, missile impacts are visceral and the firing of beams and cannons are pleasantly destructive sounding, but I would have liked to hear more.

As far as the music goes, EVE comes with a jukebox with a rather expansive list of tracks you can listen to, but they play without regard to the situation you happen to be in, and there are situations where you find yourself in a rather intense fleet battle with a slow, soft piece playing in the background that can lead to a slight sense of dissonance.

While I did mention the sound being the weakest aspect, I would like to reiterate that it is in no ways bad, rather that when this is the largest gripe I have with the game, it must be doing something right.

While a game with splendid presentation can be impressive, it’s rarely fun without some content to back it up.

ANow I am normally a proponent of well written, highly story driven content, but in this case I will happily eat my words and say that EVE Online, especially with the new changes made in Dominion, delivers some of the highest quality player driven gaming of this or any other decade.

It does this by masterfully combining two related, but subtly distinct systems. In fact one might say that EVE Online provides two games for the price of one.

The first of the two meta games, and I would imagine by far the more niche, is the economy.

Now, many games have “economies”, but every other one that I’ve seen to date has paled in comparison to the amount of work that has gone into the market system in EVE Online.

Price histories, market reports, an incredible number of tools are all built into the market screen you can access at any time. As far as I can figure this is one of the most unique aspects of EVE, in that everything that can be purchased and is routinely used by the large player run corporations and alliances is created by players.

As I said above, this certainly does sound, at least to me, like the far more niche part of the game, but the depth possible makes it very fun if you happen to have an interest in it.

The other major thing to do, and the one that has received some rather major changes with the Dominion update, is Sovereignty.

I have to speculate here, as I’m not sure there’s really a definitive answer to this question, but I would imagine that this is the reason that EVE Online is the only particularly successful PvP focused MMO to date. This, to me, is the heart of the PvP game.

Essentially, this is a complex system of territorial control that player alliances and corporations partake in, conquering and holding their various galactic empires, and reaping the benefits of natural resources in those systems. The most recent changes were made with the goal of addressing some of the less entertaining parts of the territorial control game previously.

To my mind it certainly is very entertaining, even though to say that I participated is something of an overstatement. Rather you might say that I arrived and was promptly relegated to observer status. Watching though was an incredibly rewarding experience, with massive fleets of ships firing on another, and debris floating everywhere.

Having said all that, EVE Online is a difficult game to write a generic review for, because it’s non-standard in so many ways.

From the real-time skill training to the unique setting, it certainly will not be for everyone. In my opinion developer CCP understands that they are providing a niche title and are cultivating that outlook. One thing that can be said for any player is that this game is one that will require a rather sizable investment of time to get the most from the experience.

In an attempt to make a definitive review statement, I will say that technically the game is as close to flawless as I’ve seen, and it does what it attempts to do better than nearly every other title I’ve had the opportunity to play.

If you are looking for an epic experience in a sprawling galaxy; being a dashing space pirate, a mover-and-,shaker in the world of finance and industry, or an emperor of a vast galactic empire, EVE Online is currently the absolute best option.

Score: A solid 5 of 5.

Disclosure: A review copy and press account were provided by LEWIS PR on behalf of CCP Games.

Oh Vanguard, how we all wanted to love you.  When you were originally released, we were excited.  The latest brainchild from two of the people who designed the original EverQuest, with art from the famed Keith Parkinson (Rest in Peace buddy, you’re missed), and gameplay designed to be a new take on the original “vision” of EverQuest, you had a lot of hype.  With Brad McQuaid pushing as hard as he could, and even a good presence on the premier EQ 1 guild site, we had high expectations.

And those expectations were dashed, and I mean strewn across every type of rock imaginable, when it came time for release.  Plagued by problems with funding, Sigil and Vanguard were dropped from Microsoft and later picked up by Sony Online Entertainment. The original release of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes was a buggy, ill received mess.  There were issues galore, lack of content from 40-50, and horrbile “chunking” and performance .

People pronounced Vanguard dead in the water.  And unfortunately, Sigil as a company pretty much followed suit.  Almost the entire was team disbanded and fired, or hired into other SOE projects, from the parking lot.  It was a sad day for Vanguard and Sigil.  But while the Vanguard team today is but a fraction of what it was at release, here is the good news:  Vanguard has turned into an amazing game.  While still plagued by nagging bugs, performance has been increased dramatically and the infinitely small dev team currently at SOE has been working their tails off to make the world of Telon full of content, and more attractive to today’s MMO audience.

I want to interject here and state this; no matter what I say, or what kind of impressions I give, Vanguard may still be a sinking ship.  While there are still a myriad problems with the title, by far the biggest issue facing Vanguard today is the playerbase.  The good:  the people who currently play Vanguard are mature and sophisticated, and almost always friendly.  The bad: there is nowhere near enough of them.  People still have a bad taste in their mouth from the original release of Vanguard, and the drama that befell Sigil still appears to be holding people back from trying the title.

And that is really too bad, because if you were to try out the title today, either as a returning player, or a new face, you would be in for a treat.  The new “Isle of Dawn” content that was added as a 14 day trial for Vanguard is a GREAT starter zone, and really gives you an idea of what Vanguard could be; a top or second-tier MMO.  The content there is plentiful, the story is interesting, and the entire experience for the most part is exciting.  There are usually people on at all times of the day, crafting or adventuring, or doing Vanguards third ” sphere,” diplomacy.

Diplomacy is like acard game that people can play, designed as an entirely different way to progress or level your character.  Same thing with crafting.  Crafting in Vanguard is treated as its own 1-50 game.  And you can do either crafting or diplomacy completely separate from adventuring levels.  Granted, you may have trouble getting resources for higher level crafting, or have to purchase mob-dropped cards for the diplomacy game through the auction, but it is still possible to play them separately from your normal leveling.  And at higher diplomacy levels, you can flip “switches” in the main towns in the land of Telon that give other players buffs.  And those buffs range from crafting and diplomacy buffs, all the way to adventuring buffs such as increased HP or damage for players.  Higher end guilds frequently  keep track of what buff is up in what city, so that they aren’t fighting other guilds to get the buffs up that they might need to raid that night.

It is an interesting way to get diplomacy involved in the higher tiers of content.  Crafting, while  giving you the ability to make boats and housing for other players, hasn’t  been as instrumental at the higher levels as a lot of people would want.  But if you enjoy crafting, it is decently fun system, just keep in mind that you might not be making items that a lot of other players will want so do not go into it with making a ton of money in mind.

One of my favorite things about Vanguard is the world of Telon.  People talk about the size and look of Telon in a lot of other impressions or reviews, but you will never be able to understand the variety of content, and variety in the looks of the land if you don’t see it for yourself.  Telon is a beautiful world, with screenshot-worthy scenes almost everywhere that you turn.

There are a lot of people out there that think that Vanguard is one of the prettiest MMOs out there, and I will agree with that wholeheartedly.  From the Asian inspired continent of Kojan, to the Middle Eastern reminiscent area of Qualia and finally the typical fantasy visuals of Thestra, the different amount of themes in Vanguard can be staggering.  And the best thing about thse different places is just about everywhere you look, you can find some kind of content for your level range.  The problem that you run into, is that not all level ranges are represented as well as they should be, and their are particular areas and quest chains that you really HAVE to do in order to keep up with gear.  Content up until level 45 or so is supposed to be smooth, and then gets a little grindy from 45-50.  But after 50-55, the content becomes a major grind, through faction, tier and XP.

Recently added to help that out though is the mentoring system.  Max level players can mentor down to lower levels if they want to go back and experience content that they might have missed, while still getting kill xp at the rate that they normally would.  And while I hear that XP rate is minimal when it comes to actually level 51-55, it still is a bonus if you are the type of person who wants to experience all the content that a game has to offer.

As far as race and character choices go, Vanguard has around 15 classes and 19 races.  Races are varied and yet still alot of overflow, example being that Vanguard has 3 different human races.  But along with those, you also get your 3 elven choices, High/Wood/Dark, Dwarves, Halflings, Half giants, wolf/tiger/fox people, Gnomes, and a few others.  The classes in Vanguard feel really well done.  Most classes feel and play a little different than others of their Archetypes.  Examples being, in the tank archetype, Warriors dual wield, Paladins use a sword and shield, and Dreadknights use 2 handers.

Healers are also interesting; you have the prerequisite Clerics in plate using direct heals and Hot’s, Shamans who focus a little more on DPS, and two of the most unique classes in Vanguard:  the Bloodmage and the disciple.  Bloodmages are cloth wearing healers that actually generate healing to others through causing damage to mobs, and Disciples are a monk/healer hybrid with Jin and mana based heals.  Jin being something that Disciples get outside of mana, that regens and can be used for healing or damaging attacks.

Intro

NCsoft has recently released their latest entry in the crowded fantasy MMO genre. Aion has some big shoes to fill, with all the hype and a large amount of pre orders the game received before launch.

Aion centers around the conflict between two races (the Elyos and the Asmodians) that live on the planet Atreia, which split apart in a cataclysm and now each race lives on their own half of the separated planet. The two races can meet in battle it out in world PvP in an area called the Abyss.

Graphics

Aion has some very nice graphics with some of the most beautiful scenery seen in any MMO. The world looks alive with lush forests, lively lakes, and deadly swamps. Birds fly overhead and help add the feeling that players are in a living breathing world.

Animations are nicely done and the little things like the character becoming visibly exhausted as their health gets lower. Mobs will rub or slap their bellies or other little animations that help keep players immersed in the world. Cats move gracefully as they stalk their prey, Ox like creatures lumber along, and every other creature acts as you would assume.

Armor is very basic when you start out and as you level and buy or loot more it becomes cooler looking. Most pieces can be dyed with dye made by other users or bought at certain vendors found in the game. This helps players differentiate themselves from other players that are sporting the same armor. Another feature that Aion has is the ability to take a higher level piece of armor and make it look like a lower level piece.

So if you like your current armor and when upgrading don’t like the look of the new stuff as well, you can go to an NPC to change the higher level to look like the lower level armor.

The only drawback is you loose the older piece in the process. On a sde note, it would have been nice to see more variations in the look of armor; my character looked the same for over 10 level with little change in appearance.

User Interface

Aion sports the usual UI as most MMOs, it doesn’t do anything to revolutionize the way the game is played but since it is practical this doesn’t detract from the game. There are all the normal options that let you move the health bars around as well as add more sidebars to the screen.

You have the option of using a quest tracker that allows you to see a good selection of quests on your screen while playing. This allows you to keep track of quest goals without having to switch back and forth between game play and the quest panel. You can also double click on a quest and it will open your quest panel allowing you to get further details. Another feature allows you to select certain words like places and NPC names and a waypoint added to your map.

This eliminates the need to search all over an area for your objective and does make the game easier as it saves you time.

Gameplay

Aion has four classes; warrior, scout, mage, and priest. Once you reach level 10 each class has the choice of two further classes to branch out to. The warrior can become a gladiator (melee DPS) or a templar (tank). The scout can branch out to an assassin (melee DPS) or a ranger (ranged DPS). The mage class has the options of a Spiritmaster (pet based caster) or a sorcerer (ranged spellcasting). Finally the priest can become a cleric (healer) or a chanter (support healer w/ buffs and melee DPS).

Aion allows you to create 8 characters per server so if you wanted to you could make one of each class.

Character creation is the first part of the game that you’ll see that really shines. The creator allows you to choose premade character builds or tweak your own for that perfect character. There are sliders that allow you to change every little part of the character and this in turn lets you pretty much make any kind of look you want. Players can even create pixie sized characters to large hulking alter egos; whatever character type one could think of can think of one can make. Once the player does select a server and choose which race they want they are locked into creating only characters of that race on that particular server. So in order to make a character of the opposing side one needs to change servers.

Once the character is made a short movie is played giving the outline of the main story once that is done, the player is free to begin their life. No matter what side the players chooses they are in for a very similar experience. There is basically no difference between the lands of each race. Both races start near farms and progress to a town move onto a lake area outside the town and then are shuffled off to a forest area and etc. Each side only has one starting area and this creates a serious sense of déjà vu and severely limits the replayability of the game.
Now onto the greatest feature found in Aion. Flight. Once the player reaches level 10, they gain the ability to fly. Flight is limited to certain areas and even then it has a timer that only allows flight for a short time. Even with these restrictions it is a great feeling to let open ones wings and jump into the sky and take flight. It would be nice to be able to fly in every zone but the restriction is there for a reason, without it quests would become too easy as one could just fly from point to point and bypass all the content in between.

Every couple levels players can buy new combat skills from the appropriate skill trainer. Prices for skill books start out low but ramp up as the levels increase. Skills are the standard “press this button” at this time to do this or that. There isn’t much innovation other than the fact that one can perform combos. Once a certain skill is used one can keep the combo going but only a few seconds is given to get the next button press in and keep it going. While combos help break up the monotony that most MMOs fall into when dealing with combat skills it still boils down to pressing the same buttons in order until the enemy is dead.

Continued on the next page.

To the outside world a nerd is simply a nerd, but anyone brave enough to delve deeper into the culture will find that there is a whole ecosystem of nerdery just below the surface. While there’s dozens of varieties of fanboys and enthusiasts out there, the groups that this particular review are likely to be pertinent to are online gamers and comic book fans.

I had the opportunity to spend many very entertaining hours playing Cryptic Studios’ newest title, Champions Online. I will say from the outset that I have been having  a fantastic time playing this game, but I will certainly do my best not to let that colour my reporting.

I suppose we might as well start with the things that are causing me to enjoy myself so much. One of the first is the setting. It’s no secret that the fantasy setting is, to be charitable, a little bit overdone. There are dozens of games with elves and wizards and big guys with swords out there fighting dragons and goblins.

As an alternative, Champions Online is based off a pen-and-paper system focused around comic book superheroes. Fans of comics will very likely find that it’s quite true to the style, from the over the top dialogue and plots, down to the highly stylized graphics with the heavy outlines around characters. Fortunately for people who prefer slightly crisper graphics, the thick outlines can be turned off.

That leads me nicely into the next high point, at least for me, and that is the plotlines. Quest lines are not a new thing in online games, but in most games they trend towards epic fantasy scenarios. While those are excellent good fun, theres a certain thematic difference in comic books.

I’m hard pressed to put the difference into words that make much sense, but if I had to try I would say that the fantasy style is much more story driven, where the plots of the quests (or missions as they’re called) in Champions seem to be more character driven, pitting you against super villains and megalomaniacs.

One other interesting thing to note here, is that while most games start you out as a keen eyed aspiring adventurer, Champions has you facing off agains super villains and major players in the villainous underworld within the first few levels. Mechanically this doesn’t amount to a great deal of difference, but it does help to make one feel “super” very early on, rather than a fellow wearing tights and harboring delusions of superheroism.

One specific note about the plots of the missions, I had held off doing this review until I reached the ability to create my hero’s nemesis. Essentially constructing a personal villain for my hero. Mechanically this doesn’t particularly change anything, but from a flavour standpoint I personally feel it adds a great deal.

One perhaps downside to this is that once you’ve finished creating your nemesis you’re occasionally accosted by the minions you’ve selected, and this can happen at inopportune times, but other than that I feel that the nemesis is a splendid addition to the game world.

Speaking of tights, the character creator is one of the highest points of the game. The level of customisation is downright insane. With the exception of blatant copies of actual comic book characters, generic powered armours, and scantily clad angels and demons, it’s difficult to pick out any two costumes that are exactly the same.

The ability to customize goes down to fingernail colour on a single hand. In fact you can create largely anything you can dream up, I would suggest that the character creator is second only to Spore in it’s breadth. That said it’s not perfect, there are some bizarre and seemingly arbitrary limitations that can be a tad annoying when you run into them, and the sorting and grouping can seem a little nonsensical at times, but if you have the time and the inclination there is very little you can’t accomplish.

But what, truly, is a superhero without their super powers (besides Batman perhaps, he’s just cool).

Champions online has opted for a classless system of character creation. Rather than selecting a class and being beholden to the skills and abilities provided by that choice at the beginning of the characters life, you find yourself selecting from the entire array of powers available in the game, albeit with various prerequisites based on previous power choices.

The powers are certainly impressive to look at, and the options are varied enough that nearly any character concept you can dream up, should you choose to go that route, can be handily created and almost certainly will be viable in some fashion. If, on the other hand, you don’t feel like creating and dreaming up a back story for your personal comic book superhero, Cryptic has provided a number of ready  made “frameworks” in the vernacular, that possess all the powers that a crime fighter could reasonably require.

All this talk of selecting powers does bring us to the question of how well they work as a matter of playing through the game.

The traditional MMO style of combat is very much ingrained in my mind, and I am pleased to announce that fighting villains in Champions Online took some getting used to. Beyond simply being different and new, the combat system is also much more in depth than most. Continuing in the vein of players controlling things to a scary extent, beyond simply hitting the hotkey mapped to the power and having it produce it’s effect, many powers can also be “charged” to increase their effects, while also increasing their energy cost.

This simple act of dynamically controlling both your energy reserves as well as the time required for the big finish attacks causes combat to feel much more frenetic and intense than most other games, as well as providing a deeper and more tactical experience when used properly.

One other very pleasant surprise I found when first playing the game, was that I wouldn’t have to wait until level 40, or 30, or even 20 before being permitted some method of easing the burden of traversing the world. Indeed, one of the first things you do when you come out of the tutorial, is select your “travel power.”

The choices represent the most common powers of the comic book world, and a great deal of thought has been put into them. In fact there are five different varieties of flight. Beyond that you can pick some more unique methods of locomotion, such as tunnelling, and fans of the Spider Man style will be pleased to hear that swinging from rooftop to rooftop is included in all it’s glory. Indeed, I was very pleased to find that travel time was not one of the primary time sinks as is so common among MMOs these days.

All is not sunshine and lollipops in the Champions world, however. There are quite a few things that I might have reconsidered were I the design team, and a number of rather unpleasant, and I imagine unexpected, results from certain system limitations.

Back when EverQuest 2 first launched in November of 2004, I was one of the people logging in the first day. Having been a very large EverQuest fan, I was ready to continue my adventures in Norrath, even if it was 500 years in the future.

Drawn in by promises of new adventures in a familiar setting, I eagerly logged in… and was a tad bit disappointed. Poor performance was what killed it for me at the time, as the game was designed with “future technology” in mind. I hammered out a few levels with some friends, but eventually just went on to something else. It was a grand idea, but one that had a lot of problems which just made it unfriendly at the time.

Fast forward almost 5 years later, and the nearing of the 10th anniversary of EverQuest 1 got me thinking again. I tried going back to the original EQ and found it to be, well… not what I remembered.

Still jonesing for a Norrathian fix, I looked into Everquest 2 again. A lot of time had passed since the first time I gave it a shot, SOE had fixed a lot of the complaints, added a PvP server, and I had gotten a new machine to play it on. Why not and gave the game another shot?

Was I ever pleasantly surprised…

EverQuest 2 today is night and day ahead of where it was at release. I’m sure the addition of 5 expansions didn’t hurt.
One of the things I was worried about was whether or not that there would even still be anyone around in the starting areas. Back when I originally played, a higher level character could always mentor down to another player’s level to go adventuring with them, but at the time there were really no benefits to that other than getting to play with friends.

With the advent of Alternative Experience, or AA, SoE offered up the ability to customize your characters even more when at max level. On top of getting AA xp for killing mobs, they also allow you to gain AA exp from killing named monsters, or doing quests that no longer give you any real experience. Therefore, there are usually always a couple people willing to mentor down and do lower level content. Definitely a big boon in any MMO, and something that sets EQ2 away apart from other MMOs.

It’s also a very fortunate thing since EQ2 has a lot of group designed content. Not to say that soloing isn’t an option, but I will cover that a little later.

EQ2 has added in ton of content over its 5 expansions, offering a whole lot of things for you to do. One of the best aspects of the title for me is it’s dungeons. With games like World of Warcraft ruling the nest for the past 5 years, it was nice to go back to a game that was focused on grouping over soloing.

There are dungeons all over Norrath, ranging from the mid teens all the way to max level. Grouping is fun and fast

paced, with all facets of the game actually interesting. Although a lot of people consider this a negative at times, you will ALWAYS have something to do in a group in EQ2.

Sounds great, right? But the reason that some people actually find it negative, is–my God–you get abilities just flying all over the place. And for some classes that leads to just way too many buttons to press.

Combat can get complicated at times, and that does bring things down a bit. Not knowing what button to press when you have 50 of them on your screen, sometimes looking a lot like each other, doesn’t mean that you are a bad player, it just means that maybe somewhere down the line a developer went a little overboard adding new abilities to classes.

If grouping isn’t your thing, there is still no need to turn a blind eye to EQ2.

Soloing has become a de facto focus for most titles since World of Warcraft brought it to the forefront, and today’s EQ2 is no different.

All classes can solo their way to max level, or close to it.  The different AA’s abilities added to classes throughout expansions give even healer classes’ very decent solo abilities. And since you can start accruing AA at level  10, and gain it by killing named mobs and doing quests, you always have something to look forward to .

It also has one thing that World of Warcraft  ”stole” for its 3.2 patch, the ability to lock XP.  You can lock combat and quest XP, so that you can stop and do all the content in your level range, if you want, and still build up AA XP.  I spoke with a few people in the mid 30′s that had locked throughout their character’s careers and had upwards of 50 AA points.  The number of AA points you have is capped at certain levels though, so keep that in mind if you decide to go this route.

EverQuest 2′s graphics are also one of the big draws to the title.  When the game was originally released, SOE had said that the engine was made with future technology in mind.  And while some of that statement is true, it unfortunately  is also mired in some old coding.

Some graphics are done on the CPU side when they should be done GPU side, and at times it can bog down when it really shouldn’t. The good news is that the current team does understand some of the engines problems, and is

currently working on some of them for EQ2′s next Game Update. The game itself is gorgeous and the locations varied.  And with the additions of old EQ1 content redone for the sequel, it can make for some interesting re-imaginings of old content.

The bottom line is EverQuest 2 is a worth giving a try.  If grouping is your thing, or if you are just looking for another title with some meaty content to sink your teeth into, you can’t go wrong downloading the free trial.

Review Score: 4/5

For additional information on EverQuest 2, or to download the 14 day free trial, visit http://www.everquest2.com

The first time that you log into Frogster Interactive’s Runes of Magic, you’re probably going to scoff and say “Hey, I’ve seen this before!” You’re probably going to spend the first hour or two telling yourself how it’s just a rip off of the 8,000 pound gorilla.  But do yourself a favor and keep on truckin’, because once you do, you are going to find one of the best Free2Play titles on the market today.  And in my opinion, one of the better titles on the market today, period.  I promise that if you give Runes of Magic a chance, that you will be not only pleasantly surprised, but genuinely hooked.

Runes of Magic has just about everything you could want in an MMO title.  Housing, a dual class system, daily quests, instances and dungeons, you name it.  And on top of that, the absolute best go to market strategy in their item shop than I have ever seen in a Free2Play titles.  And I want to focus on that and get it out of the way, because one of the biggest barriers around to the Free2Play genre are their cash shops.  And while yes, Runes of Magic does have the requisite cash shop, not shopping there isn’t going to put you at a huge disadvantage compared to those that do.  The reason for that?  Because even if you don’t spend a dime in real life cash on diamonds for the shop, you can still earn them in game.  Runes of Magic Auction House system is set up so that you can still earn diamonds in game without spending your hard earned cash in this resecession-tastic time.  You can put items up to sell that you find in game for either in game gold, or diamonds that you can use on cash shop items, as well as purchase in game items with said diamonds, right through the auction house.  And they even instituted a way to add legal in game gold purchasing.  Because on top of selling items for diamonds, you can straight up trade in game gold for diamonds, right through the auction house.

It is an ingenious way to monetize the title for the developers, while not creating a huge disadvantage for players not willing to shell out real life dollars.  It’s the most down to earth and sensible way to run a cash shop I have ever seen, and I hope that other developers in the Free2Play genre take some ideas from it and implement it in their titles, so that we can see the Free2Play subgenre dig it self out of the black hole that accompanies the name “cash shop” and get some more recognition.

Now that that is out of the way, on to how it plays…

Runes of magic functions like just about every MMO out there.  You do quests, beat up monsters and gain levels.  At character creation, you chose from your basic appearance and pick your first class.   One disappointing thing is that at this time, there is only one character race to chose from, and that is Humans.  As you level up and reach level 10, you go to one of the main cities and earn the right to do another of one my favorite features of RoM, you get to chose your second class.  And depending on what you chose can really change how the game will play for you.  As you are leveling up, you earn both regular XP and TP.  TP is what is used to increases your different skills effectiveness.  All classes have both Primary and Secondary skills to chose from.  Primary skills are only available to you when you are playing that class as a primary, your secondary skills are what are available when you are playing that class as your secondary class.  For instance, at low levels priests get 3 basic healing spells, Urgent Heal, Heal and Regenerate.  Urgent heal is a faster low HP spell, Regenerate heals you for a set amount of damage every 2 seconds and Heal is a longer cast, bigger HP return spell.  But heal is only available with priest as a primary.

And with a limited amount of TP, you really have to pick and chose which skills you want to invest in to get the most out of your classes abilities.  On top that, at levels 15/15, 20/20, 25/25, and 30/30, you can turn in some items to get an Elite skill that is going to differentiate with each class/class combination further adding to the customization and  difference between secondary classes.  I played a Priest/Warrior and for example at level 15/15, as priest warrior you get an elite skill that is a buff that adds attack and defense while reducing the amount of HP you get from heals while it is up, called Battle Monk Stance.  But as a Warrior/Priest, you would get a party buff.  I think it’s a great system that works very well with the play system.

As you level and defeat monsters, finish quests and run dungeons, you will of course get new gear.  And there are a few ways to upgrade your gear once you have them.  Monsters drop runes that you can add to socketed items, and you can always purchase items that will add +1 to your weapons and armor, possibly adding some cool particle effects.

You can also take items you get and create orbs that can them be combined and added to any item that will add increased stats.  The system can be costly, and you can always spend RL cash for diamonds to help with it, but I found the system to be fairly complex for an F2P MMO, if not a little daunting and confusing at times.

Graphics are your run of the mill fantasy look, and the music is actually very good, when and if its playing.  It seems that a lot of time, you just don’t hear it.  One of my biggest gripes about most F2P titles is the lack of different item graphics.

Alot of times you just end up looking like the guy standing next to you, only with a +1 next to your armor in your inspect box.  RoM though has a ton of different item graphics, and while I don’t think a lot of you will care all that much, it gets extra marks in my book.

All in all, I really enjoyed my time in RoM and have been recomending to anyone I know who is short on cash in this global economy.  It might not totally replace World of Warcraft for you, but it certainly is a great title that is well worth the time downloading!  You can check out the offical site here, but if you really want to DL the client, I would suggest using Fileplanet.

Review Score: 4/5

This week I had a glimpse of the future, it was covered in green slime and filled with bad guys! Dexter was there, Ben 10, and The Kids Next Door. As a matter of fact it was filled with Cartoon Network characters. No this is not some sugar induced dream coma, after watching to many cartoons and downing what was left of my holiday candy. That had nothing to do with it, I swear! This was Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall , a new MMO for kids and tweens.

Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall, was a blast to play, for me and my nephew who seems to think my computer is his new toy. It has a engaging storyline, easy to follow for young players, but still creative enough to hold my interest. The in-depth tutorial covers all the basics of movement, combat, and the user interface, while introducing the player to the situation. Fuse, a bad guy who uses fusion matter (green slime) to take over worlds, has come after earth and you must help stop him.

As a avid gamer I had some preconceived notions of what children’s MMO games where like, none of them very positive. But after playing this game to review it, I must admit this game far exceeded my expectations on many levels.

“It looks a lot like the cartoons”

To assist me with this review I drafted my young nephew who had some simple words of his own to say about the game. That was what he had to say when I asked him how it looked, short and sweet answer. There is more to it than that, though. One of the preconceived notions I had about the game was that a browser-based MMO couldn’t possibly have good graphics. That was quickly put to rest when I first saw the game world. Colors are bold, bright, and engaging. Graphically to put it into perspective I felt like I was playing an Xbox 360, or PS3 game with my HDTV.  It just doesn’t have the dynamic fog effects, or the super ground textures of some more recent games, and the sky is static on the parts of the world I viewed.

Avatars, and creatures in the game are drawn comic book style, black outlines silhouette the characters. This was a good artistic choice, it meshes well with the animation style of cartoon network characters, and lends a comic book hero feel to the game. The actual game world looks more real than the cartoons themselves, not hard to do when you’re dealing with animation, but worth pointing out. View distance is amazing, weapon and ability effects are superb. Bottom line, if you like the visuals of Cartoon Network, you will be very happy with Fusion Fall’s graphics.

“I don’t need your help!”

Don’t expect to be asked a thousand questions, or begged for help with FusionFall. I found that out pretty quickly. After the initial thirty minutes my nephew spent creating his character I left him alone to play. Coming back, after many minutes I started asking him about the game, or rather telling him what he should do and how to do it. I was quickly put in my place. He had a good grasp of the game already, and even started explaining to me things I missed.

One of the first gameplay elements you will encounter in FusionFall is the immense character creation system. It has one of the most engaging and customizable avatar creations of any MMO to date. Moving from there you enter the game world. A short tutorial quickly gets players engaged, while teaching them all the basics of movement and combat. The UI is easily read with very little clutter. If you need help with something the game guide is a wealth of information including screen shots, walkthroughs, and explanations of many of the key features. It was the easiest to use and understand guide I have seen in an MMO to date.

After you learn the basics, you start into the action. The game features a wide variety of engaging quests. The combat is easy at first point and shoot, however later it becomes necessary to use your “nanos” (micro versions of cartoon network characters you collect) to beat harder monsters. The nano system is a very creative way of introducing more abilities as you advance. My nephew kept referring to them as Pokemon, I think that is a good way to describe them. Jumping is a major game element in Fusion Fall, many quests and mini games are based on jumping through puzzle type environments.  Jumping is one of the main things players do in MMO games, at least here it serves a purpose.

There are several forms of travel in fusion fall, walking, jump pads, zip lines, teleports, flying monkeys, and shuttles. Fall damage does not exist, but the ground in many places is covered in deadly green snot, so some caution is advised when your jumping or running around. I think that the many travel options, make the game much more engaging.

Eventually though you will die. When you die you go back to a rez station in the zone you died in. There did not appear to be any significant penalty for dying, other than having to run back if you were doing a quest. I think this is important in a children’s game, as a death penalty could take away from the fun.

“Nooooooo Waagh waagh!”

I believe Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall, overall is a great game. Very appealing visually, though a little extra attention to ground, and sky would have gone a long way. The game is a not very complex, but it was able to keep me entertained for several short monster bashing sessions. My nephew however couldn’t get enough, tantrum ensued when I made him get off my laptop.  My nephew gives it a raving review if I ever saw one.

I give FusionFall 5 of 5 because of the engaging game play, great use artistic design in character models,  and amazing story line.  The game releases today Jan 14th, there is a monthly fee to play of $5.95 a month. The game also sports a free play area called the Future Zone. For more information or to get into the game head on over to Cartoon Network’s official site, or check out FusionFall now.

Review Score: 5 / 5.

Within the gaming industry as a whole there is a single word that inspires the combination of both fear and awe within legions of gamers and developers alike. The single utterance of it could send shrieking girlfriends at your throat with freshly done nails ablaze.

We all, especially at this publication, know this word as MMO. It’s an acronym which gets tacked on to various things these days and is probably more commonly associated with RPGs than MTSs. Thus enters SAGA, a newly arrived MMORTS. Delving deeper, however, finds very little massive about it aside from its booster pack price tags and mundane graphics.

Unscramble CCGMMORTS

To be fair, I don’t play many MMORTS games. I play plenty of MMOs; plenty of RTS’s, but never a combination of such insidious affiliation as the two combined.

To be quite honest, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Would it be a multiplayer game without the single player campaign or an entire new experience all together? SAGA not only combines these two but adds a CCG (Collectible Card Game) element as well. I particularly like collectible card games so I was incredibly excited to fire it up.

Excitement Doesn’t Always Equal Satisfaction

The first real problem I encountered was the graphics. SAGA‘s graphics really hovered between something made in 2002 and 2003 with drab textures and character models that really don’t stand up too well on their own let alone mashed together in a cacophony of color palettes.

An attempt to salvage this was made by random color bursts of blacks, orange and purple all was for naught. The art direction seemed particularly uninspired with factions cunningly named as “Machine”, “Magic”, “Light”, “War” and “Nature.” City architecture looked hastily thrown together and was about as pleasant to look at as a 50 year old stripper at Sizzler.

Perhaps with all of the content updates they simply didn’t have time to hand craft these units to the degree I would have liked, but the cool factor really takes a nose dive when I’m forced to overlook admiring my city of slaves..erm..citizens.

See with your Hands, not your Eyes.

Previous grumblings aside might make me look like a “graphics whore”. Let me assure you, I am nobody’s bitch. I still play old skool games on a regular basis and I know that the true RTS fan will weigh game play over graphics any day of the week. That being said, I was extremely disappointed with the lack of unique builds that each race featured.

SAGA first lets you choose one of the five factions so start off your journey. After selecting a faction and city layout, you’re able to choose a banner which all of your units carry as a sigil of your dominance. On a positive note, you get to customize this banner with various symbols and color variations, which is nice as far as banners go.

The way SAGA handles city management along with the action essential to any RTS is similar to a browser-based MMO’s. You have a management screen where you take care of the day to day actions of your slaving whelps and an action screen where you choose quest lines to plunder and pillage.

You’re only allowed to take a limited number of units on each quest (though this can total up to 50+) and should any of your disposable militia die, then it is up to you to revive them in the temple on your management screen. But don’t expect your clergy as an act of graciousness, this will cost you a resource called God Favor.

While we spend so much time in the management screen, it would be nice to see a little animation and movement in my city. I’m told I have a set amount of citizens and militia but never get the satisfaction of actually seeing them in my settlements.

Another critique, and maybe this is a critique to the genre itself, is that if you run out of resources, there really isn’t much you can do to entertain yourself aside from waiting (a long time) for them to come back. In MMORPG’s, when you get tired of questing, you can go do an instance, or pvp. If you’re tired of PvP, you’re welcome to go do other various mini-games such as fishing or leveling up various crafting skills.

Even if you run out of money, you’re able to run around and explore more of the world. Saga, and perhaps the bulk of MMORTS’s in general only have two things to do: Gather resources and Quest. If you happen to run out of resources, it’s quite likely that you can’t quest any more and you might have to wait a day or two to quest despite your desire to do so. This is really a major flaw.

If you do find yourself with enough resources to raise an army and keep your peasants happy, the quest chains that SAGA has to offer is very expansive and truly earns the MMO part if its genre tag from the sheer amount of time you’ll use mastering all of them. Quests vary from easy to hard depending on how many times you replay them which makes SAGA a real challenge for all skill levels alike.

One might expect that each factions, having evolved from different species and religious affiliations, might set up their cities in different arrays thus differentiating themselves from their opponents and making us squeal in delight. However, this simply is not so.

If you’ve played one race, you’re quite apt to be able to play them all. On a positive note, this makes the learning curve extremely low after you’ve played for more than 2 or 3 hours and might be a great introduction to RTS’s for those who simply don’t have the time to master every play style.

Another shocker is that humans quite commonly associate themselves with every faction regardless of whether you think they should or not. As you start off with the Nature faction, who I was told was primarily made up of elves, I ended up playing with human cavalry, archers and pikemen.

The only real elves I got were bowman. This was disappointing to say the least. However, this quickly changes once you start opening booster packs and can add digital creations to your armies.

Requirements and Technical Issues

Before getting into the game itself, I’d like to discuss the system requirements and some of the technical issues players have come across since launch. Though the minimum requirements posted on the box are reasonable for a game launching in 2008, the actual recommended system turns out to be something of a monster. In fact, even playing with the recommended Core2Duo 2.4GHz, 2GB of ram, and 512 MB Nvidia 7900 GTX may not give you an optimal experience.

To get a good idea of different systems’ capabilities, the game was installed on 3 different configurations:

PC 1: 20″ iMac
CoreDuo 2.0 GHz, ATI Radeon X1600 Pro 256, 2GB ram, Windows XP SP3

PC 2: Home-built Gaming Rig
Core2Duo E6300 clocked to 2.1 GHZ, ATI Radeon HD3870 512MB, 2GB RAM, Windows XP SP3

PC 3: Macbook Pro 15″
Core2Duo 2.4 GHz, Nvidia 8600 GT M 256, 2GB Ram, Vista SP1

The 20″ iMac was found to run the gam, but only just. 8 t o 10 FPS , Low Settings, windowed mode.

The Home gaming rig runs playably at anything from 13-25 FPS at 1680×1050, on medium settings.

The Macbook Pro is the best performer of the bunch, running the game at 20-30 FPS on medium settings.

It should be noted that although DirectX 10 support is displayed on the box, the actual game does not currently support DirectX 10. In fact, the option to switch to DX10 was removed by FunCom in a patch after launch. FunCom has announced that DirectX 10 support is coming at a future date, to be announced.

Your mileage will certainly vary depending on your system, but be aware that even very high-end systems (quad-core machines, 4+ gigs of ram, SLI’d 8800 GT’s) are experiencing framerate and other performance issues at this time. FunCom has not addressed these problems on their forums, and the community continues to wait for solutions to their technical woes. At first, problems seemed to be only with ATI cards not supporting the game very well, but as more reports came to the forums it became clear that the stuttering gameplay, low fps at any setting, and frequent client crashes are not limited to any single make or model of card, operating system, or CPU.

It’s not all doom and gloom in the tech forum, though. In fact, tweaks and recommendations from the Age of Conan forums went a long way to achieving higher FPS on our machines, and I’d recommend you make use of the forums to help get the best performance, and see what current tech issues are being addressed.

Unfortunately, that contest wasn’t the only thing that didn’t turn out well. Archlord, at best, is a mediocre MMORPG that brings nothing new to the table, other than it’s Archlord system which has already fell flat on its face once.

Character creation is a simple thing, really. Pick from 3 races, and a hand full of classes such as the staple Knight, Hunter, Archer, Berserker, etc etc…. Gender is based on class type, and of course classes are race specific. Customization of your avatar is also disappointing, as a lot of the choices are bland and you don’t have access to all options in the creation process. Once you get in game though, you can opt to pay for haircut, color and face changes at the stylist in town, which is an idea I always have liked and am glad to actually see in game.

Combat is nothing special. It’s your standard fare hack and slash, click to use skills, skill points at level up affair. Skills are level and class based, meaning you get one skill point a level, and are limited to not only just what skills you can use at that level, but also how many points you can have in them. For example, early in your career, you will find yourself walking around with a couple extra skill points pooled that you can’t use. Your skills have as many points in them as they can have, and yet no new skills have opened up for you to spend your newly earned skill points on.

Graphics are also nothing to gasp at, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say they are terrible. They meet the needs of the client though, and run pretty well even on aging systems like mine. The music is decent, but sound effects on the other hand got so repetitive that I had to my sound down fairly early.

Leveling is also very standard, with your groups of mobs to mow through, with random “elite” type mobs in camps. And the quest system also consist of a lot of go here kill, fetch repeat quests. One of the things that usually make those manageable, to me at least, is interesting story or narrative to go with the quests, but nothing ever really grabbed my attention enough ever really make them more than a bore.

PvP is something that is an integral part to the treadmill of the game, especially with it’s Archlord system, but honestly I didn’t have a chance to partake in it. The reason for that is, is that I just could not get past a lot of flaws in the PvE game, which is nesscary to get the levels needed to participate in the PvP game. This to me is a glaring issue. The only people who are going to be participating in PvP in its seige forms, are people that can manage to look past the games flaws and stick with it to the end.

All in all, Archlord was a disappointment to me. Before you even say it, I realize that Archlord is now on a Free 2 Play(F2P) model now. But even on that model, I don’t think the game is one that I would rank up there as one of the few good F2P games. It just didn’t pull me in as a lot of other F2P games have actually managed to do, and you can’t even compare it to most of the Western developed Pay to Play games.

Score: 2.0/5.0
Recommendation: It’s your basic F2P model type game, but it’s more boring than average grinding result in a game that is just not worth the time invested unless you are into hardcore PvP and the Archlord system. If you are one of those gamers, and can get passed the flaws of the title, you may find some enjoyment within the game world.

System Specs used: Athlon XP 2800+, 1 gig PC3200, ATI1650 AGP card.

The story behind Fury has you assuming the role of a reincarnated hero. Stop right there, that’s all there pretty much is for a story. As you play you unlock memories from you past lives which in turn unlock new abilities. I guess the writers strike was affecting this game before the protest ever began.

In Fury you are allowed only one character, but you can create templates that allow you be whatever class you want as long as you possess the appropriate abilities. No matter what class you begin the game as you can still switch to another template on the fly. This is a nice feature that allows you to only need to manage one character, and everyone knows you under one name and not several characters. WHen creating your game you are only given a few distinct characteristis to choose from and with the ugly character models it makes it hard to make a cool looking character. Character classes range from the usual fantasy fare, healers, warriors, ranged and mixed variations there of.

It takes a couple of playtimes to get into the game, at first things are a bit daunting. The combat which takes from from overhead 2/3 view, is really fast paced, enemies are coming at you from all sides. After a few times in the arenas, things get a bit easier but not by much.

Fury doesn’t contain any quests in the normal sense, instead you earn essence points in the arenas and then use them to unlock memories in the santuary, and each memory gives you a new ability. There are over 400 abilities in the game that you unlock as time goes on. Too bad many are similar and during combat I found myself just mashing attack skills and not caring what they did just as long as they did damage.

One thing that really hurts the game is the lack of content. As of release there are only six match types and none of them are anything spectacular due to the fast pace and the blandness of the different abilities. The match types range from deathmatch free for all, team vs. team, 1 vs. 1, and one where the first team to collect enough crystals wins.

The graphics on a lower end video card are something to be desired. The backgrounds in the city are nice but the character models look like Nintendo 64 throwbacks. The arena graphics suffer greatly as they look to be several years old. This gives the game a mishmash look and feel.

Due to financial problems with Auran, the future of the game is in question. Another company has stepped in to keep the game running while things are straightened out. This came on the heels of the announcement that the game would be free to download and play.

Not everyone will like this game, those that prefer a game without the typical MMO grind and love PvP will be more apt to enjoy Fury. Though the lack of content may drive away players, the developers are promising more content in the future, like a crafting system and continued updates.

All in all, Fury does not offer enough diversity to keep it in the forefront of the already crowded MMO market. Some thoughtful quests, and maybe some arena battles against some giant monsters might add some diversity to this game and take it from the slums to a level above mediocrity.

Score: 1.5/5

Recommendation: If you’re curious and it’s a rainy day, download it. It is free.

TibiaME is an entertaining distraction with a balanced amount of depth just right for a cell phone game. The graphics could be compared to the first Final Fantasy for the NES, only without the huge screen-filling bosses, and there is no sound. It has very basic auto-combat, no spells or abilities, and does not have class trainers or even a character stat sheet. It is, however, the only MMO available on a wide range of cell phones, and is based on a very popular PC game. We’ll give you a glimpse into why players around the world keep coming back to this game from 2004.

Tibia Micro Edition (TibiaME) is a dungeon hack successfully realized on a cell phone sized display. It was difficult to get into it at first, but once I overcame the cell phone controls and small screen on the Java emulator, everything started to come along smoothly. You run around and kill stuff, gain experience, kill stuff, get loot, kill stuff, get lost, die, chat with people, and buy stuff. Your main goal is to get to a higher level and maybe one day slay another player and take a piece of their loot. You can meet people and make friends, but this is greatly hindered by the chat system’s lack of a word prediction feature. Everything has to be typed out in text shorthand, and the game does not work with a bluetooth keyboard. The entire combat and movement system consists of the four directional buttons on your phone. You use the number pad to inspect / use / pickup items, and to switch the bottom of the screen to different views. You can toggle between inventory, equipment, mini-map, and chat.

The game was written in Java so it should work on most phones, but the auto-detect download page on the WAP site (wap.tibiame.com) did not properly identify my Treo 700w with Windows Mobile and should have specifically told me that it was not compatible. It took me a little while before I could conclude this on my own. To run the game your phone must have internet and be either a Symbian Operating System (S60) powered device or J2ME enabled, and have MIDP 2.0 support. As I learned the hard way, you must already have Java; you can’t just install Java like this was your PC. The game requires a minimum of 130 kilobytes of space for the most scaled down visuals, and at least a 128×128 pixel display.

OK, so you have no willpower for this type of game
This format is not for everyone. If you have a PC and are playing a current generation massively multiplayer online (MMO) game you probably have no interest or time for a game of this minimal level of detail. You might be turned off by the slow pace of combat or by the complete lack of any combat animation. I can’t convince you to suspend your expectations for 3D graphics and World of Warcraft clones, but I will try to illustrate that when judged as a game on a cell phone with all of the limitations that go along with it — Tibia ME is quite an ambitious and impressive offering.

Is that a S60 enabled device in your pocket?
Tibia ME is the MMO you can take with you wherever you go. The idea of leveling your character any time, from anywhere is quite tempting. It can be played with one hand and is quite a discreet way to pass the time while waiting for your coffee at Starbucks, sitting on the bus / train, or times when you just don’t have access to a PC. With mobility like that Tibia ME and other games like it might one day replace books and periodicals as men’s preferred entertainment in the bathroom. Watch out Maxim Magazine.

No free lunch
Obviously, you must have an internet enabled phone to play. The best option is having a prepaid unlimited access plan, because even when not doing a large download to update the game data Tibia ME uses about 0.5 megabytes of data transfer per hour. TibiaME is advertised as a free game, however to really get the most out of it any player serious enough to get past level 10 should buy the Gold client for $4.99. This will open most dungeons on Aurea, enable the auto-drawing mini-map, and allow you to list who is online. Quite a bit of the content is still locked behind the Premium account. For 3 Euros per month you will get access to all dungeons and premium only areas, which includes all of the new islands like the haunted Ashmor, included in the Autumn update on November 8, 2007. Premium accounts also gain more experience per kill after level 10, lose less experience when they die, and can use the all new portal system for faster traveling between various dungeons and town. I would absolutely recommend paying the monthly fee if you play the game regularly. If you’re just starting out, the free version should get you about 20-30 hours of exploration before you start to get curious about what else is out there.

Continue on to combat and role-playing

Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates (just Puzzle Pirates from here on out) is an entertaining series of casual games tied together by a loose pirate milieu. Each of the games represents a particular piratical job like pumping out the bilges, trimming the sails, and the like. Several players at once can combine efforts to run a ship, or a single player can run with a crew of computer-controlled NPCs. Each job assists in the ship’s progress in some manner—trimming the sails allows the ship to go faster, carpentry repairs damage inflicted by enemy action, and loading the cannons allows the ship to fire broadsides more quickly.

When you get tired of working on ship, you can go ashore and brawl, swordfight, or play drinking and parlor games. In the early stages of the game, the only real purpose of these jobs is to increase your rating in each and to earn Pieces of Eight, which are the coin of the realm. Later on in your nautical career, a player can cast their lot with a scurvy crew and sail the seas looking for prizes. This is when the jobs become critical; as the ship needs every edge it can get against its opponents.

However, this divide between new players earning coin and more experienced players contributing to a crew is one of the few major problems of the game. In an ever-widening MMO market, getting new players involved with the persistent world that differentiates MMOs from single-player—or even most multi-player—games as soon as possible is critical, and Puzzle Pirates fails to do so. While the tutorials for most of the games are put together well enough, and the earlygames themselves are easy to pick up, there is no in-game explanation as to how to get signed on to a crew or exactly why you’re completing all these puzzles and gathering up Pieces of Eight. Additionally, players can easily take on one of the more advanced jobs before a tutorial has been offered for it.

Intro-level problems aside, most of the various games are incredibly entertaining, as they should be, given that they’re drawn from popular casual games (bilge pumping is essentially Bejeweled, rumbling is Bust-A-Move/Snood with a few tweaks, and sword fighting is Puzzle Fighter II Turbo with a new skin, for instance). It would be quite easy to simply wander around the world playing these games for hours on end without ever once interacting with another player. While this may be fun, however, it doesn’t utilize the key benefit of the MMO genre, the fact that the game is played in a persistent world populated by characters controlled by other players around the world.

As your pirate earns Pieces of Eight, different clothing options, pets, swords, and even ships and shops will become available. Most of the purchasable items have no game effect, but as you might expect, new swords give you a bonus to the sword-fighting game (one of the most important ones, as it allows you to loot a ship once you’ve run it down). Shops allow you to create items to sell to other players, actually contributing to and driving the game economy, which is exceptionally cool, and one very rarely implemented in other MMOs. Ships, of course, allow you to gather your own scurvy crew and scour the seas for ripe prizes. Unfortunately, only one crew member can be captain, and all the others have to just be crew, stuck pumping bilges, repairing holes in the hull, or setting sails, and there-in lies another problem with Puzzle Pirates. Just about every pirate worth his or her salt is going to want to captain his or her own ship, and so most crew members are just biding time until they can afford a ship of their own, meaning that there’s usually a lack of permanency to a crew roster.

Despite the difficulty in getting new players involved with the world at large, those who are already playing are usually extremely friendly, and quite enthusiastic. Pirate-ese is the order of the day here, with players greeting one another with “Yar” and “Ahoy” instead of the usual “kk gg gtg” leet-speak that drives most gamers over the age of 14 crazy. I’ve heard stories of crews who stick together through thick and thin and become scourges of the seas, well-oiled machines unmatched by fellow player or AI. There are other players out there, and they’re interacting with each other, however little it may look like it at first.

Just like most MMOs, you have to pay to play, but unlike most of them, you only have to pay to use some of the features. So long as you’re happy being a bilge rat and swabbing the decks (not literally, they don’t have a game for that yet), you can play for free; the basic games are entirely free and each day there is a selection of land-lubberly pursuits (fighting, drinking games, parlor games) available to play for free. If you want to captain your own ship, run your own shop, or play any game whenever you want, however, you have to pony up with the hard currency. Several servers (oceans, in Puzzle Pirate parlance) run on a subscription-based system, where you pay a regular fee for unlimited access to any of the for-pay features. The other oceans are on a micro-payment scale, which many MMOs seem to be implementing recently, where you only pay real-life money when you actually want to use a for-pay feature.

The art and music are a little cheesy, with your pirate and everyone else in the world looking like slightly-smoothed Lego people and most song loops seeming pretty short, but they definitely fit the feel of the game, which is light, cartoony, and fun. All in all, I think that as one of the first casual MMOs on the market, Puzzle Pirates has a lot to offer the Gaming industry in general and the MMO niche in particular, but I do think there is definitely some room for improvement, especially in new player immersion and effective use of the persistent game world.

Rating: 4 out of 5. Good clean fun, but not as elegant or newbie-friendly as it could have been.

Note: This review is broken up into two parts. In the first half, we covered the early game, levels 1-25. In this half we will be covering the later levels, and the end game beyond. If you haven’t read Part One yet, you can find it [over here].

The Honeymoon is Over

We had such a good thing going, you and I. I honestly thought that it was true love. And yet, now it ends in divorce.

Where did we all go wrong?

Was it your plethora of quests? Your relatively faithful interpretation of the world of Middle-Earth? Or, perhaps, the ease and intuitiveness of your gameplay?

No… like so many divorces, it’s impossible to pinpoint any one single element that brought the relationship to ruin. It was a combination of things. Let’s just call it…

Irreconcilable Differences

I hit level 50 some time ago. Since then, I’ve been partaking of the usual activities of a capped out player in an MMO: Leveling alts, farming for gold, gearing up for raids, and, of course, waiting for a patch.

Man oh man, was I ever waiting for a patch.

The cracks in the game’s polished veneer had begun to show through even as I was wrapping up Part One of this review, when I was still under level 40. Don’t even get me started on how many horrible, horrible quests there are in the North Downs.

At the time I was seriously considering knocking points off of the score, as I could see the quality of the game dropping precipitously with no recovery in sight. But, as Part One was meant to be a review of levels 1-25, which I thoroughly enjoyed, I felt that I had to leave the rating untouched.

Aside from which, even I’m not so jaded that I wasn’t willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and hold off on any rush to condemnation until at least the first major content patch. Perhaps Turbine was well aware of the late game’s shortcomings, and intended to fix them shortly after launch, when most of their playerbase would only just be starting to experience them.

That patch has now come and gone, having resolved few of the prior issues, and at the same time creating a host of entirely new ones.

So it is now, with a clear conscience but a heavy heart, that I may write what I must:

LOTRO turns into a Tolkien-themed Asian grinder after level 40.

There. I said it.

Don’t get me wrong… I’ve got nothing at all against a game ratcheting up the difficulty in the later levels. If LOTRO were the same at level 50 as it was at level 1, they may as well have implemented a level scaling system like Oblivion.

But, this is not mere difficulty adjustment; this is blatant, unapologetic, make-work time sink generation.

I don’t go throwing around accusations like that about a game lightly, so, allow me to introduce you to two of the prime suspects which would cause me to say such a thing:

Legendary Traits

The grind that had been so refreshingly absent in the early portion of the game manifests itself with a vengeance once you hit level 40 and your Legendary Trait slots are unlocked.

Anyone who ever played FFXI into the later levels will undoubtedly recall, less-than-fondly, the concept of “genkai.” For those of you who skipped FFXI (a wise decision on your part), in a nutshell, every five levels after 50, you were forced to complete a mindless, soul-numbing quest in order to further increase the level cap of your character.

These quests often involved agonizingly long camp sessions which were impossible to solo, forcing your team to wait for hours on a rare drop item to materialize so that you could run half way across the world and repeat the process all over again.

Now, imagine that instead of having to do that every five levels, you had to do it just to train your best skills after level 40.

Welcome to the Legendary Trait portion of LOTRO.

Skills available from your class trainer dry up in the late thirties. We were at first mystified as to how we were meant to advance our characters after that… Until it became apparent that Turbine intended for the attainment of Legendary Traits to take the place of standard training.

Obtaining Legendary Traits is a three step process, each more painful than the last:

1: Find (or buy off of the auction house at exorbitant expense) a rare drop book from a random level 39+ humanoid, somewhere in the world.

2: Find (or buy off of the auction house at exorbitant expense) four rare drop pages for said book, somewhere in the world.

3: Finally, just to make quite certain that not only you, but also five of your closest friends are going to be wasting time, find four more pages which are not only rare, but also no-trade, and only drop from level 40+ elites.

[EDIT: People flaming me over on the LOTRO boards have kindly pointed out that I am full of hyperbole and BS, as many Legendary Traits do not require camping elite mobs for pages. See, I need friends like you when I'm writing an article. When I asked mine to proofread, they all said they couldn't find any mistakes. Incidently, I would like to weigh in on your critiques of my critique, but unfortunately I no longer have an active account. Feel free to use the comments form at the bottom of this page.]

To give you a ballpark figure of how long getting these pages takes (this is personal experience, and your mileage may vary):

A friend of mine obtained one of the aforementioned books on her Burglar, and a quick check of Allakhazam revealed that half of the pages she needed dropped from a certain type of elite spider in North Trollshaws. As we all had quests for these spiders anyway, we selflessly volunteered to assist her.

Over the next six hours of farming, our team got the deeds Spider Slayer for 120 kills, Spider Slayer Advanced for 240 kills, and finished five Fellowship quests.

The Burglar got one page.

We kindly informed her that perhaps she should get into the market for some new friends, as we were never returning to that place again for so long as we lived.

In all fairness, you do get one Legendary Trait for free, as a reward for your level 45 class quest, no pages involved. Of course, once you see the requirements, you’ll be begging for a nice, easy six hour farm.

Deeds

In the first part of this review, I gave an example of a Slayer Deed for killing 60 slugs in the Shire. At the time, I thought that was a good rounded number. About 30 to 45 minutes, depending on spawn rate, to complete. Not too high, not too low, based on the relatively small bonuses Virtues award.

What I didn’t mention in Part One is that the number of mobs that you have to kill for deeds doubles roughly every ten levels. If you’ve ever heard that old story about compound interest with a penny doubling daily, you can see where this is going already.

From 30 for the Title and 60 for the Virtue when first starting out, it goes to 60 and 120, 120 and 240, 180 and 360, and, so far the highest I’ve seen, 240 and 480.

No, you didn’t read that wrong. In the later levels you are going to have to kill 720 of the same mob to attain a modicum of improvement for your character.

It could of course be argued that both high level Deeds and Legendary Traits are purely optional—so long as you’re willing to forfeit your character’s best skills—and the people being masochists by just having to get them are bringing the pain upon themselves willingly, thus being unworthy of sympathy.

That may very well be true… but Turbine did not market the game to masochists. They marketed it as the kinder, gentler, “play it after work” MMO. The MMO someone with a family working 60 hours a week could enjoy just as well as the unemployed college student who plays 60 hours a week.

As far as I’m concerned, turning the end game into a massive grind is at best a betrayal of the spirit of the early levels, and at worst, a bait and switch on the playerbase.

Now, I’d like to touch on some of the issues I said I’d cover more in-depth in Part One:

Instances

The instances in LOTRO are, by and large, extremely repetitive in nature, confusingly laid out, and poorly itemized… which is rarely, if ever, a good combination.

The first major instance you encounter in the game is The Great Barrows. It’s hard to screw up a hole in the ground with dead guys in it, and, overall, I felt it was largely true to the description in the books. You could get lost for hours in its claustrophic twisting hallways, interspersed with larger caverns here and there.

So far, so good.

The problems begin at the next two instances after The Great Barrows: Garth Agarwen, and Fornost.

Despite the fact that both of them are ostensibly outdoors, the majority of their areas are made up of the exact same twisting, narrow passageways (but not quite claustrophic, as you can see the sky overhead), intersperced by the occasional larger open areas that you already came to know and love in the Barrows.

But unlike the Barrows, where such a layout is befitting of a catacomb, the mazelike structure of Garth and Fornost only serve as a refresher course in linear level design, chokepoint after chokepoint leading you by the nose from one repetitive encounter to another, eventually reaching a boss when you come to a dead end, whose loot (if they have any at all) is so uninspiring as to make the entire journey feel a wasted venture.

As for the bosses themselves, in nearly every case the differences between them were minimal. Not unlike their quest archetypes, Turbine chose not to go out on a limb with AI or scripting, and, as a result, nearly every encounter seems to follow three distinct patterns:

A: The boss will summon adds every thirty seconds.

B: The boss will stand there and let you hit them until they’re dead, using their special ability every thirty seconds.

C: The boss will summon adds and use their special ability every thirty seconds.

Option A was, by far, the most common choice. This got predictable to the point that before every fight we’d say, “Alright. You know the drill. MT on the boss, assist OT on the adds.”

These factors, among others, added up to the point that I am not exaggerating when I say that I have played through better dungeons in MUDs, over ten years ago. When a guy in his underwear sitting in his mother’s basement writing mudcode in Notepad is outdesigning a title with an entire extra dimension and a budget in the millions, something is seriously wrong.

Raids

So, obviously, I wasn’t particularly fond of the instances. That’s fine. Generally I’m not a real “small dungeon crawl” type as far as MMOs are concerned, anyway. I’m a raider. I love the feeling of leading my guild into the unknown, getting them working together like a well-oiled machine, and taking down an encounter that has never known defeat.

Through it all, the book grinds, the 720 mob deeds, the repetitive instances, my guild and I held on to the glimmer of hope that the forthcoming raids would be the panacea that would cure all of our ills with the game.

If Turbine really nailed raid content, perhaps all could be forgiven.

In the end, the only thing that got nailed was us.

On patch day I rallied my guild together for a raid on Helegrod. They didn’t need much encouragement. We had been awaiting this moment for weeks, collecting the best available gear, maxing out our Traits and Virtues, hoarding potions and scrolls from our scholars… If anybody was ready, it was us.

In true LOTRO style, every member of the raid had a dozen quests a piece for the new instance, and we were all looking forward to the phat lewt and good times that the new encounters were sure to provide.

That is, until we actually got inside.

There we were, 24 people with a dozen quests a piece. Quests, which we rapidly discovered, mostly required item collection… in particular, items that only dropped from bosses. Once per kill.

Meaning, if everyone in the raid wanted to complete a particular quest, we were going to have to kill the same boss…

Two. Dozen. Times.

In all of my considerable years playing MMOs, I am hard-pressed to recall any dungeon that I ran two dozen times, even during those dark days in WoW when the only thing to do was blitz through UBRS to get people their Onyxia keys.

Still, we could live with that. Not everyone can complete every quest, making the rewards different and unique for the ones who did. If the combat was up to par, and the encounters were challenging and engaging, we could forgive a lot.

In an epic night in which near-lethal levels of caffeine and tens of thousands of calories worth of junk food were consumed, we fought our way tooth and nail through the Dwarf fortress, searching for the evil within.

The first boss we came across was a rather unfriendly looking spider, so we quickly got down to the business of cheering it up by killing it.

After several false starts, involving the encounter resetting itself, and the spider death touching the entire raid for no apparent reason, we soon thereafter savored the sweet taste of victory, and were rewarded by a large and conspicuous treasure chest which mysteriously appeared atop the spider’s dead body.

Despite the fact that such overt displays of magic as a spider swallowing a treasure chest whole were not supposed to be such common occurances in the world of Middle-Earth, we decided we could let this one slide.

Upon opening the chest, there was much oohing and ahhing–and several groans–as it was revealed that the chest contained one quest item, and one pair of gloves for the Loremaster armor set. Bind on pickup. And we didn’t have any Loremasters in the raid.

Still, they had to be worth something at the vendor. So, we rolled for greed… and, immediately thereafter, the chest vanished into thin air, taking the loot with it.

Alright, alight… that was just an isolated incident, we told ourselves… Patch night jitters…. Surely they’ll have a hotfix for that in the morning. We didn’t need those gloves, anyway. We elected to press on.

We came to the next boss, an equally unfriendly looking giant, eager to try again.

We got him down to 30%… to 20%… then, under 5%, on the very cusp of victory, when we were already discussing loot distribution, and pronouncing a curse on the designers should we get any more Loremaster gloves… he entered into Anti-Exploit Mode and healed to full. He then proceeded to stand there doing nothing for half an hour as we attempted in vain to reset him, whereupon he, too, promptly vanished without a trace.

Most of my guild cancelled their subscriptions the next day.

Crafting

Do you enjoy spending dozens, even hundreds of hours of your life farming for materials from heavily camped rare spawn mobs, only to have the one-time use recipe it took forever to find produce a sub-par item inferior to quest rewards?

Then the world of Master crafting in LOTRO is for you.

Even with the best crafting equipment, the critical component item, and a buff from a scholar, you are never guaranteed a “critical success” item, which are, in general, the only items in the game superior to quest rewards, or even five man instance drops.

I haven’t met many designers who would think it fun and endearing to players to have them spend all day grinding out a level, only to have a 50% chance that once they got there, their character would spontaneously combust and they’d end up back where they started.

Who thought that it would be fun to use that system for crafting?

I understand the need to reduce mudflation and keep prices for player-made items at a reasonable level, but in this case, the ends do not justify the means. There are many other routes they could have taken to reduce the commonality of high-quality player crafted items without resorting to causing outright frustration… for instance, making armor bind on use. As it is now, my Armorer friend can see a suit he crafted be sold in perpetuity… not exactly good for repeat business.

Monster Play

I had originally intended to write a thorough deconstruction of the PvM system in this half of the review, but, as it’s turning out to be longer than I had expected, I will have to keep it blunt and to the point:

I hope that Turbine has big plans for Monster Play once the rest of the world starts opening up in future expansions and new zones become available for it… but, at the moment it seems like nothing more than a ham-fisted attempt to appease the PvP demographic, tacked on at the eleventh hour almost as an afterthought.

Even as an afterthought, Turbine was forced to dance a fine line, attempting to provide enough incentive for people to participate in it, while at the same time not providing so much incentive that it produced a considerable edge for participants over more pacifist players, who would then whine about it without cease.

In the end, it seems that their solution was to render the system almost completely irrelevant beyond the borders of the small zone which PvM is confined to.

The Final Word

So, having just spent the last ten pages ravaging it, do I still think that LOTRO is a good game? Absolutely… up to and including level 35. After that… You’d be better off waiting for the first expansion, when the rest of the game will hopefully start to arrive.

I’m sure that the rest of LOTRO will be as good as its beginning is in due time—they’re undoubtly going to get rid of the grind two seconds after they feel it no longer needed to buy them time to fully develop the end game—but it certainly isn’t now.

After ten years of playing “release now, patch later” games, and hoping beyond hope that LOTRO would be the light shining in the darkness, now is what matters to this reviewer.

Part Two Rating: 3/5
Recommendation: If you buy it, play casual, and pretend the level cap is 40.

The three playable classes are one-dimensional, the combat system is very basic, and all of the monsters are in instanced dungeons. Like most RPGs your first few challenges are easy to do solo, but at a certain level you feel prepared to team up with other players and take on some more rewarding encounters. Dungeon Runners offers little in the way of player interaction, and there just isn’t much incentive to group up. All of the level 30+ players I talked to said they’d spent maybe one day in the last two weeks in a party — usually just for thirty minutes to complete the final couple levels of one dungeon. The rest of the time they play solo and barely acknowledge other players.

Who needs crowd control and healing anyway?
Currently the game offers the choice of a human fighter, mage, or ranger. The standard RPG character sheet shows your character’s level, class, base stats, magic resistances, magic bonuses, defense, and combat stats. A fighter will focus on endurance for hit points, strength for defense, and agility for attack rating. Mages need intellect for mana points. Rangers use agility for attack rating and critical hits. This is all pretty much as you would expect. Fighters get the most hit points per point of endurance, mages get the most mana points per point of intellect, and Rangers get the most attack power per point of agility. Most developers are straying away from systems that let the user customize their character in this way because it leaves too much room for the user to completely gimp themselves if they choose to neglect the mechanics of the game. However the ability to customize your character at least offers players the chance to role-play a little in this very simple game.

Besides your statistics you can further customize your character by getting magical equipment, and by purchasing new skills from a trainer. All skills are available to all classes — so your ranger can purchase the fighter’s knock back skill, or a fighter can purchase the mage’s fireball. You will still have to depend on your class’s strengths to survive, but later in the game it may be beneficial to have certain combinations of skills, and those may be what make your character truly unique. However, in the first twenty-four hours of play time I did not find that my ranger was any different than anyone else’s. My experiences were not unique; the game is linear. I walked the same steps as everyone else. I killed the same monsters and acquired the same level in exactly the same way as everyone else. I might have gotten to level ten faster than one player, but as soon as they hit level ten there would be almost no way to tell us apart except for our names. We are the same race, the same class, we have both had access to the same items, and we have acquired the same amount of gold. Sure, I picked the face with the eye-patch for my avatar while yours has a huge scar, but that’s hardly distinguishing in a game where you’re looking at the back of your head most of the time, and where the variety of equipment graphics is severely lacking.

A headache and a finger cramp
This inability to distinguish one character from the next is primarily frustrating in a dungeon. When you’re killing monsters all you really have to do is keep the mouse cursor over the target and hold down the left mouse button. The ranged classes will stand and fire, and the fighter will run up right next to the target and start hacking away. The camera keeps your character centered at all times, but if you’re running with two other players that look identical to you it can be very confusing if you’re all on screen at once. You just have to keep clicking furiously until everything is dead.

Much like Diablo this is a hack-and-slash click-fest and all dungeons can be navigated with just the mouse and the click-to-move option (which is defaulted to ON). Unlike Diablo, you can use the keyboard to run, strafe and turn. This makes traversing dungeons a little smoother because you can just sit back and hold down the ‘w’ key and tap the ‘a’ and ‘d’ keys to turn. Moving with the keyboard makes Dungeon Runners appear to be an MMO like World of Warcraft or City of Heroes, but it still plays like a MUD and feels more like Dungeon Siege. With combat and movement both controlled by the mouse it can be very annoying to fight as a melee character. If your cursor isn’t directly over a monster your fighter will run to the spot you’re aiming at. If the monsters are moving around at all, your character will do more running than killing. Fortunately the game includes the hold position command, an important convention in click-to-move interfaces. Holding the ‘shift’ key turns your character into a turret throwing fireballs and punches in the direction of the cursor. If you ever feel out of control or like your character just won’t stay put the ‘shift’ key can help you focus and do some damage. I also found it helpful to use the ‘v’ key to reset the camera behind my character, and to zoom out a few clicks on the mini-map for better barrings.

Wash, rinse, repeat
After taking the time to get used to movement and combat the game pace picks up pretty quickly. Since there are no heal spells or crowd control skills in Dungeon Runners your character’s survival depends on potions. There is no cool down timer restricting your use of potions so you can use as many as you want. Hit point and mana point potions can be purchased in amounts limited only by your inventory space. Free accounts can use potions that take up one square in the inventory grid, but subscribe and pay $5 USD per month and you can use the stackable variety — vastly increasing your potential space. Any equipment you pickup utilizes this same inventory grid, and just like Diablo and Dungeon Siege, managing your inventory and deciding what items to pickup and what to ignore is a constant chore. Subscribers get their own bank space in town to store items for later use. Good equipment drops are rare and are never more than a couple levels above yours, so it isn’t often that you save a piece of equipment. You can either use it immediately, or you sell it. Its common for players level fifteen plus to only pickup blue quality items or better because anything less just isn’t worth the inventory space.

Once your inventory fills up it is standard practice to use a way point scroll to teleport back to town, sell everything, and buy more potions. Way point scrolls are relatively cheap so it isn’t uncommon to fill your inventory and make a trip through town two or three times in an hour. This sort of loop is repeated over and over until you’ve completed all seven levels of the dungeon and killed the final boss. The repetition and the mind-numbing simplicity of combat make me want to setup a script to level my character for me. It would almost be more fun to automate this game and watch it than it is to play it.

Dungeon Runners appears to be a quick and dirty release of what perhaps Diablo III would have been like if it had been released two years ago. NCSoft succeeded at making a very accessible game with many of the standards you’d expect from an RPG. The interface windows and objects are easy to use and understand. The quest system keeps you moving so you don’t get lost. Character customization is simple and straightforward. All of the basics you’d expect are there, but that’s it. There are no intelligent monsters to keep you guessing. There are no puzzles or any extracurricular activities like crafting. The itemization is pretty bad, and what is there is all random including names and stats on equipment. (At level twenty I don’t have any gear that appears unique.) There is no variety in the equipment models so everyone looks the same. There is no player vs. player and there is really no way to die. There is no combat outside of instances so you’ll never make a new friend by running by someone and lending a helping hand. The only interaction is in town, and everyone is just there to buy skills or potions before teleporting back into their dungeon. The game just isn’t really much more than a single player game that requires an internet connection. I’m completely burned out on the game and I’ve had it only two weeks. After I found myself in the rut of kill, port to town, sell/buy, port back I started to lose interest. Not that im looking to get addicted to the game, but it would be nice if there were at least some redeeming qualities to keep me coming back.

Dungeon Runners is totally free, so you should give it a try if you have some time to kill. If you really get serious you should purchase the subscription so you can have stackable potions, the highest quality equipment, bank storage, and login priority in case the world server is full. If you enjoy games like Dungeon Siege and are content with only one character and vastly limited content then you might enjoy this. On the other hand, if the “free” price tag doesn’t intrigue you or you’re looking for a deeper game like World of Warcraft then don’t even bother.

Rating: 3/5
Recommendation: Try it, don’t buy it.

Perhaps the greatest compliment that I could pay to LOTRO is that I didn’t want to stop playing it long enough to write this review.

No one is more surprised about that than I am. Like many MMO players I know, I was sure that after the cancellation of AC2, and the, shall we say, “less-than-stellar performance” of DDO, LOTRO was destined to be the final nail in Turbine’s coffin. If they didn’t learn from their mistakes the last two times, why would they the third?

Color me shocked. Not only has Turbine learned the lessons of their past missteps, they have created what is arguably one of the most polished and addictive MMO experiences in years.

The Good

In a welcome breath of fresh air, departing from what seems to be the industry standard of “release now, patch later,” LOTRO has a level of polish and overall quality I haven’t seen in an MMO this close after launch in quite some time.

Server stability (at least, on the one I play) is second to none, and crashes, lockups, and other hassles that tend to accompany new releases are nearly non-existent.

Client performance is impressive, as well. My machine hasn’t been top of the line since this time last year, and I’ve been able to run the game on Ultra High with only a few hiccups, mostly when moving into new areas.

The graphics are not the most cutting-edge that I’ve ever seen, but the game world itself is richly detailed, and the art style is exactly what we’ve all come to expect Middle-Earth to look like (I’m sure Peter Jackson had something to do with that).

The gameplay is of the “click skill buttons and wait” variety, which should be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever played an MMO in the past ten years. Turbine obviously wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of mechanics. Instead, they seem to have tried to boil the game down to the pure, basic essentials that make all great MMOs so entertaining and addictive.

This is at once both one of the game’s greatest strengths, and its greatest weakness. On the one hand, jaded veterans (such as myself) will likely experience a distinct feeling of déjà vu at having already played through most of what LOTRO has to offer in a dozen previous titles… On the other hand, for players just starting out in the genre, there hasn’t been an MMO with this level of accessibility to the general public since WoW.

Even one as jaded as myself has to admit, with certain admiration, that although the game doesn’t bring very much that’s new to the table, what’s there is executed to near-perfection.

On top of this, the game is just plain fun to play. Turbine has chosen to buck the prevailing design trends of “harder deaths, slower exp,” and take some of the grind and monotony out of MMOs—though, granted, there’s still plenty of it to go around. The game has no experience loss on death, no corpse runs, and no “hell levels” that you’ll be stuck grinding for a week.

In another departure from most MMOs on the market, you won’t be starting out in this game by killing rats (they save that for later). I won’t spoil all of the openings for you, but, depending on your race, you’ll be doing anything from escaping a brigand camp with the help of a Ranger, to trying to stop the resurrection of an evil Dwarf king. Within minutes of starting, your character will find itself embroiled in an epic quest that will span the entire length of the game.

These introductory sequences are a great hook, and serve to get you into the world and fully immersed in the story right from the start.

And, once you’re into it, you will never find yourself for want of something to do. Every zone seems to have at least a hundred quests, ranging from one-offs that reward only some quick experience, to story-driven chains culminating in boss fights deep within enemy bases.

This wealth of content extends nearly to the point of absurdity; just when you think that you’ve completed all the quests in a particular zone, and are finally ready to move on to the next, you wander into an area you hadn’t explored previously, and find a camp with a dozen more.

If you should ever find that you are not in the questing mood, the game also has a full-featured crafting system that, much like the rest of the game, is very intuitive and easy to get into.

To encourage people to take up a craft, Turbine claims that the best items in the game can only be made by players, but I haven’t seen much evidence of this, yet.

I’ll have more on the crafting system in Part 2 of this review.

The Bad

All of this glowing praise is not to say that the game is without faults.

For instance, all of these hundreds and hundreds of quests necessitate a certain amount of repetition—and, even by level 25, you’ll begin to notice when three NPCs in the same area ask you to kill varying numbers of exactly the same mobs.

Boars, in particular, seem to be a developer favorite. One of the more lighthearted amongst them even pokes fun at this, by having one of the taverns in the Shire selling “More Boar Beer.” Description: “Because you can never have too many boars.”

Turbine also didn’t go out on a limb and attempt to create any bold new quest archetypes… You’ll largely be collecting wolf hides, playing FedEx, and killing conveniently placed mobs, just like the old days.

The crafting system, while very intuitive and easy to get into, is not particularly useful in the early levels.

In most professions, by the time you’re skilled enough to make Master items (which are the only ones worth equipping, when compared to quest rewards, or even common drops), you’ve already out-leveled them.

Worse still, in the later tiers crafting becomes a monotonous resource grind, where you will be spending hours and hours out in the fields mining, chopping, and studying your painfully slow way to Mastery.

The size of the game world itself is another minor detraction for me—or, more specifically, the lack of size.

I own a hardcover copy of The Lord of the Rings with one of Tolkien’s original maps printed on the end pages… According to the map’s distance key, it is approximately a hundred miles to Bree from The Shire.

This being the case, considering the fact that it takes about five minutes to get to Bree from The Shire on horseback either indicates that horses in the game are traveling over a thousand miles per hour, or that Turbine employed a 100:1 compression ratio on Middle Earth.

Now, obviously, 100 miles in any traditional MMO is untenable (and no, Dark and Light does not count). I doubt if all the zones in EverQuest laid out end to end are even 10 miles in total after eight years of expansions.

Still, I think if Turbine went even 50% larger on the game world, it would feel that much more immersive, and more “world-like,” rather than like a Middle-Earth themed Disney World.

But, that’s a personal preference on my part. Many people will likely enjoy a smaller, more “intimate” game that is full of life, as opposed to one that is vast and empty.

My final gripe (for this half of the review) has to do with the amount of lore that the development team is limited to… and to explain it properly, I have to delve into a bit of a history lesson:

The Ugly

In chaos theory, it is said that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon rain forest can trigger a hurricane on the opposite side of the globe.

A similar chain of unlikely events has added up to give us The Lord of the Rings Online today.

In 1968, J.R.R. Tolkien got a bill from the tax man he couldn’t afford to pay. To cover this debt, he sold the film and merchandising rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to MGM Studios. The exact figure he received for them seems to be in dispute (various sources claim it to be anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000), but, suffice it to say, in retrospect it was not nearly enough money.

MGM soon afterward turned around and sold the rights to a Hollywood producer by the name of Saul Zaentz.

Zaentz, evidently a very sly businessman, has gone on to make roughly a bajillion dollars from the rights through his company Tolkien Enterprises, which licenses the creation of movies (including the much-derided 1978 animated version of LOTR), trading cards, collectible figurines, and, of course… games.

Not a single cent of this money has ever gone to the Tolkien estate, aside from the rise in book sales which accompanied the popularity of the more recent films.

Tolkien’s son, Christopher, is understandably somewhat bitter about this, and as such, he refuses to touch anything Zaentz is involved in with a ten foot pole.

As a result, barring an act of God, only lore, characters, and areas depicted in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit will ever make it into the game. The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-Earth are all completely off-limits to the development team. These omissions may not bother the average player who has only read the trilogy or seen the films, but for hardcore Tolkienites (is that even a word?) this fact will likely be a thorn in their sides, and a major detractor to playing.

Moving on…

The Gimmick

Every new MMO these days seems to try to have a gimmick in an attempt to set themselves apart from the other million or so fantasy games on the market, and, in LOTRO’s case, it is arguably its most innovative feature: The Deed System, which serves as LOTRO’s answer to Talent and Alternate Advancement systems.

Every character has what’s called a Deed Log, and, after performing certain tasks (completing a quest, killing a mob, reaching a new level, etc.), new Deeds become available.

The Deed rewards come in three varieties: Titles, Virtues, and Traits, and each comprises a sort of miniature quest, with only one goal, which largely seem to have been designed around the four classic Bartle Types: Achiever, Killer, Explorer, and Socializer.

For Achievers, there is the obtainment of the Virtues and Traits which the Deeds award, which offer various character improvements, such as added stats, in the case of Virtues, and new skills, or improvements of old skills in the case of Traits.

For Killers, there are Deeds to, for example, kill 60 slugs in The Shire (which also has a very amusing title to go along with it).

For Explorers, there are Deeds to find all of the Elven ruins in Ered Luin.

And, for Socializers, there are titles and special role-playing abilities awarded to those who collect a certain number of emotes directed at their character.

The ingenious nature of this system lay in the fact that even after a player reaches the maximum level, there will likely always be some Deeds that they missed along the way (not unlike quests, there are at least a dozen of them to be had in every single zone), which can still help them improve their skills if they’re inclined to put in the effort.

Virtues and Traits can have a major impact on your character, and, as you only have a limited number of slots for them available, choosing between them can at times become a painful decision, just as a system of this nature should be.

A lesser gimmick is the game’s Monster Play system, which allows for PvP (or PvM, as Turbine calls it) against player-controlled mobs. But, as there are currently very few level 50 players to engage against, I will save mention of that for Part 2 of this review.

In Conclusion

The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar doesn’t do a whole lot that’s new, but it does a lot of old very, very well.

It has taken and refined some of the most entertaining and addictive elements of MMOs of the past, and masterfully blended them into the world created by J.R.R. Tolkien (or, at least, the portions of it that Saul Zaentz has the rights to).

When all is said and done, I can summarize this entire review with a single sentence:

“If you like WoW, and you like Lord of the Rings… that’s pretty much it.”

Rating: 4.5 / 5

Recommendation: Buy

In the next part of the review, we’ll take a look at instances, epic traits, monster play, and why if I never set foot in the North Downs again for as long as I live, it will be too soon.