Category Archive: Reviews

Jan 03 2011

Retro Review: Lord of the Rings The Battle for Middle Earth 2

Categories:

360, Completionist, Jon, Reviews

by Jon Shute

January 3, 2011

The plan for this year is to go back and look at the games that triggered my descent into console madness way back in 2006 when I first got me 360. I’m looking at the games I didn’t get around to completing by going back and, well, completing them of course.

The first game on my radar was actually an RTS: The Battle for Middle-Earth 2. It turns out that back in the day I had played through most of the good campaign and fallen at the hurdle of a mission where I had to nursemaid a force through encounters before I could unlock the ability to create new units. This seems to have been a problem to me back then, and even today that mission was far too long as even when I had reached that part I still had to mount a full assault.

The plot is simple enough. There are two campaigns, good and evil, and you are generally pottering around in the north dealing with the forces of Sauron for the good campaign until the inevitable win due to Hobbits disposing of rings offscreen and you crushing the last of the enemy. The evil campaign is more interesting as it’s not constrained at all by the books and gets to cover a bunch of events that might have happened if evil had prevailed. It does  drift towards the events of the books with the scouring of the shire, but in a way so that even that is different due to there being more evil around than at the end of the books.

The game only has 16 missions, 8 for each side, but that should still be at least 20 hours gameplay for most people and quite possibly more if you’re more of a base builder so the game is certainly good value

The game is an real time strategy game of the type that is obviously better off with being on a PC. That’s not to say that they haven’t tried, but console RTS games, even today, tend towards the zerg over finesse. You can select units individually by clicking on them, selecting everything using the d-pad or you can select all of one unit type through a very quick and painless menu selection. There are no routes to program, you just tell units where to go. It’s very basic, but works.

The reason why it works is that it’s a very direct game. You don’t need subtle when you have a horde of troops running between objectives, or shoring up defenses but this can lead to a slightly straightforwards and linear feeling in an RTS. In fact I was mocked by my co-host during the final mission of the game as I solved every little problem with giants throwing rocks. Merry and Pippin? Rock to the face! Elrond? Rock to the face! Gandalf? Rock to the face! Not very subtle, but it worked. Still, a level or so earlier I had done the same to Gloin, which anybody who remembers our adventures through Lord of the Rings Online will know was a very satisfying thing indeed.

This certainly isn’t a game for people who don’t like Lord of the Rings as I suspect that the subject material forgave a lot of the flaws in the game for me. The plot relies on knowledge of the books or films in order to tie together and taken on it’s own I think it would be quite disjointed. The lack of any real strategy in an RTS is probably not a problem for most casual players, but the controls are clunky enough to mean that people who want more subtly will be disappointed.

The multiplayer servers are being turned off on January 11th and I took the opportunity to grab those achievements while I could, but I resorted to boosting as actually playing this game online was very unsatisfactory. It just lacked the level of control I needed in order to enjoy myself but to be fair I really don’t like multiplayer in RTSs as my experiences always have been those of min-maxing the best strategy before the opponent does the same.

Performance wise the game doesn’t look like it should tax the 360 with its pretty basic graphics and last generation shadows.

The last strange little note about the game is that it doesn’t have a full 1000 gamerscore with its achievements. These very early games hadn’t quite figured out the whole achievement thing, and the game stopped at 750 points. What’s more some of those achievements were bugged until the end of last year when the multiplayer servers were reset and so it’s had something of a bad reputation for most of it’s existence.

So in summary this is for LOTR fans who only want a casual experience, and I suspect the loss of online play will only be mourned by those who still need the achievements. As it’s an RTS on a console, and a very early one at that, it’s not exactly the smoothest experience for either the controls or the framerate. Still, everybody was learning how to use the console at that stage and the games quickly improved.

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Apr 29 2010

Review: Splinter Cell Conviction

Categories:

Jon, Reviews

by Jon Shute

April 29, 2010

There’s something interesting happening with stealth games lately, and Batman: Arkham Asylum was a good example of this as it takes the sneak-em-up gameplay and adds enough arse kicking to make you feel powerful despite the fact you spend some of your time hiding.

I think it’s this “They should be afraid of the shadows because I’m there” attitude that Batman got so right, and it’s something that Splinter Cell: Conviction does as well. Batman used guns as a gate to force you to actually need to sneak sometimes, and Splinter cell does the same to a lesser extent but allows you to play more as a 3rd person shooter if you want to just run and gun your way through the game.

The plot is the usual affair. Fresh from hi captaincy of the Sea Quest (I may be confused there, but I should get marks for the reference) Sam Fisher is a tad miffed with his daughter being dead and is enjoying his retirement by sampling cafe life. Soon events conspire to require our hero to come out of retirement in order to greatly reduce the number of henchmen employed in the world. Along the way there will be one or two explosions, a little bit of killing and some rather fun gadgets. It’s a Tom Clancy affair, so remember to expect lots of near future gear in a world that doesn’t look too unlike our own.

There are a few great gimmicks in the game, the main one being the mark and execute mechanic. Performing a melee kill unlocks this, and allows you to mark between two and five (depending on your weapon) bad guys for an appointment with their doctor. When marked enemies have a grey icon over their heads if they are out of range and red if they are in range, and hitting Y will cause all of the red ones to die very quickly with a set of one shot automatic kills. To start with you are marking people by hanging outside windows and the like, but before long you are figuring out you can use mirrors, cameras and other gadgets to do this before you even open a door or get close to being seen. As a mechanic I’m rather enamoured with it, and although it makes some fights rather easy it just feels right and, let’s face it, Bond like. The shining moment for marking is on one level where you have to exit a building quickly and every enemy is automatically marked for you and you can just spam the button whenever you need to clean a room. It’s not very challenging, but it really gives an impression of needing to get through the building as quickly as possible with the single minded dedication that really screams Bond again. It’s the casual single shot kills on the lesser enemies when Bond is in full swing in the films.

The stealth side of the game is pretty robust as well. When you are hidden the screen goes black and white, which works really well except for in the few occasions that it makes things a little difficult to see what is going on. I think it’s probably the cleanest indicator that I’ve seen, and it sure beats having an icon come up on the screen.

Gadget wise (he is a spy after all) it’s a pretty standard set of gear that all actually has a use. The basic equipment consists of items like a personal EMP and EMP grenades (how does that work exactly?) to flashbangs and normal grenades, but there’s also a camera for sticking under doors, proximity mines and even a nifty little camera that you can throw onto a wall (that can be used for marking) that also contains explosives. It also has a small speaker that can play a rather annoying snippet of music to get the attention of nearby guards which leads to some interesting moments. Lastly there are the sonic goggles which are useless if you try and move in them, but when you’re standing still they will highlight any nearby people and, handily, let you mark them. I found that I tended to use these by pinging them on and off just to get a quick update of where people are.

The atmosphere of the game is quite interesting. It feels very much like Bond/Bourne in places and almost as extreme as Batman in others. The plot is slightly bollocks, but it is Clancy after all. The standout bit of the game for me was walking through the streets of DC after a (hopefully spoiler avoiding) event has happened and walking past civilians. Their reactions, and especially the reaction of one man to his wife, made an impact that something had gone wrong in a much stronger way than, say, Modern Warfare 2 did with it’s much bigger “event happened in Washington” level.

The single player campaign is short. 6 or 7 hours should see you through it, but there is a similar amount of content in a co-op prequel campaign (save it until after you have played the single player) that promises to be plenty of fun if you and a friend enjoy sneak-em-up gameplay. It may be slightly less fun if either of you are a more run-and-gun player of course. There’s also a challenge mode that is a good way to recreate the feeling of playing the game well after you have finished the plot and just fancy 30 minutes of being a sneaky little killer.

Overall the game is excellent, and I can’t recommend it highly enough if you like stealth based games. The actual gameplay is very satisfying an the atmosphere is top notch all the way through. The single player campaign could have been a bit longer, but it might have outstayed it’s welcome if it had gone on too much longer so perhaps it is better this way.

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Apr 06 2010

Review: Flower

Categories:

Jon, PS3, Reviews

by Jon Shute

April 6, 2010

For my first review of games that I’ve completed this year we have Flower. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a PSN game that can be downloaded onto your PS3 and is something amazing: It is the reason why the motion control in the PS3 controller isn’t a total waste of time and the game that makes me hopeful about Move.

I’m really playing my cards close to my chest in this review, as you can tell.

The Game

The premise of the game is very simple. You are a petal floating around on the breeze, or are you the breeze moving a petal? When your petal gets close to another flower it will pick up a petal from it, and as you play through the level you end up with a long stream of petals in the wind behind you. Flowers make a sound when you trigger them, and some flowers will cause something to happen in the world such as scenery changing and opening up new areas. As you progress you bring colour to the world as well. Yep, that’s about it. There’s only six levels and the playable end credits so it’s a very short game, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The Controls

The controls are simple. You press a button (doesn’t matter which) to move forwards and twist and tilt the controller to control direction. The bizarre thing about this is that it not only works, but it works really well. It is truly an example of a game that works better because of the motion control than could have been achieved with normal controls. In fact I’d go as far as saying that it’s the only example on the PS3 of a game that really uses the motion control in that way. Yes, that includes Fl0w, as that would work fine with the analogue stick.

The Story

The story of the game is told without words, and you have to infer what you can from the events. Each of the six levels is, I believe, the dream of a flower on the windowsill that makes up the main menu for the game. As you progress through the levels the view out of this window becomes brighter, this being triggered as the levels get progressively closer to the city.

The story doesn’t matter at all in this game, the atmosphere is king. It is hands down the most relaxing game you will ever play, so much so that I had trouble playing God of War after playing it as I just wasn’t in the mood any more.

The Graphics

Graphically the game starts out really well. Grass is animated and sways as you fly close to it, the petals float on the breeze in a most satisfying way and the various items on the ground that you interact with are all nicely implemented. Where it fells down in the final level, which has some uninteresting buildings to start with and ends with a cityscape that the engine just can’t render. Flat polygons and black marks depending on distance as the camera moves gave the ending a feeling that it really could have looked much better. One level not being as stylistically impressive as the others may not sound like much, but that’s 1/6 of the game itself if you don’t include the end credits and so a large

Conclusion

This is a hard game to review. Some people would say that it’s not actually a game, but be wrong. The game is also very short, and I’m not sure how much replay value it has but I suspect that it is one I’ll go back to and get all the trophies for as an excuse to play it again with more specific goals. I might also kick off one of the earlier levels after a stressful day when I need to relax in the future.

Before I even start to say how I score this game I need to say that this is one of those games that you have to try if you own a PS3. If you haven’t then you are doing yourself a disservice.

The game mechanics are very simple. You fly around using controls that work very well and change the landscape as you collect flowers. The colour change mechanic gives you a really nice feeling of progress as you move through a level and the later levels start to up the scope of the world quite satisfyingly. The length of the game is good too, with it not outstaying its welcome. All in all the mechanics are a textbook example of what to remove from a game rather than what to add.

The atmosphere is the real bulk of the enjoyment of Flower. The world sucks you in and carries you as easily as the petals on the breeze (did I just say that? Sorry) and even with the graphical disappointments towards the end of the last level the ride you’re on at that point more than make up for it. You could claim that stylistically nature is high detail and man made is low detail, but the fact that I was noticing the glitches in the final moments more than the thing I was meant to be watching is telling.

It’s strange that while part of Sony seems to be playing “me too” with copying features (Move, Trophies etc) there’s another part that’s encouraging people to do interesting things in a way that somebody like Microsoft just seems to be ignoring. With Flower last year and Heavy Rain this year for example the platform feels really healthy and innovative.

The game doesn’t have a trophy for completing the game so I can’t prove that I finished it that way. I do have the Stars trophy, which you get for collecting all the names during the end credits which will do just as well though. I can’t link to this to show that I have it though so you’ll have to look at this list, possibly while being logged into PSN and then drill down into flower yourself. Nice UI there Sony.

Random thoughts from playing the game:

  • If your end titles can’t be played through as an actual level of your game then you’re not trying hard enough.

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Aug 27 2009

Concerning Pirate Galaxy…

Categories:

Old Blog Posts, Reviews, Tim

by Tim

August 27, 2009

As mentioned last show, after an unexpected turn of events, I somehow found myself playing an extra MMO amid my already packed schedule, so here is a bonus Op Cheapseats reviewlet for a strange and quirky little bit of online fun; Pirate Galaxy, which can be found here:

http://pirate-galaxy.gamigo.com/

It’s a browser-based game, so negligible download, and is Free 2 Play, in the no-sub, item-shop sense of the term.

In the distant future, mankind has been driven to the brink and near extinction by the evil Mantis empire. Reduced to the status of guerilla fighters, rebels and pirates, the remainder of humanity now fights a hit and run war on the worlds of the Mantis, using atmospheric capable star fighters to weave through enemy lines and hit strategic objectives hard. The battle to reclaim the heritage of mankind starts on the remote world of Vega 2, where you arrive in a modified transport with a pair of blasters and a thirst for revenge.

Three Good Things:

  • Novel
    Despite being about spaceships, the actual gameplay takes place on the surfaces of canyon-based planets. The ship hovers a fixed distance above the floor and can’t climb canyon walls, despite being orbit-capable under its own power. Functionally then, the player is more in the nature of a tank or hovercraft than spaceship, scootering about the planet maps carrying out the missions. Saying all that, the basic gameplay is a lot of fun, being sufficiently light and carefree to complement the more serious MMO as a good drop-in, fifteen minute sort of thing.
  • Slick
    The audio and visuals are very well done, particularly the space-based travel/lobby/shop sections, with music and camera-work that comes together well to create a stirring sense of purpose to it all. The art is somewhat cartoony in style, rather than the stark elegance of something like EVE Online, but works well with the overall theme. Ship paint schemes are extensively featured and while the various ship models used seemed broadly quite similar, the planetscapes I’ve seen so far are surprisingly different and interesting.
  • Unlocks
    As befits a renegade army on the run, the equipment upgrades must first be taken from the enemy, in the form of blueprint unlocks, before the hangar robots can sell you one to equip. Although these can be found by accident, the necessary blueprint unlocks are also the focus of many of the side missions on offer. I quite like the sense of steadily increasing potency this brings, and non-essential blueprints, like ship paint designs can be found as drops as well. Similarly, travel routes to other worlds must first be probed for, forming a similar unlocking mechanic to the galaxy map, and again, the completionist in me enjoys seeing the unknown gradually revealed bit at a time.

Three Bad Things:

  • Ammo
    The ships have no autoattack, and the various hotkeys cost harvestable Energy spheres to use. This is especially noticeable with the ‘Gun’ hotkey; there is no autoattack, and the blasters cost an increasing amount of energy per shot, as you equip more powerful upgrades. This all means that the time you’re onto the Vega 1/Lyris stuff, you’ll likely be spending nearly as much time harvesting Energy as fighting stuff, as you stock up ahead of fights. Running out of Energy mid-combat leaves you able only to flee if you can, and even the Afterburner needs Energy to use. Gamigo understand that this is a problem and would like to help you, by giving you the opportunity to buy big stacks of Energy, Crystal and more, for real money, in the item shop! Oh I know, they’ve got to earn their money somehow, and I personally don’t mind the downtime that harvesting enforces, but this will annoy many, I suspect.
  • Classes
    The Vega 3 starbase has a variety of ship types for sale, which based on their available slots correspond roughly to tank, healer, debuff and damage dealer. All very well and good, and the sort of thing an MMO is supposed to have, but the speed and pacing of basic gameplay most reminds me of Auto Assault, a game in which traditional party-based coherence was extremely hard work, due to everyone moving about too fast and far apart. I’ve yet to actually try group work to be fair, but I suspect it’ll be hard work here, for many of the same reasons it was in Auto Assault, and even then, it might just be easier to bring a full team of DPS types, rather than work the usual tank-healer-damage sort of thing. How well differentiated classes will actually work in this sort of game, I’ve yet to see. Perhaps I just found the tired old Trinity somehow inappropriate in a game about pew pew spaceships.
  • Clicky
    The game seems a little floatey on the controls. It features click-to-move, with left click being a combined target/move to/autofollow and right-click being a non-targeting move to command. Trouble is, the speed the ship cruises along at means you reach a distantly clicked move-to point very quickly, necessitating many such clicks to get about. This also gets quite frantic if you want to try combat more advanced than following the target, shooting. Since most of the Mantis all close to melee range when engaged, you just end up parked in front of each other trading blows until one of you blows up. Use of alternate LMB/RMB is hectic, but can allow you to kite them a bit more effectively. WASD keys work, but are a bit sluggish; holding W while pressing D will make your ship turn, but with a noticeable delay. Possibly all this stuff is remapable and I didn’t notice, but it just seemed like ship control could be a bit tighter to me.

 

I do like this one a lot, but probably not as a ‘serious MMO’, whatever that means. As a filler, in short bursts when there isn’t time for an extended session of something more in depth, Pirate Galaxy serves admirably to entertain. I’m not sure I’d put any money into it though; to me, the harvesting seems a necessary part of the game, and anyway, their tariff is a bit steep for the knickknacks you can buy in. For example, the Anjin 1450 is the next ship up from the starter noobship, requires level 7 to fly and 126 Crystal in-game, which will take about ten or so missions to earn, but if you are lazy, you can just buy one from the item shop for about 7 Euros/10 Dollars/6 Pounds. I have no idea what that is compared to other F2P games since they all set their own markets, but seems somewhat poor value for money to me.

Still, that is just me, and apart form grumblings about RMT which probably deserve their own post shortly, I’m finding Pirate Galaxy well worth a look.

Final Verdict: Casual Carefree Fun. An excellent drop-in MMO for those smaller sessions.

Still got the Vanguard write-up in the works, and it’ll feature on the very next podcast before that, so watch this space!

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Aug 06 2009

Concerning Sword of the New World…

Categories:

Old Blog Posts, Reviews, Tim

by Tim

August 6, 2009

No need to panic! I somehow managed to break the previous stylesheet, and anyway thought it was time for a change. This new scheme is a little more olive than I’d like, but does have some nifty user-controls up top, letting you folks decide the layout of the site for yourselves!

On with the blogging:

Sword of the New World: Granado Espada

Another free-to-play title, presumably supported via item-shop purchases later on in life. It’s quite big, at 4.1GB, and I had to go to FilePlanet in the end to find it. Ptttht!

 

Against a backdrop of fierce national conflict, two explorers from the war-torn and foundering Opoluto embark on a dangerous expedition to circumnavigate the world and find new trade routes, free of foreign tariffs. Instead, Ferrucio Espada and Gilbert Granado discover an entirely new land; a New World. As the old rivalries, conflicts and diplomacies take their toll, Opoluto cedes to the nation of Vespanola, and the queen of this victorious nation seizes on an opportunity to turn the tide against her enemies. Under the new Reconquista Policy, adventurous Vespanolian families are granted great opportunity to conquer, tame and exploit this New World. You are one such family and start life aboard ship, headed for Granado Espada, the New World, to seek your fortune…

Three Good Things:

  • Stylish:
    The game exudes a certain sense of style that I’d not seen in many other places, and definitely not in the Free To Play market. From the grandiose character select/creation screen, through the world design and music, to the character tailoring, the whole thing comes across as very lavish indeed. Very impressed with the overall look-and-feel, and level of polish, certainly in the newbie areas and starting towns I’d seen in my fortnight. I guess I’d developed a set of sneering low expectations from the F2P genre in general, but this title shows that it needn’t always be the case.
  • Pacy:
    The nearest comparisons I was able to make for actual gameplay were Dungeon Siege meets Diablo meets Guild Wars, and playing through SotNW is almost entirely unlike the turgid trading of methodical wood-chopping sword-blows found in the majority of the existing fantasy MMO genre. Combat is hectic, fast and although most monsters die in one hit, the rate they come at you more than keeps you interested, making gameplay more about considered advances than hotkey timers. Characters do have hotkeys, but these seemed much less important than elsewhere. At last, default attacks that are worth a damn! You play as a squad of three characters, instead of one, making it almost a tactical RTS of sorts, which I found very refreshing in an MMO.
  • Novel:
    The whole setting and time period also go a long way toward creating an MMO experience almost entirely unlike any other I’d tried to date. Set in a kind of parallel 1700s, with a parallel Spain colonising and conquering a kind of parallel South America, but with magic and monsters thrown in too, the world I found myself in was a real breath of fresh air. No quasi-Camelot (Stormwind, Qeynos, Altdorf, et al.) here; instead the towns and cities are passable imaginings of stately colonial Spanish styles, with a level of technology to match. Probably not ‘steampunk’ per se (which is a very abused term anyway), but a far cry from The Usual. This extends to the characters too, and the class list features Musketeers and Scouts, as well as the Wizards and Elementalists. It all fits and seems to make for an extremely unique and well thought out game world.

Three Bad Things:

  • Family:
    The game is played with an interchangeable team of three family members, meaning that you aren’t really playing as ‘you’, but a squad instead. This differs from Guild Wars in that there, you at least have one key person that is meant to be you, and the rest are hirelings. SotNW places equal emphasis on all of the 15 or so characters you can initially create, each of whom have to be levelled up separately, divorcing the player from the avatars a bit. The level of customisation available to these characters is shockingly bereft also, with each class being available in a single male or female version, all with one set face, hairstyle and outfit, making them hard to identify with particularly, and relegating them to functional game pieces far more than in other MMOs. I expect roleplaying is possible, but difficult when the other team of three that you are chatting to look identical to you.
  • Classes:
    While the MCC (Multi Character Control) system is indeed novel and well-implemented, the freedom it offers you seems mostly the freedom to get it wrong, and a bit of dabbling with different party makeups soon showed that the Holy Trinity is alive and well, only here, you have to be all three yourself! A team of three melee characters (Fighter, Scout with Dagger, UPC Soldier Bloke) got driven out of the first zone because they couldn’t do anything at all about flying mobs. A team of three ranged (Musketeer, Wizard, Elementalist) did fairly well, but kept wiping when attacked by larger groups simply because they were too squishy. The winning team seems to be precisely: Fighter (Melee combat, high armour and ‘provoke’ AoE Taunt), Scout (Unarmed, they act as healer), plus a Musketeer/Wizard/Elementalist (Just anyone who can do damage, and hit flying things – DPS). This was all very well and extremely familiar, but somewhat disappointing given how innovative everything else seemed, and much of the team selection options seemed like red herrings. Perhaps as a member of a larger squad (multiple players/families), different people could experiment more with the more obscure roles; Scout as Melee DPS, Wizard as Debuffer, and so on, but solo, the lack of workable options seemed a shame.
  • AFK Play:
    I mocked this a lot on the podcast but yes, I did manage to level my team up from 13 to 15 each, while taking a bath, by the simple expedient of pressing the space bar (Defend Mode) and walking away from the PC. I didn’t spend any time at all working out a special place to do this and it seems more a function of the general game design, than any particular exploit. Perhaps this was just the early zones being easy on me, and that further in, things get a lot more fraught, and the various hotkey special attacks become necessary; no idea. I’d think that this was intentional and a way to compensate for being unable to pause the game, as you can do in similar sorts of single-player game, but the in-game help (which is well done itself) seems to suggest that botting is a no-no. It seems like botting is actually quite unnecessary in this game, when mashing space will do. Actually making progress through the various zones still seems to require a hands-on approach though, mostly due to the insane crazy spawn rate the thing has by design.

 

The whole thing was quite a change from the sort of MMO I’m used to, and I found myself really quite charmed by its novel world and fresh basic gameplay. As ever, I have no idea about the Long Term in these games, and perhaps the relentless monster-mashing will get stale eventually, but I definitely caught a whiff of that certain indefinable something that makes Diablo II so unaccountably popular; a rare moment in an MMO where I was enjoying the moment-to-moment gameplay instead of putting up with the basic gameplay in order to get somewhere else or unlock something else. Slaughtering my way through the early zones was fun in and of itself.

Final Verdict: Well worth two weeks of any MMO gamer’s time, simply to see a different kind of world and a different kind of gameplay.

Personally, I think this one is a keeper, and I look forward to playing it in a bit more depth and properly, when time allows, as it seems to fit the ‘Fifteen minutes, what shall I play?’ category that I don’t have a lot to fill with at present.

Next up is one that I’ve decided to pick for myself, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes; one of those core MMOs that I just missed entirely, but feel I ought to have played…

 

Saturday is the West Dean Chili Fiesta, which we’ll be podcasting from. If you are going and want to meet us and be on the podcast, the best bet is probably to coordinate via Twitter Direct Messages to @jonshute as the Cohost tends to start violently trembling if he is more than fifteen feet away from the Internet, and I’m a luddite without one of those fancy iPhones!

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Jul 21 2009

Concerning Rappelz…

Categories:

Old Blog Posts, Reviews, Tim

by Tim

July 21, 2009

As extensively rambled about in the previous podcast, I’ve been playing Rappelz for a fortnight, among other things. I should probably have been logging my hours, but I’d guess at 10-12 hours of play over the fortnight, mostly Sunday Afternoons and Wednesday Evenings, with the odd half hour elsewhere. I’ll dredge up the old format for another season.

You can have a go yourselves here:

Rappelz: Epic VI Prologue: Navislamia: Downloads (1.4GB)

It’s entirely free to play, and wants merely an email address. It hopes you will spend money on gPotatos at a later date though!

 

High Priest Emmanuel always meant well, but attempts to cheat death aboard the good ship Navislamia all went a bit dark side and now the ship is a place of the dead, ruled over by the fallen cleric himself. You wake up with no memories on the nearby Trainee Island, with little more than a blade and a nagging sense that something isn’t quite right.

Three Good Things:

  • Pets
    If you enjoy being a World of Warcraft Hunter or Guild Wars Beastmastery Ranger, there is a lot for you here. It seems that the pets in Rappelz are fundamental to gameplay, and every class gets to use them in addition to whatever else they are. They can be equipped with their own items, trained in their own skills and talents, and in general seem as well defined as the player is. Pet evolution and management seems key to long term success and most of the trade spam I saw was related to the various types of pet cards, of which you can have as many as you have room in inventory for. Pet classes in other games are typically very strong solo characters and that may have a social impact on the game as a whole, but it was hard to tell if the game had been balanced with this in mind.
  • Uhh…Low System Specs?
    Maybe I’m more jaded than I used to be, or maybe this just isn’t that great a game, but I did have trouble finding three different and praiseworthy unique selling points for this game. Let’s go with ‘Low Systems Specs’ as a plus then; any reasonably modern PC will comfortably run this with all the whistles and bells turned on. You could read this as a negative ‘Dated’ instead, but as Everquest II and Age of Conan both learnt to their cost, pegging the system spec too high might look amazing on the ninja development PC at HQ, but can cause disgruntlement when Joe Average tries to play at home.
  • Umm…Free?
    Not sure I’d want to part with any money for this one, but fortunately, I don’t have to! If I were to so choose, I could keep on playing this title indefinitely, which is always one of the perks of the Free To Play model. It is worth serious reflection actually; at present, I am playing three subscription MMOs, largely in the company of good friends on regular guild nights. Your extra new game will have to be something absolutely mind-blowing to make me cancel any of my current subs and choose you instead. I happen not to be playing World of Warcraft at present, but many are, and the above ultimatum applies there even more so. A Free To Play game neatly dodges that brutal and increasingly unreasonable choice and slips in under the radar instead. Whether we’ll then pay up for extras down the line is another matter, and one dictated by a much longer appraisal than a 14 day trial can possibly offer. On the basis of my 10 hours of Rappelz alone, there’s no way I’d sub up, but perhaps, one day in the distant future, I might bung a dollar or two on some fluff.

Three Bad Things:

  • Clicky:
    I could probably get used to the Clickfest To Move system if I absolutely have to, but fortunately, I don’t, as pretty much every other game I’ve ever played with click-moving, offers keyboard mappings also. I’m not even sure ‘W’ did anything else.
  • Bland:
    As indicated above, there really isn’t an awful lot to this game. The world is sparse, populated only by hills and monsters with few interesting sights or memorable landmarks. The combat is more about chugging potions than any real tactical skill, given how few hotkeys there are, and remembering to have the pet attack too. The starter island seems to be part of the most recent content update, the Epic IV of the title, and the Navislamia itself seems interesting, but soon runs out, with me on the last encounter of the set during my meagre time there. The mainland beyond seems mostly to be a place for monsters to stand and little else, with questing very much in the kill ten rats or GTFO category. Also, if they’d put half as much effort into the movement of the trees as the movement of female character breasts, the thing would look a great deal more passable than at present.
  • Extraless:
    I did see some kind of Ursan Cavern lobby thing which may have been some sort of group instance type of affair, but never saw anyone using it. Each town also has a PvP Arena of some kind, but again seemed unused. Apart from that, the game really suffers by lack of extras. No apparent crafting, no fishing, no collection type games, no battlegrounds, nothing, or least nothing I could easily find. It seems trivial, but with combat that lacklustre being the only thing to do, there is no reason to keep playing when you tire of grinding. Functional living and breathing worlds in their own right may be a bit more than most of us want, but on the other hand, one single ride does not a theme park make. Maybe all the above is in the game and I just didn’t find it, in which case change this one to ‘Directionless’ instead.

All in all, a somewhat indifferent experience which probably stands on its own merit well enough, but when compared against, say, Runes of Magic, does nothing to say ‘Pick me!’. I was reminded a great deal of Aeria Games’ Shaiya, but at least there, the PvP side of the game distinguishes it. Rappelz pets are interesting, certainly, but not enough to carry the whole game. It seemed either rushed or under-resourced, and if I was cynical, the minimum framework required to necessitate an item shop. Mind you, it is clearly quite old, and has probably made more money than I have in the last five years!

Final Verdict; Meh!

I’d probably recommend giving this a miss and trying two weeks of Runes of Magic or Free Realms instead, to be frank, and despite now being a gPotato Statistic until the end of days, have already uninstalled it, to make room for Sword of the New World: Grando Espada. More on that in a fortnight or so!

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