What the Dev says about the game: a combo battle system where skills can be chained together; exotic mounts, such as trolls whose shoulders you can ride; open player-versus-player combat; and all the fun - or misery - that comes from grouping with other human beings. My experience was rather different.

It began choosing a race, which was between the warrior Tempskron or the magical Morion. classes are gender restricted. I picked Tempskron and decided on the male Fighter over the female Huntress, mostly because he grunted when we moused over him. Fighters can branch out and become Warriors or Combatants at level 10, before picking Violent, Warlord or Destroyer paths later on. After choosing our class I changed my look in a fairly limited, but nicely varied, character creator.

The first problem I faced upon entering the world was knowing what to do. Clearly there was no new-age 'lead you by the hand' design here. Eventually I stumbled into a quest-giver, got our first task, and felt at home enough with the familiar user interface to set about chopping up some mushroom men. Mission accomplished, I jogged back into the city, got my reward, bagged more quests and headed out again. And again. And so began my arduous night of slaughtering giant bunnies, wolves, armadillos, pixies and hunchbacks, then running back into to town to pick up more quests and do the same thing all over again. Another problem that I encountered is that weapons are overpriced at NPC's you can't even get a decent weapon and armors at your level

I got some new skills along the way, plus some slightly less tattered armour, but once resting between fights was added to the repetitive battles and monotonous slogs back to town, I began to lose hope. And all of this at just level 15 - But I simply couldn't face it. And why should I? Let alone settle for 60 levels of it.

We understand MMOs lead you into the meat of the game slowly in order for abilities and features to be grasped, but this was quite clearly design cast from the mould of old. It was oblivious to recent advancements in the genre, introduced to ease - rather than rely on - the grind to flesh out content.

Much of the high-level content demonstrated in Barcelona offered little more; the zones were barren and vast, with a mish-mash of uninspired monster types ambling aimlessly around as if waiting for someone to pick a fight with them. It could have been the starting area all over again, just with bigger statistics involved. If grouping was the star feature on show, I saw none of the teamwork expected of instances in World of Warcraft, and the player-versus-player combat petered out after the combatants proved too equally matched to make a dent on each other and decided to call it quits. Of all the features displayed, only the spunky combo system provided any real glimpse of differentiation.

Pristontale 2 is only in closed beta, but already the production values of a game with an experienced MMO developer behind it are plain to see. Those prepared to pour the hours in will have plenty to discover. The world lacks the instant personality and depth seen elsewhere in the genre, but Pristontale 2 is certainly a technical stride forward for the free-to-play crowd, and a game only the harshest of criticisms would warrant the curious not trying.

RATING:

I can't see any good points of the game

2/10

ADVICE:
AVOID

Posted by Lunarmyst at 12:51 AM |