Who am I kidding, any game that has an ACTIVE STORE is NOT in beta. A beta is a FREE phase to allow players to hard-test a game. If a store is active then a game is no longer in beta. This is a shameful attempt to try and conceal bad things about the game.
I'll be honest, this game starts off pretty bad and I expected better from Perfect World. It is NOT their first MMO, they have at least a couple, including Perfect World International, which I used to play myself.
I'm also gonna complain a bit about the fact that they decided create their own launcher launcher. This has to stop. Now. I'm fed up with origin, uplay and the like and I really would like all companies to stick to what everyone is using: Steam. You have no idea how frustrating it is to have to have Steam, Uplay and Origin on all at once! I will however say that on the contrary of EA's Origin, PWE's Arc is really well made and polished, I also think that they have an innovative way to do downloads, even though I haven't been able to check if it works myself, I think the download only half the file and then start playing while the rest downloads strategy is a good one and maybe one to explore further.
Now onto the game:
There are several things that will shock you in this game. First, there is absolutely NO voice acting.
Characters spout a few chinese words when you speak to them which in no way accounts for what is actually written in the dialogue box. (3 paragraphs of text = 3 seconds of non-English speech).
Second, When characters do speak, including your own, there is no mouth movement. I find that especially disturbing and I believe that this is really a requisite in any game.
Third, the character creation has pros and cons, in the pros, I appreciate the two edit modes: advanced and simple, this should be in every game as it simplifies your way of customisation a lot.
However, there is a very limited choice of hair textures and no eye color to choose from, why?
The game's quests work just like any other average MMO, you will meet your exclamation marks, again, so nothing innovative here. Most quests seem to be "go see that guy and then that guy, and then that other guy again" or "kill the enemies to drop the loot".
This game's graphics follow an anime/manga style and the world is quite nice to play in.
I wouldn't rate the graphics 10/ 10, but they deserve a 7 or an 8.
Animations on the other hand are perfect, this statement includes combat animations, moving animations and emote animations.
In terms of combat gameplay, as you might have heard, you have to choose one of ten classes, each with their own weapon and their own style (though many use swords it seems), there are two different damage types (endo/exo) plus four elements (earth, fire, ice and poison).
Combat is fluid and would be much better if it wasn't for bizarre game decisions:
First, the enemy AI is bugged and flawed. They will stop attacking you for no reason, not help their teammates when attacked right in front of them, and the fact that you can pass through anything doesn't make things easier, especially for big enemies you can actually be fully inside of.
Second, you start the game being waaaaaaaayyyy too overpowered to enjoy anything, it takes a hundred hits (perhaps more, I'm serious here) for an enemy of your level to kill you (that's including the bosses) and you kill any enemy in five hits. This is no way to properly start a game. Also, "monsters" -and by that term I mean all non-friendly NPCs, not literal monsters- are way too many on the field and nearly stack upon each other. It's just game breaking to be walking in a field and be surrounded by 30-40 enemies just walking by you. As I said before, non agressive monsters will not become agressive if one of their own is attacked right in front of them, which makes it a chore to accomplish combos as you have to hit each non agressive enemy once to bring them towards you and then finally activate your AOE (area of effect) powers.
Each class seems to have different unlockable paths which enhances customisation a bit more.
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| What's wrong with swordsman in a nutshell |
Storywise, because yes, there is a story, prepare to not be amazed as the story in this game is just bad (after continuing in the story I can say that far from being bad, the story is unexplainably awful and I really mean it, it just doesn't make any sense, is full of stupid cliches and is really lacking anything a story should have. This is maybe the worst story I have ever seen in a video game before. They try to make you attached to your character but the sad scenes are simply laughable and the serious scenes don't fare any better). I'm not talking about the unusefulness of the many, many 5 second cutscenes, the fact that you can't understand a word of what is said because everything is in chinese, or even the fact that stuff actually written in English never stays on screen long enough for you to be able to read it (this happens a LOT), I'm talking about the plot which would have been funny had it been a parody of movies like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.
There are other than that lots of small bugs that may ruin your gaming experience, for example, you can not meditate without your game freezing for 5 seconds or the ease with which you can grab fallen objects is quite bad.
You could also mention that the english text is quite bad and filled with quite a few obvious grammar mistakes.
I think it is music-wise that I was deceived the most. I really expected some kind of great soundtracks, and any good MMORPG should have a great soundtrack, well I wasn't expecting a Jeremy Soule level of soundtrack but at least a functionning soundtrack, because the soundtrack in this game is broken, you only get to hear it a bit and then it cuts off for no reason and you are left in silence for the rest of your play session (BGM-wise, not SFX wise). In fact, if you listen well enough, you can easily hear that even the SFX is botched up with the enemies all having the same death sound and your sword strikes not sounding at all like sword strikes and all sounding exactly the same.
Finally, what is the deal with this game and health bars? I mean 10 health bars for one mob? seriously? was one not enough?
Overrall, in it's current state, I rate this game 6.5/10, it is a slightly above average Free to play MMO that doesnt stand out that much from the others except in terms of combat animations which are above perfect.
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