Allods Online

I know I haven't updated much recently, but that's because I doubt you want to hear the exploits from the only game I'm really playing at the moment, Team Fortress 2. The Demoman vs. Soldier update comes out tomorrow and of course, those are my two least played classes. I'll play them to get most of the achievements, but will probably be right back to my usual rotation of pyro, scout, medic, and heavy.

Now back to the titular topic, Allods Online. I had been hearing some good things about it in the blogosphere recently and thought I would finally give it a shot. I finally got a beta key two days ago and went merrily about downloading the game. Since it is in beta, I didn't have to worry about the micro-transaction business model that I despise the implementation of in most current F2P MMOs. After a quick download, maybe 40mins tops, I installed and went to the character creation screen. There was little to no background information on the two sides from what I could see, so I ended up just picking the evil looking side.

From there, there were a bunch of classes that fit into the typical fantasy archetypes, paladins, mages, rogues and the like. Loving to go into battle in full on plate mail, I chose a paladin-esque character and went on to the game, where the disappointment began quickly. The graphics, even though I am not typically a graphics whore, were downright atrocious even maxed out on my system. The visuals were fuzzy and downright low quality. In 2009, even decent looking graphics are commonplace, not the shoddy ones presented in this game.

Quests were almost exactly like World of Warcraft, go to the person with an exclamation point, ignore the wall of quest text presented, and commence killing. Perhaps I'm just spoiled with single-player rpgs and the promise of full voice overs in TOR but it did nothing to draw me into the storyline, whatever it may have been. One particularly bad intro quest saw me firing a cannon til I hit the enemy ship. The only problem was that I had no control over the aim so I had to just keep clicking before it decided to hit it.

That takes us to the combat side of things, a pretty standard affair. I didn't like the lack of an auto-attack, or at least one I couldn't find. You right click on an enemy to lock on and then have to run up to him and spam one to do your basic attack. Combined with some mediocre class abilities, the battles were forgettable at best. The ability cooldown was so fast that I rarely even had to use the basic attack in any of the early battles.

So, from the general tone of this review, you can probably tell that the game was off my hard drive about 3/4 of an hour after installing it. I get a feeling early on about how I'm going like games and I could tell there was no point in going on.