Taking Another Trip To Pandora

What do you think when you hear browser based? You probably think 8-bit rpgs and those RTS games that are such ridiculous rip offs of Age of Empires that I dare not soil my blog with their tainted presence. Well apparently a new style of MMO has recently joined the no download group. The game I'm looking at today is Ruined Online: a Browser-Based Third Person Shooter MMO.

Ruined takes place in a post-apocalyptic world were for some reason only the big bad villains of the world have survived, now the only thing they have left is to duke it out with each other in battle scared and in some cases horrific lands until only one of them is left and that one person can commit Seppuku; except not really – HaHa.

(Almost looks like something out of Tron)

Ruined probably requires more skill than any MMO Shooter I’ve ever played. Your only source of in game money is kills so if you suck at killing, you’re left to the dogs. Lucky for you less than good players you start out with a pistol with unlimited uses and enough premium money to get one unlimited use item right off the bat. So you don’t need to worry if you were the punching bag of your games because hey the guys running this game still love you. (cause after all whats a shooter without pin cousins right?)

The biggest problem with Ruined Online is how good the graphics are. It’s a browser based game with graphics, characters, and game play all almost flawlessly resembling Borderlands so lag is an ever present issue, however turn all the graphics to their minimal and play it on a desktop with a good graphics card and you just might be fast enough to actually get a decent shot in. The only other problem with this game is that any cover lower than 3/4ths of your body is completely useless as there is no crouch option and any pro player is going to aim at your head anyway.

Anyway to wrap things up Ruined Online scores 6 out of 10;

It’s definitely something any shooter fan should look into whether you’re looking for a time killer you don’t have to download or you’re a die-hard Borderlands fan who wants to watch a psycho and a bruiser duke it out with lazars.

Vengeance Doesn't Factor Into This

With the success of Forsaken World I returned to Perfect World Entertainment searching for my next great play. There are a few games in development it seems, none of which would let me into Closed Beta testing *sad face* so I’ll have those to look forward to, in the mean time I stuck with Jade Dynasty: Vengeance, a PVP MMO.

While this game isn’t the totally horrible game I was looking for in my last review it certainly didn’t meet my standards when it was compared to the epic that is Forsaken World. The graphics and music were stunning but that was all the game had going for it, everything looks like something that has been done before; only much MUCH better. Jade Dynasty isn’t bad though, it’s simply run of the mill; nothing new to show to the world, it’s almost like a one of those Abominations from Warcraft, only each part of the body that is sown on represents a different game whose ideas JD is using.

The game is an absolute grind fest in an attempt to get to a decent enough level that you can enter an arena and not suck horribly, but hey I guess that’s the norm for PVP MMOs it’s all about doing whatever it takes to get to a higher level than your opponent, until you get to the max level in which case it becomes a battle over who has the best equipment (see World of Failcraft –cough- Warcraft). The worst part about it is you’ll get your quests in roughly groups of 5, each of the quests wants you to kill the same creature but the quests don’t stack. In other words you have to fulfill the requirements of each quest one after the other, considering all the quests are literally nothing more than “kill [number] of [this]” you’ll easily end up grinding the poor creatures into extinction. After words the game says its sorry by giving you so much XP from the quests you end up jumping like 8 levels, and that’s outside of the 4 levels you gained from killing the creatures in the first place.

Last thing I’d like to point out is how overpowered the Assassin classes are, I mean I know they’re suppose to be heavy hitters but your very first skill hits so hard that you 1 hit kill your quest target. This is effective at getting rid of the grinding, but at one point while killing my usual 128 monsters (that’s the literal number by the way, I actually did the math out of boredom) I stumbled upon a well hidden boss distinguishable only by the name which you don’t see until after you begin attacking it, rather than panicking like what SHOULD happen when you start fighting a boss by yourself I simply sighed and said “oh look I found a boss” followed a minute later by “well that was fun…back to the slaughter.”

I myself am thoroughly disappointed in Jade Dynasty: Vengeance, however there’s nothing absolutely horrible with it so it’s not like I’m gonna give it a bad score. JD scores 5 out of 10, and who knows; maybe there’s a silver lining after the grind fests and over powered killers.

WoW's Undead Have Nothing On This

Guuuuuuhhhh; Being bored out of my mind recently I went through some of my oldest reviews and have come to two conclusions: 1) They weren’t long enough, and 2) over 90% of them were reviews that had good scores. I mean come on, what kind of reviewer doesn’t have a decent amount of rejects under his belt? (No I’m not counting my recent rant of S4: DL) So unsatisfied and demoralized I continued my search for games. Eventually I stumbled into Forsaken World and Hoping I could make a bad rant or two I downloaded it and played it.

Unfortunately much to my disappointment the game was really-really-really-REALLY good… Forsaken World is the counterpart to Perfect World, the Yang to its Yin in a since. The graphics are awesome the visual effects are nothing short of stunning and you couldn’t get any more racially diverse if the game was based off of League of Legends.

I’m being completely serious, most people are waiting for future games like Guild Wars 2 or Star Wars: The Old Republic to be the “WoW Killer” when they don’t even realize that one is right under their noses right now, if more people knew about this game WoW could be dead within the month.

I was all ready to flag this game with a perfect score when some unknown all powerful force tapped me on my shoulder and convinced me to continue playing, so I did; what I found was quite possibly the games one fatal flaw.

GRIND QUESTS! – Quests that take half an hour at least to complete; the ones that have you kill a ridiculous number of monsters or ones that require you to collect a large amount of items from a monster that have a small amount of chance of dropping. Sure the game play is so amazingly good that you should be able to look past it, but the fact still remains: They are there!

On that note I raise this question: “Why would you pay $15 a month to play WoW for endless hours at a time when you can get the exact same satisfaction from Forsaken World and not ever pay a cent?” If the 11 million members of the WoW cult stopped playing for a week and spent that week playing Forsaken World instead, my guess is half of them at least would never go back.

Forsaken World gets a 8 out of 10 it’s addictive, it’s amazing, and I’m going to keep playing it even as I go through the other games I review.