Probably a bit overly bias against the game to be honest, but I really didn't enjoy the experience at all. Also, the coding is acting a bit weird but I can't work out why so sorry in advance.
[HEADING=1]Fallen Earth[/HEADING]
Fallen Earth is a third person shooter MMORPG based in a post-apocolyptic wasteland who is pushed on and advertised by The Escapist seemingly at every chance they get. As tempted as I am to rip into doing a third person shooter and a MMORPG combined together (while begging to ask ?WHERE'S MY SKATEBOARDING PART!? just so we can please just about every group of audience there is), I realise quickly that this has worked before. Okay, it wasn't a MMO, it wasn't even on-line, but it was a FPS/TPS RPG none-the-less, the game was Fallout 3. Sure it had it's problems but so does every game. However, it just worked. It was too into it's shooting to entertain RPG fans, but it was too into it's RPG to please shooting fans (which I know too well since my brother sold me the game after hating it). It was in the centre, and it worked to everyone who liked shooting and RPG games (which that market is plentiful). However, Fallen Earth adds a MMO twist to it, like adding some lime in my vodka and coke drink.
You start off running the game and being blown back by a strange creature. After taking a second, you'll realise this is your character creator. You'll play with the limited dials (height, hair style, pre-created faces, skin colour, etc) which extremely dated considering it was released late last year. Just for a comparison, Age Of Conan was released early/mid 2008 and offered a lot more options (you know, like class selection) and your character was actually bearable to look at. So, after choosing your ugly character (complete with shirt and shoes you will cease to see the second you find armour), you'll enter the game. You play as a clone and you must escape a facility. There was other back story, but it was thrust upon me at such speed that I half expected me or at least my character to have a spontaneous nose-bleed. It also made me barely care about the circumstances.
[HEADING=1]Fallen Earth[/HEADING]
Fallen Earth is a third person shooter MMORPG based in a post-apocolyptic wasteland who is pushed on and advertised by The Escapist seemingly at every chance they get. As tempted as I am to rip into doing a third person shooter and a MMORPG combined together (while begging to ask ?WHERE'S MY SKATEBOARDING PART!? just so we can please just about every group of audience there is), I realise quickly that this has worked before. Okay, it wasn't a MMO, it wasn't even on-line, but it was a FPS/TPS RPG none-the-less, the game was Fallout 3. Sure it had it's problems but so does every game. However, it just worked. It was too into it's shooting to entertain RPG fans, but it was too into it's RPG to please shooting fans (which I know too well since my brother sold me the game after hating it). It was in the centre, and it worked to everyone who liked shooting and RPG games (which that market is plentiful). However, Fallen Earth adds a MMO twist to it, like adding some lime in my vodka and coke drink.
You start off running the game and being blown back by a strange creature. After taking a second, you'll realise this is your character creator. You'll play with the limited dials (height, hair style, pre-created faces, skin colour, etc) which extremely dated considering it was released late last year. Just for a comparison, Age Of Conan was released early/mid 2008 and offered a lot more options (you know, like class selection) and your character was actually bearable to look at. So, after choosing your ugly character (complete with shirt and shoes you will cease to see the second you find armour), you'll enter the game. You play as a clone and you must escape a facility. There was other back story, but it was thrust upon me at such speed that I half expected me or at least my character to have a spontaneous nose-bleed. It also made me barely care about the circumstances.
No matter how hard you try, he'll never look right.
It was after a minute that I had to actually get my control system open and look at the controls. I then had to change about a bit and check the other controls. A game that requires you to actually change the controls so it functions better (Q and E to strafe, A and D to turn left and right, I thought we had an agreed consensus about this?) is a game that didn't do much research. Allow me to give more examples. Let's say you have an assault rifle but you want to change to the fire-axe since there's a guy running towards you so weak it's not worth the ammo. Depending on the slot the computer automatically assigns, you must press ctrl and a number. This is not good practice, especially since this may lead to a lot of fumbling as you realise you need a rocket launcher and not the assault rifle as a boss character charges towards you.
So, after I got my controls figured out, I managed to find my first side-quest. ?Goodie!? I say as I approach the guards I was meant to dispatch to free the civilians. ?Wait a second...?. You'll find the guys who are a part of the same group with the civilians you were meant to rescue. No guards to kill. You'll then be told to defend them against the guards. After five minutes of waiting, I leave the room deciding that no guards were coming. I was then awarded with completing the mission. The last thing anyone wants to see when starting up a game is a broken quest, especially when there are only NPCs besides you in the area. So, later on you'll have to defeat a boss. You defeat the boss and be told to disarm the bomb. For reasons unknown to me, she then tells you to just drive the bomb out of the dam. ?Road kill it is!? you'll say as you climb onto a quad-bike that so happens to have the bomb on it. You'll start driving your quad-bike when you find bad guys. You know what you're going to do. You line the bike up as you drive closer to them, the time going down and...
You'll go through them.
You'll spend the rest of that minute absolutely bored as you drive the bike down the tunnel until, finally, it goes off. You die. I was about to curse when suddenly, the game displays that was meant to happen. You sigh loudly as you realise you're just an insignificant clone, a clone that is now slowly dying since the head of that facility did something that means you are slowly dying. Again, it was a point where I felt so bored with the game that I couldn't care. I am finally told to choose an area depending on what kind of thing I want to specialise in: Action, crafting or support. I decide to choose crafting since I am a sucker for creating items. Well, then the game pushes me into the game and says ?off you go chap? like a parent trying to push their child into a child-care company. After talking to some people (and told that if I want recipes so I can finally go try to make something, that I should go elsewhere because they're not sparing anything), I am told to go speak to a guy near the mail-box, shown with a giant envelope. I got there and find...Nothing. There's a house with nothing inside it and near-by a town, but no one I was meant to talk to. I look at the map and find out what they meant by mail-box, was the post office. I go there, and he gives me a quest to go try a melee move out on some chickens. ?Alrighty! Some action!?. So I find some chickens, try it out, and die. Apparently, not the right chickens.
It's at this point, I turned the game off. I figured the best way of showing my view of the game was describing my experience with a running commentary. Very few games successfully treat a new gamer as badly as this one, pushing you into the thick of it as soon the tutorial is done (which one tutorial stage was skipped because that was broken). Even fewer appear, well, broken. Then again, maybe I'm bias because I really do not like third-person shooters, but I also find the combat annoying at best, the AI sometimes glitching out as I try to kill them. If there was team missions where I have to help or be with AI, then I really don't want to know.
The good points, well, the graphics aren't terribly bad and there's some good ideas lurking about here. Shooting in a MMORPG though is something very hard to pull off without balance issues and it makes an attempt that may be considered as ?as good as it gets?; at least currently. However, most things about this game either worked to kick the newbie, or to just kick the player generally. It's as user-friendly as Linux, without the the feeling that there must be something good in it. The entire game-play feels generally boring with no reason to look deeper into it. It doesn't even leave a taste in your mouth making you think ?if this was less under-cooked or over-cooked, it may of tasted like something the best minds of Team Silent, Rockstar North, Infinity Ward (pre-being wrecked by Activision), Value and Tim Schafer would create, or at least something similar?. It just leaves you just bored and apathetic.
However, as it is, I couldn't give a strong enough recommendation to just try something else, especially due to the monthly subscription fee. If you wanted a post-apocolyptic wasteland with RPG and shooting elements, then you'll likely be better off playing Fallout 3. If you wanted a MMORPG, then you'll be wanting to at least try the trial of Lord Of The Rings, Champions Online, City Of Heroes or World Of Warcraft. If you wanted a MMORPG with shooting elements, well...It may be best to just come back in a good decade or two.
It was after a minute that I had to actually get my control system open and look at the controls. I then had to change about a bit and check the other controls. A game that requires you to actually change the controls so it functions better (Q and E to strafe, A and D to turn left and right, I thought we had an agreed consensus about this?) is a game that didn't do much research. Allow me to give more examples. Let's say you have an assault rifle but you want to change to the fire-axe since there's a guy running towards you so weak it's not worth the ammo. Depending on the slot the computer automatically assigns, you must press ctrl and a number. This is not good practice, especially since this may lead to a lot of fumbling as you realise you need a rocket launcher and not the assault rifle as a boss character charges towards you.
So, after I got my controls figured out, I managed to find my first side-quest. ?Goodie!? I say as I approach the guards I was meant to dispatch to free the civilians. ?Wait a second...?. You'll find the guys who are a part of the same group with the civilians you were meant to rescue. No guards to kill. You'll then be told to defend them against the guards. After five minutes of waiting, I leave the room deciding that no guards were coming. I was then awarded with completing the mission. The last thing anyone wants to see when starting up a game is a broken quest, especially when there are only NPCs besides you in the area. So, later on you'll have to defeat a boss. You defeat the boss and be told to disarm the bomb. For reasons unknown to me, she then tells you to just drive the bomb out of the dam. ?Road kill it is!? you'll say as you climb onto a quad-bike that so happens to have the bomb on it. You'll start driving your quad-bike when you find bad guys. You know what you're going to do. You line the bike up as you drive closer to them, the time going down and...
You'll go through them.
Don't hope to enjoy the freshness of driving after all that running and shooting, and don't think you can kill people with that quad-bike with the bomb on the back.
You'll spend the rest of that minute absolutely bored as you drive the bike down the tunnel until, finally, it goes off. You die. I was about to curse when suddenly, the game displays that was meant to happen. You sigh loudly as you realise you're just an insignificant clone, a clone that is now slowly dying since the head of that facility did something that means you are slowly dying. Again, it was a point where I felt so bored with the game that I couldn't care. I am finally told to choose an area depending on what kind of thing I want to specialise in: Action, crafting or support. I decide to choose crafting since I am a sucker for creating items. Well, then the game pushes me into the game and says ?off you go chap? like a parent trying to push their child into a child-care company. After talking to some people (and told that if I want recipes so I can finally go try to make something, that I should go elsewhere because they're not sparing anything), I am told to go speak to a guy near the mail-box, shown with a giant envelope. I got there and find...Nothing. There's a house with nothing inside it and near-by a town, but no one I was meant to talk to. I look at the map and find out what they meant by mail-box, was the post office. I go there, and he gives me a quest to go try a melee move out on some chickens. ?Alrighty! Some action!?. So I find some chickens, try it out, and die. Apparently, not the right chickens.
It's at this point, I turned the game off. I figured the best way of showing my view of the game was describing my experience with a running commentary. Very few games successfully treat a new gamer as badly as this one, pushing you into the thick of it as soon the tutorial is done (which one tutorial stage was skipped because that was broken). Even fewer appear, well, broken. Then again, maybe I'm bias because I really do not like third-person shooters, but I also find the combat annoying at best, the AI sometimes glitching out as I try to kill them. If there was team missions where I have to help or be with AI, then I really don't want to know.
The good points, well, the graphics aren't terribly bad and there's some good ideas lurking about here. Shooting in a MMORPG though is something very hard to pull off without balance issues and it makes an attempt that may be considered as ?as good as it gets?; at least currently. However, most things about this game either worked to kick the newbie, or to just kick the player generally. It's as user-friendly as Linux, without the the feeling that there must be something good in it. The entire game-play feels generally boring with no reason to look deeper into it. It doesn't even leave a taste in your mouth making you think ?if this was less under-cooked or over-cooked, it may of tasted like something the best minds of Team Silent, Rockstar North, Infinity Ward (pre-being wrecked by Activision), Value and Tim Schafer would create, or at least something similar?. It just leaves you just bored and apathetic.
However, as it is, I couldn't give a strong enough recommendation to just try something else, especially due to the monthly subscription fee. If you wanted a post-apocolyptic wasteland with RPG and shooting elements, then you'll likely be better off playing Fallout 3. If you wanted a MMORPG, then you'll be wanting to at least try the trial of Lord Of The Rings, Champions Online, City Of Heroes or World Of Warcraft. If you wanted a MMORPG with shooting elements, well...It may be best to just come back in a good decade or two.