RF Online, a Sci-fi'ish MMO game is now completely free to play. http://www.rf-onlinegame.com/
just hit the link at the games website to generate a key, choose a download link from the list and off you go. the client is around 1.5 gigabytes in size.
[Edit] Time for a small review then. First lets talk about the story, wich still is a bit of a mystery to me after a few hours of playing so i decided to quote the wiki article of the game wich has probably been written by someone who has played the game a lot more ( or just copied and pasted the info from the developers website ).
So with only a few hours of gametime behind i can already tell why this game has been made free, by todays standards and now that MMO's are finally starting to break into the mainstream gaming scene this game is quite badly outdated and im not talking in terms of graphical quality. There are some rather odd gameplay design solutions that just made me go "huh?". But lets start from the beginning shall we ?
In character creation you get to choose from 3 races wich basically are the most human like guys, the elf like guys ( same as human but with pointy ears ) and robots. I ofcourse went with the Elf race and my aim was to create the prettiest female character possible since im not the type of guy who likes to stare another mans virtual ass... i prefer cross dressing instead. In character creation you get most of the basic options, face type, hair type and so on but there was also the option to choose the type of starter armor you wore but the term armor is maybe a tad misleading in this case unless you consider lingerie armor, thats right the starter "armor" for these pretty female elfs consisted almost entirely of lingerie of different kind and color, i naturally chose the most inappropriate ones. So my character was done and looking hot, as my class i chose Ranger wich is a class that fights from long range with ranged weapons such as bows or guns ( surprise! ) and off to the world i went.
Upon entering the game i was thrown in to a tutorial area where i could run around alone and familiarize myself with the game a bit. The tutorial wich is optional was the type that totally underestimates the gamer, highlights include for example: familiarizing yourself with the options screen and going through all the settings one by one. Kinda pointless if you ask me since they could have just added tooltips that popped up when you hovered your mouse cursor over a setting but i guess that was too much work. By the time i had gotten into the part about movement in the game i already wished i had clicked no when i was asked if i wanted to do the tutorial and speaking of movement, this is where the game starts to go wrong. Its safe to say that pretty much all PC gamers are used to the good old W,A,S,D movement and controlling the camera with the mouse but the fellas who made this game thought that it would be a better idea to use a click system where you click the game field with your mouse and your character will merrily jog to that spot. I guess this type of playing suits some people but the good old WASD controls could atleast been an alternative.
By default your character is in running mode and you can toggle between running and walking and you kinda have to since your character cant run infinitely since you lose stamina and once you've lost all your stamina you will be forced to walk because you will be tired. Now this is just silly. Since they really had to add a mechanic like this they could have done it in a way that would have served gameplay a bit better like have a standard run that doesnt drain anything, then have a sprint button that makes the character sprint and drains your stamina and finally the walk wich would let you regenerate stamina.
The combat in the game is more or less like in any other MMO. Click enemy to target it, click it again to engage it, watch things happen. There is one pretty nifty feature though, you can level up your special skills by simply using them. Every time you use one of your specials, you gain a skill point for it and after a certain amount of points you level up that skill wich i guess grants you a stronger version of the skill. Theres a catch though as the skills use Force Points wich is like mana i guess you could say, when you start the game you have maybe 40 Force Points and using a skill seems to cost around 30 Force Points or atleast they did for my character and the Force Points regenerate awfully slow so it takes quite a bit of time to level up a skill when compared to the standard levels your character gains.
What about the UI then ? The UI isnt actually that bad, its fairly clear and all or atleast most buttons have a tooltip wich tells their function. The shortcuts are also logical, "I" opens the inventory, "O" for options, "M" for map etc. My only problem with it is that it doesnt scale with resolutions ( or then i just couldnt find the option ) so expect to stare at some really small icons and fonts if you choose to play the game at a reolution of 1600 x 1200 and above.
Upon entering the actual game world and some sort of home base complex i immediately received my first quest from an npc on some sort of intercom system and i was tasked to kill 5 small flems and 10 normal flems wich are your avarage puny starter area monsters, the quest contained a 3rd objective though wich was "Hit level 3"...hmm, thats different. So off i went, out to the wilderness to hunt flems and to hit level 3. I achived my objective and as a reward i got a new bow and a bag wich i thought was generous but this is where things went wrong again because during my hunting i had aquired various pieces of loot ( wich included a new set of clothes that were even more inappropriate then my starter armor ) wich i hadnt sold yet and my bags were full so i never received my shiny rewards... how barbaric i thought.
After having completed my very first quest and receiving my very first rewards that i did not actually receive i naturally started to look for new quests but i couldnt find any npc's who might have given me new tasks, no npc's with big yellow exclamation marks over their heads anywhere in the area. I then did some digging and browsed the Journal and found that there was a whole list of quests and most of them were marked with a red color and a number wich i assume stood for the level requirement of the quest so back to the wilderness and grinding. I destroyed several puny starter area monsters and gained some levels and by the time i hit level 5 i got contacted by the npc who had a new task for me wich was about exterminating more monsters but at a different location.
On my way to the new location i came across some new types of monsters wich much to my surprise killed me with 1 hit and this certainly raised an eyebrow, why would you populate the starter area with monsters that you cant possibly beat ? So if i understood correctly, im meant to sit by the home base and kill those little monsters untill im high enough to proceed a bit further ? That certainly seemed to be the case since after my very first death i decided to approach the location from an alternative path wich turned out to be equally dangerous and once again i ended up getting killed in 1 hit. I dont know how large the game world is, but if the first area has such dramatic variations of monsters, then it cant be very big.
And that pretty much covers my first experience with RFO. Not that many great things to say really. According to the Wiki article, this game was released in 2005 but if you look at the graphics, it felt more like the game might have been made around 2000, the visuals are awfully boring. Sure the characters look alright and some of the monsters that i saw looked alright but the game world itself uses very few details apart from the odd tree here and there. On the plus side, atleast the game runs smoothly even when there are lots of other players around and this game does seem to have quite a few players still playing so it must have done something right, i just havent yet discovered what it is. Among the better things the game has to offer i'd like to mention sound as the music is pretty nice, its not very memorable but it certainly doesnt get on your nerves either and the sound effects seemed alright too.
This is my first Korean MMO that ive played and ive read that most Korean MMO's tend to be all about pure grinding and based on the short time i spent in RFO, there seems to be some truth in that statement. Its hardly fair to write a review of something that ive played for only a very short while so im just going to leave it at these first impressions of the game.
To those of you who want to see a score or something, im gonna borrow the words of Dr.Ashen who is known to some for his hilarious Youtube gadget reviews such as the Neo Double Games ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow9SHsnFG2U ) and say: Overall i'll give it 8 out of 10, but only because its made in Korea and im terrified of their goverment.
just hit the link at the games website to generate a key, choose a download link from the list and off you go. the client is around 1.5 gigabytes in size.
[Edit] Time for a small review then. First lets talk about the story, wich still is a bit of a mystery to me after a few hours of playing so i decided to quote the wiki article of the game wich has probably been written by someone who has played the game a lot more ( or just copied and pasted the info from the developers website ).
...and thats about all there is.
So with only a few hours of gametime behind i can already tell why this game has been made free, by todays standards and now that MMO's are finally starting to break into the mainstream gaming scene this game is quite badly outdated and im not talking in terms of graphical quality. There are some rather odd gameplay design solutions that just made me go "huh?". But lets start from the beginning shall we ?
In character creation you get to choose from 3 races wich basically are the most human like guys, the elf like guys ( same as human but with pointy ears ) and robots. I ofcourse went with the Elf race and my aim was to create the prettiest female character possible since im not the type of guy who likes to stare another mans virtual ass... i prefer cross dressing instead. In character creation you get most of the basic options, face type, hair type and so on but there was also the option to choose the type of starter armor you wore but the term armor is maybe a tad misleading in this case unless you consider lingerie armor, thats right the starter "armor" for these pretty female elfs consisted almost entirely of lingerie of different kind and color, i naturally chose the most inappropriate ones. So my character was done and looking hot, as my class i chose Ranger wich is a class that fights from long range with ranged weapons such as bows or guns ( surprise! ) and off to the world i went.
Upon entering the game i was thrown in to a tutorial area where i could run around alone and familiarize myself with the game a bit. The tutorial wich is optional was the type that totally underestimates the gamer, highlights include for example: familiarizing yourself with the options screen and going through all the settings one by one. Kinda pointless if you ask me since they could have just added tooltips that popped up when you hovered your mouse cursor over a setting but i guess that was too much work. By the time i had gotten into the part about movement in the game i already wished i had clicked no when i was asked if i wanted to do the tutorial and speaking of movement, this is where the game starts to go wrong. Its safe to say that pretty much all PC gamers are used to the good old W,A,S,D movement and controlling the camera with the mouse but the fellas who made this game thought that it would be a better idea to use a click system where you click the game field with your mouse and your character will merrily jog to that spot. I guess this type of playing suits some people but the good old WASD controls could atleast been an alternative.
By default your character is in running mode and you can toggle between running and walking and you kinda have to since your character cant run infinitely since you lose stamina and once you've lost all your stamina you will be forced to walk because you will be tired. Now this is just silly. Since they really had to add a mechanic like this they could have done it in a way that would have served gameplay a bit better like have a standard run that doesnt drain anything, then have a sprint button that makes the character sprint and drains your stamina and finally the walk wich would let you regenerate stamina.
The combat in the game is more or less like in any other MMO. Click enemy to target it, click it again to engage it, watch things happen. There is one pretty nifty feature though, you can level up your special skills by simply using them. Every time you use one of your specials, you gain a skill point for it and after a certain amount of points you level up that skill wich i guess grants you a stronger version of the skill. Theres a catch though as the skills use Force Points wich is like mana i guess you could say, when you start the game you have maybe 40 Force Points and using a skill seems to cost around 30 Force Points or atleast they did for my character and the Force Points regenerate awfully slow so it takes quite a bit of time to level up a skill when compared to the standard levels your character gains.
What about the UI then ? The UI isnt actually that bad, its fairly clear and all or atleast most buttons have a tooltip wich tells their function. The shortcuts are also logical, "I" opens the inventory, "O" for options, "M" for map etc. My only problem with it is that it doesnt scale with resolutions ( or then i just couldnt find the option ) so expect to stare at some really small icons and fonts if you choose to play the game at a reolution of 1600 x 1200 and above.
Upon entering the actual game world and some sort of home base complex i immediately received my first quest from an npc on some sort of intercom system and i was tasked to kill 5 small flems and 10 normal flems wich are your avarage puny starter area monsters, the quest contained a 3rd objective though wich was "Hit level 3"...hmm, thats different. So off i went, out to the wilderness to hunt flems and to hit level 3. I achived my objective and as a reward i got a new bow and a bag wich i thought was generous but this is where things went wrong again because during my hunting i had aquired various pieces of loot ( wich included a new set of clothes that were even more inappropriate then my starter armor ) wich i hadnt sold yet and my bags were full so i never received my shiny rewards... how barbaric i thought.
After having completed my very first quest and receiving my very first rewards that i did not actually receive i naturally started to look for new quests but i couldnt find any npc's who might have given me new tasks, no npc's with big yellow exclamation marks over their heads anywhere in the area. I then did some digging and browsed the Journal and found that there was a whole list of quests and most of them were marked with a red color and a number wich i assume stood for the level requirement of the quest so back to the wilderness and grinding. I destroyed several puny starter area monsters and gained some levels and by the time i hit level 5 i got contacted by the npc who had a new task for me wich was about exterminating more monsters but at a different location.
On my way to the new location i came across some new types of monsters wich much to my surprise killed me with 1 hit and this certainly raised an eyebrow, why would you populate the starter area with monsters that you cant possibly beat ? So if i understood correctly, im meant to sit by the home base and kill those little monsters untill im high enough to proceed a bit further ? That certainly seemed to be the case since after my very first death i decided to approach the location from an alternative path wich turned out to be equally dangerous and once again i ended up getting killed in 1 hit. I dont know how large the game world is, but if the first area has such dramatic variations of monsters, then it cant be very big.
And that pretty much covers my first experience with RFO. Not that many great things to say really. According to the Wiki article, this game was released in 2005 but if you look at the graphics, it felt more like the game might have been made around 2000, the visuals are awfully boring. Sure the characters look alright and some of the monsters that i saw looked alright but the game world itself uses very few details apart from the odd tree here and there. On the plus side, atleast the game runs smoothly even when there are lots of other players around and this game does seem to have quite a few players still playing so it must have done something right, i just havent yet discovered what it is. Among the better things the game has to offer i'd like to mention sound as the music is pretty nice, its not very memorable but it certainly doesnt get on your nerves either and the sound effects seemed alright too.
This is my first Korean MMO that ive played and ive read that most Korean MMO's tend to be all about pure grinding and based on the short time i spent in RFO, there seems to be some truth in that statement. Its hardly fair to write a review of something that ive played for only a very short while so im just going to leave it at these first impressions of the game.
To those of you who want to see a score or something, im gonna borrow the words of Dr.Ashen who is known to some for his hilarious Youtube gadget reviews such as the Neo Double Games ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow9SHsnFG2U ) and say: Overall i'll give it 8 out of 10, but only because its made in Korea and im terrified of their goverment.
