Dark Ages

"Addicting, but not that fun, really.."

This game really didn't do it for me at first, and it took me a couple months or just playing it randomly while bored to really do anything, and when I did, it became like a disease...
Okay, first of all, the game is very bland, but the community setting really gives it it's charm (weddings, group-hunting, arena, et cetera) It's a game that the more you see players who are better than you, the more you want to play. I, personally, quit about 124304230840 bazillion times. My first character was a Rogue, which I would hunt a few levels, leave...come back, see everyone I knew from before getting better, catch up a little bit...repeat...Until I eventually got to level 99, was talking to the lady, about to master and!...got exiled, so I got frustrated and quit. Needless to say, I came back...Now onto the review:

Game-play(7)
Depending on your personal preferences, this game really isn't that bad..It's true, on a lot of classes (particularly warrior) it's very repetitive; but this can be fixed with the concept of "sub-classes" (classes that go to level 99 as one class (e.g. rogue, wizard..) then go to another class, but keep their old skills and spells from their last class, plus get the ones from the new class...) A lot of players make strange combinations (although now, no combination is really strange, since most are over-made) and hunt with other strange combinations to make hunting more challenging and a little different...but if you just do things generically the whole way, you're going to get bored fast. Although the arena in this game does require a tiny tiny (tiny) tiny bit of skill...as other players have more brains than the mediocre monsters you fight in hunting grounds...and a lot of the time, combinations of spells and skills have more effect in owning arena than just going up to somebody and hitting spacebar until they die..So, that's a little bit of a perk, I guess.

Music/Sound(7)
I, personally, didn't think the music was too bad, though it gets annoying after a while. As for sound; some of the spell noises were a little cool, but sounds like the generic assail (spacebar) noise was just plain annoying. Although it was fun to log on to noob-chars and annoy people with it...

Community(7)
This has been touched on a million time, but players are horrible. Some can be nice, and helpful, but the majority are just asses, and want to cheat you and rip you off as much as possible. Noobs, they like to annoy you as much as they can. And politics was the big thing, it was cool that it was player-run, but the constant political bickering got really old, really fast.

Roleplay(6)
Okay, roleplaying...Not many people roleplay in this game anymore, but if you want to be one of them, find a nice roleplaying guild, and roleplay with them..or roleplay and just listen to other people not roleplay..I don't think it ruins the point of th game to hear people not roleplaying, but, some people may feel that way...It's a fantasy game, so, it's possible to roleplay, just don't expect a lot of it outside of yourself.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/24/06