Anarchy Online

"An excellent game, but hampered by several serious flaws."

Anarchy Online has the potential to be a great game, but for the time being has some problems that seriously hamper gameplay for many gamers.

The gameplay is excellent. Funcom has explored a realm that has been curiously missing for a long time. For those of us who get sick of elves and dwarves and all of that, here is a game for you. You will never get bored, with countless missions to undertake through a rather good random mission generator. One town, most especially Omni-1 will keep you busy for a surprisingly long time.

The interfaces are laid out well, with everything easy to access. The easy to learn interface makes the game fairly easy to learn.

The music is simply amazing for this type of game. Usually on online games the music is atrocious, but all of the music is expertly composed and just plain sounds good.

The actual sound effects are par for the course, with not much to distinguish them from any other game. This is not necesserily a bad thing, but there was definetely room for improvement.

The graphics are some of the best I have seen. With a rather high-end video card and a mid level system (700mhz+ PIII or Duron) with a good amount of RAM you will get graphics as good as anything you might see on a Playstation 2. That is very impressive for an online game. Looking at the camera flare effect from the suns is amazing, and the cities truly give you a sense of, well, being in an actual futuristic city.

Besides, it's just plain cool to run around in a trench -coat with a laser rifle.

With all of it's good points, Anarchy Online has several rather serious, persistent flaws.

Many people can not even install the game. People that can actually get the game on their systems run the risk of corrupting the files while connecting to the patch server. Now some of this can be taken care of by downloading the .exe patches but this is still a hassle.

I have tried the game on nearly every version of Windows available and have had the best luck with an evaluation version of Windows XP and with a copy of Windows 2000 Professional. Most people having serious problems currently are running Windows ME.

Now, I am sure that these problems will be fixed with time, but currently they are frustrating for many people, especially those who don't have multiple operating systems to try.

Lag...Every online game has it. It does get particularly bad in the cities sometimes, but it is playable on a 56kb/sec dial-up connection.

Most people do not have a crashing problem. The few crashes I have experienced are the result of a video card driver conflict with my operating system.

All of the problems with the patches and installation will doubtlessly be fixed as time goes on, but until they do you're going to have to try your luck. When it gets fixed, however, it has the potential to be one of the best games available. Even with the flaws it is still a solid investment.

Let me stress strongly one more time that you may have problems installing or running this game, so be sure to purchase it somewhere where you can actually return or exchange it if you get a bad copy.

(When the bugs are fixed, it will easily get a 10)

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/02/01, Updated 09/02/01