Asheron's Call

"Never Buy a Used Car From Asheron"

Horrible Horrible HORRIBLE! This game would have gotten a four if not for the fact it keeps you coming back- only to be dissapointed, and the fact that you have to pay a monthly fee. Let me describe how my ''adventure'' in Dereth went, and you won't be so unfortunate as to waste money and time on this game yourself.

Let's see.... I opened up the box and loaded it up..... ok, time to update! Shouldn't take too long. *three minutes later* What the??!! 1% done? Fine, I went and did something else for five hours.

Ahh, finally loaded! Let's make a character... SWEET!!! So many different options! Ok, let's get to work... *five minutes later* Ok, a guy who specializes in Unarmed Combat! He can cook, fletch, and mix, I'll get so much EXP with him!
*an hour later* Ohh... I forgot to put any starting points into endurance.... *remake*

Ok, now he's loaded up on endurance! *two and a half days and five levels later* I'm in town talking, and some guy tells me ''Hey man, what skills do you have?'' I told him, and he advised me to remake my character, so I did. ''U ned a patron?'' he asked. I declined. I played my new guy until level 3, where I deleted him and decided to make another character.

I want to try and make a mage! Ok, he's specialized in War Magic, Arcane Lore, and Mana Conversion! Let's go fry some drudges! The mage eventually gets scrapped after reaching level 10 a month or two later. In the mean time, I find myself a patron whom I like. ''You know,'' he says to me, ''I think you should make a new character. Here, use this template...''

Ok, so I manage to crawl my way up to level 22 while under the tutelage of a kind but busy patron. The highlight of his patronship was when I finally got (mostly being given by my patron) enough motes to get a Peerless Atlan Claw, something everyone wanted, but turned out to actually be pretty worthless. I was later given Katars that smoked the Peerless Atlan Claw, but for some reason would only sell for two or three motes. (36 motes makes a an Atlan Weapon.)

Eventually, disgusted by the fact that it takes 28 hours of hard work to level up, and that no new quests were being made for my level bracket, I left. I renewed my subscription a few months later, to find that my patron was gone. I got in touch with some people from the same clan, and managed to get a new patron.

''Are you sitting down, man? I think... you should make a new character''

I played for a while with my new character, then cancelled my subscription.

Graphics- 10/10

The graphics are great, and there are a variety of weapons in all shapes, sizes, and colors. This is definately the strongewst point of Asheron's Call.

Variety- 4.5/10

This is the only game that I have ever marked down for having TOO MUCH variety! You want armor? Sure... You have to provide protection for your feet, upper legs, lower legs, abdomen, arms, hands, torso, and head... Just to show they hate you, the programmers decided to add various levels of protection against Blunt, Piercing, Slashing, Fire, Cold, Acid, and Lightning. Ok, so when something hits you, it could do any of 64 amounts of damage. This will piss you off greatly when you get hit in the hand for 89 points of electrical damage because, whoops, your gloves have no lightning resistance. But that won't matter a whole lot anyway, since this will catch you toatally off gaurd, making you die, and you probably won't be able to get your corpse back when it dissolves. Good ridance.

Gameplay- 2/10

Being an online game, it has the added intrigue of lag! YOu will become a master of cursing when you lag out of the game, only to see yourself clad in only dirty underwear when you log back on, because those cheap monsters killed you while your character while he stood and drooled on himself. For added fun, try using the autorun feature! If you get disconnected while auto run is on, your character keeps on running until he gets killed! Of course, you will have absolutely no idea where you died while you were offline, and thus will be deprived of your overly complex equipment. Pretty soon you will be reduced to shooting at rabbits from the walls, having no equipment and a 40% vitae penalty. A vitae penalty, I should add, is a reduction of your skills that you get when you die in 5% increments. I guess I should put in the part about spells in here. There are some ridiculous number of spells, like 10,000 or something. But don't worry about that, you'll never get them anyway. To research a spell, you need to mix over 160 or so components in such a way that you get a spell by ''testing'' it on a target. Let's see, 160 squared would be...25600 different combinations. Sound fun? Oh yeah, you have to get them in EXACTLY the right order, and there are eight slots, so let's just say you have a one in 248,000 chance of getting a spell. That's IF your magic skill is high enough, IF you remember to target something, and it's the right kind of target for that spell IF you even have that school of magic, and IF you get lucky. Yeah, you only get a spell about 1/5 times, even if you have the components in the right order. And you have to BUY these components.

Sound- 3/10

??? What? No music? Ugh... You can hear the monsters grunt if you hit them hard enough, though, and hear your pitiful cries after getting killed by getting slashed on the foot. That deserves a few points.

Balance- 0/10

You have your poor broke mages who do about as much damage as an Unarmed Brawler, except with less ability to jump, cary items, and use shields and armor. They can't use shields while waving their little magic sticks around anyway. Also, if you managed to get a mag to level 5,000, he would still do the same amount of damage as a level 100 mage (100 is about as high as anyone has gotten to), since spell damage is based only on what kind of spell it is, as well as some dumb ''World Mana Pool'' system which is supposed to make your spells do more damage if nobody has been casting it recently, but probably gives EVERYONE, including non mages 25% more lag for about 2 more damage. You have your middle of the road fighters, then you have those damn archers. Everybody hates archers. You do more damage with a bow, even untrained, than you do with a spear, axe, katar, mace, or staff specialized! Archers can also hit from long distances.

So... just don't play it at all, you'll be better off. It is interesting for a while, but mostly leads to remade characters and bad feelings towards the game.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 11/23/01, Updated 11/23/01