So after christmas I looked at picking up a copy of Flagship's first game, being a huge fan of Diablo 2 and all, and I've played through about 20 or so hours.
Overall the game is neat. It's a lot of fun to look at, as I'm a big fan of post-apocalyptic stuff in general, but the levels are -ridiculously- repetitive. You basically have a "Out in the street" level, a "Inside some buildings" level, and a "In the subway tunnels" level that just repeat over and over again.
While this makes sense in that if you're in the tunnels under London, they're all going to be pretty uniform in general, I've gone through to like, 4 different "towns" now, and the repitition is starting to get a little annoying. Add to that the fact that areas aren't linearly connected, and instead all work off the hub that is each town, it makes navigation a little annoying.
So far levelling has been comparatively slow, I'm sitting on only level 15, after enough play time to be pushing 40 or 50 in a game like D2, and you get the D2 standard 5 stats and 1 skill point each time you level.
I'm playing as the marksman class, which uses exclusively guns, and from playing as long as I have, so many fights are "slowly back away while shooting things" that I don't relish playing a melee class when you get surrounded.
The equipment system is really neat. There are level reqs on wielding like usual in this style of game, but each item also has requirements for stats (Of which there are 4) which, unlike D2 (where the reqs are a matter of threshold) where the requirement is just "have at least X" in whatever the relevant stat is, equipment here has requirements that are additive.
So if you have 20 stamina, and an item needs 10 stamina to equip, you can wear it, and then have 10 stamina left to pay equipment costs on other things. It makes for a little more micromanagement and stat planning, but that kind of depth in planning for the character build gives a lot more variablity in players.
Money is usually quite short in comparison to the things you can spend money on, and sell values on equipment are quite low in general. Add to that the fact that you can dismantle items rather than sell them, which gives you componants you can use to upgrade your existing equipment, and create additional items, and you're pretty much never at the balance point in most other MMOs where you can just leave most crap laying around.
All in all, the equipment system seems predicated on a huge amount of minor customisation and micromanagement, where you'll get a piece of great gear from some boss monster, and then hold onto it for some long time, using other things you find to scrap for parts to upgrade what you've got.
There are a nigh endless series of side-quests that seem to basically come in two flavours: "Kill X of monster y" and "Go kill bossish monster Z" of which you get about 8 or 9 in each given "town" and main plots, while occasionally more interesting, tend to involve a lot of "Get to the next town and talk to foo" which leaves a little to be desired, but is still pretty standard for games of the type.
I'm quite sure I've got a not-small amount of play left to go in the game (At least, I damn well better!) so my opinions of the game are apt to change as I go, but so far, I'm quite enjoying it, it is well put together and fun to play, but it falls victim to similar looking and similarly laid out map syndrome in a big way, and there isn't all that much variety in what you're supposed to do, but then, being a game made by the guys who originated "Destroy the Den of Evil" its pretty much par for the course.
Overall the game is neat. It's a lot of fun to look at, as I'm a big fan of post-apocalyptic stuff in general, but the levels are -ridiculously- repetitive. You basically have a "Out in the street" level, a "Inside some buildings" level, and a "In the subway tunnels" level that just repeat over and over again.
While this makes sense in that if you're in the tunnels under London, they're all going to be pretty uniform in general, I've gone through to like, 4 different "towns" now, and the repitition is starting to get a little annoying. Add to that the fact that areas aren't linearly connected, and instead all work off the hub that is each town, it makes navigation a little annoying.
So far levelling has been comparatively slow, I'm sitting on only level 15, after enough play time to be pushing 40 or 50 in a game like D2, and you get the D2 standard 5 stats and 1 skill point each time you level.
I'm playing as the marksman class, which uses exclusively guns, and from playing as long as I have, so many fights are "slowly back away while shooting things" that I don't relish playing a melee class when you get surrounded.
The equipment system is really neat. There are level reqs on wielding like usual in this style of game, but each item also has requirements for stats (Of which there are 4) which, unlike D2 (where the reqs are a matter of threshold) where the requirement is just "have at least X" in whatever the relevant stat is, equipment here has requirements that are additive.
So if you have 20 stamina, and an item needs 10 stamina to equip, you can wear it, and then have 10 stamina left to pay equipment costs on other things. It makes for a little more micromanagement and stat planning, but that kind of depth in planning for the character build gives a lot more variablity in players.
Money is usually quite short in comparison to the things you can spend money on, and sell values on equipment are quite low in general. Add to that the fact that you can dismantle items rather than sell them, which gives you componants you can use to upgrade your existing equipment, and create additional items, and you're pretty much never at the balance point in most other MMOs where you can just leave most crap laying around.
All in all, the equipment system seems predicated on a huge amount of minor customisation and micromanagement, where you'll get a piece of great gear from some boss monster, and then hold onto it for some long time, using other things you find to scrap for parts to upgrade what you've got.
There are a nigh endless series of side-quests that seem to basically come in two flavours: "Kill X of monster y" and "Go kill bossish monster Z" of which you get about 8 or 9 in each given "town" and main plots, while occasionally more interesting, tend to involve a lot of "Get to the next town and talk to foo" which leaves a little to be desired, but is still pretty standard for games of the type.
I'm quite sure I've got a not-small amount of play left to go in the game (At least, I damn well better!) so my opinions of the game are apt to change as I go, but so far, I'm quite enjoying it, it is well put together and fun to play, but it falls victim to similar looking and similarly laid out map syndrome in a big way, and there isn't all that much variety in what you're supposed to do, but then, being a game made by the guys who originated "Destroy the Den of Evil" its pretty much par for the course.
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