As I eagerly await the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic, I decided to spend my time looking at some of the other new MMOs out there on the market. It’s hard to review an MMO without having some kind of context of games to compare it to. You also need to understand that these are just my opinions, and I know you’ll disagree with them. I’m going to try to be unbiased and objective, but don’t flame in the comments just because you don’t agree with me.
I held off reviewing this game until I’ve played it for a couple of months, so I hopefully have some good insight into the game.
Character Creation
Somewhat underwhelming. It’s a middle-of-the-road process where you select predefined features for different slots on your character. I’ve seen worse (Star Trek Online), I’ve seen some on par (Lord of the Rings), but I’ve seen a lot better (EVE Online, DC Universe Online, WoW, Aion). In my opinion the character creation process should teach you something about the game and the world you’re going to be playing in. EVE Online, and Aion do a good job of that. With Rift I had a hard time telling the two main factions apart, and just as much trouble telling the races apart. I was left with the question “why should I choose this faction instead of that faction”?
User Interface
I really like that you can completely customize the user interface. You can change the location of every single UI element which helped me to get much more comfortable with it because I could rearrange things to something more familiar. I think more games should allow you to do this.
Class System
I liked the class system much more than a typical MMO like WoW or LotR. The ability to blend three different roles really allows you to develop a character that plays to your style. The only downside is that it can be pretty overwhelming which choices you should make.
Gameplay
The gameplay is on par with most MMOs. The real selling point of this game is supposed to be they dynamic content with rifts opening up and spewing enemies all over the land. It was ok for the first couple of weeks, but then it turned more annoying as I was just trying to level up my character and go through quests, so the rifts kept getting in my way. In my opinion it’s not a big enough unique selling point to make the game stand out.
Even after two months of playing this game, I still don’t really understand the world and the struggle that everyone is going through. I mean… I understand what’s happening NOW with all the rifts, but it doesn’t do a good enough job of telling a story. Some games have stories to tell like LotR, WoW, and Aion while in other games you are the story like EVE Online and Star Trek Online. If a game has a story to tell, I want to experience the story without having to read a bunch of tiny text in a quest dialog window.
Conclusion
Rift is an MMO that offers only a couple unique selling points that other MMOs of it’s class don’t offer. An advanced class system along with dynamic content in the world aren’t enough to make it stand out and really be something special. It was fun to play for a couple of months, but didn’t get me hooked enough to continue playing it.
Let me know what you thought about the game. Do you agree with my review or disagree with it?
