August 25th, 2012
Reviews
MMORPG’s have been the same hack and slash style for over 10 years, where you can lock on to a monster and auto attack them to death. World of Warcraft pioneered the way of leveling through quests instead of the endless grind and has been the forefront of all MMO’s for the last 8 years – still being able to charge its subscriber base as a lot of games are going offline or switching to the free to play model.
A new bread of MMO’s are hitting the market where they are becoming more ‘arcade’ like and giving you support to use an xbox/playstation controller instead of the normal keyboard and mouse set up and these games are the likes of Tera and RaiderZ with their new style of combat which has moved away from the auto target combat system 99% of all games feature.
This new combat style is true action combat, it is where you are unable to auto-target a monster but where ever you cast your spell or swing your sword it is where it hits, so you can actively dodge monster attacks and more skill is required.
With Tera being P2P, I didn’t want to invest any money in to it as I am looking forward more to Guild Wars 2, but when I got accepted in to the NA closed beta of RaiderZ I was very happy as I have been really eager to give this game a go for the past 4 months.
Take a look at the official trailer before reading my review.
The gameplay is really smooth, you can select 4 classes for now, the standard classes you see in most games – a mage, tank, cleric and berserker – looking forward to see an assassin type or an archer in the future. I jumped into a mage and love that I could aim my spells where I wanted and I knew if the monster moved I would miss so a lot more skill required. RaiderZ is quite standard on its questing, find an NPC and accept the quest, kill xy monsters and hand in – but as it is still in closed beta there is a possibility of more unique quest types moving forward.
The character development is relatively standard, where instead of going to a npc to learn skills, you have a skill tree to access and when you level, you get one point to add in to a skill of your choosing and along side this you get talent points auto created for you depending on what skills you take.
The music in game is nothing special and is compared to other titles such as Aion, Tera and Lineage with its Korean styled music.
The visuals in-game are beautiful and not too graphicly demanding on the average gaming PC. I was able to stream RaiderZ over twitch.tv without any lag on medium settings and when not streaming I can set it to max without any FPS drops. My PC is an i5 over-clocked to 3.9 ghz, 4GB ram and a Nvidia 460 GTX.
With the community just being in a closed beta state, their are players from all over the world on the NA server as there is no IP restrictions. I haven’t spoke to any body in game and the global chat is pretty toxicated a majority of the time. I will give it a second look once it moves in to open beta and then global release.
I would highly recommend RaiderZ as it is unique in its own way, the questing and gameplay is enjoyable and the monster hunting style MMO is new to the genre. With it being free it will have a large community so hopefully this will make it a much enjoyable experience!
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