TheSecretWorld

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The Secret World, or, "What AnarchyOnline did next".

The premise is, roughly, secret societies, cabals and intrigue in the modern world.
The intro mission has you inhale a butterfly, investigate darkness in a subway, with a shotgun, and discover the river of life.

And... then the main game sends you to [K]ingsmouth nr Dunwich, to investigate a fog which rolled in, sucked away lots of the people, and filled the town with zombies. While it beats whacking rats (and they do put up a pretty good fight for your starting character) it's not quite what was promised. (The closest to that I've found so far is at the church - it sends you on a clue following mission; sent by a guy who "Is an associate member of the Illuminati. Well, I post on their forums. A lot.")

There's the occasional lampshading of the lack of subtlety - but it really shifts tone back to traditional hack (and shoot) and slash. There are investigation missions - but, well, even the in-game web-browser brings you to google; and at least one of the corporate websites the in-game clues refer to has stopped operating. Leaving the first and only source of clues to be pure walkthrough solutions. Which is a shame. If you do want to solve any of the puzzles legit - use a notepad. The in-game log 'forgets' to record important parts of the clues.

It does well at introducing a semi-exploration type of game. MoonLogic?-aly, by reducing the number of missions you can take to one plus three side-quests. And the quest, or side-quest, usually shows you a new area, or NPC, or quest, so that you have something you can continue with.

The game also prides itself on doing away with levels - but there is skill growth (until you unlock them all; re-spec among unlocked skills is free and has a save/load system thank goodness) and importantly there's an 'equipment use' skill or two for each type of equipment. Meaning that effectively you replace levelling up by levelling up your gear. Which sounds tempting - until you realise that this leaves you with having levels and without any way to usefully con enemies. (The game does flag up elites, but is it an elite you're expected to take on with teir 0 gear; or an elite that will kill anything except a full squad of tier 10? Who knows!)

: The game does actually tell you this, though there's no particular reason you'd actually know that it does this unless you'd read a guide. The shape of the symbol next to the monster's name flags it as elite/normal/whatever; the colour tells you its tier in relation to you - green for much lower, blue for lower, white for same, yellow for higher, red for much higher. --SF

The skill system does have nice PathOfExile style synergies to discover. And a built-in search engine. But mainly you end up relying on online buld guides anyway.

And... I have yet to find a useful shop. Or indeed any purpose for either of the in-game currencies I have so far found. (There's one that sells tier 0 basic gear of each type; at least.)

It's quite pretty. Cut-scenes use the in-game engine (with render quality cranked up). And even remembers what gear you have on. But, your character is unvoiced; and indeed pretty much immobile. Somewhat immersion breaking. Also the game is very inconsistent about what gets captions and what doesn't. I've had to resort to cheat-guides three times so far due to being unable to hear the NPC instructions. (The log helpfully said "Go to the place that such-and-such suggested")

Oh, and amusingly, sometimes I stash my assault rifle (remember, secrecy and cabals? Yeah, the game didn't - again, lampshaded nicely by an NPC who asks if you are "another neighbourhood spiderman" - I advise standing around and listen to their idle banter, much of it is hilarious) on one shoulder; and sometimes on the other. And occasionally, presumably due to a glitch, both.

Oh; and crafting. Crafting crafting crafting. Nowhere sells crafting components, you decompose stuff, or get drops. There's no skill; just make patterns of the stuff and get the result. Which is nice. Except it means you're always crafting one or two teirs below the gear you have equipped. So, uh, why would you bother? Guess it's an end-game-only thing.

So it gets a rico score of 2. Played 4 weeks, fairly heavily. Unlikely to bother picking it up again. Got as far as Transylvania (yup, you guessed it: Vampires. In broad daylight.) Combat started getting... well, I want to say "Trciky?" but you still hit the same combo over and over. You just end fights with less health. So yeah, it took that long to get repetitive and samey; which is pretty good really. But at that point some actual difficulty kicked in too, and even though I'ver got plenty of headroom to improve the character, why bother? So I've stopped. Not a bad game by any means. Just not really a good one either. (And despite the double boost of holiday events and HumbleBundle, kinda unpopulated too.)

CategoryGames MMORPG OP==Vitenka