A faithful WoW clone, but is that a bad thing?
THE WORLD
Allods is set in a predominantly fantasy world that has a dash of steam punk thrown into it. The world is vast and moderately varied (for a free MMO) with a good amount of mobs and quests to grind. However you never have the luxury of choosing a zone or attempting a different set of quests. The zone progression is linear (each of the two faction has their own starting zone for the first quarter or so of the game), and there is *just* enough quests to tie you over to you next chain.
GAMEPLAY
Allods play very similarly to WoW in terms of the combat and class. Each of the 8 classes (They recently added a 9th) all have a little unique mechanism such as a secondary resource to make them feel fresh and unique. Balance is a serious issue. Like most free to play games there are very little patching.
There is a crafting and gathering system, but it is nowhere as robust as WoW.
END GAME
Every true MMO player grinds to get to the end game, so what does Allods have to offer? The current end game features grinding through dungeons islands floating in the astral (space) called allods (islands).
Astral ship is unique to allods where the party take various roles to fight through demons, enemy ships and their own sense of direction to get to their allod instance.
Currently there is only one end game raid instance. The difficulty of the raid is extremely steep. Only major guilds are making progress through it one boss at a time.
There are daily arenas where the two factions fight in a gladiator style pit for items and upgrade ingredients. There is also a open PvP zone where players fight for similar rewards. However the gear received from PvP is dwarved by the PvE gear.
Since there are long long gaps between new content patches players can find themselves grinding the same things repeatedly.
CASH SHOP
The cash shop has very expensive items that can blatantly boost your abilities as well as a range of items that offers you perks. All these can be purchased using the in game currency, but would require a considerable effort.
The gpotato prices are very steep, a decently geared player would need to spend hundreds of dollars to gear out a character. However each character can have a "reborn" alt that can share these cash shop item benefits.
MY 2 CENTS
Allods offers a decently smooth and interesting world to play in and explore. The gameplay mechanics and the feel of each class should be enough to entertain you. Being killed by blatantly better cash shopped enemies can be very frustrating. If you ever want to pay for a free mmorpg this is the game.