Would be a mildly promising pre-alpha technology demo...if it weren't $15/month and claiming to be a final product.
And then there's the actual content. One of my biggest complaints about World of Warcraft is that it's a little lacking in character customization features. Compared to ArchLord, World of Warcraft's character creation screen offers nearly limitless possibilities. There are three races here: humans, orcs, and moon elves. There are three human classes, three orc classes which are clones of the human classes, and two moon elf classes. TWO. Classes are race-specific AND GENDER-SPECIFIC, meaning you cannot create a female knight or a male mage, for example. As you narrow down, the options don't get any better. Creating my male knight, I had four or five hair styles to choose from, each style with its own color that could not be changed, and a few face models. At this point I gave up on attempting to put anything resembling individuality or personal flair into the character and resigned myself to choosing the least stupid-looking option in each dropdown.
Already I'm a little miffed, but I decide to stay open-minded to the gameplay. After all, that's what really counts, right? I spawn in the middle of a town, ripe and ready to begin my adventure. I take a few brave steps forward, and...wait, what the %*&#?! I'm not taking steps at all. I'm GLIDING FORWARD across the ground, TOTALLY MOTIONLESS. My legs do not move. My arms do not swing. My head does not bob. I slide forward like an electric football figurine, and so is every other player character I can see in the vacinity. I start to wonder if something is wrong on my end of things, but then I see two or three people complaining about the same problem in the main chat. After gliding around for a few minutes just absorbing the hilarity of the situation in awe, I exit the game and hit up the ArchLord website's knowledge base. Apparently it's a fairly common problem: "Sometimes" when creating a character for the first time, none of the character animations work. Whoops. To fix the problem, just restart the game.
Okay, fair enough...pretty GLARING bug, but still, I haven't even experienced any of the core game content yet, and it's easy enough to fix the problem. Let's see how it actually plays. I start up the client again, type in my information, hit connect and wait. It hangs for about five minutes on "Waiting for response from server." No timeout, no error message, no "The server is not responding, please try again later," it just sits there doing nothing, giving me no input. Since there's no cancel button, I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and end the process, then start it up again. It logs in smoothly this time. I'm FINALLY in the game, finally ready to experience what it has to offer.
I hit the W key to move forward, as I'm accustomed to using WASD to navigate in basically every video game I play, and it is more or less the most awkward experience ever. I tap W to take a couple steps forward. Sometimes the character takes an appropriate couple steps forward. Sometimes it runs forward for an indefinite amount of time after I've released the key. Sometimes, after releasing the key, it does a 180 and takes a step back toward me, effectively cancelling out the forward motion achieved. But it doesn't end there, folks. I try turning to the right or to the left whilst running forward, but I don't turn so much as I suddenly change heading by 45 degrees like a half-hearted Tron character. Needless to say, the only feasible way to get around is the click-to-move system, which, to the game's credit, actually works. (I could mention that it would seem pretty difficult to screw up click-to-move, but then, it would seem pretty difficult to screw up WASD movement so horrendously too, so perhaps they do deserve a pat on the back for getting this much right.)
So, after resigning myself to navigating via click-to-move, I'm instantly lost. None of the nearest NPCs can give me a quest, nor can they offer me any other useful information. I wander around for a little while and begin to notice just how uninspired and boring the area design is. Every square foot of the village appears more or less indistinguishable from the next, making it not only really boring looking, but difficult to remember where you've already explored and where you haven't, which made finding the actual quest-giving NPCs a lot more difficult than it should have been. Eventually I find someone with a big yellow "O" over their head. I walk over and talk to him...aha! A quest! He instructs me to kill five level-1 enemies just beyond the city gate. Predictable, but not necessarily bad, though it's worth noting that the quest receiving/completion interface bears the same abysmal aesthetic quality as the character creation screen. It feels more like interacting with a spreadsheet program than with a videogame character, and the visuals appear designed by a C++ programmer who thinks Photoshop is just a complicated and expensive tool for cropping and resizing.
Anyway, I go to kill the big green worms, and I receive my first (and--sorry to spoil the ending for you--last) pleasant surprise in the entire experience. The actual combat LOOKS really cool. The attack animations look really nifty (there appears to be actual physical contact between the two combatants, unlike in WoW where two melee characters can stand ten feet apart swinging their weapons at thin air while combat damage numbers pop up over their heads), and there's a bit of neato bell-and-whistle effects going on with the reducing health bars. Nothing we haven't seen before of course, but a nice touch. I kill the required five worms, leveling up once or twice in the process, and go back to the quest giver. I find another quest giver who just wants me to fork over some of my health potions. I already had them to begin with, so I didn't have to put forth any effort to get ahold of them, I just have to...hand them over to him in return for a few gold and some experience. Sort of a ripoff, but whatever. I get another quest from him and now he wants me to talk to someone. At some point during this I get another quest from the worm-hating quest giver to talk to some guard near the city gate. I go off to talk to the guard where the NPC described him as being. There are four guards here, two of which are targetable but can't be spoken to, and two of which aren't even targetable and appear to be merely part of the environment geometry. I look around for a minute or two and still can't find the guard. At this point the boredom overwhelms me and I quit the game and go back to WoW.
No, folks, I didn't make it past about level 3. I didn't craft my own weapons (something I was really looking forward to), purchase any armor or upgrade anything. I did not ride a nifty looking mount, and I most certainly did not become ArchLord. I did, however, experience about as much of the game as I suspect any sane individual playing it on a free trial key can be expected to before becoming frustrated or simply bored into giving up. It was enough, I think, to give a reasonably informed recommendation to avoid this game and pick up a better title like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars. ArchLord may be worth your time a year or two from now when they've patched the hell out of it to fix the current bugs, add a lot more content, make the interface better looking and simply make the game easier to get into for a new player, but before then, there are much, much better games to invest your time and money in.