Difficulty:

Very Hard

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Grows on you"

Eve's negative reputation not entirely undeserved.

It has an insane learning curve.

It has large numbers of players who will (within the bounds of the games rules) scam, mislead and harm you. More on this later.

You can lose dozens of hours of gameplay "work" in an instant.

It can be exceedingly slow paced.

So with all that? Why would anyone play?

Because its one of the only true 'role playing' games out there. Nearly everything in the universe is player driven. Players mine the ore that make the minerals that make the ships and components that conquer the universe that take over the moons and build the space stations that... you get the idea.

You aren't stuck with a class you picked at the start of the game.

You can never 'max' out and you constantly have to think and calculate. By the way, if you don't like basic number crunching, stay the hell away from this game.

You can customize your ship loadouts to an absurd degree, and oh yeah, dozens of ships and hundreds of fittings and ammo types to play with.

You can make a career out of being a blockade runner for other players. You can be a day trader and deal in contracts and commodity prices. You can be a deep-space salvager. You can be an honest-to-god pirate in a roving gang pillaging other players freighters and goods. You can be a part of massive wars or work singly by yourself doing NPC missions and generally futzing around. It has the most flexibility of any game I've ever seen.

What was one of the more negative experiences in the game for me and my brother was paradoxically also one of the most exciting and inventive. We took up a contract to transport bulk goods, that had a large collateral cost to put up. Turns out that the contract issuer sold us out, and told pirates our likely route and we were jumped and destroyed, losing the expensive freighter and the collateral. The fact that this sort of behavior is possible is an incredible testament to the flexibility and diversity of the game.

Yet, as I stated earlier. It has a lot of negatives. This is *not* a typical MMO. It is a far cry from WoW, Guild Wars and other typical fantasy MMORPGs.

It is harsh, and unforgiving and difficult to get a grasp of.

But if you want an incredible open universe with which to play in, a thinking man (or woman's) RPG, then I cant recommend it enough.