User Rating: 4.7 | Horizons: Empire of Istaria PC
I decided to give the 7-day free trial a shot and here's what I found. First off, you'll need to know what I'm running because it's related to this review. P4 3.0 Hyperthreading, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB, Serial ATA HD. The graphics are quite stunning, in fact Horizons has one of the best skys I've seen in an MMO. It also comes across as looking a lot like WOW. However, walk into town and watch your system choke. I literally mean choke to death. I was running it in 1600x1200 with graphics cranked up and I had to minimize everything to recover from what appeared to be a 'you're going down buddy' crash. For an on-line MMO, one of the worst I've seen for performance to date when you get into heavily populated areas with buildings, lighting, etc. It's even worse than Lineage 2, which is god awful when you get into areas with lots of players. Frame rate - 1.2 frames per second. Need I say more. Secondly, there are hardly any players. I felt all alone in what appeared to be a fair size world. I did a search on elves (my race) and found only 45 or so of us on the entire map. Based on what I saw in the 10 or so towns I visited, that sounded about right. I asked around as to where the population was, but there really didn't seem to be a lot of players on-line. Combat was interesting and crafting system looked extensive, but I gave up after my system choked a few times. On a positive note, the interface is one of the best I've come across for an MMO. You can pick it up in a very short period of time. I can't recommend this to anyone because like Lineage 2, it dies when you get into populated areas and there really doesn't appear to be many players. The most I ever saw at a given time was about five or so. On top of that, if you want to turn up your settings, forget it. It simply cannot run in 1600x1200, unless you turn everything off. Two thumbs down on this one - probably why they are giving away these 7 day trials.
