Tries hard to be Tabula Rasa but fails to have the playability of other MMO's
I shall firstly focus on what Tabula Rasa fails at accomplishing and turn to aspects of the game I liked. After being impressed at the opening cinematic I felt that the storyline was perhaps a little weak. Earth attacked by aliens, survivors go through giant portals to other worlds...right. The character creation wasn't that bad, it was more developed than WoW but most of the different designs looked bland and unappealing. After fiddling with my characters looks I entered the game, here the disappointment really sank in. The tutorials were rather shoddy and I felt that I could learn more about the controls and functions myself rather than the tutorials which seemed to have little order to them. The starting stage had a back story but like many MMO's thus far there is little over-arching story-arc. Within 5 minutes I had already changed my weapon and gear for something slightly better.
Another disappointment was server stability, I have played many MMO's but the lag and 'jerkyness' of this one seemed more apparent. For a game that seemed to have surprising few players this point seems to me all the more relevant.
The user interface felt overbearing and was rather staining on the eyes, it was not simple by any means. The controls were easy enough to grasp but portions of the interface just felt just felt nothing short of a blunder, I tried hard to like how it was laid out but the small text felt too much of an eye sore to even bother attempting to read.
Throughout the time I was playing I did not need or was compelled to interact with other players what-so-ever. It felt more like Pirates of the Burning Sea, a more single player orientated game with players in a mmo world. There were people in the chat talking but there seemed little enthusiasm for interaction within the game such as grouping.
The game does feel like an odd version of Halo. The creatures, ships and landscape looked oddly familiar, I don't think this is at all a necessary negative point. I did enjoy the landscape and how it was structured. I also enjoyed how you played your character, it is like a 3rd person shoot-em-up. The combat felt more fluid in terms of MMO design, being able to use special abilities alongside your main weapons and occasionally use a finishing move in melee to earn a bonus. I loved the way you were able to run over a corpse and be able to pick up whatever was available instantly. I also really liked the layout of the planets and thought that there were some really well designed areas.
Another impressive feature was the actual classes and how you chose them. The tree design of slowly specialising in a class was superb. It was a different perspective that I have not seen and I hope is repeated in another future MMO's
What Tabula Rasa does is try to be different from all other MMO's, it tries to be different for the sake of being different rather than it being better playability and gameplay. In the end the game was a bore to play and I neither felt involved or had the patience to give it