Why is everything green and what button do I press to turn it off?
The Matrix Online is a game that was obviously designed by a group of developers that hate people and want to hurt you personally. MXO punishes the player for playing the game and Monolith Productions makes sure you feel the burn. After spending several more hours that I probably should have playing this game I've determined that for the most part, they've succeeded.
Wanted: Editor
The biggest glaring problem with MXO is that for some reason the dialogue was written by the janitor while he was drunk. Sure it saves money, but the typos in the game are horrendous. Some times I don't know what the heck is going on. I'll just pick out the words that look like places or people, go there and kill them and hope that's what was I was required to do. I didn't even get paid to write this, but I can bring myself to put a period in the right place every now and then. Sometimes, when I'm feeling really generous I'll correctly capitalize a letter. The developers can do complex mathematical computations, code entire worlds, but don't know where to put a comma in a sentence?
It's A Boring World After All
When I get the occasional mission that makes sense it'll just be the same crap I've done for the last far-and-few-between coherent missions repackaged. All of them follow the same form: Find something, talk to something, kill something. And once in a while in a mission you'll be given the pleasure of using one of Metro World's great elevators. Whoever decided that it should take fifteen thousand mouse clicks to open a f***ing elevator should be drug out and shot. No, change that: Drug out, insulted, slapped, beaten, THEN shot.
I wish the problems with the environment ended there. If FFXI's dominant color was gray then The Matrix Online's dominant color is turd brown. Everything is brown. Everything. This wouldn't be so bad (I like brown) if the environments were actually interesting. It seems that every four blocks in any given area its the same brown buildings in a different order. I usually don't like to get into arguments about textures, bump-mapping or any of that tech crap, but it bears mentioning that the brownish textures in MXO suck. Doom 2 had better textures for walls. Oh how I wish that were sarcasm.
When you bore of looking at the brownish world, take a look at the brownish clothing that you can buy. For being a major selling point of the game, the clothing line would make even "Let's do the same damn thing over and over" Levis hang their head in shame. The local Salvation Army has more clothing types than this game. Not that it really matters as everyone is either dressed like a Pimp, Ho, or a Goth. There's only so many places that you go with those styles.
Stand Still!
When you actually get around to fighting someone, you'll find that the game tries hard to imitate the fighting in the movies. I mean "tries" in the same way that a four year old "tries" to help you paint your living room and ends up painting most of the carpet or your mentally challenged cousin "tries" to help you with your math homework. Initially you'll go through a period where you'll try to find a pattern or develop a strategy around the battle system. This will be brief, as you'll soon catch on that it all breaks down to just guessing or in my case, guessing poorly.
Whatever you do, don't pick up a gun for you character, they're worthless. Apparently there is a disarmament deal going on between the humans and the machines where the machines won't enslave the humans if the humans replace all their high powered weapons with BB guns. Really. In The Matrix Online, a kick is deadly and a bullet is just aggravating. No, I don't understand it either.
MXO: The Slideshow
All of this is rather pointless though, considering that most people will never get the d*** thing to run in the first place. I won't go through the particulars with you, but four hours into the game I still hadn't played it yet. There were several problems getting the thing to install, the biggest of them being the system requirements. You almost have to have a Cray supercomputer to get this game to run poorly. You have to do twice as good as that to get the game to run decently. The game box should read "Recommended System Requirements: Deep Blue".
AC: 20% To be quite honest I really didn't see that many people online. It must have just been the time of day or the server I chose. It also may have been because I spent most of my time running into walls as my Alienware struggled to keep my frame rate above 3.
LLA: 80% The few people that I did run into didn't seem to either speak English at all, or thought that they could imitate English by giving me a random string of letters. "LLO!!1 wtF RU saiz??/? kiLLR?!?!1" In my country that translates to "I love to suck d***. Please put one in my mouth so I'll shut the f*** up."
LSR: "Farscape Fan" You'd have to be one exceptional masochist/loser to play this game for more than a couple of days. The game is grinding (not in a good way), and tedious. The story stinks, and their mother dresses them funny.
My Character: I played a Brittney Spears clone posing as a prostitute. So basically I played as Britney Spear's sister.
Conclusion
All in all Matrix Online is a bad game. The more you play it the more you get the feeling that the developers are truly out to make you suffer. The real pain will come when you realize that you paid for it. That probably hurts the worst. Truth be told if I were a red piller and I had to deal with this s***, I'd jack out, go to Zion and give cave dancing lessons.