Hero Online is a Korean-style MMORPG which makes up for a noticeable lack of variety with its gameplay, and its price.
Hero Online really doesn't offer much variety in the way of character appearance customization, map areas, quests, races -you can only play as a human-, weapons (six or seven different weapons), classes (there are only four available classes, with two subclasses each), or quests. Its graphics are nothing to write home about, either. Still, Hero Online has some strangely compelling gameplay mechanics, which I'll try to analyze in the following paragraphs, that make the game rather appealing.
MMORPGs are about combat, improvement (levelling up, gaining skills, getting better equipment), and interaction with other players: partying, trading, joining a faction and/or a guild, and doing PvP battles. So, let's structure the analysis in those sections.
Combat in Hero Online is quite fun. You have two kinds of attacks: standard and skill attacks. Skill attacks cost chi -energy, or mana in other RPGs-, always hit, and tend to do lots of damage and/or hit various enemies at the same time. Standard attacks, on the other side, do not cost any chi but may both miss or score a critical hit, which makes an extra amount of damage directly influenced by your Dexterity stat (more about stats in the following paragraphs). Even though graphics aren't exactly top notch, combat animations are a sight for sore eyes. Standard attacks look awesome, and are directly rooted on Wu-Shu, a very flashy acrobatic martial art. Skill attacks not only have nice animations, but the special effects they display often made me gape in amazement. It is really convenient that combat is so well done since it will take lots of it to progress through the game. Hero Online has a lot of grinding into it; you can alleviate some of it through some paid services that speed up your experience acquisition rate, and through some special items you may earn throughout some of the game's longer, tougher quests, but grinding will no doubt grow tiresome at times. Grinding is aggravated by the fact that there are only a few maps available -with loading screens in between them-, so you'll be grinding in the same places against the same enemies for hours. Thankfully, the quality of the fighting in Hero Online and partying with some other fellows helps making the grind much less of a chore.
When you finally level up, you may distribute a variable amount of stat point between the three stats Hero Online characters possess: strength, dexterity, and intelligence. Strength affects your striking power, maximum health, and maximum load you can carry. Dexterity improves your defence, your dodge ratio, your hit ratio, and the extra damage you score via a critical hit. Intelligence enlarges your chi pool and improves your skill attacks. Stats are quite well balanced, in the sense that there are plenty of opinions about which is the best build. You may relocate stat points, but to do so you will need to spend some dollars on Hero Online's paid services.
When you hit certain levels you may learn some skills. Combat grants you both experience points and skill points; it's these that you must spend to acquire and improve either your active skills or passive skills. Active skills, like special attacks, require activation; passive skills offer permanent bonuses, like extra health points, better armor or a higher dodge rate.
Skills are really fun to watch and use. Not only combat skills are a pleasure to look at, but even movement skills offer lots of fun. The so-called "Wind drift", for instance, allows your character to run faster but also to jump on top of buildings and through great distances. Remember "Hidden dragon crouching tiger"? Remember the jump-on-top-of-the-roof scenes? Well, you can do the very same movements here, and they look just as good. There's a lot more of depth into skills than just mapping them to a hotkey. Skills are grouped into sets, called "books", and you assign skills points to those sets, not to individual skills, with a few exceptions such as passive or movement skills. Some skills inside those sets unlock only after you have raised to a given point your level of proficiency in that particular set of skills. Raising your skill set level takes an increasingly higher amount of skill points, and improves the related skills' effects but at a higher chi cost. Also, lower skill sets may grow obsolete in favor of higher skill sets, so configuring your character's abilities takes a lot of thinking. Proper skill usage is rather demanding, too. Attack skills have each different cost, power, recharge time, range, area of effect, and shape of its area of effect. Some strike only one foe, some strike all foes in a cone-shaped area, some strike everything inside a given radius circular area. Some may hit from afar, some only hit at melée distance. While one skill is executing, you may queue the next skill. Devicing a proper sequence of special attacks is tricky. Learning to execute that sequence takes some time, too, but the whole process is a lot of fun, actually. In fact, Hero Online skill system puts to shame that of other commercial MMORPGs. For instance, you'll never see in Hero Online enemies like the fire imps of Guild Wars, that start flapping their wings and three seconds later your character is set on fire with no visible cause/effect link. Also, if your blows do cause extra damage, rest assured they will certainly look -and sound- like causing a lot of extra damage, insted of just displaying a different animation of an axe blow.
Skills are a central theme in the game, just like in the Hero movie. In fact, the most powerful skills -called "master" skills- are available only to high level characters, and cannot be purchased from any NPC. You have to either earn them, or become a "disciple" of another, more experienced player, that is called the "master". The master may teach you those valuable skills in exchange of a share of the experience your character earns. A master may take many disciples at the same time, and may release them after the due payment in experience is fulfilled.
While you fight those epic battles and gain more experience, you'll come across better equipment: armor, weapons, jewelry, that affect your abilities in may ways. You may also come across some special items -rubies, diamonds, jade stones- that allow you to enhance individual items. The more you enhance a weapon, or a piece of armor, the harder it becomes to add more enhancements. There are books and tools that better your chances of successfully enhancing items, but those are few and far between, and hard to find. There are also books and special components with which a blacksmith may create very special weapons and pieces of armor. As you may imagine, it takes a lot of time to get to forge one of those items, so it is really rewarding when you finally are able to lay your hands in one of them. In general terms, the item system in Hero Online is interesting and provides a nice motivation for keeping on playing the game.
Of course, you are not alone in all those fighting, levelling, and item gathering. The "multiplayer" part of MMO plays a role, indeed. You may party with other players throughout any parts of the game. The party system is pretty simple; you join forces and share the profits -i. e., experience and loot. It's simple but effective.
You may also trade with other players. You may directly engage another player into a closed two-party transaction, or open a shop where you offer some of your items at the prices you deem most appropriate. Or, you may also open a sort of "pawnbroker shop", where you allow other players to sell to you the items you want, at the prices you specify. There is even a "Central Marketplace", which is a special, isolated area, in which players gather massively to open their shops or search for bargains and hard-to-get items. The Central Marketplace has a a tavern clerk (a special NPC you may buy potions and other useful items from, or sell items to), bank clerks who provide access to an item storage utility, and a blacksmith to enhance existing items, or create new and powerful ones. So, the Central Marketplace is a really convenient feature.
Just as many other MMORPGs, Hero Online offers the possibility of creating your own clan, called "House", or joining any of the existing ones provided the House leader invites you. You may also join one of the confronting factions that exist in Hero Online. Those factions periodically engage in battles for the control of special zones of the map that offer certain benefits. There are plenty of interesting ideas regarding the PvP, or player-vs-player, side of the game, like a "bounty" system or "karma", a special statistic that hints to many interesting possibilities like turning into a bandit due to your "bad karma". Bandits, for instance, no longer enjoy the usual NPC services, but have to resort to those of the "Bandit Camp", a special separate area of the game. Bandits often have "bounty" on their heads and may be identified by their character names, written in red.
Hero Online offers other interesting gameplay features, such as pets. Pets vary in types -you have mount pets and combat pets. Mount pets are divided into generic mounts, such as horses, and class-specific mounts. For instance, warriors may ride lions, whereas hunters may ride reindeer. Hero Online offers mounted combat, though you may not use your combat skills while riding. Combat pets will fight on your side. They come in different flavors: bears, tigers and hawks. They may behave in different ways, or modes, you can directly control. Pets may go into "owner-support priority" mode, "direct combat priority" mode, flee mode, or passive mode.
All pets, both mounts and combat pets, level up along with your character and may evolve, just like "pokemons", after hitting certain levels. Pets must be either bought or tamed. Taming pets has its own mechanics; there's even one class, the hunter, that is taming-oriented. Generally speaking, the pet system in Hero Online is a hit.
Another gameplay feature of Hero Online is gambling. There are special types of items, called "fortune boxes", that come in many sizes and colors, and cost a fixed amount of money to open, according to their type. You may find a treasure or a piece of junk; more often than not, however, the outcome is worth the cost.
Hero Online gameplay mechanics rewards long playing sessions. When you hit a certain amount of kills in the same session you have a chance of winning some random gift items. Also, you get an experience bonus equal to 1 per each kill you scored since you last got online, or got killed. And if you want to take a break -short or long-, you can always go to the Central Marketplace and open a shop with those nice items you no longer use but others may find useful.
Movement is a carefully looked-after aspect of the game. Besides those movement skills and mounts, you may teleport to other areas via the Tavern or bank clerks. You may also use some teleport tokens that instantly take your character to the closest safe location - usually a Tavern in the same area. All taverns allow you to teleport to the Central Marketplace, which serves as a hub since it allows you to teleport to many different zones.
Another aspect worth mentioning of Hero Online gameplay is that of paid services. Hero Online strikes a remarkably balance between appealing paid services, and gameplay advantages. Paid services won't grant you a noticeable advantage in PvP -that is, you are not going to smash other players just by opening your wallet-, but they can certainly make your gameplay experience more comfortable. You may level up faster, need to make much fewer "pit stops" at the local taverns, have twice as much storage space and offer twice the amount of items for sale in your shops, but you won't be able to make up for your lack of skill just by paying. Still, many of those paid services are definitely worth purchasing.
The control system in Hero Online is some kind of hit-and-miss. You may only move via clicking with your mouse, which may become tiresome. The camera control system is also somewhat jerky, even though one gets used to it after some time. The hotkey system, however, is excellent, allowing you to store up to four different sets of mapped keys, each of them having eight shortcuts. This extensive hotkey system adds even another dimension to the skill system, and is definitely a hit.
Death in Hero Online is punished with a loss of 5% the amount of experience needed to progress from your actual level to the next. The whole 5% is taken from your experience points, even if it implies taking a level from your character. You may reduce the punishment to one half by means of some "premium" (i. e., paid) items.
Hero Online graphics can't be said to be top-notch, but the excellent combat animations and mechanics more than make up for it. The sound is fine. Sound effects are appropriate -again, attack skills sound great-. The music themes are nice but repetitive and grow tiresome after a while.
Hero Online suffers from a few bugs; some are rather noticeable, like enemies that can't be hit and won't react to the environment, some camera glitches, and a few others, but in general they don't detract much from the gameplay experience. Hero Online is also pretty stable -it has never crashed to desktop or the like. I didn't experience much lag -even though the game may clog a bit when entering the densely populated Central Marketplace. Still, you should play with a solid internet connection, because if you happen to get disconnected in the middle of combat, the server won't log you out in time to save your character's life. Hero Online hardware requirements are low too, and there are many options to control the level of detail so that the game runs smoothly in older machines.
All in all, Hero Online is a nice MMORPG that, while being limited in its variety and relying heavily on grinding, it offers great value and an excellent combat system that betters those of some other much more renowned MMOs.