A good game with no glaring problems, but considering how much it's been talked up, I'm a little disappointed.

User Rating: 7 | Rift (2011) PC
Rift is a solid game with many good features. The combat it smooth and easy to pick up. It has a nice "ability queuing" sort of feature that let's you look at what your fighting rather than watching a bar or buttons to time the global cooldown. The class system is unique, letting you spec into 3 "talent trees" at the same time and having up to 4 sets of 3 trees to switch among. The rifts which randomly appear provide a break from quest grinding, and have an interesting side effect of bringing players together without the tension that can often arise in pvp battle grounds or instances. The leveling speed has a good balance of requiring you to spend time in a region but not getting bored waiting to earn your next talent points or abilities. These are just a few of the good things, but there are many small things that left me under whelmed.

Although the game is technologically sound, with very few bugs or mechanics problems, it's brought down by lots of little things that just eat away at the experience. The world of Rift looks great if nothing is moving, but start to run around and the character motions look rigid, poorly animated, and unnatural. You can track quests on the side of your UI, but there is no easy way to hide them like a dropdown menu. They're always there cluttering up your view. If you use many custom keybindings, you'll be disappointed to find that there are certain keys for which the bindings cannot be changed. There is no instance queuing system of any kind, leaving you to spam LFG messages if you want to do a dungeon. Many of the menus are extremely basic to the point of being slightly difficult to use. The auction house menu is lacking several functions that I would have expected from a brand new game, such as the ability to create an auction based on price per item, not just price per stack. And although the Rifts are cool, there are just too many. Their novelty wears off fast and you quickly find yourself not caring whether they get closed or overrun a town.

If you've been suffering from boredom with your current MMO, then rift is a decent distraction. If you're looking for a complete, refined game that you can really get into for a long time, I think there are better choices out there.