Online multiplayer Gauntlet + MMO conventions = FUN GAME
Basically, like most games, you play a fantasy character. Choosing the character is a little screwed up at this point but this game just came out a few weeks ago so I can let that slide. You have to start the game with a Pitfighter which seems to be a barbarian like class. There seems to be 12 classes you can choose from after you finish the tutorial which is fairly impressive and one of the major reasons I gave this game a 9. Are these classes balanced? I have no idea. There seems to be 6 archetypes each with two subclasses. I really hope they are planning to add a third subclass to each archetype maybe through expansion packs. I chose a Pangolan Shaman which seems to be like a druid from Everquest.
One of the many new ideas in this game that I didn't think I would like at first but now think is genius is that you get exp from breaking things in the environment like pots and opening chests. This is actually very fun because the pots just give a little exp and the chests give a lot and are more rare and usually only reachable by killing difficult monsters. When you kill a monster it doesn't drop any items. I thought this was a stupid idea too but it means that you don't have to have a battle of reflexes with the people you are playing with when a good item drops. I hated it in Diablo 2 because I never got any good items because someone was always faster than me. Instead, everyone gets something at the end of the mission.
The gameplay is very good and there are skills just like any MMORPG. When you open up the skills page on your character sheet it shows this really long skill tree with new skills every two levels. I guess every time you level you get skill points that you can use to upgrade existing skills or buy new skills. It is all very impressive and complex looking. When I played the pitfighter in the tutorial, he had three skills which were all useful. He had a skill that would attack with extra damage, a close combat stun that lasted 3 sec and a passive skill that gave him a 10% chance to hit everything around him. The Pangolan Shaman had three skills too, he had a ranged wind attack that seemed to do a lot of damage but had a long cooldown, he could shoot poison darts and he had a targetable AE fire attack which looks really good. Apparently there are three kinds of skills in the game. There are skills you can use as much as you want but have to wait for the cooldown to expire before using it again. There are passive skills which means they just work on their own. and there are skills which you can only use three times in a mission. This is another reason I gave this game a 9 because this actually makes sense and it's innovative too.
The graphics were obviously designed to run on any kind of computer. They are functional but don't attempt to break the previous boundaries of graphics technology in any way, which is ok with me personally because the gameplay makes up for it big time.
The sound was actually really good except that I heard a crackling noise every once in a while. I have an old sound card though so maybe that was the reason.
I want to play so i'll just quickly describe what actually happens when you play. You go into a lobby and join a game with 5 other players and do a mission. I actually like this better than a game like Everquest where you have to travel through a virtual world to get to your adventure. It means you can get right to the action quicker. Anyway, I don't feel bad writing a review after spending so little time playing because the game is free to download so it won't cost you anything to try it.