I got dragon, err … not really – Last Chaos first impressions

Last Chaos is cool, free-to-play MMORPG with a fantasy theme. I started to play it just recently but here is my review.

Sorcerer – first impression
After some time playing a mage I created a sorcerer and started again. The sorcerer is something between summoner and fighter with magic. He has some relatively strong summons and several close range attack skills. The summons aren’t fully controlled, you can only decide their mode – attack, attack second, defend and follow. They stay in attack mode very short interval of time so you can’t leave your character sitting somewhere and getting experience while you are away, drinking coffee.
I get pissed off because the summons leave attack mode if I move my character even a little. There is no such problem with attack second though.
The summoner is a weak character, maybe the weakest of the all Last Chaos characters. If you intend to PVP, choose another one. Or be prepared to think fast and consider your character’s weak and strong points.

Getting basic consumables
If you a newbie in Last Chaos you may have problems in obtaining consumables like HP and MP potions and so on. You can buy potions from one NPC in the town but the prices are too high. I had this problem – all my money went for potions even though I don’t use much.

 Herb field

So what is the solution?
The game emphasizes much on the production. You can produce your own potions very easy – for hp potions you need to collect herbs, for mp potions – waves (or something like this) and for pet food for hatchling dragons and ponies you need to mine ore. Yep, you feed your pet pony with ore. Poor little creature. I can understand dragons eating ore, but horses? Also if your pet dragon or horse feels ill and its HP goes down you can give it some herbs. And if the creatures by any chance start to dislike you, you must feed it with waves and it will be the same again.
Sorry, I was talking about the potions. To produce potions from your ingredients you need a recipe and a skill. You have first level skill by default so you can collect materials and make first level potions. The recipe is obtained from the same NPC who sells potions. You need to learn some skills to produce better potions and collect more resources but be careful with your sp points. 

 

Getting waves for MP potions

 

Ore is healthy breakfast for dragon babies.

Moon stones
You can obtain moonstones as a regular drop from the monsters. There are several levels of moonstones. You can exchange them for a random reward at the statue in the middle of the town.


Dragons and Dragon Hatchlings
To obtain a hatchling you need to finish a quest called Drake's Egg. You get the quest from Loraine, the NPC near the class masters. First thing you need to do is to obtain a Dragon Egg. It drops from the monsters around the town, I get even two for very short time. You can purchase an egg from the other players. With the egg, you talk again with Loraine, and she sends you to the second town to talk with some other NPC, I forgot his name now. Some archeologist, maybe. You teleport to the second town and talk with him and that’s the quest. Congrats, now you have baby dragon. To find the teleporter, search for a NPC with a teleporter before its name in the NPC list. It’s location is near the PVP arenas.
In the second town you can talk with any NPC for a direction. Don’t be shy, they are only Non Player Characters.

Cute

Horse and Pony
To get a pony you need to finish quest called Pan’s Flute. It is given by Loraine again, and it is very similar to the Dragon quest. At the end, you obtain funny, fat pony with short legs that eats ore and needs wave to like you.

The pets you obtain from these two quests are level 1 and they level up while you fight in their company. They get only a tiny bit of your experience and they level up very slow. I got bored even before my pet dragon reach level 2. Also, aggressive mobs tend to attack your pet first if you don’t attack them. So at the beginning pets are just a nuisance. Of course, it is cool to ride a horse or a dragon, but they level up so slow …

Funny

I’ll stop here for today. I must write something about the personal dungeons, fighting the Barlog and so on.

Last Chaos – awesome MMORPG game

Site: http://lastchaos.aeriagames.com/

Last Chaos is a free-to-play, 3D MMORPG with cool graphics and nice gameplay. The game looks incredibly similar to the popular pay to play MMORPG Lineage 2. More or less most of the free to play MMORPGs have problems with its gameplay. They sure look good but after some time the player finds no depth. In contrast, Last Chaos doesn’t have awesome graphics but its gameplay is ways above. I really was amazed to find myself addicted to a game so fast. 

Graphics
The game has somewhat beautiful graphics with large castles, vast territories and strange monsters. There are also a lot of different pets and mounts with bright and cool graphics, they create part of the magic atmosphere in the game. The horses maybe are a bit to colorful but the overall impression isn’t bad.

Gameplay
One drawback of this cool game is the poor customization options of the game characters. I really prefer to have bigger choice.
When I play MMO games I prefer to play magic damage dealer so I created a mage character. At the beginning my mage was thrown in something called private dungeon – there you can fight different monsters (zombies and similar) and learn the interface. At the end of the dungeon I was teleported to the first town. What made me an impression was that the game has good number of players – many players were selling different goods and some number of newbies like me was fighting low level monsters outside the gates. There were also many players leveling their pets with low level mobs. The pets are something cool – with many different shapes and colors – not your usual stupid (or cute) looking pets but fantasy creatures with nice and eye-catching design.
The monsters also make an impression – they are not grouped by types and you can see many different kinds in one field. The foxes at the beginning look too much like the keltirs from L2.
The game offers large maps with many places for exploration and different mobs. You are actually free to do what you want, you are not bound to different quests like “run to point A, return to B, then run back to A”. Of course you can do quests as you want and they bring a lot of experience (I usually go and take all available quests before hunting but I don’t like to do quests only).

Classes
Last Chaos has six playable races – Knight, Healer, Mage, Rogue, Titan and Sorcerer.
Knight - The knight is your usual tough guy with sword and shield or two swords.
Healer – She is a surprise, she actually can use bow and arrows and she can become an archer or a cleric at her first job change.
Mage – I like characters with high damage, especially high AoE damage.
Rogue – fast and deadly character she can use dual daggers or a crossbow.
Titan – rough guy with high HP and sword or axe of course. Do you like barbarians? My brother always plays this type of characters.
Sorcerer – something like summoner, maybe strong character. I need to try this one soon.

PVP
I haven’t tried it yet, my character is brand new, but I prefer to play on PVP servers. I was surprised to see a bunch of high level, bored people at the town gates in the middle of PVP battle.

The story
Actually I spent some time reading the story – war between gods of course. Good against evil, light against darkness and we, the humans were always the good ones, blessed with many abilities. Now you can choose a side and fight for it. So cool, I wonder who writes these stories and why game creators or publishers won’t hire a professional writer to do the job. Either way, the game is cool, maybe the best free to play game out there.

ShadowTale – cool browser MMORPG

Site: http://www.shadowtale.com/

Shadowtale is a flash-based, 2D MMORPG game that can be played entirely in a web browser. The game has great features more similar to usual MMORPG games. Playing ShadowTale is like adventuring in a tale world.

I didn’t expected much but it turns out to be really fascinating game. Its universe is persistent, players go around from one scene to another, meet other players, fight monsters and do quests.

The battles are actually real time and quite fast. You can’t take a breath between attacking enemies. The enemies tend to surround you, fighting large groups isn’t easy. You don’t know what enemies would emerge behind the next turn. At the beginning series of goblins, wolves and boars will attack you. You must go on a mission to save a girl and then you must infiltrate a castle. Castle guards will attack you and they are quite strong. My character had a hard time fighting them. You can use spells together with regular attack to fight.

The game interface is convenient and similar to traditional non-browser MMORPG games. You can equip your character, eat food, drink special potions, upgrade your weapons and armors and so on. You even can have a pet although I don’t have one yet.

Players can explore many different locations like the Catacombs, Gravelands, and even some castles. The game graphics looks like images from an old, tale book.

TLBB ( Dragon Oath Europe ) – gameplay review

Site: http://tlbb.eu.changyou.com/

Here you can read my preliminary Dragon Oath post.

Dragon Oath, known also as TLBB (Tian Long Ba Bu) is a Chinese MMORPG recently made available around the world. I played on the European servers so my impression is related to them only.

I downloaded and started the game with great expectations so when I saw the camera rotation restrictions I was a bit disappointed. The game camera is not freely rotated like other Asian MMORPG games, you can freely rotate around your character but the min and max camera height are very close and you look at the game from a certain angle. I really prefer to have much freedom of movement and to see larger area around my character, this helps a lot in PVP battles or even in standard PVE gameplay.

Graphics
As most Asian games TLBB has beautiful and eye catching graphics. Players can enjoy fantasy sceneries and Chinese themed towns. I spent some time just sight-seeing and walking mindlessly around the world.

Gameplay
Your character starts is journey in a beautiful Eastern town with many NPC and missions. In fact your starting town is large enough to get lost several times. This is not a problem because you can easily find a NPC or coordinates by clicking on it in the quest window or on the map. The game start with quests and you will have to do more and more quests. I prefer simple grinding but quests give you more experience and you level up faster through them. At some point somewhere around level four or five you must kill some mobs. The mobs on the first environment map are relatively weak, character level 5 easily kills level 10 enemies. Anyway quests give you more experience. There are treasure boxes all around the map, even in towns. You can open them and get their reward. Soon your inventory will be full of some boring stuff like bread (equivalent to potions in other games) and so on.
After two hours running mindlessly doing quests I was level 10 and I was allowed to join a class. I selected a pyromancer because I like to have strong attack and I don’t care for defense or hit points. There is no quest for joining a class, you just need to select join from the class representative menu after talking to him. After joining a class I receive a bunch of teleport tokens to go directly to my class palace.
The skills of pyromancers are awesome but you are overpowered against mobs even without skills.
I almost forgot about pets. You will have a mission to level up an ugly bunny. I really don’t care about pets in games but now they are fashionable. Leveling up your bunny is easy enough, you need to kill two level 1 mobs. Capturing your next pet – a duckling is also easy, I succeeded from the first try. But if you bring your pet to fight higher level mobs they will attack it rather than you. After joining a class you can claim a pet from the representative. I got something like hedgehog.

Classes

• Pyromancer - For weapons Pyromancers use spears and falcons. They give up defense for a short in order to have a powerful attack. They have the most powerful attack of all nine classes in TLBB.
• Lotus Order - Lotus Order members use single or dual one-handed swords. They have ability to absorb damage and to heal.
• Royalty - They prefer to use their finger than any weapon. Anyway their weapons of choice are Fan and Chakram. They have skills to stun the enemy or reduce his spirit abilities.
• Minstrel - Minstrels rely on devices and traps to fight the enemies. Their weapons of choice are Fan and Chakram.
• Taoist - Taoists use single or dual one-handed swords.
• Voodoo - Voodoo members use single or dual one handed swords as their weapon. They are the weakest as physical strength and so they rely on poisons to inflict damage. They have strong defense against spirit.
• Assassin - Assassins master the physical and ice attack, they prefer to do quick and powerful combo hits. They have a skill to become invisible. Their weapons of choice are fan and chakram.
• Beggars Alliance - They use combination of moves and each hit increases the damage of their next attack. They can use poisons. They use falcons and spears.
• Shaolin - They use falcons and spears. They have good offensive and defensive powers. 

Shot Online

Site: http://shotonline.gamescampus.com/

Shot Online is a free-to-play, sports MMORPG game featuring golf simulation. Sport MMORPGs are relatively rare and this is the first golf game I ever see. I am not really into sports, even online but the game looks cool and entertaining.

Gameplay
The game allows up to four players to tee off together, players can trade between them, gain experience and in-game currency from completing holes and have fun. Characters can level up and gain skills through in-game training. The game offers even quests and events.

Classes and Characters

Player can choose between seven classes: Zygmunt, Shaoring, Erda, Belzebuit, Wotan, Albus and Camilla.

Trailer:

Luna Online – mmorpg review

Site: http://luna.gpotato.com/
Status: Free-to-play

Luna Online is a colorful, anime-styled MMORPG published by gPotato. The game has cute, fun graphics and relaxing atmosphere. If you like to spend some time in a tale world, this MMORPG is for you.
Do you have problems to fight cute, little monsters? (Am I cute?)

Gameplay
You can choose you character race, appearance and class. There are three available classes at the beginning, and 52 classes in total so players can customize their character development in details.
When you fight monsters you gain experience and level up, at each level you get stat points and skill points. To learn skills you need skill points, gold and to reach a certain level.
The monsters drop both whole items and parts for creating items. You can construct and reinforce different things.

Classes
You have three classes to select at the beginning – Fighter, Rogue, and Mage. At level 20 each of them can advance to a new class. Not all classes are accessible from all races. Leveling up is not very fast, for two hours intense playing and doing quests I was only at level 8. Today I’ll try to reach level 20 and obtain a profession – Elven Mage.

Community
You can actually find many people playing the game. I was surprised to see so many characters selling and buying things at the shop area in Alker Harbor.

I’ll spend some more time in game before evaluating my impression. I am not exactly the type to like chibi characters but the game took my attention and I enjoy my playing time a lot.