Today RiotGames launched the long awaited new gameplay mode Dominion for their MOBA League of Legends. As with the other gameplay mode, Dominion pits two teams of five against each, however in this mode in order to destroy your opponents Nexus, players must conquer and hold points on the map. Hold the points longer than your opponent and your team will be victorious.

Dominion mode takes place on a new map called Crystal Scar, which is basically a large circle with 5 control points along its perimeter and multiple paths cut though the center. Each team begins the map with 500 Nexus points and as you gain control of the hold points your opponent will slowly start to lose their Nexus points. The first team to hit zero loses.

Dominion starts off with players already at level 3 and with double the cash, so right from the get go you can tell this is a much faster gameplay style than the original game mode. Kills don’t matter and aren’t even displayed until the match is over, which I’m assuming is done so players don’t concentrate as much on champion kills as holding points.

Once the game begins both teams rush out to conquer their two nearest hold points with a fifth hold point in the middle at the top of the circle. When you conquer a point, 3 minions will spawn in both directions to help you attack the other hold points. You also gain a lot of XP and money by conquering points so leveling and being able to purchase high-end items from the shop happens much faster.

Does it live up to expectations or is Dominion a dud? Read the rest of our League of Legends Dominion review below to find out.

Continued…

Perfect World Entertainment’s latest MMO game, Rusty Hearts, recently launched into open beta this Tuesday and while it was a bumpy start, it was well worth the wait. I only say it was bumpy because there were a few issues with downloading the client and patches where they wouldn’t update properly, so it took a few days to get things working.

I really can’t remember the last time I played any type of side-scroller, maybe on the original Playstation, but I’m glad Rusty Hearts re-introduced me to the genre. While it is a side-scroller, the maps are fully 3D, however the path you walk on behaves as you would find in any side-scroller.

Starting out you select from one of four characters, in open beta it’s actually three as one isn’t selectable. I’m not quite sure if you have to unlock the forth character, buy it or if it’s just not available in open beta. I selected Frantz, a melee character who specializes in swords and axes.

You start off in the corner of a small town, with the rest of the town being inaccessible until you unlock it, and with a few NPCs stating about.  It’s a bit overwhelming when starting out as there’s a lot of options and things to click on, but you’ll quickly get acclimated to everything.

There is a overall story-line with every quest, but thankfully there is also a skip button so you can just get the quest and move on. The quests are given in the old RPG style where a chat box appears, in this case the bottom right, and there’s a back and forth dialog between you and the NPC.

Continued…

For someone that just recently got into the MOBA genre, I have to admit I’ve been swept up in it and am loving it. So when first heard of Rise of Immortals, the new MOBA from Petroglyph, and read that it was just another “Dota Clone” I decided to check it out for myself and see what it had to offer.

Much like every other MOBA title out today, Rise of Immortals is a free-to-play game that features an item store that allows players to purchase immortals, skins, upgrades as well as utility items such as XP bonuses for faster leveling. Launching with only 12 immortals, character selection isn’t on par with some of the older games out there, but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing as you can quickly get accustomed to all the heroes.

Here’s were RoI separates itself from the pack by incorporating something traditionally found in MMO games. Instead of players leveling a master account and being able to choose from any of the available heroes before a match, players select one hero during login and only level that one unit. Meaning if you ever want to switch to another hero, you’ll have to start over from level 1.

While many players will not mind this difference, I think it’s an overall downgrade in terms of gameplay. Some characters naturally play better together in teams, so being able to pick on the fly what character you want to use before a match is a big deal.

Read the full Rise of Immortals review by continuing below.

Continued…

The last time I set foot in the lands of Mortal Online was back during its open beta testing phase where I was ultimately disappointed with the progress of the game and lack of content so near to launch. A little over a year later and after the release of its first expansion, Dawn, I return to see how the game has changed and evolved in our Mortal Online first impressions review.

Starting off with character creation, which has remained relatively unchanged from what I saw in open beta, I created my character selecting a mix of two of the four races available, creating a bit of a hybrid character. After I distributed my stat points, I selected a starting location and logged in. There I was presented with a game intro help menu and a few NPCs standing next to me to help me get started on my journey.

The Dawn expansion was supposed to revamp the intro help menu and provide newbies, like myself, with a lower initial learning curve to get started, however the new tutorial system really gave me no extra info then the old one, which is also still available in game. The new system does however give you pop-up “tips” as you progress, so it’s a little better.

After reading through the tutorial tips, I walked up to the various NPC standing in front of me to see what they have to offer. One was a tutor, so I was able to learn my first crafting skill, teaching me how to use my pick axe to mine and chop trees for wood. One was a “helpful man”, that was actually his title, and basically regurgitated some of the same info from the tutorials, then there were two vendors, which were of no use to me as I had no money.

That was all the guidance I got, so the next move was for me to figure out what I wanted to do. Since my only equipment was a old rusty short sword, a pick axe and rags, I decided I needed to get some money so I can buy some respectable gear to wear. Since my skills were non-existent I knew going out to kill things was out of the picture so I decided to go look for more tutors around the city and acquire additional crafting skills.

As I began to walk around, I quickly noticed my character was slow as if I stepped in gum with both feet and when I tried using my endurance to run, I would only be able to for about 10 feet before becoming completely exhausted. And forget about jumping, even though my guy wasn’t white, I was only able to get about 2 inches off the ground and after two jumps in a row my endurance would be completely drained. I was having issues jumping onto stairs, I could walk on them, but I couldn’t jump up them.  Even a minor bump that was 6 inches I couldn’t jump over and would have to find stairs or another entrance to get around.

Continued…

When Trion announced their half-birthday promotion last week, offering gamers a free week to try out RIFT, I decide to bite since I’ve been contemplating getting into RIFT for some time anyway.

My initial foray into RIFT was much like any other MMORPG I’ve played before, you select your faction, customize your character and get going. I selected the Defiant faction and decided to select a class I’ve never played before, I usually go for DSP or tanking, but this time I went with the Rogue class.

RIFT starts out in the present where Regulos, the god of Death, has taken over the world of Telara and most of the people left believe it’s the end of the world. My character is brought back to life by some scientist who tells me I have to travel back to the past, before Regulos conquered the world, and it’s up to me to stop him. So after completing a few tutorial quests, I jump through a rift that was created and travel back to the past.

You’re relocated to your factions starting area years before Regulos takes over the world, however because of the time traveling, or so I think, rifts are tearing through from the future into the past opening up portals for monsters to come through.

That’s of course only one part of the main story. The other is the war between the two factions the Guardians and the Defiants, who fight amongst each other for religious reasons. The Guardians, who are the chosen one’s of the Telara’s gods and extremely devoted to them, believe they’re the only ones that can stop Regulos.  While the Defiants have turned their backs on the Telara’s gods, blaming them for everything, and have embraced science and technology instead. This obviously didn’t sit well with the Guardians, which is why they’re at war with each other.

Alright, now that we got the storyline out of the way, lets get to the actual game. Click continue below for the rest of the first impression Rift review.

Continued…

To really understand where I’m coming from with this review of League of Legends, one has to go back to where I was first introduced to the MOBA genre, with Warcraft 3. War3 was released at a time when I was getting a little bored of RTS games so I spent a lot of my time trying out all the community created mods for it, one of which was a MOBA mod.

Now this was 8-9 years ago so I can’t really recall if the mod was DotA, some early version of it or perhaps another MOBA all together, I just remember not liking it. There were no instructions, no info, you basically loaded the mod and had to figure it out for yourself. Which is actually no different than 99% of all the other mods in WC3, but since I wasn’t getting into it, I didn’t feel like putting in the time to learn it. I ended up playing a few rounds, but in the end it was confusing and I was getting my ass kicked by players who knew what they were doing so I moved on to another mod and never went back.

Fast forward a few years to when I first heard of League of Legends. I read it was based on a Warcraft 3 mod called DotA and when I saw some of the videos I lost interested instantly. Then a few weeks ago when Riot Games announced it had hit 15 million registered players, I thought, hmm, there’s got to be something more to this game then that War 3 mod I played so many year before. So after about 2 weeks of contemplating I decided to finally download it.

Check out the full League of Legends review after the jump.

Continued…

Elves, orcs, dragons and magic, the MMO genre is saturated with fantasy games that offer similar atmospheres with slightly different storylines. So when I went looking for a new MMO game, I turned to the sci-fi genre and Black Prophecy which caught my eye years ago. Now that it finally launched in North America and included its first major content update, which was released on EU and NA servers at the same time, I was pretty confident the game would have a certain level of polish having been released in the EU 4 months before. It turns out I was wrong.

I really wanted to like Black Prophecy, I really did, but my hopes of finding a worthy sci-fi space flight sim were crushed as I learned Black Prophecy was nothing but a grindfest.

The game has two major issues to overcome if it’s going to make it.  The first are its instanced missions and the second is the lack of player driven content. Up to this point my pilot is level 15, which translates to about 40+ hrs of game time, but I’ve already completely run out of things to do.

Continue below for the full Black Prophecy review.

Continued…

Over the last week I had some time to checkout the recently launched NA version of Black Prophecy and as far as first impressions go, it’s not a good one.  Starting off with the installation, I knew it wasn’t going to be a smooth ride as Gamigo required you to download 6 separate files, one of which was a broken link, so I had to wait a few hrs for them to notice  and fix it.

Once installed I logged in, created my character and was ready to go.  The game begins with you taking the role of a random crew mate on a ship that is attacked and you have to man the turrets.  The tutorial is meant as an introduction to the games weapon systems and normally I would gloss over something like this, however this is where I ran into my first bug.

Upon completing the turret tutorial, the game looped back to the beginning and I was forced to redo the whole thing.  While not a huge problem, it wasn’t that long,  the reason I’m pointing it out is because this was a bug from the European launch 4 months ago. Quite embarrassing and pathetic to have such a simple bug not fixed 4 months later for the NA launch.

However this seems to be the theme with the NA launch of BP as I heard players complaining in the chat channels of other bugs from the EU version that are still not fixed. Aside from bugs, I’ve had multiple game crashes and freezes, even today 10 mins ago when I logged in to take a few screenshots.  There was also a big lag issue the first few days that seems to have been resolved now.

Once you complete the intro tutorial you’re taken to a hub station where the ships commander, being impressed with you, offers you a spot in his flight crew.  You then proceed to complete more missions which are just more tutorials to help you learn the aspects of the game.

Once you complete all the tutorial and prologue missions you’re given the option to select which of the two races you want to become, the Tyi or Genides.  The basic difference between the two races are that Tyi are cybernetically altered humans while Genides are genetically altered, and obviously they have different ships types.  Once you select your faction the real game begins.

You start off in your faction’s hub station where you’re greeted by their ambassador who has a few missions for you.  At this point of the game, there have only been 2 types of missions that I’ve come across. Missions you receive from contacting NPC’s in the hub stations or other stations, which tend to be storyline missions, or Terminal missions you get from inside the hub station.

Picking up a mission from the terminal is basically like playing a single player game, they’re all instanced missions and they start as soon as you accept it. They have both solo and group missions, but there is no direct connection with these missions and the Black Prophecy universe.  It feels like you’re in a training simulator rather than a thriving, active galaxy.

Continued…

Titans Quest and Age of Conan just made a baby, and it’s called Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising. So is the game any good? The gaming community has been avidly following Gods & Heroes for a couple of years now. It was certainly an interesting-looking title, but was it really one to follow? The short answer is no. Firstly, the game feels very dated. I don’t just mean by MMO standards either, but rather the game as a whole.

The first thing you might notice after logging in is the graphics. I’m not usually one to complain about a game’s visuals, but if the visuals aren’t even functional, then I’m going to have an issue. The graphics feel old, and what I mean when I say this is that there isn’t enough color in the world, the environments feel bland, the characters look very goofy, the textures appear blurry and the lighting is all around non-existent. Now if these points didn’t hurt the game enough, often times the graphics will bug out with texturing popping, light flickering, shadow clipping (through other objects) and broken animations.

I believe in order to survive in the MMO market you need to either bring something new and exciting to the table, or follow the traditional MMO pattern but do it VERY well. One example of the latter would be the recently released RIFT. They attempted to change things up with dynamic events but kept the traditional MMO structure. Gods & Heroes also endeavors to keep the basic structure but fails on the first impression. The bottom line is that Gods & Heroes needed to keep their graphics up to date in order to maintain that lasting appeal.

Just to clear things up before moving on. No, I do not think a game has to be pretty in order to be good.But the game DOES have to support itself with solid gameplay which Gods & Heroes does not. The game gives you the typical option to play one of six classes (two of which are currently locked). Each class is pretty standard. You have your warriors, healers, magic users and rouge classes. I played as the melee DPS class because I like to wear big armor and deal serious damage. I also rolled a secondary mystic class, which acts as the general spell caster. After you choose your desired class, you can then customize their facial features and choose an alliance. Neither alliance is really good nor bad, but depending on which one you choose you will receive slightly different perks and, more importantly, a unique list of companion characters you can acquire. More on this later.

Continued…

First Looks: Runes of Magic is a fun, free game that combines certain aspects from other games into a fast paced and inviting MMORPG. The moment I made a new character, I got sucked into a whole new world, with great looking fighting, spell casting, and killing animations. I couldn’t stop playing. The leveling is never boring because of so much variety. Even though it has the usual gathering, talking, and killing quests, I can easily skip out on a tedious one and still level up at a good pace. The double class system is really appealing because it adds variety; usually I would have to create a new character to mix up the game play among MMOs, but in RoM, switching to and from diverse play styles can be done on the fly. The best part of it all is that everyone is helpful, especially when it’s easy to communicate with zone chat.

Continued…