RATINGS
Pros: Thrilling new Reaper class that is pretty simple to play and makes good use of combo building.
Cons: Starting zone far too easy for players who have already reached level 40 to unlock the new class.
Gameplay: 8
Animations: 8
Sound Effects: 7
Overall: 7.5
We've lately had an in-depth look at The Exiled Realm of Arborea - TERA for short – in order to playtest the Reaper and get a comprehensive first impression of this newly released class that raises the amount of available class options up to 9 in total. It’s for the first time that developers decided to restrict a class to only one race; in this case the kind of cutesy Elin with their rabbit ears have received the honour. (According to speculations, one of the principal reasons for this is the amount of time the creation of new character animations takes; we therefore don’t expect the other races to get access to the class any soon).
The Reaper is a mid-ranged, light armoured DPS fighter able to infuse her chained twin scythe blades with dark energy to unleash potent area attacks and bring down several opponents at once by thrusting immobilisations, storms and knockdowns. The class is only available to those who already brought one character up to level 40; once there’s such a character in their account, players can create a new Reaper character which automatically starts at level 50. And nobody has to worry about already having exhausted their 8 available character slots with other classes, as En Masse has also raised the total number of slots to 12, granting everyone the opportunity to test the additional class.
Along with the Reaper class, there’s a new starting zone called Ashen Hope, which is located in the area of Pora Elina and has fallen victim to an enormous explosion. Players are chosen to be the hero of the hour and have to navigate through the disaster area to help refugees evacuate the land by protecting them against multiple Orcan mobs. We started out in this new zone with only a few of our skills available, had to talk to various NPCs and beat up training enemies in to prove ourselves worthy for the aforesaid "hero of the hour" title.
When it comes to attacks, these look quite spectacular and due to the huge damage they were capable of when chained together with combo attacks (hope you realised this nice pun in relation to the reaper’s weapon) and the constant knockdowns, we didn’t felt much of a challenge throughout the whole session as we tackled groups of 8 enemies at once, merely taking a single scratch. Only once, when there must have been round about 20 mobs attacking us, our health bar seriously dropped.
However, the most likely worst part of the whole experience was that after 40 minutes in the game and halfway through the starting zone, we nearly crossed the threshold to level 55 without having seen much combat that would have deserved the term "challenging" and would without any doubt have hit the level cap of 60 by the time we would complete the zone, just by simple gameplay without any grind.
All this appeared a bit pointless to us, as we are aware of far greater challenges in TERA which truly put the player’s combat skills to a test. Despite the fact that the area is the Reaper’s starting zone, it’s yet only accessible for those who already have 40 levels of gameplay experience on an earlier character, so we would have expected a much more challenging task than that we were faced with. Half of the quest chain just sent us visiting another NPC to speak with in order to learn more about what was occurring in the zone to then set off for killing another sort of mob you inevitably come across when following the extremely linear path towards the end of the zone.
The area on its own looked quite nice, especially the ultimate "Ruined Elinu" burning tree village area. Apart from this, the majority of mobs had a quite similar appearance and were scaled to a level that never presented too much of a challenge. We merely got to explore anything as the path across the map is pretty much like following a railway track.
What we ultimately took with us from our experience is the impression that the starting area is barely kind of an additional fluff you can race through in a single session to get a max level Reaper character to then enjoy the endgame content in the regular areas, dungeon and so on. It would absolutely be interesting to see how the Reaper is able to stand her own in PvP; however due to the fact that this is a newly added class which is quickly maxed, we dare predict that PvP zones will be overpopulated with Reapers in the near future as everyone who able to will surely give them a shot.
To get a better insight into the Reaper class gameplay, we recommend to check out our first look gameplay video with commentary.
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