Today we'll talk about Aura Kingdom, the new free to play fantasy MMORPG from Aeria Games that thrusts you to a beautiful fantasy world called Azuria, enriched with culture,art and magic. In the game you start embodying a character who possesses a mundane existence living in their small town, but when the world is threatened magic is awoken in special individuals, whose task is the protect Gaia, and your character is one of those chosen protectors.

We started our adventures in the game, which is currently in its pre-release alpha stage, testing the character creation system. The game let us choose between 8 different classes (the game has yet to unveil a ninth class), each of them focused on melee, ranged and magic combat, and each class showed us their main strengths and weaknesses in a brief summary.

After choosing a class, you can "customize" the appearance of your characters. The options were relatively limited, because you can only choose between few hairstyles, faces (the only thing that changed was the shape of the eyes) and... that's it.  The hairstyles were eye-catching, particularly cool on the female character, very detailed and in-line with the anime style; our main criticisms are the lack of a greater variety of choices, and that the male characters had markedly female traits; slim build, soft features, and even a lot of the hairstyles further accentuated this. Anime style or just alpha stage lack of final customization options? We’ll see.

Once you've created your character, you can choose your Eidolon, your main partner in the game, between 4 different types per class. Each Eidolon provide several benefits both inside and out of combat, and like the characters, they have their own strengths and weaknesses. We are not sure at what stage these companions come into play, but presumably it is quest/level orientated, either way we didn’t see them in action as we only played through the early levels. Pets and companions seem to be one of the most important features offered by the game, so it’ll be good to get more information on them at a later date.

Our first steps in Aura Kingdom led us to the quiet village of Port Skandia, a very detailed and visually attractive village, with cartoon style characters and environments. As we left the village and we headed further out into the wild to explore the starter zone in more detail. What we liked the most was the graphical style and the general look of the game; however, we found something that we didn't like: invisible walls. Whilst we accept areas need fencing off in some locations absolutely no effort had been made to do this subtly, it was literally suddenly running into an invisible wall often quite a distance from the area/object they didn’t want you reaching and some of which were in weird locations like the top of a cliff ledge stopping you jumping down to the area below even though this was accessible by following the path down…

The quests we experienced were low-level fodder we have come to expect, we had the "amazing" mission to deliver jam and listen in on an argument between “Kenny” and “Barbie” (not kidding). Predicting these types of quests might go on for a few levels we decide to skip them and explore for ourselves, fighting against all of the monsters that we found in our path.

Combat mechanics are simple; select the target and press buttons. An interesting detail is that if you cast a spell, and the enemy is out range, your character will automatically move into a position that he can launch the spell (which is nice but could potentially cause you some problems if you weren’t careful). One of our first attacks once activated continuously fires projectiles until the enemy dies or until we use another skill, which was very interesting, as we could focus on kiting whilst our character did the attacking automatically.

We managed to explore the majority of Port Skandia and the surrounding areas,before some portals said we were too low level, so where they lead to is still a mystery! Overall it’s a nice game, well done, but from what we saw nothing majorly unique (but in the fantasy MMORPG market that’s hardly a surprise these days). Lots of menus for weapon and armor modifications and enhancements, but as they were completely unusable at that time we don’t know the depth of the crafting. It’s cute and colourful and if you like your MMORPGs a little light hearted then might be one for you to keep an eye on.

RATINGS

• Graphics: 8


• Gameplay: 7


• Sounds: 7

• The good: Gorgeous graphics, cute and colourful.


• The bad: Combat is pretty easy.

Overall: 7.5

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 12th, 2013 at 5:54 pm and is filed under MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.