RATING:
Pros: Nice visuals, half decent soundtrack, attempted action based combat.
Cons: Mindless repetitive quests, nearly exactly the same as every other RPG they’ve published.
Score: TBD
We recently took some time to check out Stormthrone: Aeos Rising from R2Games, currently in open beta it is a browser based free to play MMO and we figured we’d give it a bit of an extended test for this review, managing to get to level 30. With R2 Games I think it’s safe to say that many of their RPGs have a similar theme, feature set and general mechanics and so we were hopeful that this new title would potentially bring something a little different and not simply be the same game but with different graphics and a different story arc. Not to give the game away, but it wasn’t.
From the outset things did absolute promising, the six available classes each had a description and star rating out of five for their attack, defence and required skill level, this amount of information alone combined with the fact that there are six classes as opposed to the traditional three that we often see from a lot of R2 Games’ titles (tank, caster, archer) usually with no information about any of them. Stepping into the game as our Mage (five out of five required skill) the next thing we noticed was the graphical quality, say what you will about R2 Games they always have great illustrative graphics and top-notch scenery in their RPG’s and Stormthrone was thankfully no different. One of the things we will say is that there were more than a few NPC’s and enemies that looked extremely similar to World of Warcraft artwork (Muksaners looked like WoW’s Kobold Workers, the Vault Manager looks identical to the WoW Goblins, and a couple of the NPCs look exactly the same style as WoW’s Night Elves, Blood Elves and Worgs), also the fact that they went with calling their ranged bow using class a "Hunter" as opposed to Archer or Ranger makes me think these links are more than coincidence. Far from game breaking, but we noticed it.
If you’ve played R2 Games other titles then you’ll be all too familiar with the Battle Rating system, a numerical counter showing how powerful your character is based off their gear, pets, mounts, upgrades and more. Well the Battle Rating is in the game as are the subsequent shall features that make it up including the Forge to upgrade your weapons, the ability to train your mount and pets and all that other stuff; again the core features are there and they’ve not strayed too far from them.
What we were happy to see didn’t make the cut was the all too common (and for all is extremely boring) squad/group building feature where players recruit NPC’s, attach them to the group and then enter automated battle in an instanced based environments. Instead we got action-based combat where are we had a variety of spells on our hotbar that we could use in combat as well as moving ourselves around and either we were blind to it or it wasn’t there but we couldn’t actually see any automated combat options (though for the first time ever late in the game we were actually looking for them hoping we’d find them).
Our biggest problem is that when we first started out from level 1 to 5 our quests consisted of speaking to an NPC, getting a "quest" to kill X number of a certain type of enemy, i.e. the batch of mobs that we were about to encounter on the very linear map where there was only one direction you could head, so getting to the end of the map level, then handing it into the next NPC. From here that NPC would give us a "quest" to kill X number of a certain type of enemy, i.e. the next batch of mobs we were about to encounter. Whilst there was definitely story and narrative behind the quests they were exactly the same, unfortunately there are also the same for the next 30 levels and this is pretty much what the PVE quest campaign consisted of. Now we don’t necessarily mind "kill X number of enemies" quests, the problem is every enemy it was exactly same, they were all melee combatants with the exception of the occasional elite or level Boss that might have the odd ranged attack. 30 levels of the same quest, fighting the same monster, but in a different skin does not an RPG make.
To add insult to injury, for action style combat, it actually gets really boring and is no saving grace. As mages we figured we’d be a little weak in combat, but the truth is that to get through our endless stream of “kill X number of monsters” quests our go to tactic was to range attack as many mobs as we could, get them to pile on us, then cast our AoE spell to decimate them. As the difficulty of the enemies scaled with our level progression, they were always killable with relative ease and we barely dropped below 90% health in our entire playthrough. So as well as tedious content it also lacks any sort of challenge. You’re able to improve your skills and put points into a talent tree each time you level up, improving your stats and more passive abilities, picking up points each time you level up.
One of the bigger PvE challenges were supposed to be the Dungeons, which could be played on Normal or Hard mode, well Normal mode was just like standard PvE quests and didn’t feel any different other than having a boss at the end. We were able to play Dungeons with either a pickup group of players or, if none were available, NPC companions that filled the spots, but honestly we noticed not difference between playing with players or AI as, like we mentioned, the combat was so simplistic it didn’t seem to matter. The only major difference was having to roll need or greed on loot when it dropped to the floor and someone picked it up to see who got it, as when playing with just NPCs you obviously get everything, but it got to the point where so much loot dropped we just weren’t even that bothered about picking it up anymore. That said, they do have a halfway decent system where when your bags are full and you can’t pick up any more items then it allows you to recycle your unnecessary magic items to make crafting components instead of having to discard them.
Another "challenge" was the World Boss encounters, which seemed to just be the same key story bosses that you found perhaps every 10 levels, where you got the chance to fight them in a Horde mode style battle with wave after wave of enemies that you had to survive whilst taking on the boss; again, it was ridiculously easy. We queued for PvP to see if that’s what the game was being geared to, we imagine our Teleport abilities and Polymorph turning enemies into harmless minions for an amount of time might be more useful in PvP than it ever would be in PVE. Unfortunately even after 30 minutes of queuing the battleground didn’t trigger, albeit the game is open beta, so we can’t attest as to whether it would normally take this long.
All in all the game just wasn’t that interesting unless you’re a sucker for story, which we typically are, but not at the expense of having a linear regurgitated copy of the same games they’ve published a dozen times before. The game requires absolutely no skill in PVE and whilst the PVP may be entertaining, it just wasn’t worth playing for hours to experience it and then having to grind mindless PVE to stay competitive with your gear.
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