Our team has recently tested the open beta of R2 Games' browser-based fantasy MMORPG Knight's Fable (which has been developed by Youzu Games), the same guys who brought you Wartune and League of Angels. The title has a very similar type of gameplay as the previous titles of R2 Games, so the game has been pretty familiar for us because the other games that we have analyzed from this editor share many features.

As it is usual in this type of game, you can choose between various character, in this particular case four different heroes, and your goal is to make them more powerful, either leveling them up or equipping them with powerful weapons and armors, so that they can face a multitude of PvP and PvE challenges. In the game you will see how powerful is your character through its Battle Rating, a numerical value which determines its power in comparison to other players and monsters.

Knight's Fable is free to play browser-based, making that delve into the game is very simple; you just have to go to the game's website and click on a button to get into the game. The first time you enter into the game, you will appear in a character creation screen where you can choose your hero among four predefined characters, which you cannot customize in any way (well, you can name them). The available clases are Warrior, Knight, Spiritus and Magi, although the game does not tell you anything about them or their playstyles ... If you want to know these details, you have to return to the game website and find the information there. At least the characters are quite common, so we decided to choose the always faithful and brave Warrior.

One of the first impressions that the game gave us, is that everything is going at lightning fast, the narrative dialogues pass very quickly, and everything seems to go with haste, which can become overwhelming and annoying. Another highlight is the extreme automation of the game, to mention one example, when you talk to an NPC that gives you a mission, they usually send you to you seek another NPC, and the game automatically takes you to talk to him, and this NPC in turn will tell you that you have to eliminate a certain number of enemies in a specific area, where again you will be taken automatically. Another point that left us something cold is the game's storyline, whether is not that bad, but things happen so quickly it was quite hard to tell what happens, which roughly tells us that there is a conflict on a large scale between the hosts of heaven and the armies of hell.

Combats are equally automated; at the start of a battle, you will see how your characters fight against their opponents in turns, until one side defeats the other and the match ends, you have absolutely no involvement in whatsoever. The only thing over which you have control is on building up your hero and decide which attacks they will perform in battle, which will greatly affect the outcome of the fighting. After each battle, you get a score that determine how well your characters have fought, which will also determine the rewards, money and experience you will receive. The majority of battles that we fight were quickly resolved with a couple of blows, and we mainly got the highest score: Perfect, so the battles themselves lacked emotion and were a bit pointless.

As it is common with these types of games, the interface is full of  flashing icons that we were prompted to check out, to earn rewards because we played for a certain amount of time, or because we have entered into the game that day. Basically the game literally thrown us  experience, and in less than 15 minutes, we were already level 10, which is rather worrying as the maximum level (at least in the open beta) is 60. As players advance through the game and raise level their characters, they unlock new features which will open them a wide range of possibilities within the game.

In conclusion, you can hate or love this type of fully automated games, in which you can have the feeling of being a foreign Viewer, but the numbers do not lie, this type of game is booming, either by its "casualization" or by its simplicity, becoming more and more popular every day.

RATINGS

• Pros: Environment art looks nice, though gets reused very early on


• Cons: Very little traditional gameplay if you don’t simply like acquiring gear just to get stronger for the sake of being stronger

• Graphics: 6


• Sound: 5


• Gameplay: 6

Overall: 6

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2014 at 8:22 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.