We recently checked out the newest RPG from R2 Games Winterfrost Legacy. We gave the game a good couple of hours playthrough, hitting level 54 and acquiring our wings (which seems to be a major milestone marker that these Asian inspired RPGs really go for). So what did we make of our time?

Starting out there were 4 characters classes to choose from, a step away from the typical 3 classes we normally expect with these games, including Mage, Warrior, Rogue and Shaman. As these games typically don’t exactly offer much different in the way of playstyle between classes other than different stats and different visuals on the skills, we didn’t deliberate too much which class to go for and picked up the Shaman; absolutely zero customization involved, which again wasn’t that surprising.

The game loaded up, it’s browser based but the lag is pretty overwhelming at times, graphics pixelating and taking a few seconds to load up was only the first part of the problem, aside from the shoddy load times the graphics were pretty great as ever with some truly detailed environments that makes the entire game look like amazing concept art. The character models weren’t as great and some of the special effects were clunky, the short number of still frames used on the animations made the pixel based graphics look jerky and extremely dated when they moved.

The story was pretty much the same as the majority of other RPGs we’ve played, many of them from R2 Games, and involved Good Guardians versus Evil Guardians that were threatening to destroy the world. The storyline was all over the place and seemingly tried to cater to a typical fantasy theme with the inclusion of orcs and elves and pointless sideline quests that made absolutely no sense. For example early in the game after learning that you were going to have to save the world and being asked to fight some Evil Guardian alongside your father (spoiler: who dies in the battle) you fly off to the elven realm on the back of a winged dragon type thing and the first “quest” you do when you land, after this horrific moment in your life and you being the summoned saviour, you play hide and seek with some village girl. Things like this cropped out throughout our entire 50+ levels of play, and given that the storyline and quests were completely linear and really short lived, there’s no reason to not have epic heroic moment after epic heroic moment. The game doesn’t have the depth of an MMORPG with weeks’ worth of play and shouldn’t have filler quests to pad things out.

The mechanics and features are pretty staple: Tavern to recruit your Merc companion, some form of alter to get currency for the Tavern (in this case the Anima Alter) and then putting these Mercs into your party and into a formation with the typical frontline-centre-backline approach. Then you go on to earn new gear, spend Gold to level it up, level up your mounts, spend skill points to upgrade or learn new skills (however you can only place these skill points in a specific order so you upgrade a skill or learn a new one at the same time as everyone else). Essentially the entire feature list is the same as practically every other RPG from R2 Games, if you’ve played one… you’ve played Winterfrost Legacy. That’s my main gripe with the game, with all these games, they’re exactly the same apart from some different graphics and a slightly different (albeit boring) storyline that a pre-teen could write as fanfiction, and at least the English would likely be more coherent than the awful translation job they’ve done for Winterfrost Legacy.

Combat is repetitive and boring, essentially your party gets into turn based battle and with their primary attacks will individually build up rage, which they then spend to perform the bigger skill attacks. You don’t get to control the Merc companions but can choose which of your attacks to make, or you can hit “Auto” and let it perform the fight for you (gotta love those automated features…) Early on it made no difference whether we fought manually or let the computer do it itself as there were no real challenges (and by early on we mean all the way up to level 54 including Dungeons and PVP); later on then we imagine players won’t want to rely on the automated feature quite so much though. However, for us it made no difference regardless of what feature we were fighting, which are pretty much all exactly the same: Merc Duels you fight through a few waves then fight one of your Mercs, quests you fight through a few waves then a boss, the Crypt dungeon you fight through a few waves and then a stage boss. The only differences were PVP where you fought against another players assembled party, or the Chaos Chess where you fought against a single party including a particular boss mob, but it was all still essentially the same boring combat.

Fundamentally the game offers nothing new, literally, if we didn’t put the name of this game and omitted named features like “Chaos Chess” but simply gave a description, you could think this game was the same as practically every other RPG from the company. Players like the games, we see that, the global chat was a constant buzz of questions and discussion, but for us the core of the game is boring and the only appeal from one game to the next is the graphics, which seem to be what have had the most time spent on them, as even the storyline is so similar it’s hard to say that there’s much effort that has gone into making it. The game constantly rewards you with flashing lights, throws XP and gold at you to make some people feel like they’re really achieving something, but coming away from it we personally feel that the entire experience was just a waste of time.

SCORE:

• Pros: Great graphics as ever, don’t have to spend anything to play it.


• Cons: Same content and features as every other RPG of this nature, bad loading times, boring gameplay.

Rating: TBD

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2015 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Articles, 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.