Short Blurb on Infinity, Monato, Goonzu

Hey everyone,

*Finally* done my midterms for this semester, just a few projects to get out of my way and I'll have this week off of homework. Woohoo!

Onto more important matters. During the past few weeks I've tried the various open beta, and to sum it up nicely, have been disappointed. I'll start with Monato Esprit.

To identify the game in one acronym, it be WoW. It is essentially a clone of WoW, except of course its from Korea. The graphics are done well, but it gave me the eerie feel of WoW with a little anime thrown in. The game content is the same, with the generic quest NPC's in town and quests progressing as you go on. The most important aspect is the stat points, or the lack thereof. Overall it felt like I was playing WoW. If I had desired that I would simply have played WoW instead.

So this one gets an:
AVOID
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The next game I tried was Goonzu Online. I'm going to warn you beforehand, its not 3-d, and the graphics are very "simple", but I found them done well enough to enjoy it regardless. The most exciting feature of this game is the stat system and market system. Player guilds control towns, taxation, which NPC's set up shop in their towns, and the town's dungeon which was fascinating as a "goal" for a guild.

The economy and market system was VERY well though out. Every item is sold at the "market" price to an NPC. If there is increased demand for that item, price goes up, and thus so does selling price to the NPC. The only items ever in the the economy are those players sell, thus the market system works brilliantly for controlling inflation and such.(Exception of healing potions of course). Also almost every dropped item in the game has some sort of purpose; whether it be a questing, crafting, or feeding your pet, everything had a value.

Next is the skill system which is also done nicely, increasing your levels in a skill by learning from "books" which are sold to the market from other players and thus you can buy them. Goonzu also has various crafting books in everything from armors and weapons, in what seems like an endless amount of them. These require ingredients, such as steel, coal, silver..etc which are made from other crafting skills. Thus you can see how every item in the game is used someway or another. Lastly, another exciting feature was the pet/summon system. Once you reach a specific level you get a "pet", a very weak low level pet which helps you in battles. As you level, so does it, and once it reaches certain levels it has the opportunity to evolve. You must buy special tickets for this evolution to happen and sometimes the results are unpredictable, but this evolution can occur hundreds of times. Thus leading to a very wide variety of pets and when you obtain a "legendary" pet its announced server wide as an accomplishment. And on that topic, there is also a market for horses, which level up as you feed them/use them to gain faster speed and weight, however they eventually get too old and leave you for "retirement". The game does contain a lot of walking if you are going to high level dungeons so having a horse is quite useful.

Lastly, the stat system is a standard 5-6 different stat points and they affect your characters damage, attack speed, health..etc. Which is almost a requirement for me to play an MMO. However, the reason I'm not playing it right now is.... no PVP. Absolutely none, there is no way to fight against other plays shy of KSing them on monsters. They went into each aspect of gaming so detailed, I was so happy, but they failed to address the most important part of MMOs.

Thus this game gets a:
MAYBE

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Lastly I'm going to review Infinity.

Initially I thought a system of skills involving mouse click combinations would be a good thing. However, in practice, the system is poorly designed and results more in "random clicking" that actually performing various skills. I also found the character movement to be horrid and almost "choppy". I was initially lead to believe it would be an MMO style, but it turned out be a "GunBound style" where you join a game room and complete the mission in that room. There was also PVP rooms but they were nothing more than complete chaos of people hitting random buttons hoping to get combos. Overall its poorly designed and horribly implemented. Without further ado:

Rating:
AVOID

That's all for now folks, hope to get Spellborn open beta soon or a few other games, right now none have caught my eye. I'll keep you posted as usual. Also as a note; I will not be reviewing Rappelz, or even downloading it, as it has no stat system and is a clone of L2 in almost all aspects.

-RF