The Matrix Online has you. Well, I would say the Matrix has me, But I am still not entirely convinced. Lee believes that I will like it if I just give it a chance, so he bought it for me for my Birthday. (No you haven’t missed it, it’s coming up soon.) Problem is, I am still having a lot of fun with WoW. Everything in WoW just seems to work, and work well. I now have a level 45 Troll Rogue and I am enjoying the PVP. Now I realize that with MXO there is 1: A learning curve and 2: a new shiny interface that’s different. (Shiny and new and different is always fun for a while.)
So I am trying it out. First things I can tell you, the game is very pretty. Obviously making great use of the graphics and such of a 3d world. It’s also nice to see an urban environment. The concept of the game is great. My problems are pretty limited but kind of deal breaking. My Main concern is that I really hate the combat engine. Once again, the concept is great, you line up your abilities and when it comes initiative time, the higher number gets the action. What I don’t like is that you are locked in combat with one target. You can not move, you can only queue up actions. This means that if there is someone else targeting you, you can not change targets, you can not see who they are, or engage them. There is a “Disengage Close combat” option, but that’s an action that gets queued up. Once it’s triggered, the opponent has a change of re-initiating close combat with you which will re-lock you in combat again. I had this happen to me. I got stuck in a loop until target B behind me shot me to death because I couldn’t get out of combat with Target A. Also, the views while in “Close Combat” are very disorienting. I found many times where I could not see the action because of the camera angle, when I tried to change the angle. I wasn’t centered on myself but rather someone else in the fight. I couldn’t even find me.
The next thing that annoys me is the missions. It is very City of Hero’s like in that you make contact with someone and you can call on them to receive missions. The problem is, the missions all go like this:
- Make Contact
- Receive mission
- Go to Building
- get in Elevator
- Go to Floor X as dictated by the mission
- go to Marked room and enter
- Look around until you find the contact Person or thing
- do one of the following:
- Destroy or Kill Target
- Talk to Target
- Receive Goods from Target for Transport
- Have Target Follow You
- Leave Building quickly before an Agent comes for you
- If you did either C or D then Go to Another building and Repeat the process for delivery.
That’s it. So far I have been on quite a few missions and every one of them has been some variation of that. Wash, Rinse, repeat.
Last thing is Sort of a simple silly thing really but still. The loading into “the Matrix” is annoying. You get the Green “code rain” all over everything, and it lasts for a long long while. I mean about 1-2 minutes. You can move around and do things but its all code rain. It gets annoying really fast.
Ok so outside of those problems, the game doesn’t look all that bad. It has a lot of potential and I get the feeling that if I try it a little more they may me more to it. I guess we will see.
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