0 5 people found this review helpful

Recommended 112.6 hrs on record

This game is an MMO that isn't built like an MMO. You can play this game by yourself just fine, or with a couple friends if you want. This is hands down the best story experience I have had in an online game. Every single quest giver NPC has full voice acting, and every single quest has some kind of cinematic setup to it. It legitimately feels like a single player action RPG since everything you interact with is so fleshed out.



I want to mention something here that I have never seen in an MMO. There are a special type of quest called "investigation missions." These are usually combat free and completely puzzle based. They often have you pulling up a web browser and looking through different websites for out-of-game information that you need to answer the game's riddles. I don't want to go into details since I will spoil the solutions, but suffice it to say that I was looking up everything from ancient Egyptian history to the social media accounts of various (fictional) corporate CEOs. These are optional but have massive experience rewards, so for someone like me who loves that kind of thing it is a great reward for doing something I would have wanted to do anyway.



Let's talk setting and world. This is the game's strongest point. It is very much a White Wolf/X-Files/Cthulhu "all urban legends are true" kind of world. You work for an agency that hunts down the stuff that goes bump in the night. I can't really do it justice by description so I advise you to try it for yourself. Each arc of the story is very unique and has its own locations and tropes, but they are all woven together in an overarching story. The endgame experience is not great so if you want to play it like a standard MMO this will not be something you enjoy.



Let's talk mechanics. This game is 100% the standard MMO "hit the buttons really fast as your cooldowns come off rotation" style gameplay, but the leveling and advancement system is very unique (there are no classes. Your abilities are determined by what weapons you use). Honestly, if you are playing this for depth of combat mechanics you probably won't have fun. This game's real strength is story and world building.



Let's talk grind. It is very real. This is a very equipment focused game that requires a big grind to level up your equipment as well as your character. You do this for each piece of equipment individually and it puts you squarely into grind hell. The good news is that to complete the story the grind is not necessary at all. If you 100% the story quests like I do then you will find yourself perpetually over leveled and over geared, which I kind of find to be a good thing since the combat itself isn't all that memorable and I'm mainly playing to experience the world and story.



You can also grind auction house currency by accomplishing daily rewards (or you can just buy it with real world cash if you really want to). There's a fixed list of these every day which are always the same and boil down to "kill X monsters, complete X quests". The good news is that you can buy a full loadout of high quality "2nd best in slot" gear with only about a week worth of grinding. This will put you way above the power level the story is balanced around and unless you play to endgame there is no reason to save up for best in slot.



One last thing, this is very much a free to play MMO in that they will be trying to milk money out of you to make grinding less annoying. There are many many systems that all feed into this to give you minute stat boosts and I won't go into detail about them, but suffice it to say that everything you can do in this game to make you character stronger can be done faster if you want to spend money. I am normally against this, but as I have mentioned there is no grind required to beat the story at all. If you are just here for that then you can play it for free and ignore the monitization.



In conclusion, this is not really a good MMO, but it is a pretty awesome single player action RPG pretending to be an MMO. I highly recommend it.