Kill the Bad Guy - Full Review (PC game)

This monochrome game looks and feels as though it has more ambition than it can handle and, whilst it has some decent moments, tends to come across as pointless and repetitive. Unfortunately, a sleek look and some tongue-in-cheek humour is just simply not enough to elevate this game to the status it desires as an intelligent and imaginative slaughter fest. 

Developer: Exkee
Genre: Puzzle, murder simulation
Release date: May 28, 2014  
Platforms: PC, Mac and Linux
ESRB: T - Teen

‘Kill The Bad Guy’ is an indie puzzle game that revolves around assassinating targets using objects in the environment whilst remaining undiscovered and is generally depicted in a simple, understated artistic design with plenty of dark humour. Though the game suffers from some key issues you’ll still manage to squeeze a few hours of good old fashioned puzzling fun out of it even if it is an incredibly slow starting game. This is a puzzle game that puts you at the heart of revenge murdering individual targets who are more often than not based on real life offenders.

Gameplay

The objective of the game is rather self-explanatory; for each level you must kill a bad guy in various, unusual ways. The game comprises of 60 of these bone shattering, blood splattering levels and for every level there will be some way in which you can manipulate objects within the environment to bring about the doom of your target. At the start of every level you read a fairly amusing profile about your intended victim which tends to include details of their crime and a name that vaguely points towards somebody in real life like ‘KimDotKom’ in reference to Kim Dotcom or ‘Oscar’ in reference to Oscar Pistorius. After reading your target’s profile you’re then dropped into a white environment with black objects such as cars, ropes hanging on walls, steam vents and pianos that you can pick up, rotate and combine. You’re given very little guidance on what to do from here, except on the first few levels, so instead you have to work out what it is you can do that will result in your target’s death. By selecting dark coloured objects you’re shown a large array of arrows that point to where you can place objects, be that on the top of buildings or just simply anywhere on the ground. Objects that can be combined are coloured green after you pick up one of the constituent parts so, in this sense, it’s not particularly challenging to work out what goes with what. 

During gameplay there are very few controls other than picking up, rotating and combining but after you have managed to pull off your mission you can watch, cinematic style, as your target is killed over and over again in a replay mode. During replay you can switch the angle of the camera to get the best shot but, though not a particularly offensive element of the game, it does come across as a rather pointless. During actual gameplay you can, rather helpfully, pause the game and look around the area but you cannot manipulate anything whilst the game is paused meaning that, when you decide what you’re going to do, you need to do it quickly. This is fairly useful as in the later levels there are usually so many elements to contend with you need to give it a few moments before you figure out what it is you’re going to do. It’s not a simple matter of strapping a spear to a glorified slingshot and flinging it halfway across the map into the poor sod’s chest though, oh no, you have CCTV and the police to be concerned about. The real challenge of the game comes with doing everything undetected as these obstacles, and later on bodyguards, all have lines of sight. If you’re caught doing any of your dastardly assassinating then its mission failed and you need to try again but with less probability of your assignment being plastered all over YouTube.

As you progress through the levels you’re not just exposed to new challenges like the police and cameras, there is also a pretty significant increase in the variation of objects you’re given and thus the ways in which you can assassinate your targets. It must be said however that the first ten levels of this game are by far the worst of them all. Truthfully, I was amazed that I even progressed beyond them and discovered that the game did actually contain something challenging and interesting. Although these first few levels are intended to be tutorial levels that ease you into the mechanics of the game what you instead experience is something painfully dull and excessively lengthy. Never has a ‘tutorial’ chapter dragged on so slowly and so uneventfully and, worse still, it doesn’t even feel like a tutorial as there are very few instructions on what to do or how to do it. Instead you must trawl through what feels like a rite of passage before being allowed into the real game as you suffer through level after level of repetitive music that sounds as though it’s been put together by two thirteen year olds, deaths that all look the same bar one electrocution and one screaming guy on fire and an incredibly limited set of tools to experiment with. Now, whilst I’m of course glad that’s not all there is to this game I doubt many people enjoy the feeling of suffering for somebody else’s art.

Thankfully the game opens up after a couple of hours play and you’re exposed to more than one way to kill your target with these methods becoming gradually more complicated. The animations of your dying target do become a tad more varied in that they fall over when they are electrocuted but overall there’s not much difference between driving a spear through your target’s head, dropping a car on him and crushing him with a wrecking ball as, either way, he ends up as a bloody smear on the pavement. In a game where the method in which you kill your target is designed to be the be all and end all of the gameplay I would have expected more death animations such as a crushed, flattened body or some pierced limbs. 

The game has some degree of re-playability as within each level of the game there are ‘secondary objectives’ which include the same basic tasks; catch the tooth of your fallen victim, kill them on the first day and find a hidden passport. The only interesting additional objective is to kill your target in a specific manner as the rest are repetitive and restrictive. The passport tends to be in locations like beneath cars or objects and hidden within buildings that become transparent as you pan over them. By completing these unimaginative challenges you gain stars which count towards unlocking a bonus level at the end of each chapter. These bonus levels are, ironically, quite a bit more interesting than the main game as they tend to have more varied objectives like killing 30 zombies before they hobble over to the other side of the screen. Despite the fact that the bonus levels are pretty fun it’s still a shame about the ways in which you must unlock them as repeatedly clicking on a tooth that bounces away from your target after he dies is extremely dull. Searching for a passport in the environment is also very boring as, due to the unfurnished nature of the area, it’s very easy to spot them. Even though they are sometimes hid under an object this really adds in little to no depth and, frankly, I don’t know why they wouldn’t offer up different objectives. 

As a final note I found that the game’s humour often borders on the tasteless as there are sometimes very graphic descriptions of real life crimes such as those perpetrated the Columbine killers that some, if not many, may find uncomfortable. Generally the profiles of your targets are humorous covers of less invasive crimes such as fraud and embezzlement but when the game describes in graphic detail the crimes of the monstrous Albert Fish then the vibe of what is supposed to be a carefree, slaughter orientated romp is very quickly killed and is instead turned into something much darker and not at all light-hearted. Questionably dark humour aside the profiles still do offer good, immersive introductions to the start of every level and are relatively engaging. Besides, since all the targets look the same it’s good to offer up some way of distinguishing between them.

Appearance and sound

The game is decked out in a very simplistic design of pure white backdrops and solid black interactive objects. This professional feeling environment comes across as clean and crisp and, overall, it’s all very pleasant. The simply designed streets and parks never feel too plain however as, once your assassination attempts start, the landscapes are quickly cut through with bright red blood, fiery orange explosions and piercing blue water. Your targets also stand out vividly in comparison to their surroundings as they each support a yellow jacket and massive red bull’s eye target on their faces so there’s no chance that you’ll mistake a regular pedestrian for them. Unfortunately all of the targets look identical to one another and any kind of variation, even if it was just the colour of the jacket, would have done the trick but, regardless, I enjoyed how apparent they were in their surroundings.

I’ve already mentioned that I didn’t like the music and, whilst initially I enjoyed it, it quickly grates on you as essentially it’s just a sort of rap lyric of ‘kill the bad guy k-k-kill the bad guy’ over and over again to a beat. Thankfully the music only plays at the start and end of every level and not during gameplay as it would quickly become unbearable. Aside from the music the game has very good sound effects with plenty of appropriate noises for almost every action you can perform. There are

Overall

Whilst the game starts off slow and simplistic it quickly develops into a more robust murder simulation with some fairly imaginative solutions to the dilemma of how to discreetly kill your target. I particularly enjoyed the rather difficult task of luring your target to a particular spot or changing the path they were following by quickly putting obstacles in their way without them noticing. The level of difficulty scales as you play but even when the game becomes more complex there are moments where it comes across as pointless and repetitive. The secondary objectives are uninspiring but add in a reason to replay the previous levels and the bonus levels are a nice change of pace if you’re tired with the base game. Currently the game feels incredibly overpriced at $15 as it feels very much like a free, online game that’s been bulked out with additional levels and a couple of added in features. I would recommend waiting until the price has dropped but if you enjoy flippant murder simulation games with stark graphics and environmental manipulation then perhaps you’ll enjoy this more than I did.

The Good:

• A good concept
• Cool bonus levels
• Achievements are always fun 
• Nice looking map area
• Quite challening in later levels 
• Sometimes pretty amusing
• Nice use of CCTV and other obstacles to put more pressure on player

The Bad:

• Boring and uneventful
• Very under-developed
• Overpriced, feels like a free game
• Repetative and unexciting
• Lack of varation in death animations
• Pointless challenges

The Score: 4/10 

Last thoughts: "Thank god I don't have to play any more of that dreary rubbish..."

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Lilly Looking Through - Quick Review (PC game)

Initially I was looking forward to playing this game due to its charming appearance but all I was met with was a short, shallow and extremely simplistic game more suited to young children than adventure gamers. 

Developer: Geeta Games

Genre: Puzzle adventure

Release date: November 1st 2013

Platforms: PC and Mac

ESRB: E - Everyone

For a game that looks and sounds so beautiful it’s quite simply just not up to par and should be avoided by anybody wanting a game with even a smidgen of substance. There's very little character development, which is a shame, and the story itself is in no way complex or fleshed out. There are no conversations, very little speech and generally the game consists of solving puzzles with Lilly and, sometimes, Row to advance through the game. ‘Lilly Looking Through’ is supposedly a point and click adventure game, meaning it will have some puzzles to be solved that may be inventory based as is typical of the genre but for me it failed to live up to the genre.

To begin with, there’s no inventory, much to my disappointment as it meant they’d be no finding and collecting items for later item combination. The puzzles are instead performed by clicking on a very limited set of locations on the screen before watching Lilly solve the obtuse puzzle herself. In that sense, that you click on things, it's a point and click in the very literal understanding of the phrase but it lacks what makes point and clicks interesting; storyline and substance. There are only a few things you can click on and very few areas in the game leading to what is a very easy and very short game. The solutions to the puzzles tended to be obscure in nature rather than challenging and there were times where, even after finding the solution to the area, I was completely taken aback by the actions that Lilly proceeded to perform. Worse still, the puzzles are extremely repetitive with one particular colour puzzle being repeated three times which results in an increasing frustration of having to repeat the same, mostly guessed, puzzle combination you completed just twenty minutes ago. 

In case everything is just too damn confusing for you there's also a hint system you can use to highlight objects in the area that tell you what else you can click on. The game itself is incredibly short and the ending is little more than an unsatisfying cliffhanger that I would care more about if I’d found the story interesting, which I did not. Disappointingly, despite the game starting to show potential it felt as though I'd paid for half of a game rather than a full one and that its potential to get better was prematurely cut short. After a brief and unexplained appearance from another character all you'll be left with is confusion over whether the game is now over, and then a credits scene that confirms you just wasted a couple of hours of your life.

Maybe if the developers had spent more time on fleshing out the gameplay rather than focusing on the pretty pictures and ethereal soundtrack then maybe I’d be more interested, but despite raising double what they asked for on Kickstarter it’s clear that for this game beauty is only skin deep. The animations of Lilly are very well done, the environments are varied and beautifully illustrated with real attention to detail and the music is a lovely, mystical and much grander than the game itself. It’s such a shame to say this but this is quite simply not a very good game and I’m actually disappointed that I was fooled into buying it due to positive reviews and deceptive screenshots. You’ll get about an hour or two out of this game depending on how well you are at guessing your way through the puzzles but, despite there being the essence of something greater, I doubt it will be a very enjoyable couple of hours for you. On a positive note, this is a game that young children will love to play provided you are there to help them through some of the more confusing puzzles.

The Good:

• Looks fantastic.
• Very charming.
• Storyline is pleasant.
• Perfect for children.

The Bad:

• Far too easy, just plain weird rather than difficult in places.  
• Few environments.
• Repetitive puzzles.
• Extremely short game.

The Score: 4/10 

Last thoughts: "Disappointing, it didn't feel at all like a real point and click but I guess it's alright for children."

If you don’t mind short and shallow romps through lovely environments, pick up the game for $10/£7 from the developers website here or on Steam here.

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Maple Story - MMORPG Review (Online game)

Maple story is a much beloved free MMORPG that’s got a pretty cutesy, chibi feel about it whilst maintaining classic RPG gameplay, albeit in 2D. To begin with, it’s not a browser based game which is quite common of MMORPGs but I found the 5GB download to be a pretty steep commitment for a new player. The game features very in depth customization of your keyboard and mouse settings, which is the primary means of playing the game, so if you’re not happy with the set up you can be sure to change every aspect of it. The game is quite alluring with its simple, 2D style and promise of far and wide adventures across the land however scratching beneath the surface reveals a game that’s fast falling out of favour with its players.

Storyline and quests

Strangely, Maple story doesn’t really have a storyline though there are a lot of quests to complete and skills to train. The lack of storyline is fairly irksome given that the very name implies that they’d at least be something there. There’s some general reference to some evil Black Mage hovering about in the background and that warriors are needed to eventually, at some point in the future, fight him. Black Mage has been banished for several years now and hasn’t re-joined the fray yet so there appears to be no immediate threat. In terms of a plot that’s all you’re going to get. Players are generally citizens in the world and don’t actually appear to have any sort of ‘hero’ status. You can find out the previous storyline by talking to all the NPCs and slowly piece together why the world is the way it is. If you can consider this storyline rather than a history of the world then I suppose it’s alright; it’s a nice little story but more serves as a form of lore than as something you can interact with and become a part of.

Bright, cheerful and varied environments.

Maple Story’s quests are certainly numerous, if a bit repetitive. There are a lot of quests that tend to be along the lines of delivery tasks, killing a certain number of monsters or collecting a certain number of items. For completing quests you tend to get a lump sum of experience and sometimes a few items like healing potions or a piece of equipment. There are however, absolutely dozens and dozens of quests that require increasingly higher levels to unlock so if you intend to complete them all then you’ll certainly have lots to do.

Music and sound

The music is pretty decent and the style of it changes depending on which area you’re in. The music is very varied in the style and can range from classical string music to some hard-core rock. If you’re in one area for a prolonged period of time the music naturally gets repetitive so you either turn it down or turn it off completely, but the fact the music changes style at all is great. Each skill has its own sound and, like the music, fits in well with the whole feel of the game though the death squeals of certain monsters start to grate on you after a while. Overall, the music is fairly cute and pleasant sounding but tends to get repetitive after continued exposure to it.

Gameplay and content

Gameplay generally consists of increasing your stats and levelling up your character by combating monsters and completing quests. Players can form guilds together to make these challenges easier and may trade and chat with one another too. There’s a fairly pointless system that allows straight guys and girls to marry one another but that doesn’t stretch to be inclusive of potential homosexual couples, take that as you will. Maple story doesn’t seem to have a great deal of content unless you really enjoy grinding your combat skills by killing stuff and, when judging when an MMORPG is worthy of my time I do tend to look at how much choice players get when deciding what to do today. Maple story certainly is lacking in choice and content as, after levelling up, you don’t tend to get access to something bigger and better you just sort of have to… do it all again and level up some more. New equipment is unlocked quite frequently in the very early levels but after that it becomes less and less frequent whilst taking longer and longer to level up. It’s frustrating that prolonged hard work isn’t really rewarded and it just makes the grind worse. On the plus side, it’s really easy to level up… I guess that’s a plus side because it means the game will be over faster. I’ve spent a lot of time in games that include vast amounts of grinding as I play RPGs quite often but grinding needs to be counteracted by the reward of good content, new areas or storyline progression and Maple Story just lacks reward for what feels like a lot of pointless, hard work.

Yep... still looks pretty good, shame about all the problems.

Maple Story lacks the feature of player killing which is a shame as combat is a core part of the gameplay. Rather than killing your fellow players Maple Story would prefer it if you worked with them instead. A large aspect of Maple story revolves around the community and playing with groups of people, for instance, through team-quests. This is the kind of game you’ll want to play with friends as it makes levelling up so much easier, especially in later levels. Of course, since there are so many people who play this game you’ll have no trouble finding others to buddy up with and help each other out. This brings me onto the community of the game which, due to the focus on team playing, is extremely important.
Community

Every online game has its good players and its bad players, that’s simply the way things work. You’ll always find people who are selfish, greedy, disrespectful or just plain irritating and that’s kind of a part of playing with people you’ve never met before. So, I was expecting a degree of those kind of bad attitudes but what I was not expecting was the sheer amount of it. In a game that encourages teamwork you’d expect there to be some kind of incentive for people of all levels to be able to work together, where a higher level working with a lower levelled player was of no detriment to either player. I’m reminded of certain MMORPGs where experience gained is relative to your own account when working in groups, not relative to those around you. Unfortunately in Maple Story it’s just simply inefficient to help out or buddy up with low levelled players because it produces less experience and thus is more time consuming. Kill stealing is quite common where, when you’re about to kill a monster, someone else comes in and nabs it thus gaining the experience. In the current release of Runescape that used to be quite common however it was changed so there’s no incentive to be a dickhead to other players and all experience was guaranteed to the player what clicked the monster first. Simple system, discourages kill stealing. Maple Story simply lacks incentive to be nice to one another and actually passively encourages bad sportsmanship.

Graphics and environment

The game looks good, no doubt about that, as a side scrolling 2D game it’s taken on some fairly impressive graphical features. Everything is very bright, colourful and detailed with a very traditional chibi style that relays it’s South Korean and Japanese origins. The backgrounds that are inaccessible behind the primary area are detailed and beautifully shaded whilst not being too intrusive on the main area of gameplay. The fact that the game is actually a platformer of floating islands is quite interesting and it sometimes feels like an RPG in Rayman’s world though with a completely different graphical style. Your character itself is very well detailed and any change in armour or equipment is very visible on the character which is great given how hard you have to work to get something that’s of a higher tier. Overall, everything is beautifully animated and incredibly sharp with lots of nice little embellishments that give additional character to each new area you discover.

 

Lots of hacking and slashing and attention to detail found here.

The environments of Maple Story are quite varied and the game world is actually rather large. There are dark creepy woodland areas and bright, grassy regions too. The game consists of different islands, some bigger than others, and you can visit them as you progress through the game which is nice as exploring new worlds is a great part of RPG games. The regions of the game are all very distinct and interesting and there are plenty of towns and cities with their own unique background and style.

Pay to win capacity

Unfortunately there are many aspects of the game that revolve around the purchasing of ‘NX points’ such as character customization which, if paying for clothing isn’t bad enough, all expires after 90 days of use. A lot of new features that are brought into the game usually come with the little ‘if you pay for it’ clause that is very off-putting in an online game. Obviously, all companies need to make their money but no player likes to feel like they’re getting a raw deal with weak content but plenty of overcharging. The cash shop also features items that are not just cosmetic but that provide users with an in-game advantage over other players. By purchasing benefits that prevent experience loss upon death, double exp or full on exp buffs it seems as though ‘pay to win’ may be a big problem for those looking to play this game, for free, on an equal playing field. Most of the things in the cash shop are cosmetic such as pets and clothing though the ability to get married in game will cost you somewhere between $10 to $30, depending on how much your love is worth. Thankfully there are no subscription costs and NX points are not a necessary purchase so you can quite happily enjoy this game without spending a penny.

Overall

I find Maple Story to be lacking in any worthwhile content due to the strong focus on killing monsters. The quests are repetitive and fairly boring but the dialogue between yourself and NPCs is quite ample. It’s quite hard to get on servers and I frequently experienced crashing and disconnections with no real help from the support team. The community isn’t particularly good either. Whilst I usually wouldn’t a blame a game for what kind of people play it I believe there should be a means of not making new or lower levelled players an inconvenience on the rest of the community. The fact that those with greater real world wealth can purchase stuff to give them an in-game advantage is a pet peeve for me and whilst I don’t mind cosmetic items I don’t agree with double or buffed experience purchases. Maple story looks and sounds wonderful but its surface charm quickly dissipates with actual in game experience.

Score: 5/10

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Runescape 3 - MMORPG Review (Online game)

Runescape is one of those games that has been around for quite a long time now and has been given a new face several times over. Our current release of Runescape is Runescape 3 with updated graphics, combat system and quests that are gradually all being given top quality voice acting and music. Generally I’ll be looking at this game from a F2P point of view but bare in mind that the members side of things gives a lot of additional content including mini-games, higher tiered equipment, additional resources and means of levelling up at higher levels and things like player owned houses and a huge map area. 
 
Graphics and environment

To begin with, the free player map is actually quite large and includes several different areas such as cities, desert regions, swamps, forests, mountains and the wilderness. There are mines and underground dungeons to also explore and train in. The graphics are good, considering it’s all in a browser based Java system and what’s better is that the Jagex team are constantly upgrading parts of the game to make it look even better. There is currently the intention to move the game to HTML5 so the game will run smoother and with additional capacity for graphical improvements. The primary means of travel in the game is running about but as your magic level increases you’ll be able to teleport using runes, alternatively, if you visit and unlock them you can get access to ‘lodestones’ that allow you free travel to major areas. Canoes have also become available for free players where you can travel up one large river to various points, though you have to make the canoe yourself. The free player map does not have too many high levelled creatures out to kill you so everything’s quite safe; you need to travel to specific places to find the assortment of high levelled monsters but, especially at lower levelled, several creatures will still attack you. 

Music and sound

Music in Runescape is unlocked as you enter new areas and can be controlled via an in-game music player. A lot of the music is now considered out-dated compared to the new style of music that is being released into the game. Despite this it’s still extremely popular in the community as it’s reminiscent of retro RPG classic games. More than 100 of the old music tracks have been recently re-recorded for the release of Runescape 3 with a live symphony orchestra, making Runescape music some of the best and most atmospheric music in online RPG games. Some quests now have voice acting and where voice acting is implemented it is truly of a fantastic quality. The dialogue is varied, humorous and emotive with no two voices the same. Where implemented, the voice actor’s style truly does match that of the NPC character.

Content

There’s always plenty to do in Runescape and the free play side of it is a great way to introduce you to the game and, whilst many go on to be members, there are plenty who prefer the non-pressurized approach of FTP and the challenge of getting a skill up to 99 without the added additions of member items/areas. Alongside training skills, trading, questing and money making there are several other activities available to free players. A mini-game called ‘fist of guthix’ is a great way to train your magic and the duel arena in the desert means you can fight players in a safe environment. 

It's pretty easy to make money in the game and there's no way to buy in-game coins with real life money. All players have access to player trading and a stock market where you can buy and sell your items with ease. A lot of people use this as a way of making money so if you’re into number crunching then go right ahead and try ‘flipping’ for cash. You earn money in Runescape in quite an organic fashion, through training your skills and selling the materials. If you don’t know what to do with your time in Runescape there are things called ‘daily challenges’ where free players get up to 2 at a time. These challenges will tell you to do something like craft x amount of x or kill x amount of x and then reward you once the task is completed with experience in the relevant skill and trading items if it involved collecting and handing over materials. Daily challenges are a great way to trying out new areas of the game that you may have not yet experienced as it encourages trying out new activities. There is also a task system available in one of the cities where, by completing a set of tasks you’ll get an item with special abilities at the end of it along with a bit of money for each task completed. 

Storyline and quests

The history, lore and religion of Runescape is very in depth and told mostly through quest lines but all of it can be found on the website. A lot of players tend to choose a deity and can show their support through clothing, items, ‘titles’ which show up after your name or, these days, by supporting them in the current war. There are a lot of quests available in the game, almost 200 for members but a comparatively paltry 24 for free players, but generally they’re all pretty good quality. Runescape comes with a great deal of sardonic British humour that makes reading the dialogue very worthwhile. The free player quests are all graphically updated and are of a generally higher quality than the members quests as a lot of the members’ ones are getting on years now. Quest series tends to stretch across a variety of different storylines; from a penguin ‘cold-war’ type takeover, to vampire quest series to elven quest series but these are generally felt by the members more than the free players. Free player quests are generally an introduction to different skills and serve as the opening quest to several long and complicated quest lines that are realized later on in your Runescape career.

Training/grinding

As an RPG game a large portion of the game is naturally dedicated to training your skills and with that comes grinding. Grinding used to be a large part of Runescape and, to a certain degree, still is today so plenty of people pride themselves on their skills due to the amount of hard work and time put into it. Nowadays, a lot of the grinding aspect of levelling up in Runescape has been removed with the addition of bonus experience opportunities, mini-games, alternate and more varied training methods and social training. For free players the grind is still very apparent as many of the updated methods are aimed at paying members. Despite this, little additions like the ability to “make all” rather than individually clicking items is universal and common for all activities so free players are able to reduce the amount of repetitive strain injury endured. 

Player killing is available in this game however it needs to be conducted in a special area; the wilderness. The wilderness is a very area at the top of the map that is home to dragons, a lava maze and several monsters like ghosts, bandits and skeletons. The wilderness was the site of a great war but, these days, is just a burnt out span of landscape. Player killing can also be combated duel arena that has recently made available to free players. Here, players can combat one another in safe circumstances without the risk of losing any items unless you stake gold or items on your own victory using a safe, scam-free system.

Whereas members have 26 skills available to them with training methods all the way up to level 99 (or 120 for dungeoneering) the free playing community have access to only 16 of them, though with the ability to train members skills up to level 5. All free player skills can be levelled up to 99 though this is much harder in free to play worlds due to the lack of high level training methods, it is not however, impossible.

The skills included are: Dungeoneering, Woodcutting, Firemaking, Smithing, Mining, Fishing, Cooking, Crafting, Runecrafting, Magic, Ranged, Prayer, Defence, Strength, Attack and Constitution. The additional member skills include: Agility, Thieving, Hunter, Slayer, Summoning, Herblore, Farming, Divination, Fletching and Construction.

Community

Free players and members are divided off into different worlds so whichever one you pick you’ll find a supportive, lively community of good natured players. This game is generally orientated at teenagers and young adults and the community tends to consist of mature, polite and helpful people who genuinely care about the game and its players. If you’re the type of gamer who isn’t really into group activities and much prefers to play solo then this game supports that 100%. There is practically nothing which requires lots of other people and, in the rare case that it does, the forums are constantly thriving with people who are probably in a similar situation to you. Whereas some online multiplayer games can be critical of new players you’re more likely to find players who are willing to help out somebody who is new as there’s no detriment to them or their skills. Competition for resources is limited to certain skills like combat training and mining and many activities are social and non-competitive like firemaking, where you get bonus experience for sharing a bonfire, or fishing; where resources are not dependent on the number of people fishing. Dungeoneering is a skill that involves descending down levels of a mysterious fortress in the wilderness and is more advantageous to players if done in groups of 2 or more, though it can be done solo, so teamwork is encouraged but generally at your own pace.

In terms of updates, Runescape gets weekly updates and every month you’ll get a ‘behind the scenes’ post showing what’s coming to the game in the upcoming month. The constant updates and tweaks to the game really show how much farther it has yet to come and how alive and supported everything is. Of course, plenty of players will voice their criticism of updates and due to this Jagex have now released player polls so that players get to choose which content is released into the game.

Conclusion

Runescape is a game that is friendly, content filled and constantly evolving into something better. There are very few micro transactions in the game and it’s not one of those ‘pay to win’ games that you often see. As a free to play game it of course has less content than the members version but there is still a lot to do and with no time limit or trial period it means you can play it for as long as you like with no downsides. The tutorial is interactive, simple to follow and thorough in how much it teaches you about the game and it’s a pretty easy game to get into without feeling too daunted. The ability to customize your character with a range of equipment means that no two players often look the same and overall the entire world feels alive and kicking, just what you want out of a multiplayer game. Overall, I rate this game highly as it is addictive, challenging and time consuming but in all the best ways possible. 

MMORPG Score: 9/10

For more information, check out these links:

• Runescape homepage
• Runescape Wikipedia
• Beginner's guide

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