Today we take a look at RaiderZ the latest title to be released by Perfect World Entertainment. It's an action MMO so it uses a crosshair 'aim your skills' system we're seeing more and more this year. It's a good system and a system a lot of people prefer. This review is written with slight hesitance as it's only in its Alpha stages right now and there is a lot that just isn’t there anymore. If you like action games, you’ll love Raiderz. If you hate or are indifferent to the Action MMO genre, I think you’ll have trouble keeping any kind of interest in the game.
Let’s talk graphics. The game is very beautiful for a free-to-play MMORPG. More so than you would expect, however the system requirements are incredibly high. The highest I’ve seen for any F2P MMO and this might put a lot of people off as the recommended specs involve a lot of expensive and up-to-date computer parts, which lots of people just do not have the luxury of having this of course was not an issue for me, running best settings with a perfect 60+ FPS and the game ran very smoothly with a “mid” gaming system.
When you open the game you are greeted by a pretty basic character creation screen. With some elements you get more options but for the ones you care about there is very little to select from. You can be unique, but only if you choose the crazy ‘wacky’ options. I did like you get to choose your starting outfit, though.
The game starts out with a typical MMORPG introduction “go and talk to the entire town NPC’s they’ll give you quests that teach you to craft” this isn’t all that bad, but it’s very tedious. The game play (for an action game) is pretty slow at first due to lack of skills. Levelling was a pretty good speed but I felt bored on more than one quest right at the beginning, which is a very common mistake many MMO’s make. I always felt you had to captivate your audience to keep them going, but Raiderz believes you should grind through boring tutorial-esque content before you get to anything fun.
After you are done with the starter area, the game shows some of it’s fun and unique features. You might pick up a weapon dropped by a monster that for a short time will give you new skills and make you much stronger, changing your kill speed from a few mobs a minute to a mob a second, it’s a fun and very acceptable change of pace. I can’t talk much about the multiplayer functions of the game as it is Alpha, Whisper and Friends are simply not enabled, but I duo’d most of the early levels and it was pretty easy and wasn’t too frustrating.
Raiderz does the action combat pretty well when you get some skills to use, but the early game is a boring grind which in my opinion felt even worse than traditional RPG’s as you were forced to ‘aim’ every boring level 1 skill. With a little revision on the beginning, I feel like this could be a game definitely worth playing and hey it is Alpha, who knows this might definitely be a game to watch!
