Warlords Awakening

Review

Warlords Awakening is a MMORPG game played out in the realm of Epheia, an early access game brought to you by PLAYWITH Inc.

Before you start playing the game, you’ll have to create your character, so to get you going you’ll have the choice of five different classes, Blood Knight, Mage, Hunter, Psychic and Assassin. Next, you’ll choose the race of your character; there are four options here - Kartu, Liru, Sapiens and Naru. However, if you want to play as an assassin, you’ll only be able to play as a Naru and vice-versa. Once you’ve sorted who you’d like to be, it’s on to Skin Colour, Hair Colour, Hair Style, Face and Eyes, there’s plenty of options for you to fully customise your characters look. Then it’s time for an outfit; there’s six different types to choose from, along with four different poses. All you need to do next is to name your character, and you’re ready to trot!

After choosing the game server to play on (Europe or USA - make sure to play on the server that’s best for you as you can’t take a character from one server to another), you start in Baratan Fortress and as it’s nearly Halloween, (gauging by theme, with pumpkins all around the place). Walking up to one and activating it will change your appearance to a skeleton for fun. It’s your first day and you’ll have to go through a bit of training, which is just some easy quests to complete, to give you the gist of how to play the game. You’ll also have to go and get yourself a pet, which is one of the quests, to familiarise yourself with the game. Once all done, you’re able to go wandering around looking at the fortress and checking out the sights.

One of the first quests is to help find someone called Natz, so you depart Baragan Fortress towards the wild lands outside of the fortress’s safe walls, into the Forest of Hallucination. The area map will point you in the direction you’ll need to be going and you can either get there yourself or you can click on the map and you’ll run there, automatically running past everything until you reach your destination. As you progress and talk to others, you’ll get more and more quests to complete. If you have multiple quests to do, you can select the one you’re interested in doing first by clicking on the list of quests under the mini map on the top right of the screen; this will then let you know the direction you should be going. On the map, the quests will be numbered, and these will correspond to the quest information below the mini map.

As you complete one part of a quest you’ll move on to the next part.  You’ll come across new quests through talking to others, or you can find more on notice boards as you travel around. There are also daily login quests for you to complete, like staying online for two hours. Completing quests and dispatching monsters will help you level up your character; you’re also able to level up and train your pet. You may come across some eggs dropped while in battle, which you can hatch and have as pets. You can also combine different pets to produce something new.

As you defeat monsters, they’ll maybe drop some coins, potions and/or chests. Each chest will display the level of a chest, whether it’s magical, rare, weapons, armour etc. These will help you in having more protective gear and weapons as you increase your own level. You don’t always get chests which are at your current level; you might be on level three but get a chest for level five or nine.  I think it’s best to open these when at those levels, so you have newer gear as you level up and so you don’t have to buy anything unnecessarily.  You don’t have to, but you’re more than likely going to get an item around your current level;  there is information when checking a chest which will give you a hint at what you can get.

You have an inventory to store items, but this can fill up rather quickly.  You are able to buy extra slots for gold if you want, but gold is hard to come by, at least early in the game so far. One hundred copper coins is equal to one silver coin, and one hundred silver coins equals one gold coin. You can choose to sell your old items (or items that you don’t want) to merchants, or you can just drop and destroy them.

As a Hunter, I had three different weapons; I’m not sure if this is the case with other classes, but I had a cannon, a rifle and a bow as my weapons. Each of these has their own brand of destruction, and these can be upgraded with any skill points you earn while on your travels, further increasing their power.

Once you reach level forty you can then test your silky combat skills out in the arena.  There’s four arenas you can enter:  one versus one, two versus two, three versus three, and yes - you guessed it - four versus four! I haven’t tried the arena yet, so not exactly sure what the rewards are for partaking in them, but I do believe you’ll get ranked to prove you’re a warlord who kicks botty among other players, if that sort of thing floats your boat.

Some of the dungeons you can’t enter until you’ve reached a certain level, and then you may need some help. You could do this either with some help from friends, or you can use the Dungeon Matching option in the menu screen (which is indicated next to the chest in the bottom right of the screen) to group you with others who are around your current level to help you tackle a dungeon. In the menu, you’ll find other information, like monster journal, search party, guild, ranking quest list etc.

There’s plenty in the way of options, so you can tinker the game to how you’d like it: Video (Screen Mode, Resolution, AA, Vsync, Trail Effects, Bloom Effects, Shadow Quality and Effect Quality); Sound (Master, BGM, Ambient Sounds, Sound Effects, System Voices and Turn on Background Sounds); Screen Display (Interface Magnification, My Character, Other Characters, NPC, HP Bar and Speech Bubbles); Message Display (Battle Messages, System Messages and All Messages), and Community (Reject Invitation), along with a rest button.

The graphics and sounds weren’t too bad, although the gameplay I found a bit repetitive (kill 50 of these, kill 50 of those etc), but this is my first time playing a game of this type; maybe after playing some more it’ll grow on me, as it wasn’t too bad a game overall.

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com!