Age of Wushu

Enter Age of Wushu, a MMORPG from Snail Games and become a martial arts legend. Starting out? from a small tea shop or abandoning your royal family, you'll see your character rise in rank and spiritual understanding in one of the eight schools to become a noble hero or an opportunistic villain.

You start out by creating a character and engineer his or her model, even specifying the height of the cheekbones and length of the nose; Age of Wushu has a fairly well-detailed character creation screen. The exciting thing is selecting a Legend? one of four distinct "prologues" that start off your character in a specific Chinese city. You'll then get started on a gruesome, nearly two-hour series of tutorial missions that will teach you the basics of movement, combat, and skills.

House of Flying Tea Cups
It felt good to walk around Chengdu, a bustling city with lots of shops, non-player characters, and aspiring kung-fu masters?players. In terms of flavor and climate, Age of Wushu immerses is an experience distinctive from other MMOs. Fans of the Orient, martial arts movies, and Chinese culture will find plenty to be enthused about as they listen to the climatic, delicate tunes. The environments, although often way too vast and empty, are aesthetically pleasing: large, lush gardens, rivers, and traditional houses. The most interesting part, of course, is fighting with the martial art skills. NPCs react negatively as you run into them or scatter when you're horseback riding.

There's no auto attack in the game. Instead, each attack is a different move that you have learned and assigned to your task bar. Even the earliest, double sword slashes can have some kind of stacking or wounding property, be a lifting uppercut, or a charging move. Other than attacking, holding the right mouse button makes the character stand and block, something unusual for MMOs. It minimizes damage rather than negating it completely, but many special parry moves can apply additional effects like chance of paralyzing the opponent on block. And this is where feint moves come in; those overcome the blocking stance and give you the advantage. Effectively, the fighting is a rock-paper-scissor system, which works quite well and adds some depth. With double and triple jumping and other aerial movements, the combat is a pleasure to watch and execute, simulating fairly well what is seen in movies like House of Flying Daggers.

There are many traditional MMORPG elements from games such as World of Warcraft: guilds, various gathering and producing professions, quests, and so on. But Snail Games does some things differently. My character, Linhua, picked up calligraphy. Producing scripts that other players found useful involved a simple minigame. A nice touch, but the process can be found wearisome if you have a stack of items to produce. ?Leveling up skills can be done with one of three ways: Internal Cultivation, Practicing Martial Arts, or Team Practice. The first method involves selecting one skill to be passively learned as you play the game; the second is much faster, but requires money the third needs more players to gather. Team Practice can be done with less than 10 people, and it involves a minigame, but it goes really slowly unless you have a maximum squad. It's good that the game encourages playing socially, but unless you spend money, it takes an awful amount of time to increase skill levels, because the times increase significantly with each level while you can only train one at a time.

This is the beginning of the problems for Age of Wushu. In the initial hours of the game, I learned so many skills it was really hard to keep track of them. My entire action bar filled really fast with moves like "Flowers Reflected in Moon," "Flying Flowers and Falling Leaves," "Whispers of Falling Dust" and so on. They take time to sink in because of similar names and long tooltips that could be shortened significantly. They just came too early, and too fast, and while still learning the game, it felt overwhelming. After finishing the tutorial, I was able to select which of the eight Schools I wanted to be in. And while those have easily distinguishable philosophies, you still are presented with one of three skill sets that you need to select. RPG enthusiasts will embrace it; the rest will cry out and just settle on something. It just takes too long to look through 24 skill sets. Moreover, many tooltips in the game have spelling or grammar mistakes that extend into the dialogue of the game. The translation feels really obvious and is occasionally humorous.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/Us25jy4g7rE/0,2817,2418260,00.asp

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