Last Chaos Open Beta - My review and thoughts on it

joejccva71

Last Chaos is pretty dull and kinda lame at that. I didn't have high expectations being that it was another Korean MMO as there are more of these lame MMO's than social security checks being written. I did have a little enthusiasm reading up on the site and looking at the screenshots, but again I wasn't expecting flying bells and whistles.

Lets go over a few things:

Movement

The whole "click and go" moving feature just sucks. Sure this is fine when playing Neverwinter Nights or another regular RPG game but for an MMO it should be WASD movement. This is particularly important for when reaching much more dangerous dungeons/zones to the point of where if you accidentally click somewhere on the ground next to a dangerous mob you have to make sure you stop moving or your dead. With WASD movement, you are in more control. This is pretty much a no brainer, yet tons of Korean MMO's seem to like this way of movement.

Graphics

Graphics are ok, but nothing spectacular. The buildings in the towns and the walkways look decent as well as outside the town looking at the trees, bushes and grass. However, the character models are a little messy and not that detailed. I know this is still open beta, but lets not go through another Roma Victor "oh just wait the graphics will be awesome at final release stage" incident. It could get ugly if we go through this again.

Targeting

Seems a little clunky and hard to accomplish. The way the camera views are handled in the game it makes targeting somewhat cumbersome until you get used to the controls and even then it can be a pain. Eventually it becomes easier but it could have been done much better.

User Interface

This feature is ok but some of the menus and windows seem like they came from a game that was made back in the Meridian 59 days. Very very bland and clunky. It seems like there wasn't much effort put into the main screen and some of the menus/options/windows. Atleast it has a nice little skill/spell/attack slot bar at the bottom which was refreshing as every MMO needs this. The one thing that really bothered me was the fact that they mapped some strange keys to some basic commands that we all use on a regular basis.

For ex: To check your inventory it's something weird like hitting "Alt-E", instead of hitting just "I". And "I" isn't being used for anything. Everything you want to look at regardless if it's a skill window, quest window or inventory is the Alt+another key feature. Not being incredibly picky but I have a problem with not being able to just hit I to go to my inventory when that key isn't even being used for anything else.

Also there isn't a way to remap your keys. Kinda uncivilized.

Combat

Combat is decent in Last Chaos because it's not a mouse mashing button contest. You target the mob clicking on it and your character automatically runs to it and starts whacking on it and keeps swinging the sword until the mob is dead. I enjoyed this as it was refreshing so to speak. The combat system also has the damage done with each swing overtop their heads which was ok. Characters have special combat skills which inflict much more damage and have a nice character effect when the skill is done. Nice addition to the game. Overall combat is good, could be tweaked a little more however.

The only gripe I have is with mages. When you cast a spell, it looks more like the mage is swinging his staff and doing melee damage even though some magical effects show on the screen. The spellcasting doesn't look very well done either and it's extremely dull.

Quests

This is very well done. I won't go into too much detail about this but from what I've experienced so far it has good potential to be up there with some of the best. It has alot of diversity and is layed out well.

Skill System

A little bland and too many other Korean MMO's do it. You have 1 skill for 5 levels which you can upgrade a few levels, then at level 5 you can train in another skill, then at level 10 train in 1 more. There are combat skills, passive skills and job skills. Combat skills are for combat related, passive skills are skills you dont need to do anything to use as they are always on, and job skills are for crafting basically.

They almost had it right with this but I just don't really care for the 1 skill every 5 levels bit. I need more diversity than this to be honest.

Rating: 6.5/10 <-- being a little generous too

Bottom line: It's probably one of the better Korean MMO's, but yet it's still a Korean MMO and they are never really made well to be honest. Of course it's still open beta, but 9 times out of 10 open beta's are pretty much what the final release will be and this game has it's fair share of many problems.

The game is pretty buggy as well. One of the bugs is when you pick up gold coins off the floor on a mob it says you have collected 64d gold or something along that nature. Problem is, no one seems to know what the hell 64d is?

There's my short little review. Take it as you will and as always...thanks for listening.

Joe