When you’re jumping into the world of MMORPG’s you better bring some good content and something new to the table. Going up against the likes of World of Warcraft and Guild Wars is quite a daunting task. Sadly, RYL (Risk Your Life) posts no immediate threat in the MMORPG world. If you don’t have anything new to bring to the table, odds are you won’t be converting anyone from other MMO games.
There are two different sides in RYL, one being human and the other are the Ak’Kan. These feuding factions are joined by “God’s Pirates” who are a third group that are in pursuit of peace – by way of war of course. So, when you get all three factions together you are looking at quite a power struggle. This is the basic background of the game.
When you first start the game, you can choose between human or Ak’Kan race. The typical features of face style, hair etc allow you to mildly customize your character. You also receive a few points that you can apply to certain abilities your character will have. Use them wisely. If you plan on being a warrior, use them for strength, a Cleric, intelligence, and so on. Upon reaching level 10, you can enhance your character to more refined and specified talents. The normal classes are present and range from the typical Warrior all the way to the Cleric. Regardless of whether you choose human or Ak’Kan, you can later decide if you would like to unite with God’s Pirates.
After you are through setting things up, it is time to get into the game. This is where it all falls apart. You spend hours and hours grinding your way through the levels and better enjoy killing things over and over.
There aren’t as many quests as one person might think. Therefore, there won’t be hundreds available for you! You grind, sell things, rinse and repeat. The promises of pvp like the game claims are vastly overrated. Eventually when you can join a guild and pvp against other guilds, then things might get mildly interesting. However, you are ready to rip your hair out after your hours of intensive grinding.
To add to the monotony of grinding and selling, rinsing and repeating, you have the added pleasure of the game being void of tradeskills. My equation thus far looks something like this:
Grinding to level 30 before pvp + minimal quests + no tradeskills = A quickly cancelled RYL account.
Honestly, I don’t enjoy bashing games but after you have seen what MMO games are on the market now, you expect other products to be remotely close to them. However, RYL stands light-years away; point proven when you see the graphics. Holy polygons batman! You won’t be blown away by your attacks as you click and kill repeatedly (since it sort of turns into a hack ‘n’ slash game). The sound effects and music are lacking – then again, hacking and slashing over and over probably doesn’t involve hundreds of sound files.
Moving your polygon-man (or woman) around is perhaps the worst part of the game. You can control using either the keyboard or the mouse. The setup is pretty awkward and takes some getting used to. I think someone sat down and thought about the most difficult navigation and unanimously decided that it should be used. It’s bad enough that I’m getting carpal tunnel from gaming too much but now I actually have to THINK about how I’m moving my character around in the game. No thanks.
Don’t get sucked into the fact that there is a $1 million dollar tournament going on for the person who gets the most “fame” points (you know, from killing stuff over and over) between now and April ’06. It doesn’t make the game any more exciting. I’m guessing it goes to the guy who figures the easiest way to hack the game without getting caught. Then again, if you can bear it, get the game and wait for people to bore themselves to death and quit. Then, you might be one of five people playing therefore making your chances to win the money that much more!
The way the tournament works exactly is that there are three servers that you can play the game on. One is called Tournament and that is the only one that counts toward the big prize. And to make things fair, each month every character there is wiped back to level zero. At the end of the month, the 12 people with the most fame get a chance to compete for the big prize, with the final PvP event taking place at next years E3 Expo. At least this is a fair way to do it. If you miss the top 12 one month, you can always try again next time.
On the other two servers, you can play as normal and just build your character up the natural way. They won’t get wiped out each month.
On a lighter note, there are other MMORPG’s out there that you can play that are probably more fun. If you are a masochist, you can get this game AND pay twelve dollars a month. Being an avid World of Warcraft player, I can say that my money was much better spent on that. RYL seemed interesting in concept, but the execution is just really bad.