Review: ARGO Online

Hey guys, LMS here again. :D I don't really have anything exciting to say so I'll just cut to the chase and present my review of ARGO Online. :)

Game Basics:

Title: ARGO Online

Publisher: Alaplaya

Genre: Fantasy Adventure MMORPG
Website: http://argo.en.alaplaya.net/

Cost: Free-to-play

Ratings:
Graphics: 3/5
Character Customization: 3/5
Beginning/Tutorial: 2/3
Class Skills, Character Development, etc.: 3/5
Story, Quests, Content: 3/5

Level I Gave Up At: 7

Before I actually review the game itself, let me talk about Alaplaya's website for this game. If you were looking for information on it before you played the game, like I was, DO NOT BOTHER TO GO TO THEIR WEBSITE. It has next to nothing on the game, save for some screenshots and generic marketing info on the game. Nothing about their classes, very little on their races, and very little on the game itself. I had to go to a Wikia site instead for information, which is just sad. 

At any rate, I had found this game while looking around for up-and-coming MMOs for 2012. I heard a lot of praise for the game in terms of its freshness for the genre. It boasts itself as a "hybrid" MMO (what "hybridity" it refers to I'd yet to see) where Steampunk and Fantasy genres meet in PVP, faction-based fighting. According to in-game lore, World War 4 happened (JEEBUS.) over control of some precious mineral and has caused a rift in humanity. Some people want to rebuild the destroyed cities and control the mineral supply through industrialization, etc. etc, and they became a group known as the Noblian, a steampunk-based society. The other group decided to retreat to nature and rebuild the planet through symbiotic relationships with the earth. They're the fantasy group Floresslah.(If this sounds like Avatar to you, you'd be correct! 8D -- Or any other thing that Avatar ripped off from was inspired by works, as well.)

Each faction has the four archetype class system and each of the four archetypes is broken into two sub-class types, giving each faction a total of 8 classes to play as. Now, before you ask for a comparison of the classes available, from what I understand, each factions' classes are the exact same, just with different names. AND GUESS WHAT? All of the classes are EXTREMELY GENDER LOCKED. To the point that only women can be healers and only men can wield two-handed weapons. That fact alone irked me when I was checking out the game but I figured I would grit my teeth and bear it anyway. 

In terms of healer classes there are "four," two for each faction, but I'll only discuss the two basic classes, disregarding factions. The names have changed in-game since the article was written but the info I have is the Supply/Oracle ("Summoner") and Healer/Cleric ("Healer").

The "Summoner" Classes

The "Healer" Classes

From what I understand, their stats and things are the same, they're basically the same classes. The Summoner focuses more on summoning than healing but can still heal some. The Healer is a pure healer. I couldn't find more information to discern what abilities the two had, other than healing or summoning as a differential feature between the two.

In terms of character customization, it was fairly decent. I was, as I said earlier, pissed that classes were gender-locked, but the game somewhat makes up for it by giving a customization range that is like a mini-version of Aion or RIFT; you can change arm length, leg width, etc., in addition to hair and facial features. It's not as extensive as Aion or RIFT, but it's definitely better than most MMOs right now, so props to them.

The graphics aren't horrible, either. Again, I've been spoiled by RIFT and Aion, but these graphics are better than most other MMOs, too. 

 

The environments aren't too empty, at least in the starter zones; they're filled with a balance of NPCs, monsters, and plantlife, which makes you feel like you're immersed in an inhabited world. The starter tutorials aren't horrible, but they're not my favorite. They give you a combination of generic "Click here to learn more from this NPC!" quests to these annoying video tutorial-things. They're voiced by this disembodied head that give you information that you already knew but they have to tell you painfully slowly with no way to get rid of them, to my knowledge. 

So, you might be reading this and saying to yourself, "Yeah, but LMS! You quit at level 7! You can't really say much about the game without having played that much!" And I'm sure you're right. Want to know the reason why I quit? The interface was HORRENDOUS. And that's putting it LIGHTLY. Trying to talk to NPCs is a nightmare; I spent approximately a full minute trying to get the NPC to acknowledge the fact that I WANTED to talk to him and then he sat and processed that for another minute before deciding to talk to me and even THEN it was ANOTHER minute before I could click the "next" button on the quest dialogue. OR, BETTER YET, I'd try to click an NPC to move toward them, only to go THROUGH them. Or I'd have to hit the button to open my bag about thirty times before it actually opened and then it decided to close again as if I had hit it again immediately after opening. Or when I'd go to move, there was a horrible amount of lag, approximately 10 seconds or so. Not to mention the game animation was so choppy that it gave me headaches. The screen decided to, when I stopped moving or first loaded the game, shake back and forth in a glitch-like fashion for about 4 or 5 minutes or until I decided to beat my computer in and stop the program. And, no, before you ask, I tried it on three or four different wireless networks, so it wasn't my connection. I hope it was only my computer or else someone in their design departments was a serious fuckup who didn't test their interfacing properly. 

The fact of the matter is is that I couldn't enjoy the game fully because the interface was SO friggin' terrible that it distracted me beyond anything I had experienced before that. I tried suffering through it for the good of the game, I really did. But I couldn't. It was unbearable. I hope that it was only my computer (but I had read one or two other reviews of people who had similar problems) so that people might actually try and enjoy it. But I couldn't. I had really good hopes for this game, since it seemed so promising. But that damn interface just prevented me from playing it for more than five seconds without ragequitting.