Anarchy Online

Rating:
Summary: The worst ... I ever spent..DON'T BUY ANARCHY ONLINE!!
Review: I really tried to give this game a chance. I did the Beta (which this game is still in) and it is still in beta almost a month after its release. FUNCOM (or as most people call them NotSoFUNCOM) has got to be one of the most disorganized companies I have ever seen. It took them almost a week to get their secure website up so that you could use your credit card to activate the game. The customer support is almost nonexistant and they only do it through email, they have said they will not be having phone help. The graphics are nice, but other than that the game(if you can play) is really kinda boring. Even when you go way out from the cities there is not much to do. I would save your money and wait for something better. On 7/19/01 they just lost the saves of characters and they had to reset to a previous saved character, which means you lost most of you items and lots of XPs. SAVE YOUR MONEY!! DON'T BUY ANARCHY ONLINE

Rating:
Summary: Great Game.....Almost
Review: Awesome game, Potential to be the new Big Kid on the Block for online RP.....But...

Currently game Lag can be Atrocious making the game almost impossible to play at peak times. There are still a few minor bugs that can interfere with play. Fortunately every time I log on, which is almost daily there is news of new fixes, and the Improvements that have occurred in the last few weeks alone have made at least for me, a significant improvement on game play.

Released a little early in my opinion, but more and more bugs are being fixed every day. Wait a few weeks and at the rate they are going the game should be everything that you could want in an online game. Unfortunately I'm still uncomfortable with recommending the game at this time. But like I said, it is getting better every day. My Recommendation is to watch this game and when the majority of the Lag problems are finally fixed, buy it immediately. Until then I'd hold off and wait.

Rating:
Summary: Ehhh
Review: I'm giving Anarcy Online 3 stars... and this review has nothing to do with the disconnects, long patch downloads (which happen less frequently now than they did). At the time I'm playing it, it seems to be working as well as it should (when it first launched... don't get me started on those problems).

I do have a problem with extremely high lag in the cities... and I'm running more than recommended system requirements and a faster than recommended connection.

I do dislike the game itself. The mission system (while indeed eliminating the camping situation) is extremely boring and repetative. The friends/team members/chat system is harder to use than more text based games. The game doesn't feel as vibrant and lively as some of the other games and also the sci-fi elements for me at least take away from some of the excitement. I don't feel like I'm working towards anything.

The game also feels very limited and many of the "professions" in the game are very close to the classes in other online games. I would have preferred something a little more origional.

Not to take away from the games wilderness environments, which are graphically stunning.

Overall... to me, it feels like Everquest if it came out 2 or 3 years later than it did. Hopefully they can port the beautiful graphics into something that is a little more fun to play.

Rating:
Summary: Come on
Review: Ok, I admit the game is a bit buggy, and lag is bad in the citys, and you can't play during peak hours.. I've been playing since the first week of it's release.. and I'm addicted.. Funcom has made HUGE advances, and have been coming out with client and server patches every few days to fix problems they have been working on... what program EVER has come out with 10-15 patches within the first month of release. you can't say they're not trying hard.. Graphics are great, story is excellent, everything about the game and character development far exceed any game I've ever played.. The game will only improve technically.. just give it some time..

Rating:
Summary: Tough to review a game that can't be played
Review: Folks, I bought this product on the first day and struggled, hard, for hours on end to log in even once to the servers. I failed. You may deride me as an incompetent computer user if you like but in my opinion this game should not have been launched. I cancelled my account and so far have not been charged for that. I will eat the price of the game itself. Lesson? When it comes to MMORPGs do not be the first to buy. Wait at least two weeks, preferably a month to find out if the game will be playable. Its worth the wait the two weeks will not put you that far behind the first day buyers who do manage to log on (if that is a concern, it isn't for me).

AV

Rating:
Summary: It's getting better!
Review: Back at June 27th, I might have given this game a mediocre (2-3 star) rating because of its instability. FunCom has actually been working on it, and it is getting more and more stable and less laggy with each patch. I don't want to get into much detail about the instability and lag, it's depressing.

All that melancholy aside, on to the actual gameplay, something that has hardly been touched. I play-tested this game, and it was excellent! It looked very polished, except that my pitiful PC forces me to look at the ground in most areas.

Auto-content Generation (ACG)

This is the best feature of the game. You no longer have to camp an area for hours, or even days, to get something you want. You just head to the nearest mission terminal, set a few options, hit Generate, and you can pick up a variety of missions, that actually work now! Some will challenge you with finding a person, or [geting] them. An automatic mission generator builds your own mission area that only you and those you give duplicate keys to can enter. Most areas will involve combat, but playing with the mission settings can reduce the amount of enemies considerably, such as setting the Physical - Myst slider to "Myst".

Huge World

It took me about 10-20 minutes to run from one side of a playfield to the other! This world is huge, and the weather effects are a nice feature! If you don't want to spend all this time running across a playfield, train on your travelling skills, like run speed and Vehicle:Ground. If you have enough money, you can buy a vehicle (which is permanently bound to your cell structure, so you may never lose it) and drastically reduce your travel time. Then there's always the Grid. You can use it to 'teleport' to other Grid access panels from any point in the world. Grid travel requires a high Computer literacy skill, however. Then you have your traditional two-way teleporters called whom-pah's, yadda, yadda.

A Support Team that Cares

They haven't got all the dents out in C-S yet (such as telephone support), but in my experience, the support team is excellent. A.R.K. is a group of FC employees and player volunteers that show up when you petition, and they are extremely helpful...when you can get to them. My only gripe with the support team is the slow response-time. You could petition them, then two hours later they will respond when you have already solved the problem on your own. Maybe this is a customer support feature? If Customer Support can't help you, the community might. The players, for the most part, are helpful and patient to newbies. The manual is a bit thin, but it provides some great propaganda from both the Rebels and Omni-Tek!

One other thing: considering the scope of this game, the graphics are amazing, and the sound is great.

Bottom line: WAIT! Just as Rome wasn't built in a day, Rubi-ka will not be perfected in a single month!

Rating:
Summary: Bugfest? ha, try it out now!
Review: I know it was WAY to buggy the first 2 weeks or so, but funcom has been working 24/7 ever since the release, and it has paid off! I live in Norway, and as you might know, AO is a Norwegian game (Norway= that long, narrow country way north in europe ) hehe. Anywas, the newspapers here have a lot of AO news, so we get constant AO updates in the news. And they all say the same thing, things are really shaping up now! Well, my point is that most of the bad bugs have been fixed now, like the server crashing and game crashing. While you could count on only staying online 5-10 minutes to start with, I have no problems staying onlin 5+ hours playing up a storm now...! So go ahead and buy the game, it's a great game, and it gets better every day! Funcom has done an INCREDIBLE job with this one!

=O)

Rating:
Summary: I'll try to make this helpful.
Review: Ok. I am currently playing this game. Personally, I think its great! Ok, just 2 days ago they wrote a server patch to reduce the lag. Sure, almost every day they shut down the server for an hour or 2 to change the server or to add a patch, but that means that EVERY DAY the game gets better. The game is NOT for low end systems, no matter how much lag is reduced. I'm playing on a Celeron 400Mhz w/ a Rage 128 card. Of course, I consider this a VERY low end system now. I got it thinking that since the minimum requirement is PII 300, I could run it fine. WRONG! In the big cities (especially Omni-1) the game LAGS. I have about thirty seconds to run around before my computer is overcome. BUT, they are writing patches to improve this! And besides, I have a LOW LOW end system. (I'm getting a new one this week, so I still can rate the game well) The game isn't hard to get into, and its easy to learn. It should have had a practice single player campaign though. So, WHY am I giving this game 4 stars? Because, its the best online sci-fi rpg out there. I don't like all that fantasy stuff, bring out the ultra modern shiny black augmented body armour, baby! Bottom line is, if you have anything over a PIII 500, and a decent 3d card, BUY THIS GAME!!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: WHY WAS IT RELEASED?
Review: Most of you couldn't wait for this game. I am amazed that while I was testing the BETA software for this game I had fewer problems than I did when I started running the purchased game. I guess that they didn't learn from Verant's mistakes.

I was online for an hour the other night and only played for about 15 minutes. I was stuck in lag spikes the size of Mt. Everest. I kept fought the same critter for 25 minutes, I timed it.

Take care in buying this game until you hear positive stuff from these reviews. You will suffer more frustration than enjoyment at this point. The servers lag is unacceptable, the support is non-existent and the gameplay is for the extremely patient.

Good luck...

Rating:
Summary: Funcom=OmniTek?
Review: The world of Rubi Kai has enormous potential, unfortunately serious technical problems keep Funcom's effort from being a great game, and has reduced my gaming experience to frustrating reinstalls, constant disconnects, severe lag, and unplayable game features. To say the game was released prematurely is an understatement. Not to mention the ... minimum requirements on the box lable. Do not even consider purchasing this game is you are running less than a 450mhz processor and 256K RAM (not 64, or 128). Even with those stats you'll still have to set visual setting options in the game to zero (yes zero) and turn off all the lovely graphic details to get decent frame rates (this has even been reported in high end machines, so if you want decent frame rates you'll need 512RAM and at least a PIII 1 ghz). Even with that, Funcom has advised players to avoid cities(yes, avoid cities, I'm not kidding), because P4 users with 512 RAM and 64mb video cards still report frame rates in the 10-15 fps range with visual settings at a minimum. Won't even get into all the bugs, characters trapped in downed zones, shooting through walls, horrible (and I mean horrible lag) even with cable/dsl, patch crashes, install bugs, CD id bugs, login bugs, frequent disconnects, etc., etc. Funcom says their working on it, but that the game is 100% playable. I have to laugh. It's been seven days since I tried to patch from version 11.5-12.1 and now after wasting countless hours reinstalling and repatching I cannot even play. No word from Funcom "support" yet (although I was given an ID number for my support e-mail). My advice is to wait a month or two and check the boards to see if there's been any improvement. Otherwise, don't waste your money.