Preview: RaiderZ
The kingdom of Rendel has fallen to a plague of beasts that are recklessly determined to wipe out the remaining humans who struggle to live out their day-to-day lives and look to the only hope they have left of saving the land: the hunters (that’s you!).
RaiderZ is an MMORPG with third-person, monster-hunting action, and a bright one at that. Anyone lucky enough to play the closed beta will know that despite its fairly grim underlying storyline, Rendel is a beautiful fantasy to be in. Let’s face it, we all dream of slaying a dragon every once in a while! Before starting your adventure, you must create your character. You are given a variety of classes to pick from: Berserker, Cleric, Defender and Sorcerer. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that this choice will determine your characters aesthetics and attributes for the rest of the game because it does not. You can switch class at any time by simply changing your weapon – a nice little feature that gives you the ability to adapt to the task at hand. You also have some customisable character features such as hair style/colour, tattoos and scars, although I would not spend a great deal of time here as your character’s face is often covered up with a hood or helmet.
Your first few quests are very simple. One of which is to kill a few monsters that walk about on the beach aimlessly carrying swords (as you do). Despite their big muscular bodies and seemingly powerful weapons, like most of the enemies in the first area, predicting their attacks is very easy, and they die quickly. As you start with little in the way of special attacks, the controls are also very simple. A few left-click attacks and right-click blocks, and the beach will soon be cleared. Most enemies in the early stages do little more than try to punch or spit on you. A simple tap of the Tab key with your chosen direction (W,A,S and D) is enough to avoid most attacks with a stylish roll, but just like any third-person melee game, you should take note of your enemy’s attack patterns and dodge appropriately, only attacking when you have an opening. In most stages of the game you don’t want to be attacking frantically in the hope that your enemy will die first, because I assure you they won’t.
In each area you have many quests that slowly build up to a final challenge. These vary from simple tasks like “Could you make yourself some armour? I’ll give you gold and some beef if you do?” to slaying a troublesome beast of epic proportions. I really appreciate how quests often reward you once you have reached your location, and you don’t always need to return to the person who gave you the quest to receive your reward. Every now and then you get someone asking you to do something that is just ridiculous such as “My wife left her poems at her friend’s house. Would you fetch them for her?” to which you long to reply with “Get stuffed”. But what kind of MMO would this be without the random quests that serve only as easy experience and gold?
Most of these small quests hint at a great monster that will be your final adversary of the area. These final quests are often party recommended, but being a great fan of difficult third-person melee games (Monster Hunter and Dark Souls to name a few), I couldn’t resist but attempt these party quests on my own. Joining a small party and repeating the quest was still just as exciting. It’s so easy to communicate and invite people to your party that you may find yourself doing it often, even if just for five minutes. You can help anyone you see fighting a monster, but unless you are in the same party, you will receive no experience or goodies.
As you gather new items, materials and enemy body parts from quest to quest, you can forge new equipment. If there is a piece of equipment you are looking to forge but haven’t yet gathered the correct materials, you can ask for a recipe that will add the needed materials to your journal and will even notify you when you have gathered them. There’s nothing more pleasing than parading around wearing what looks to be your last defeated foe. Creating new weapons works in the same way, making you even more determined to kill that next boss. Some can be enchanted or combined with special stones to increase certain attributes. Special abilities are also available to purchase with points acquired every time your character levels up. These abilities can be set to a control of your choice – I have a few of mine set to my extra mouse buttons. Abilities can also be levelled up with the same points, increasing power, area of effect or special effects like knocking small enemies down for several seconds.
As well as using your own choice of equipment, you can often pick up enemy drops separately to their materials. Sometimes these are weapons that can be used for a set time – often around 10 – 20 seconds – and others are a simple boost in power, health, magic etc. There aren’t many games where you can beat a monster to death with a fish, now are there?
Amongst all of the fighting and traveling you have these beautiful areas. The graphics aren’t the best, but the lush green woods and hustling industrious city streets are enjoyable places to be. The cities are filled with all kinds of shops, and people fighting in the street, cooking, forging weapons and riding Moas (I have accidentally called them Chocobos on more than one occasion). There was even a guy in huge armour playing a guitar in one area. Then all of a sudden (and I still to this day don’t know how he did it), a Moa was summoned and his crowd was left sitting in the rain.
The closed beta has now ended and we can expect RaiderZ to be available towards the end of this year. If you’re a fan of the Monster Hunter series or anything similar then this is definitely one to look out for. It will be free to play so there is no reason why every person in the world shouldn’t download this one. I know I will.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KridhF6axlI&hd=1