adventure

Well, I heard a lot about this game, and looked at a lot of reviews and screenies for it, and decided it was a good lookin game. So i decided to try it. This was a long time ago and im still playing. This game is still fresh and addicting!

You start off with the character creation screen, adding points and runes that affects your characters disciplines and skills for future times. You can pick a bunch of different races and 4 different classes which lead off into tons more when you hit lvl 10 and have to choose ur path. So you make your character and start off by noticing how everything on your interface is customizable! This is a great feature when you need to get stuff out of the way and move things around. The first few lvls are easy to gain by yourself but then you're going to need a group to level faster. once you leave the .:"Noob Isle":. (at lvl 20), you will need to join a guild. Finding guilds are rather easy. Just making your own guild is hard. If you want to do this, you need to probably need to be level cap, and you also need TONS of money. Once you are in a guild or have your own guild managed, you'll notice that you'll eventually have some enemy and allied guilds. You can go to war with other guilds and slaughter each other in the process. Losing is a very bad thing to happen. you lose your guild =( but most of the time that doesnt even happen. Thats about all i have to unleash. If you want to know more about this game, feel free to email me (spazztic2003@yahoo.com) . I might post more later.

Well ive given ya the basics of the game. Lvling, meeting new peeps, and going guild v guild. The political activity in this game is all around you. Watch for it. you'll see what i mean.

But to summarize this review, its a great game, and i think a lot of people should play it. Well peace

I participated actively in beta, was part of a guild that sieged and did PvP regularly. I must say that this game has interesting elements to it as far as PvP is concerned, but is no where near ready to launch (as of a week before release). The graphics aren't even as good as ancient everquest, and even with my P4 2ghz machine with a gigabyte of ram and a Geforce 4 Ti 4400 the game only pulls 30fps with all the details turned down at 800x600. The client is simply terrible.

As far as gameplay goes, you can max your character's level in less than a month, and from there it's all PvP. This, however, is only mildly interesting, even when engaged in large-scale sieges between hundreds of people.

There is very little variety within the classes. Each race is obviously designed to be a specific class, to the point where other races taking that class are pretty much gimped and worthless. They also have a heavy-handed skill system, that forces you to take specific weapons, etc... or not be effective in combat.

Every character is exactly alike.

Oh! And don't even get me started on the class balance issues... It's usually not too bad in other games, but since this is pure PvP, expect a high level mage to run through your camp and gank your entire team pretty often.

The game is fun, if you have a few dozen friends already ingame to watch over you. While the game protects players until level 20, you don't become viable in any of the serious combat situations until level 50. With experience, you can hit level 50 in a week; however, if you just start the game, it could take you close to a solid month.

This is not a light gaming experience at all. If you're looking for an MMOG to try out just for the sake of trying it out, I suggest City of Heroes or Dark Age of Camelot. Shadowbane is "advanced" MMOG gaming. It requires you like hunting and being hunted by other people, at all times and in all places, and being comfortable ending the playsession further behind than where you started.

That's why I gave it 2 stars. It's not a good all-around title. It's fun for a very specific type of player.