By Jason Van Horn

One of the greatest possible faults with a MMORPG is coming across a mission or enemy zone where you're simply done for if you haven't got any friends to quest with you. If you can gather the required party, good for you, but too often you're left alone, trying to survive, while you yell across the chat channels you're looking for help. Changing up things a bit, Sword of the New Worlds doesn't give you just one character to control at once, but rather a party of three is possible at all times; and trust us, you'll need all their help. However, with each innovation to the genre, it creeps more and more into the realm of a Diablo dungeon crawler than the kind of MMORPG you'd associate with the Everquests and World of Warcrafts out there.

You start the game out not by designing a single character, but rather defining your whole family, who will all share in the last name that you choose for them. Once you've decided on your last name, then you have a limited amount of spots - four at the beginning to be exact - to craft a team that you could stand-behind when the going gets tough out in the field. The class options that you have include: fighter, scout, wizard, musketeer, and elementalist. How you want to mix and match is really up to you, but a solid foundation, spreading out the love between the classes is perhaps the smartest move. Fighters are the up close and personal fighters of the team, while the scout is a thief/burglar option familiar to many, finally segueing to the musketeer and then the wizard and elementalists in terms of the reach of their attacks. The most unique one to the genre is the musketeer, who uses guns and ammo to deal damage from a distance, taking the place of perhaps the more familiar archers and hunters of other games. The musketeer is a great class, just as long as you keep their bullets in stock, because they can breeze through them and suddenly you find yourself cornered, enemies on all your sides, and you with one less fighter at your side to help out.

There isn't too much character customization in the beginning, as all you can really do is determine the sex of your class choice, and then picking one of several different outfits they can wear. The outfits reflect the look of the characters for most of the game, because updating with some new armor, for instance, never really changes the look of your characters, so plan those looks ahead to begin with. The real options in character customization come in the way of Stances, which are essentially the way in which a character of yours stands, but in essence choosing Stances equal different attack and defensive plus and minuses, and they give you different abilities, useful for dealing with the harder enemies of the game. A few such abilities include using some elemental spells of the elementalist in a selected area or using your musketeer to unleash a barrage of bullets on your selected foe. Much like your character, Stances level up, and with different levels comes different abilities, so it's smart to plan around your team strategy.

However, your family members aren't the only characters who will be at your disposal, because by taking on certain missions or completing specific objections, you unlock the cards of other characters you meet in the game, who you can then build a character of in your family. One early instance has you fighting a young adventurer because you either admired or disregarded a picture of his crush, and if you beat him, suddenly you have the option of making him in the game, and going out into the field wit him as one of your party members. Some of the NPC cards you get this way can be quite useful, as they have different attacks and work differently than the normal classes you start out with.

Given the fact that you are controlling three characters at any given time, you might think it would be terribly difficult to properly get them to do what you want. If you wanted, you could have ultimate control and control the attacks of each individual character, and though it might give you the exact actions you want, it could borderline on tedium too. Instead, a group option is available, which allows you to input commands for one player, and then your other two follow. If you want everyone to focus an attack on one character, you can left-click on them to engage them. If you want to traverse a great distance and want to fight every creature that gets in your way, you can Ctrl + left click and you'll attack everyone nearby. We found ourselves using the Ctrl click method more often than not, just because it was easier to use, though it can be frustrating to want to move somewhere specific and fast, and have to randomly stop just because an enemy chose then to spawn nearby, gaining the attention of one of your characters. The other control method is the Ctrl + Shift + left click, which puts your characters into Harvest Mode, making them not focus on battling, but grabbing the scattered dropped loot that they have privilege too, such as weapons, money, loot you can sell, or items which will replenish your health when eaten, such as yellow mangos. For the most part, the controls for handling three characters at once work very well, and only occasionally do they seem to fail and properly do or act like you'd like them to. The only control issue that might annoy some is the fact that you move with left mouse clicks and not the standard WASD keys; the system works, it just makes it feel more Diablo than World of Warcraft.

Much like other MMOs, Sword of the New World is centered around various hub cities, where you can get quests, sell items, buy new weapons and armor, or even craft some nice weapons if you have the goods and recipe for them. The crafting system is a bit on the weak and tiring side, as it often felt like more effort than it was worth, so the random buying and sell of new items from the vendors was a much more preferred method. The system of buying and selling goods is really easy, as the user interface isn't complicated at all to figure out.

One thing that is hard to figure out, however, are the EXP Cards you are rewarded for completing missions, which are basically the experience points other games give you right away after a quest is completed. Trying to navigate the menu system isn't exactly a chore, but it isn't perfectly streamlined either. As soon as you find where in the inventory the EXP Cards were placed, it soon becomes an episode in frustration trying to use them, since they have so many restrictions on them (can only use on Lvl. 10 or higher characters, for example), and even then it was often a struggle trying to get the experience I was owed by properly activating the EXP Cards.

As mentioned, the EXP Cards come mostly from the quests of the game, which are your garden variety "kill x amount of creatures" and "deliver this item" quests. The FedEx quests aren't terrible, if only because they are over relatively quickly. The monster killing quests, however, take a bit more time, as you usually have to kill many, many, many before completing your task. In some MMOs, you might have to kill 10 or 20 or so, but in Sword of the New World expect to be grinding 100, 150, and even higher. It helps a little that there are so many creatures on the screen at once and that you can do away with them relatively quickly considering you have three members on your team, but still it often seems like too much fighting for so very little. You'll also find some other quests here and there, which have you usually killing something or discovering something, and these work pretty well, though they suffer in that oftentimes it's hard to know where exactly to go or what to do. One early quest of this type has you going to a statue to stop some saboteurs; it's easy to get to the statute, but what then. The player has no way of knowing that they're supposed to just walk around the statue aimlessly, and eventually the saboteurs pop into place, and then you can attack them. How are players supposed to know the enemies pop into play like that? They don't.

Much more interesting are the instances of the game, which are quests that will pop you into specific places all so that you can do a short quest with a bit of story to it. The instances take you basically to places you've already been to or will travel to in the near future, but it's a treat to have something to break the game up a bit, letting you journey with some soldiers, for example, helping them kill beasts in their way until they can get to the Big Bad and hopefully do away with them. With its focus on more storytelling quests, the instances are the best part of the game, and ones you'll be looking forward to discovering whenever you can.

If you like a little PVP in your MMO, then Sword of the New World certainly has the goods, though getting people together to put it to proper use can be troubling. You've got several different PVP options, such as Family vs. Family duels, Clan Wars, Faction Play, and various combos of different number of players against different numbers. The PVP is really just the regular combat but against human players, so if you're into that, then hey, all the power to you.

The place where the game suffers worse is in the community, as it is all but non-existent, or when it is there, you wish it were gone. I've spent hours playing, and the most messages I've read have come from some company trying to sell gold to people. Worst yet, unlike the LOTRO chat channels that I've found to have respectful and cool people, the Sword of the New World players have a bunch of jerks at times. I'm a Harry Potter fan, and I picked the novel up on the first day of its release. One day later, while playing in Sword of the New World, someone just had to shout across the whole server book ending plot points, which has hampered a bit my enjoyment of the novel.

Perhaps the biggest reason why the community is so poor and generally silent is because with you always having a party of three players, there just isn't much of a need early on to have to rely on other players to get you by, and so there isn't much teaming up to fill in your weak points. Tanks don't need healers to survive, healers don't need tanks to fight the enemies, and so everyone just cares about themselves. Also, once you get high enough characters for certain enemy levels, you can simply put the game on an auto-fight or sorts, allowing you to walk away from the computer, and simply let the game play itself with you doing nothing. So, as you crawl through the latest dungeon or area, you'll often find different family teams have simply setup shop in some location, camping on the spawning creatures that hit that area. It makes it frustrating to get your own kills yourself, and it simply sucks to find people abusing the system so badly.

Visually, the game is a beauty, taking place from a pivoting top-down perspective, which lets you look at the action from above, or swivel the camera down so it's looking down on the action more from an angle than a straight look down. The camera works well, though it can run into some faults near buildings or if you pan it below the ground line. The characters are very anime and manga inspired, which lean a bit more towards a Final Fantasy movie cutscene rather than the over-exaggerated big round eyes and cutesy looks, so the game is far from appearing kiddie. Meanwhile, the creatures are really detailed and interesting to look at, and the environments are lush and gorgeous, featuring swaying trees, bubbling streams, and golden rays of light making the work sparkle in the sun. The only thing better than the visual is the aural experience, which features some of the best music I've heard come from a MMO. The soundtrack is a strange mixture of Victorian waltz meets electronica meets a gothic chorus chanting with an eerie beauty. There are a few numbers that aren't the best, but otherwise it's a tight soundtrack and one of the best yet.

The game is both visually and aurally appealing, and while the gameplay itself is solid, it's not exactly groundbreaking, and the severe lack of community really hampers the overall game. If you're getting tired of the other MMOs out there, it wouldn't hurt to try playing Sword of the New World. You can play the game for free initially, but once you reach your 20th level you're going to have to pay if you want to advance any further in the levels (of which there are many). So why not go ahead and give the game a shot, letting the first 20 levels be your trial run. Sword of the New World is certainly worth that much, so why not see if you find something you like. It's not going to change the MMO genre, but it does have a few nice features. Find out more about Sword of the New World at http://www.swordofthenewworld.com.

LOW DOWN

• Control teams of at least three characters at once
• First 20 character levels are free
• Lots of monster grinding

PROS

• Beautiful world and character designs
• Amazing musical soundtrack

CONS

• Terrible community
• Crafting/recipe system

Gameplay 7
Stability 8
Interface 7
Community 3
Reviewer's Tilt 6
FINAL 6.2