Even if you’ve never, ever played an MMO we’re fairly certain you’ll have heard about Atlantica Online. If not then you’ve obviously been living the life of a hermit somewhere far away where Internet access and conversation is banned. We jest of course but seriously Atlantica Online has created quite a following in a very short space of time. This game is simply one of the single most popular free to play (F2P) MMO games out there at the moment

The story for the game is based on good old planet Earth but several thousand years in the past where you play the part of descendant of the lost people of Atlantis. Your one single focus as one of the last Atlanteans is to fight your way across the ancient Earth and once again discover the location of the lost city of Atlantis.

Okay so we have a pretty decent back story there and one that’ll keep people entertained but surely it’s not just a clever storyline that keeps people glued to this game? Not at all – it’s the combat system that sets it apart. This game has a turn-based combat system which is combined with the MMO environment around it – kinda Pokemon style combat if that makes sense?

This combat system is what has people hooked because it’s just totally different to anything else you find out there and is more reminiscent of RPGs from several years ago than a modern MMO like this one featuring amazing graphics and sound.

The character creation process is also a little bit different to what you’ve come to expect from MMOs. Instead of choosing a specific class you actually wind up choosing a specific weapon type instead so you become one of these: Spear, Sword, Axe, Gun, Cannon, Staff, Maniac or Musician – the musician looks exceptionally cool as a character or weapon class. It just feels like Motley Crue the MMO when you see this weapon class.

When it comes to the actual combat you get to fight with mercenaries in this game because turn based one-on-one combat is boring. Your mercs have their own unique characteristics and can level up just like a normal player character. You start off the game with 2 mercenaries on your side and you can recruit up to 6 more to fight with you in your total group of 9 which will make for some pretty interesting scraps!

Towns obviously exist and give you a place to buy resources for crafting but a guild can also lay claim to an entire town itself and then earn money from the taxes from the town. At higher levels entire cities can fall under the control of your guild but that’s beyond the scope of this review.

An MMO with fantastic graphics and a truly unique combat system and a nice twist on the character class creation process. Interested? You should be!

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that an MMO based around Lord of the Rings was going to be an instant hit. The main benefit for the developers is that this franchise has been established for decades in the minds of fans and has been passed down from father to son and mother to daughter generation after generation.

In short these guys didn’t really have to do much marketing to get the message out there – they already had an audience starving for this game to be released.

And now with the fact that LOTR Online has gone from a paid monthly subscription model to a F2P (Free to Play) model it’s attracted a whole lot of new citizens to the plains and cities of Middle Earth whereas before there was a distinct lack of people using this online game. Turbines move to make this game F2P has given it an entirely new lease of life and was a very clever business move on their part.

Now of course nothing in life is truly free (well except maybe for oxygen and only for right now) but as a new or returning player to Lord of the Rings Online you do get to enjoy an awful lot of the games content entirely for free.

The idea of charging everyone a monthly subscription fee is slowly becoming outdated and with the current economic climate it’s one of the first things to get the chop in a family budget – that’s just a financial reality.

The standard install for this game is over 6GB in size and will require several patches (applied during installation) before you actually get to play so you better not be in a hurry to get involved. Ideally start the install and leave it run overnight and make absolutely certain you’re using high speed broadband and even at that a 6GB install is going to take its sweet time.

Oh and there’s a 9.5GB high res install available as well – if you have that much free time or determination.

The actual gameplay itself takes place while the Fellowship is on their journey to destroy the One Ring in Mount Doom and you get to participate in this world as one of the main races of Man, Elf, Hobbit or Dwarf and have a wide range of character customization options to choose from after that point.

Within the game you can expect the usual fetch type quests as well as a good smattering of story driven missions to give the true fans a taste of Middle Earth history and adventure.

Now there are some things in the game that don’t come for free and the expansion packs are examples of exactly that. Items like these can be purchased for Turbine points which can be purchased in groups of 100 for roughly £1 each.

This game works hard to keep you involved and entertained right up to Level 20 by which time you’ll have figured enough out to make your own way in the online realm of Middle Earth.

System Requirements
Windows XP or higher
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
1GB of RAM
10GB of hard drive space
128MB GEForce 6800 graphics card or better

Guild Wars 2 – The Ultimate F2P MMO In The Making?
So now we return to the land of Tyria in Guild Wars 2 and no less than 250 years after the time of the original game. And staying true to the original concept of enticing more people to play MMOs this game will also have no subscription fees to play. All that’s required of you is to buy the game for your PC and enjoy playing it online. Simples!

One of the biggest changes in Guild Wars 2 is that you’re able to play as non-human characters from the 5 distinct races in the land of Tyria who are:

Humans – don’t really need to explain these ones we hope?

Charr – these are the Orc-like creatures who overran Tyria in Guild Wars – ferocious warriors with equally ferocious war machines.

Norn – these are huge shape shifting warriors from the Northern Lands who are utterly brave and very fond of fighting.

Asura – a hyper intelligent species who have access to extremely advanced technology – small in stature but great in power.

Sylvari – this is a new race which recently sprang into existence. A very young race but an extremely powerful one. And they look exactly like Elves.

The professions you can choose from for each of these races are (so far) guardian, thief, elementalist, warrior, ranger and necromancer but you can expect more professions to be announced as the game draws closer to release.

For ardent fans of the original game you’re not going to be able to transfer your character to the Guild Wars 2 game environment because it’s been completely overhauled. But you do get your own slot in the Hall of Monuments where your previous exploits can shine for all to see.

The original graphical engine has also been upgraded so you’ll now get rich textures, shading and shadowing for example. The combat in the game has also received a facelift so you can expect to see combo attacks and environmental weapons (rocks, trees etc) being included which will add a whole new element of fun to the game – which is whole idea in the first place right?

And there’s good news for solo adventurers here too because you’re going to be able to go questing all on your lonesome in Guild Wars 2 although the game obviously does have full support for group quests and missions too.

We’re expecting great things from this game and the addition of advanced technological weapons for the different races (the Charr have basic guns for example) should make this game a very interesting one to get immersed in.

Watch this space for more details of the release of Guild Wars 2.

If any one thing stops people from playing massive multiplayer online games it’s the monthly fees that companies charge to participate. Not everyone can afford to do this and even the people who can afford it don’t like have to pay for something every single month especially if it doesn’t prove great value for money – which is all down to how many hours per month you expect to play online.

So the team at ArenaSoft saw an opening here and released Guild Wars which has zero monthly fees – yup you can play the game literally free of charge.

Guild Wars is based in the land of Tyria which has been laid waste by a tyrannous band of evil warriors known as the Charr – who actually look and act an awful lot like Orcs to be fair but that’s a minor detail.

As with the vast majority of other MMOs your first game task is to create your avatar or game character. This game has a limited number of physical options for your characters but what your characters are capable of is pretty varied.

So once you make the choice between male or female you then need to choose between the classes of Warrior, Elementalist, Monk, Ranger, Mesmer, Ritualist, Assassin, Dervish, and Paragon and Necromancer.

And then you can then give each character two separate professions they can use and each profession has over 150 unique skills tied to it so you can create some pretty unique characters using this avatar creation process.

So how does the game play? You’re getting a pretty visual experience here and a very easy-to-use interface which is always a bonus. The game itself does tend to feel more like a big cooperative game than an MMORPG at times but that’s down to the nature of the game play and the fact that it can take a lot of hours to really establish your character in this online world.

It does give you the option of using a level 20 character from the outset so you can test what each type of character is truly capable of though.

In terms of graphic effects and overall visuals Guild Wars is pretty striking and once you see the capes you’ll get a real idea of how much attention to detail went into this feature alone.

Guild Wars gives you 25 missions to work with and well over 200 quests to get involved in so you’re not going to be finished with this game anytime soon and in fact you can probably expect to get at least several months of fun from it.

So if you want a fantasy based MMO that has no monthly fees and is very easy on the eyes then you should check out Guild Wars – it won’t cost you anything.

Windows 2000 or higher
Pentium III 1GZ or higher
512MB RAM
CD Drive
2GB Hard disk space
ATI Radeon 9600 or better
Internet access

Petroglyph first caught my attention from their development of a few favourites of mine like Star Wars: Empire At War and the sequel/add-on pack Forces of Corruption.

I just liked the way they put their games together so when I saw them venturing into the world of MMOs it put a big smile on my face as I waited to see what they’d produce.

End of Nations is the latest in a series of games from the combined talents of Trion Worlds and the team at Petroglyph and based on that pedigree right there you know you’re going to be dealing with a polished end product.

What we have here is an RTS (real time strategy) game that is both online, multi-player and absolutely massive. The concept of this game is that nations as a whole have failed and just as the world was on the brink of disaster the Order of Nations arrived on the scene to save the day.

But slowly people began to realize that the Order of Nations weren’t exactly the most friendly guys in the world (literally) and that dissent was put down with an iron fist but now the Shadow Revolution have risen up to change the order of things.

Now in a traditional RTS you get to play against maybe 4 – 8 other online player and within a limited map structure but End of Nations expands that to a whole new level by allowing dozens of commanders on each side to play against each other or, if the need arises, dozens of commanders combating one single but very powerful enemy for example – over 50 players can participate in each game.

This is a very progressive game and your units are constantly evolving as you learn and get to unlock new units and super weapons as the game progresses. Plus the fact that you’re not just playing in a confined arena anymore – the world is literally your oyster.

This makes the longevity of this game pretty much guaranteed because no matter how complicated the AI for a game is it will never be sneakier, smarter or more devious than playing against a human being but with EoN you can multiply that by a factor of 50x – you better be prepared to think on your feet soldier.

Can playing this MMORTS suffer from the same rush’n'crush tactics that plagues most RTS games? This is all down to how the game itself is played but the human player element means that more refined tactics are going to be required if you expect to survive past the few first minutes of play.

Graphically End of Nations is very lush and you can see the influences of Petroglyph here with neat little unit features and animations that might it stand out.

End of Nations means that you’re not just playing for a single victory – you’re playing for world domination here people.

There’s been a demand for something truly unique in the MMORPG scene for quite some time now. It’s not that the games designers and publishers aren’t constantly being innovative or creating entire new worlds that are stunning to see. It’s just that it’s all been done before to one extent or another.

So Trion Worlds have managed to change all of that in one fell swoop but this swoop didn’t come quickly. As a matter of fact this particular “swoop” took over 3 years of development time but in the end you have something that is really unique in the MMORPG universes – a game that is tied to a TV show. Now most people are instantly thinking “Running Man” (which was actually written by Stephen King) but we’re not quite at that level.

Instead what Defiance does is take an MMORPG game with an open world and they’ve tied it to a TV show of the same name where the TV series influences the game and vice versa. This is a pretty ground breaking move in games development because this isn’t just a tie in or crappy game-to-movie (like the awful, awful, awful Doom) or movie-to-game (take your pick of great movies that have been turned into terrible games) – it’s something totally different.

So what is the game all about? Well in a future Earth mankind and alienkind have been locked in battle for decades and the world has been torn to shreds as a result of all this fighting. The entire game takes place in the San Francisco bay area which you may have guessed from seeing any of the early trailers or previews of the game although the TV show is actually filmed in a different location.

You can play as either a human or alien and enjoy all the usual progressive weapon, armour and ability upgrades as you gain experience in the Defiance world. And the Defiance world is something to behold in itself because of its true open-play nature – you’ll never have to pause at the edge of one zone while the next zone loads which is something that always takes away from real game enjoyment.

And the environment also supports several thousand live players at any one time which gives the game huge scope and what is looking like a very long life span. But what does it all look like? Well this game is very polished looking and is on par with, if not exceeds, the level of graphical complexity you’ve come to expect from the very best MMOs.

And Trion Worlds aren’t going to deny anyone the ability to enjoy the Defiance MMORPG world because it supports gamers on PC, Xbox 360 and the PS3 also so you can expect a lot of gamers to test the waters of the Defiance universe to see what it’s all about.

Have you always wanted to be a superhero ever since you were a kid or since the first time you saw Superman? The answer to that is probably a “Yes” because most kids wanted to be superheroes when they grew up until they realized that real life was all about soul destroying education and then usually an equally soul destroying job. But I digress – we need to focus on the superhero stuff here.

The first thing you’ll notice about this game are the type of character you can create as long as they’re humanoid in their basic form and how many options you have in creating your own superhero.

You’re going to be able to recreate any of your own personal favourites from the Marvel or DC universe because there are that many options you literally can do anything you want.

City of Heroes is also different in this regard because you get to create a powerful character straight off the bat instead of having to spend weeks of aimlessly battling bats or poisonous frogs to build up enough experience points to get any useful powers/weapons/gear like in most other MMOs.

That’s what puts most people off playing these games – you usually need to invest a huge amount of time into them to get any kind of entertainment value from them. Not so with City of Heroes – you can get into the thick of the action pretty much instantly.

So what are the different classes you can play in this game? We’ve broken them down here for you:

• Blaster – a specialist in ranged powers/weapons

• Scrapper – great for close range combat

• Tanker – super tough melee fighter

• Controller – support and crowd control class

• Defender – healing and support character class

The action itself takes place in Paragon City which is a huge place and that’s one of the potential issues with some of the missions/quests in the game. Because the environment is so large you can spend a lot of time running or flying around that just becomes tiresome – especially when the goal of some of the quests is to just to run to another zone to meet an NPC that you’ve been sent to meet by another NPC several zones away.

But to its credit the action in City of Heroes is fast paced and exciting as you take on a variety of monsters, criminal types and of course your villains and arch villain types so that more than makes up for the previous issue.

The game has a neat and simple interface that won’t take too long to figure out and you’ll find that most things in the game are pretty intuitive and there are, of course, tutorials to help you get started.

If you’re looking for an MMORPG that allows you to create and fight other superheroes and villains than City of Heroes is the only real choice for you.

PC Requirements
Windows XP or better
Intel or AMD Dual Core Processor
2GB of RAM or more
Geforce FX5600 or ATI Radeon 9600 or better
High speed broadband connection

You may not have heard of Trion Worlds before you read this blog post but believe me if you’re any way actively involved in PC gaming or more importantly in MMO style gaming then you’re going to be hearing a lot more about these guys very soon.

Why?

Because they innovate, the push the boundaries and they work with other smart people like the team at Petroglyph. These are people who have an eye for how games should look and not just in terms of style but what gamers actually want to see.

And then they embellish this vision with lots of neat little touches that they know avid gamers will spot. For those already in the know these guys have worked on such vaguely familiar titles as Aion and World of Warcraft for example.

With their Headquarters in Redwood Shores, California and development teams and studios working out of San Diego, California and Austin, Texas this is a company that’s constantly growing and the success of their existing game efforts is what drives that growth forwards.

You need only look at their existing catalogue of games and those in development to see that this company is changing how MMOs are viewed by bringing the experience directly into the gamers home – with the SyFy channel overlap in their new game Defiance being an excellent example of true ingenuity when it comes to games development and embraces gamers on PC, Xbox 360 and the PS3 too of course.

Then you can look at their MMORPG game Rift which just keeps taking award after award and recently won Best New Online Game for 2011 – and with good reason. You only need to take one look at the graphical complexity of this title to see where all their hard work went.

And Trion Worlds have also created something truly unique in the form of End of Nations which brings the normally pretty isolated RTS (Real Time Strategy) gamers out into the world with thousands of other games battling the global menace of the Order of Nations. This game supports a massive number of players in a massive gaming environment – this game has global appeal and reach in more ways than one.

So keep an eye on the team at Trion Worlds and the other developers they collaborate with. They’ve already created some fantastic and award winning titles in the form of games like Rift and with future creations like Defiance they’re blazing a new trail in how MMO games will be created by other software developers.

Sony Entertainment like to have their fingers in as many digital pies as possible and the success of World of Warcraft was bound to drive Sony to compete and Saga of Heroes is their attempt to breach the walls of the MMORPG world and gain entry. So how did they get on?

Well the first thing you need to be aware of is that this game has its own fair share of bugs and glitches. Installation works just fine but there are in-game bugs that you’re going to find very annoying such as teleporting and finding yourself floating in midair or stuck inside a hill or even underwater. Annoying? Of course but they don’t happen all the time so gameplay isn’t always affected.

The game itself is set on the world of Telon which is made up of 3 unique continents. On these 3 continents live 19 separate races that are then divided into 15 different classes so you’ll have a wild time creating your own character in this world – wild in a good way of course! Actually you really can expect to invest quite a bit of time in character creation.

When you’re starting off in Vanguard: Sage of Heroes you’ll get pop-up messages that guide you on your way so you can ease yourself into the game. And the first thing you’ll notice about the game play is that this MMORPG really isn’t designed for solo players at all – there’s a really strongly enforced focus on group gaming. Flying or fighting solo on the world of Telon simply isn’t going to happen for you we’re afraid!

The combat system is a lot of fun though and will keep you entertained for as many hours as you want and one particularly nice touch is the reaction system in the combat. How this works is that if you block an opponents attack a specific way you’re then able to use a different set of counter attacks based on that so you’re not stuck with the usual parry-strike-parry-strike combat affair.

On the subject of combat you’re going to die in this game and when you die you lose experience and you’ll have to trek back to your corpse to regain some of those lost experience points which means that dying on Telon is an awful lot more hassle than dying in Azeroth for example. Vanguard is also different because it features the diplomacy system which allows you to curry favour with different factions by means of a simple card sub-game which actually works pretty well when you get used to it.

Player be warned though you’re going to need a decent system to play this game because even though the scenery is all rather splendid visually it takes a lot of processing power to churn out all that detail and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes can be a proper resource hog when it wants to be.

An interesting attempt by Sony to enter the MMORPG arena and an attempt with a lot of merit to it – well worth checking out.

I’m actually amazed at how long it took a games developer to come up with the idea of a football MMO. After all football has such an incredible following all over the world it just seems like the most natural thing in the world for a company to do too tap into the almost fanatic following the sport of football has. After all for many people football isn’t just a sport – it’s more a way of life.

If you’re familiar with the game Football Superstars from Cybersports then Striker Superstars will instantly look familiar to you because it uses the same graphical engine in the form of the Unity game engine – after all if it’s not broken then why bother trying to fix it?

And fans of the Superstars series of games will be glad to hear that this game is entirely browser based and there’s no client to download and install at all. This means that your actual minimum requirements to play the game are going to be..well…minimal because once your system can run the browser required it should be able to run the game by default. Striker Superstars is compatible with both PC and Mac so for once Mac users aren’t excluded from the fun.

So is Striker Superstars designed to take over from the previous Football Superstars title? Not at all and in fact the design of the game lends it to more of a “login, play a bit and leave” experience. It’s not that you can’t progress your players in this game it’s just that Cybersports are obviously keeping this game pretty open – like not having to register to play for example. But if you register you get to enjoy additional benefits like “levelling up” your player.

Plus because Striker Superstars supports a 5 a-side match environment if players want to take part in 7 a-side or 11 a-side matches they’ll need to play Football Superstars instead. So that’s why this game is designed as a companion game, in a sense, to the original Football Superstars title.

Striker Superstars is completely free to play, there’s nothing to download and you don’t even need to register to play the game – what more can you want from a football MMO in fairness?

If you fancy a quick blast of 5 a-side with some mates during your next lunch break then Striker Superstars is pretty much perfect for you.