Rift – The Game To Smite The Mighty World of Warcraft?

Here’s the first thing to know about this game – Rift took players away from Wow! The mightiest of mighty MMORPGs has lost some of its audience to a newcomer?  How can this be? Read on dear reader…read on.

The game of Rift is based on the world of Telara where, because of a mighty magic battle in the past, the barrier between the world of Telara and other planes of existence has been torn and these tears are called rifts. When these rifts appear they provide a pathway for the world of Telara to be invaded so you and your band of heroes need to sally forth and conquer whatever comes through.

For fans of MMORPGs around the world you’ll be glad to hear that Rift as a game is complete when you get it so you don’t need to wait for updates or patches to actually make the game worth playing. Instead you actually get to enjoy it out-of-the-box which is a rare experience for fans of these types of games.

As an MMORPG you can see where Rift was influenced heavily by other games of the same genre like World of Warcraft or the Warhammer MMOs. This isn’t a bad thing because the team at Trion Worlds have taken a great concept and made it even better without attempting to reinvent the wheel in the process and this game has still managed to truly stand out from the crowd.

Graphically and aurally the game is what you would expect from a fantasy world based MMORPG but the appearance of the rifts themselves are pretty amazing when you see them the first few times – they do cause a few jaw-dropping moments of gaming. Oh and one of them was so, so influenced by the Hellboy movie that it’s not funny but it’s still a cool effect so we’ll let that one go.

So down to the game. To combat the destruction of Telara through the appearance of these rifts two factions arose – the noble Guardians and the technomagical Defiants. Both of these factions want to preserve Telara but through different methods altogether.

Of the 2 factions you can choose from there are 4 main classes/callings that you can then choose from – Mage, Warrior, Rogue and Cleric and then as sub-class to that there are 3 different types of souls you can choose from but you can earn more souls through quests and you can expand your character based on this.

And that of course leads us onto to the actual gameplay and yes the bulk of the gaming is quest based as you’d expect from a game that’s going to or is currently rivalling WoW and this is combined with several different types of currency that you can use and of course the collecting of the Shards dotted around the world of Telara.

If you’re an MMORPG fan and you’re bored and looking for something new to play that does offer you a new gaming experience that is pleasing to both your eyes and your ears then Rift is well worth checking out.

Recommended Specs

Windows XP or higher
Core 2 Duo 2.2 or better
4GB of RAM
15GB of hard disk space
Nvidia GTS 250 or higher
High speed broadband connection