Knight Online - MMORPG Review

My character

Knight Online is a massive multi-player role playing game and a basic account is free.

If you love Medieval style role playing games and if you long for an online multi-player game that has real 3d graphics and all of the other great benefits of the online pay to play games but you don’t want to spend the subscription money or fifty dollars on the software then this might be the game for you.

The screenshot here is of my character in world so you can see it has great graphics akin to shadowbane or Final fantasy XI and the game play is similar. You explore the world, take on quests and battle creatures. Much like the upscale games you can group together with other people for extra experience points.

Bulkan If you have come here from the Heroic Dreams Blog and would like to see the screenshots from the game they are further down the page. Click here to hop down to screenshots

One of the unique things about this game is the choice you have to make when first logging in and creating a character. You have to decide whether to be of the human nation or the Orc nation. These nations are at war with each other and there are campaigns and wars that occur. Killing members of the enemy faction will give you points.

Once you have chosen your race you have four different professions to choose from: Barbarian, Warrior, Priest or Mage and each of these has sub specialties that you can develop with experience. This is a pretty standard setup that can be found in lots of games of this type. It also has the standard point awards that you the player distribute across different stats like strength and intelligence.

Game Play

I have been playing the game for a couple of days now and there are no real suprises. There are plenty of quest, which i particularly like. And there is a wide variety of monsters to choose from. It is fairly easy to find the next level of monster as your experience grows.

Extra stuff

This game seems to have a unique selling point in that you get to play for free but there is ample access to their power up store where you can buy specialized equipment, spells, items and the such. You can also upgrade your account to three different levels of subscription. they also seem to have a very active campaign schedule where special events occur.

The game home page says that the game started in Korea and spread to many different countries. They state that the game is played in 80 countries! there are about a dozen different servers you can choose from and their forum has over 50,000 registered users!

Software/Hardware

The game has reasonably low hardware requirements so even if you have an old system this game will probably run fine. I installed and ran the game with no issues at all.

Cons

Trying to understand what to do in the game was a bit difficult for the first hour of play. It really could use a better scheme for orienting new players. You are pretty much just thrust right into the world with no training and although you materialize in a safe city and there is no risk of pvp you still need time to understand where things are and what you should do.

Cons - game play

If you consider that this game is free then it should be rated a 9 or 10 but there are some small points that detracted from the game experience.

Lag was a bit of an issue when it came to moving and spell casting. Although I have to admit that lag is always an issue with any online multi player game.

The interface with all the menus for skills, stats, chat, etc. are a bit difficult to understand. This entire system is pretty good but still it takes an unusual amount of poking and experimenting to figure it all out.

Group Play

There are many players from many different countries playing this game so grouping starts out with a big minus in that you can’t easily communicate with your group members. Also the style of game play is very loose and there are groups and solo players everywhere. the monster spawn are all over the place so groups tend to be very loose and unorganized. With shadowbane grouping with other people is very disciplined - you claim a spawn and then your group works it. With this game the spawn are less well defined and the game play is more free-for-all.

Conclusion

Considering that the game is free I rate it a 9 out of 10. Way more exciting and realistic than most of the other free stuff out there.

If this were a subscription game I would rate it a 5. So my recommendation is that you get it for the free play and enjoy it. If you realy get hooked you can always opt for power-ups and subscriptions.

Here is the website where you can sign up and download the software Knight Online

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