Snap Judgment – Revelation Online

Last night I took a look at Revelation Online for the first time. I played for about 45 minutes. I don’t have much to say about it, except I didn’t particularly care for it.

It’s a solidly average anime-style MMORPG that takes no chances. It’s an Asian version of a WoW-clone. (A Lineage-clone?) I saw nothing that advanced the MMORPG genre in any way.

I didn’t think it looked that great. They went for a more cartoony cell-shaded sort of style instead of a more realistic style like Black Desert or ArcheAge. It looks a bit like that 2D style that you see a lot in fighting games. I didn’t care for it or the character animations. Everybody moved around like they were playing Mortal Kombat and did not need to obey the laws of physics.

I picked a Gunslinger class. I lost interest in the storyline within about ten minutes. It starts out with mundane tasks to teach you the game. You can literally have the game do the quests for you. It goes beyond simply auto-running to the quest location: It will actually kill the quest mobs for you, too. Is that the only way to fight bots in MMORPGs now? Build the bot behavior directly into the game?

Beware nuclear fallout.

It’s not very efficient if you let the game play for you, since it only uses auto-attacks. But the combat is so easy that auto-attacks are still overpowered. I saw nothing particularly interesting about the gunslinger combat (there was plenty of movement and flashes and sounds but it all just ran together), except one “grenade” ability that sort of looks like a mini-nuke explosion. You get way more combat abilities than you actually need at the beginning.

Double-tapping any movement key makes you dash about a mile in that direction. Double-tapping and holding forward makes you run like The Flash. You get wings so you can fly around, too, in case you get tired of running. I found it a bit difficult to control the flying. It goes so fast that if you blink you’ll zoom past where you’re supposed to go. And you can’t just take off and land like you’re accustomed to with flying mounts, you have to hit a special “fly” key.

Fly! Be free!

I’m getting bored just writing this. I wasn’t into this game at all. It was a big chore to play for 45 full minutes. :) There was nothing new or fresh or exciting to be seen, it was all “more of the same.” The environment was bland. The story was bland. The gameplay was bland. I didn’t see anything that might pull me away from a game I was already playing. Here are the only two things that really made an impression on me:

First, the game starts off in a window for some inexplicable reason, and I could find no way to change it. You have to go through the whole character creation and a cut scene and enter the world before you get to a point where you can configure the game settings to go full screen. (You can hit alt-enter to switch to full screen but it was the wrong resolution for my setup.)

Second, the idle animation of the gunslinger actually shoots birds out of the sky. Your guy shoots straight up like Yosemite Sam, and then some blue birds and a big white duck plop to the ground. It was pretty funny. That was definitely the highlight of my playing time.

In a nutshell, Black Desert, ArcheAge, TERA, and even Aion are all better Asian imports and I would recommend playing any or all of those first. Play Revelation Online if you’re a games journalist and have to play it to write a review, or if you’re a streamer and have to play new games constantly to keep your audience. Otherwise I could only recommend it if you’ve already played everything else and you’re really bored.

P. S. I did not see any bugs or connectivity issues typically associated with a launch, so there’s no worries there.