Free MMORPG Review: Twelve Sky

Introduction

Twelve Sky is a free martial arts based MMORPG published by Aeria Games; the company also responsible for the famous free MMOs Last Chaos and Shaiya. With the success of Last Chaos Aeria Games are under a lot of pressure to keep standards up, but have they dropped the ball this time?

Storyline And Factions (2 out of 5)

The game doesn’t have much in the way of storyline – you’re taking part in a war between three factions (Guanyin,Fujin or Jinong) in China during the Middle Ages. Players can only communicate, trade and form guilds with other player in their faction. Once you choose a faction all of your characters will belong to that faction. Players can only become part of a different faction if they erase all of their characters. Each faction has a specific style of armour and fighting techniques associated with them.

The Guanyin have balanced defence and attack and use blades, swords or marbles to fight.

The Fujin are very fast but have low health and defence which means they wear the toughest armour. The Fujin’s weapons of choice are double swords, katanas and lutes.

The Jinong are slow to move but they are the strongest faction with the highest attack stats, their weapons range from light blades to spears or sceptres.

Graphics And Gameplay (4 out of 5)

The graphics and movement are the same standard as Last Chaos but Twelve Sky is missing one vital ingredient: direction. When you first begin the game there is no NPC to direct you, no obvious markers on the map and no guide to the controls. The player spawns in the centre of town with nothing to guide them. Venturing around town will mean you stumble into various NPCs – many of which don’t have quests for you because your level is too low.

Twelve Sky’s map is huge and filled with monsters. Monster drops are not as frequent here as they are in other Aeria Games MMOs. The best method of levelling up is to actually find an NPC with a quest and take it. As always, you can buy Aeria Points (AP) in the marketplace (which costs real-life money) and use them to buy items for your character.

Online Community (2 out of 5)

By far the most annoying part of playing Twelve Sky is the constant presence of bots and spammers on the chat system. Aeria Games have learned to keep bots and spammers to a minimum on Last Chaos and Shaiya yet they have destroyed the communication system in Twelve Sky.

There is also a huge air of elitism surrounding the majority of the higher-level players in the game. Most players are very unhelpful and unresponsive, especially to new players, which can make the game very frustrating considering the difficulty of finding your first quest. This is a problem that Aeria Games solved in Last Chaos by adding special benefits for players who mentor new players, which makes the elitism in Twelve Sky such a shame.

Conclusion

Twelve Sky has huge potential to be a great gaming experience but Aeria Games have not put enough effort into making it user-friendly. Having a beginner tutorial and an obvious NPC as a starting point in the game would make an amazing difference. Including some mentoring incentives for higher-level players to interact with hew players would also have a huge impact on anyone starting the game.