Good Value and surprising quality for a free-2-play, Item Mall game.

User Rating: 7.5 | Perfect World International PC
I've logged over 140 hours in this game so far and have a good feel for what is offered at the noob, grind, and end-game stages.

For the noobs, the game is a little hostile to find, install, and understand.

I'd say expect a pretty long download time for initial download and patching, but you'll need that time to hunt down and find information on the 3 races offering a total of 6 classes in this game and figure out what meets your play-style. The traditional classes are in here without any revolutionary additions: nuker, pet manager, healer, tank. The pet system is akin to that in a similar game, Rappelz, which was entirely pet-based.

After choosing and customizing your starting character, the game does a very good job of leading you around to the major game features and services. It even gives you small versions of the cash shop offerings to whet your whistle and tempt you into spending money. If I had a criticism of this early game it would be that it's too easy. You'd be hard pressed to find anything in the first 5 levels that is even capable of doing damage to you, let alone kill you.

Starting at level 30 you have had a taste of all the game has to offer. You can now fly from place to place and not pay the ridiculous teleport fees, that waste money that is all-too-scarce in the upper levels. At this stage you'll have access to all your staple skills, and will have figured out which you'll max out and which you'll leave behind.

Dungeon dwelling is instanced to your group, and the difficulty is ramped up by beefing up the hp of monsters for the champion, mini-boss, and boss category respectively. Your characters also suffer a damage reduction while in a dungeon to further tweak the difficulty. The balance is fair and makes the dungeon perfectly suited to a full complement of characters close to that dungeon's level, or two or more characters of twice that dungeon's level.

Dragon Quests offer dragon tokens that can be used later to acquire molds for legendary weapons or pets. It's a steep time and money investment, but in addition to its eventual reward, some minimal experience boost along the way. Majority opinion is that you're better off selling the items needed for the dragon quests, since you'll quickly find yourself money-strapped in the mid levels trying to pay the steep costs of skills.

The end-game is all about factions and territory wars. Factions get monetary benefits from holding territory. A territory can be taken over by a rival faction if that rival faction pays an extraordinary sum of money and the players in those factions battle over the territory in a scheduled PvP cage-fight. Other than the territory wars, which can be challenging and fun, there's not much depth in the end-game.

All-in-all, you can't beat the price, and it's good to see a free-to-play game that isn't a set of uber-characters that bought their equipment from the cash shop, and a set of crap-characters that refuse to part with their cash. The cash shop makes leveling easier, but doesn't sell equipment, so all those legendary items still need to be obtained in-game by both the rich and the poor equally.