I really was excited about this game I love exploring big worlds and really like the concept of a story-based, cooperative multiplayer universe. So I jumped on this and paid the $24.98 gladly. Here are my impressions after about 4 hours of gameplay. Pros: It is beautiful; reminiscent of Myst a bit. Love being able to shapeshift. The music and sound effects are lovely; I like hearing the crunch of sand under my feet and hearing bird and animal sounds in the jungle. The language system is intriguing; you come across stones with glyphs, word symbols. You get a definition, a spoken pronunciation and how to draw the symbol. It is a bit unclear how to initiate a conversation with another player.. I couldn't seem to figure it out. Cons: it needs a tutorial. The 'unique' map and shapeshifting and ?language? cave you get when you press triangle button is quite unclear. You can approach transformation stones to transform; but you can't seem to interact with the language glyphs? The game freezes frequently; so often that the menu button has a 'can't move' button that restarts to last auto save. About every ten minutes, the game quits completely. Usually when you go back in, it starts from last auto save, but after about 3.4 hours of constant quits, it just restarted from the beginning and I lost all progress. Bon manual save, either. The camera view frequently glitches with the landscape. While playing as the amphibian, the view kept switching from the sandy beach I was walking on to an underwater view, as if the sand was the surface of the ocean. With all of the three characters I have found (the woman with gills, the amphibian lizard and the Entlike tree form) you frequently become entangled in walls of buildings, rocks, piers and other obstacles. And I do mean entangled- part of you ends up on either side of a solid object and you can't move, then the game quits. Frequently, characters walk or swim on thin air, or walk into the middle of a rock instead of on the surface of it. I can't recommend this until it is thoroughly patched. If it was a free beta; I'd cope. But I paid full price to feel like a very early beta tester. The game is almost unplayable as it is. I will definitely keep trying to play it; and sincerely hope that after some updates I can return and give it a 9 or 10. We need more beautiful nonviolent online games. It has promise!
