This BETA game looks awesome! 
What else could you ask for??
Well, if you DO expect more from your games than just pretty pictures, you might be interested in these ugly little secrets popular reviewers aren’t telling you…
Graphics
Graphics in this game are gorgeous! The scenery, when available, is breathtaking for an AMMORPG, if just there were more of it. Unfortunately you spend a LOT of your time in really tight and often incredibly generic places, especially in the first 10 or so hours of your gaming experience. Even “outdoor” maps can be so tiny, they will give the claustrophobics among you nightmares.
While textures and lighting look great, animations seem clumsy and, I just have to vent this here, the developers not only look young, their approach at the female models is downright immature. Namely the physics of female torsos, apparently copy-pasted from a jello-simulator, paint the awkward picture of teenage boys portraying women as sexual objects.
Gameplay
Now this is where the developers proudly present their super fun combat system, as Skyforge consists of arguably nothing else.
To sum it up: “We spent massive amounts of time on:
- creating enemies, some with a lot of health, some with less health
- coming up with different generic, but flashy attacks with a linear path crammed on 2 mouse buttons to artificially inflate your combat choices
- the revolutionary mechanics that will occasionally let you move out of the way
- and all this without forcing the player to actively focus on the game, ever!”
What is there to brag about? Maybe the fact they left out healers?
While I personally welcome the challenge a healer-less game should add, as well as understand the disappointment healer-mainers will feel, how did replacing them with heal orbs that drop from monsters as you take down each of their multiple HP bars qualify as an improvement?? All it does is add to the illusion that you are actually doing something during combat, other than spamming your mouse keys. Now you will have to walk around and pick up orbs too, if you happen to lose health – oh glorious action!
Anyone who has played other AMMORPG titles won’t get blinded by the shine that attempts to cover the absolute lack of substance and freedom.
If you love those epic moments where you saved your own or even your entire group’s day with…
- a smart, high-skill, fast-reaction move, dodging or blocking a Big A** Monster JUST in time after recovering from a knock down
- a crazy assassination hit by teleporting out of an attack and into their backside
- prevented a group-wipe with a zone boss at 1% HP after an intense 30 minutes battle…etc, etc…
…well you can have all of that in games like Elder Scrolls Online, Vindicturs, Tera, etc… and even in many of the MMORPGs that entirely lack the action combat aspect. But…unfortunately not in Skyforge.
Yes, fine, some bosses have tactics. Every once in a while, after spamming your mouse buttons, you will have to move to the side, maybe destroy an object which spawned to shield the boss, or simply to get out of their AoE damage puddle, but…
Not This
Or This
Just This
Content
As mentioned before, combat is pretty much all there is. While I have neglected to add a few things, such as crafting and PVP, these parts of the game don’t seem significant enough to be mentioned at all. Good luck trying to find a Skyforge crafting video on YouTube or a PVP post that is not about how empty and/or broken PVP is in the current state of the game.
Admittedly: This game is still in OBT, needless to say that balancing and content are the least developed aspects for now, so no reason to hate on them.
But that brings up another problem. Shouldn’t bugfixing be one of the most important parts of CBT/OBT? How come nobody seems to know how exactly to report a bug in-game? The misleading bug-reporting function sends you on a round track, never actually taking you to the suggested feature! And I am not going to elaborate on how sad it is that none of the BETA testers in this game seem to know how to report a bug at all.
As for the equipment: Basically like the rest of the game. You get 2 weapon slots based on your class, the second one does not allow you to switch to a second weapon outside of your class’ capabilities, but merely boosts your class.
Then there are the 4 ring slots. To fill them you have the freedom to choose between 4 different types of rings, giving you the different stats ranging from something as boring as +damage to something as boring as +damage. No kidding that’s it!
The rest of what you would expect to be part of your equipment, your armor/clothes, is just cosmetic.
Besides a few outfits that you can pick up as you progress, you get 1 default class outfit and about 11 more, class-independent outfits which you can mix and match, coupled with a few different faces and hair styles and some more or less interesting body sliders; this might be one of the most disappointing character customization system I have seen in a MMORPG in a long time.
Verdict
I realize my critique is by no means nice, but who does it hurt anyway? Which soul will it crush if there was none put into this game to begin with?
I even feel bad giving it 3 stars, I personally think it is a blatant scam, luring people with a beautiful, empty shell by appealing to their desire for style, while at the same time deceiving them about content and mechanics.
Thus, the 3 points are for visual fidelity and the guts to throw something out on the market that puts some of us to sleep after just 10 minutes of “combat”.
