Graphics/Environment:
I enter the game. It takes a good time to load the main area. About 2 minutes or so. Once I get in, it starts a cinematic where I was a slave traveling in some boat and we get attacked (it doesn’t actually show the attack, just a still image-kinda lame). Anywho, I’m stranded on this beach and some old guy walks upto me and talks a little bit about what happened, and where I am. He explains that I’m a slave, and I’ve been washed ashore this island which harbors a city called Tortage. I’m told that since I”m a slave, I have no chance to enter the city and will probably rot in the jungle (thanks old man).

So the cinematic ends and I’m on this vastly large island. The visual details are stunning, and there’s certainly a lot of vegetation and scenery that’s being rendered. Running the game on max settings, I had to adjust manually to about medium/high. I ended up running the game smoothly at 1920×1600:32 res with high textures, low shadows and bloom disabled.

The island is believable. The vegetation is very diverse, and there are some plants you don’t see twice. The water is beautiful and the reflections are very precise. The only problem is the fact that the water doesn’t really make a splash or ripple much when you enter it. In fact, you can’t really tell you’re swimming to be honest. The swim animation isn’t very believable and the water doesn’t contract with you in it. It’s kind of like you’re flying.

The vegetation is another thing too. Although beautiful and diverse, it does not interact with you walking through it. Only the wind, which is the same as far as I can tell. There also is no wildlife as far as I can tell. I didn’t see any birds flying around, or fish in the water, or other jungle type animals, other than these crocodile NPC’s that attacked me which leads me to my next complaint.

NPCs/Combat:
The AI sucks. It really does. The NPC’s aggro you without line of sight. I figured in a game that was touting realism, maybe I could sneak past these crocs sun bathing? Nope, no way. On top of that the NPC’s really didn’t even have a path to patrol. They just sat there in obvious bunches, like the Royal Guard. They hardly have any idle animations other than a few head turns or so. Completely unrealistic. Animatronics at Chuck-E-Cheezes are more believable than this.

Next is the combat system. In AoC you don’t just auto attack. Infact you don’t auto attack at all, you must press a button to attack. You have 3 basic ways of attacking. Swinging left, thrusting forward or swinging right. While this sounds like a good idea on paper, in practice, it seemed to be completely random and have very little effect on the battle. When you target an NPC, it gives you arrows indicating which direction you should attack, and even after following it and doing my own thing, the battles resulted the same way. The weapon my class started out with was an oar. Yes, a ship oar. In fact it wasn’t even a full oar, it was broken.

Sometimes I could kill them faster if I just thrusted forward instead of following the arrows. The only real advantage was when there were multiple enemies, I could do “AOE” damage if I swing left or right depending on what side they were on.