OmeGGa Kollective: Rakion - Action/Fantasy MMO

Sometimes I get fed up. When I say fed up, I mean with everything. No, Im not a depressed or angry person in general, but I have my mood swings. So yeah... sometimes I get fed up with stuff.

Take MMORPGs games for instance. Last week, I got fed up with clicking on a monster, ordering an attack or a skill and having my character have all the fun of lifting his (actually her :) sword above her head and slashing the ears off of some orc. Over and over again... I froze; my character standing in the middle of the battle field, idle. The monsters paced idly around me, minding their own business.

My hands dropped off of the keyboard and mouse and hung beside me. I looked over to an immitation katana/daikatana that I have mounted above my immitation fireplace. "Looks like fun...", I thought. I got up and unsheathed the blade, holding it tightly with both hands by my midsection, dreaming up senseless monsters with 1/8 of my HP that might want some of this. I lifted the sword above my head and slashed downwards. "Feels good", I thought... "Feels real good!"

Time for something new. Time for some Action.

Rakion is a small game from publisher SoftNyx. Smallish downloadsize, smallish install size.

Download Size: 320 MB
Install Size: 550 MB

Action RPG, sounded like just what I was in the mood for. In this game you use the mouse slash the enemy and unleash combinations of attacks and skills. You are also equipped with a short range and long range weapon, which adds even more variations to your fighting style. The ability to solo or pvp in instanced maps, a standard RPG Gear system (buy new weapons, armors, etc) as well as Pet usage, that Im a sucker for made Rakion sound way promising.

A lot of promising games out there though... how many really deliver? Let me just tell you how my day went, playing Rakion, and you can conclude for yourself.

When you first start the client and choose your game (the other SoftNyx games are launched through the same client), you are presented with a list of several international servers that you can connect to:

On closer inspection however, you can see that there are only 197 users playing at that time, in the whole US/Canada. The game appears to be much more popular in Europe, where 626 users can be seen playing.

I really liked this server list, because I often wonder exactly how many people are playing the game I am on. In other MMORPGs that I have played, people often get dissapointed from some patch and leave the game or stop playing until they correct it - however its all just speculation and you can never tell. I am sure that the game developers keep this secret, so that blogs and websites dont give the game bad publicity: "...World of Warcraft user numbers are dwindling due to bad patch... " etc - and stupid titles like that.

So, there are a lot of promising games out there... but how many really deliver? Let me just tell you how my day went, playing Rakion and you can conclude for yourself:

Character Creation

There are five characters to choose from, giving you a pretty good variation for this kind of game. Here's what we got: Knight, Archer, Blacksmith, Mage and Ninja:

There are two weapons that each character can use. A close range and a long range weapon. Each character has unique strike combos that invovle combinations of left and right mouse button clicking, sliding and jumping attacks as well as a powerhouse GRIP attack, executed by pressing both buttons together. In addition, depending on the pvp game setup or map played, each character has a Chaos Mode - a superform that is charged up by killing enemies and that gives you great strength and abilities, which are different from your other attacks. So good variety here.

After selecting a character, the game takes you through a specialized tutorial where the various attacks and abilities are introduced to you. I liked this part. Kinda like a n00b map, only I can take as long as I want practicing. Since the game has skills that are released using button combinations, all skills are unlocked from the get-go, so you can easily spend 5-10 minutes trying to figure out tactics, like chaining attacks and figure out your own weak points (so that you dont have to do that in the middle of battle).

I picked the Ninja (was hot), the Archer (was hot) and the Mage (used fire spells, which are hot):

Gameplay

There are two game modes. There is a single player mode, in which you can attack monsters in dungeons and try to beat your previous best time, train your character - if you are having trouble getting owned in pvp - and generally have a fun time. As you progress and increase your level, you will gain access to more and more maps and gain the ability to beat your previous time, netting you more experience and cash to buy items. You purchase stuff from an Item shop attached to the welcome screen, btw. Lot of expensive things, so after a couple of hours of gameplay I was not in position to purchase anything at all, which was annoying.

The second game mode is the PVP maps, in which players can host a game and let others join them. Sounds great at first, since there isnt just one server ramping up lag for everyone and you should be able to find a game in your area.

...Ya think? Well, I live in US-Central and after 1 whole hour of trying to join a game I was rejected from each and every one, despite being on a T1 university backbone! I even tried to host my own game and let others connect to me, but after another hour that I kept the server instance open, I only saw a handful of users connect to me and get kicked cuz our respective speeds were too slow.

Conclusion

This game could be really fun. The gameplay, classes, slills and abilities were all fun and I would have loved to play against other people, which is exactly what the point of this game is. Unfortunately, I was not able to connect to any of the servers to try them out. I may try to play this again sometime in the future, if/when I move to Canada :)

I leave you with a sweet fanart of a Chaos Mage and my hopes that someone can maybe tip me off as to how to join in the action in Rakion!