Rift Review

Rift is an MMORPG developed and pulished my Trion Worlds. It is set in a fantasy world called Telera. The are mysterious rifts which monsters are eerging from and destroying the world. Along with these came Regulos the destroyer, a powerful being who overthrew everything. The lone survivors of this desolate world created a new breed of fighters to battle the evils which came to Telera. The player plays as one of these new creatures.There are two origins to pick from when you’re creating your character. You can be a guardian or a defiant. Guardians have a desire to be a great celestial hero and to save the world from corruption. Defiants on the other hand have turned away from authority and have taken matters into their own hands

There are three races each with different strengths to choose from for each origin: Eth, Kelari and Bahmi if you’re a defiant and Dwarves, High Elves and Mathosian if you’re a guardian. The Eth are clever and resourceful and use magic and technology to tame their enviroment. The Kelari are elves and powerful magic users. The Bahmi are hospitable tribesman who excel in art and war. The Dwarves have a desire to build and create and built the first cities. High Elves are magic users who protect their enviroment and Mathosians use weapons and value loyalty and hard work.

There are four callings to pick from: warrior, mage, cleric and rogue. Warriors are front line fighters, mages are spell casters and clerics are spiritual experts, both of these use magic in different ways. Rogues use melee and ranged combat to fight.Within your calling you can pick a purpose. This is a specialization which specifies what kind of magic you use or how you fight. I picked to play as a mage so I could pick from gravelord, sage, pyromentalist or war wizard. Gravelords use death magic to battle, sages are healing mages, pyromentalists use elemental magic to summon creatures and fight and war wizard are powerful at incinerating large numbers of enemies. Obviously this differs with the different callings and I think it’s a nice way to incorporate different specializations into your calling.

The gameplay and controls are good and not too diifferent from most mmorpgs. When you start off tips are displayed explaining the basic controls but one thing I couldn’t figure out was how to talk to people, you right click to do this and it wasn’t displayed at the start but other this minor complaint the controls are easy to get the hang of. If you’ve played many mmorpgs before than you’ll pick this up quite easily.The interface is similar to other games I’ve played which is good as it’s easy to figure out how to play. There’s a map which always marks your current mission and the certain buttons bring up different tabs such as your inventory and skills. It can be hard to find all of these, if you were new to gaming or mmorpgs then you might have trouble finding everything but I realised gradually where everything I needed was.

I did find it a bit confusing to level up as you get points to spend on skills in a soul tree. There were three different branches for my character and two were different to the specialisation I chose in character creation so when I added points to these, all the points were invested in that branch and certain spells I was using were unusable as I had changed my specialisation.The graphics really aren’t up to standard with games of the same genre released around the same time. There isn’t a huge amount of detail in the textures or character models. I also didn’t find the game very atmospheric. The music was ok but I found the game just didn’t create an atmosphere for what could have been a great fantasy world.

The combat was good and you could unlock new skills, spells and attacks by leveling up. It’s quite easy to defeat enemies at the start of the game which is good for keeping people interested and getting practice in. When you die you respawn at certain points on the map but once an hour you can soulwalk which means you can respawn in the exact same place which is very handy.I think overall the game is good but not very original. It seems to draw from lots of other games and there isn’t much setting it apart. It has good aspects though, it has a good combat section and lots of choice with in the character selection. I liked playing it and found it easy to get straight into it without having to spend too long learning how to play. As I mentioned, the graphics and atmosphere are only ok but it’s still a good game and fun to play.

Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.