RATING:
Pros: Graphics weren’t too bad.
Cons: Boring content, boring combat, no player involvement required.
Gameplay: 2
Graphics: 7
Performance: 4
Overall Score: 4
We recently took some time out to try the free to play fantasy browser RPG Chaos by Joybit, we had played this game previously as a First Look but decided to give it a longer play through to try and get to the nuts and bolts of the game. Published for a Western audience by Joybit the game was originally developed for an Asian as is readily apparent by the types of features, mechanics and artwork (read: anime women with massive boobs). We’ve never really been big fans of these kinds of RPG’s, though do love RPG’s and MMORPGs in their own right, we do find these Asian style RPGs extremely grindy and have so much automated content. From our First Look we’ll say that Chaos didn’t seem to be that much different, but we figured we’d give the game a chance and plough on through to see what it might be like.
The major plus about the game is that it does actually look good, the graphics seem to be a mix of Torchlight meets Path of Exile, the models on the whole are pretty well designed, a little jagged around the edges sometimes but in many ways adds to that classic RPG feel. Environments in general and NPC still illustrations we cannot fault, they’ve been designed excellently and look impressive. The music isn’t all that bad, the quality is half decent, but our main issue is that there seems to be one single track in the main area that is constantly on loop and has now embedded itself in our minds for all time.
That’s about the best we can say about the game in all honesty, the rest of this review is going through the different features that we unlocked and experienced and telling you just exactly why they contributed to us not liking the game.
To start with was our issue with logging in; having already played the game we had an account and tried the numerous password variations we typically use but to no avail, but trying to make a new account confirmed that our email was already in use. Hitting the Forgotten Password link simply sent us to an expired/locked forum page that told us we’d need to log in to see the page… excellent. So we ended up having to make a new account and playing through the first 30 mins of content we’d already seen.
The character creation is more than lacking, typically you get at least the trinity of classes in these RPGs, instead we got a choice of two, more than that it was a choice between a Warrior and a Paladin, which are so closely related (both were melee wielding fighters with some magic use) that it seemed almost pointless giving players a choice. No character customisation, of course, instead playing a pre-generated character that looks the same as everybody else in the game, there wasn’t even a variation on different looks, the only thing that differentiated players between each other was their character name and the name generator threw out some pretty unheroic names made up from standard Western names (arise "PrunellaBerkley").
The storyline is an extremely odd fusion of Western mythology and religion, we see figures such as Hercules, Diana, Thor and the Angel Gabriel appearing, all revolving around the story arc of God disappearing and the “Asmodians” under the rule of Lilith rising up to destroy the humans. We’ve seen Demon invasions at the disappearance of the Gods and higher powers happens so often in these types of RPG’s it feels like a meme (most of R2 Games back catalogue: League of Angels, Stormthrone, Mythborne, Knight’s Fable have very similar demon invading themes). The story is mediocre and the localization into English is weak, though as another plus point in the games favour it’s at least not as bad as other games we’ve seen, so that’s something.
Once we got into the game it’s safe to say that it runs pretty badly, constantly jerking and lagging the performance just wasn’t up to scratch for a browser game, even to the point where we would encounter enemies whose graphic took a few seconds to load and we’d be fighting invisible enemies with a glowing aura around them. That said, being able to see your enemies wasn’t all that important as combat by default starts out completely automated, the moment you log into the game your character runs over and starts attacking the nearby enemies without any need for player input, moving from enemy to enemy and then to the quest NPC, etc.
The automation in the game, was of course optional, you could fight enemies by manually clicking them and attacking them with one of your two skills (you only ever get two skills and it seems like even when you hit max level there’s only 5 to choose from for both classes), but combat is so monotonous you’re more likely to get repetitive strain injury from clicking your mouse button all the time than gain any actual enjoyment. Similarly you could choose to move your character manually instead of using the auto pathing, but... well... what’s the point of moving yourself manually on the completely linear path when there is only one place that you can go to anyway? The game touts itself as being an Action RPG, the absolute lack of player involvement suggests otherwise and we can only presume that the developers/ publishers believe an Action RPG to simply mean explosions, heavy hits and fancy special effects in combat as opposed to any meaningful challenge.
In all honesty the biggest annoyance for us was that the game wasn’t fully automated, if you are going to have an AFK mode then that’s fair enough, we hate the system, but plenty of people want it so that’s fine and we accept it. However, it wasn’t fully AFK and it would happily blast us through combat, the storyline and talking to NPC’s (chat windows would close after 10 seconds if you didn’t click continue), and it would move around the game all completely automated; then it would hit a menu pop-up or some other inane task that forced us to interact... Basically the only time you needed to interact was to do the most boring pointless thing, so you literally had to sit watching the game play itself just because you had to interact with the menus every so often.
In our automated play through we pretty much managed to get up to and around level 25 with very little interaction with the game, every so often it would force us into one of the menus where we would have to upgrade an item, skill, mount, hero, all of which could essentially be the same thing but with just a different name. The battles won themselves, including the PVP which presumably was against players that were registered whilst not necessarily playing as we were still AFK in the fights. There was barely a moment in the game in terms of difficulty and then we hit a huge wall, the story arc campaign was suddenly too difficult to defeat (even with player involvement), so too was the Space Battle that was like a tower horde mode where both us and our companion NPC got smashed to pieces. Literally up to this point we barely lost any hit points in battle and now we were suddenly getting annihilated. Checking our gear we realised that we haven’t upgraded anything since around level 3, as it was completely unnecessary, and as we started to try and upgrade all our gear (which can be upgraded to the same level as your character) we were suddenly faced with cooldown timers saying that we had to wait 10 minutes to continue upgrading our gear. The game pretty much jumped from tutorial mode to Nightmare mode (albeit largely due to us not upgrading as we go, but as we said there was never any need). We could of course get past the cooldown timers by using gold, the premium purchase currency, but instead we decided to call it a day.
We were hopeful when we loaded of the game given that the graphics looked pretty decent and that it was an "action RPG" as opposed to the typical build a party and let them automatically fight, it seems like it actually is the very same kind of RPG, but they just labelled it wrong. With the bare bones of character customisation, a complete lack of player input and the same features and icon spam we’ve seen from these Asian RPGs, we can’t say we enjoyed our experience in the game at all.
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