Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising Review

Titans Quest and Age of Conan just made a baby, and it’s called Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising. So is the game any good? The gaming community has been avidly following Gods & Heroes for a couple of years now. It was certainly an interesting-looking title, but was it really one to follow? The short answer is no. Firstly, the game feels very dated. I don’t just mean by MMO standards either, but rather the game as a whole.

The first thing you might notice after logging in is the graphics. I’m not usually one to complain about a game’s visuals, but if the visuals aren’t even functional, then I’m going to have an issue. The graphics feel old, and what I mean when I say this is that there isn’t enough color in the world, the environments feel bland, the characters look very goofy, the textures appear blurry and the lighting is all around non-existent. Now if these points didn’t hurt the game enough, often times the graphics will bug out with texturing popping, light flickering, shadow clipping (through other objects) and broken animations.

 

I believe in order to survive in the MMO market you need to either bring something new and exciting to the table, or follow the traditional MMO pattern but do it VERY well. One example of the latter would be the recently released RIFT. They attempted to change things up with dynamic events but kept the traditional MMO structure. Gods & Heroes also endeavors to keep the basic structure but fails on the first impression. The bottom line is that Gods & Heroes needed to keep their graphics up to date in order to maintain that lasting appeal.

Just to clear things up before moving on. No, I do not think a game has to be pretty in order to be good.But the game DOES have to support itself with solid gameplay which Gods & Heroes does not. The game gives you the typical option to play one of six classes (two of which are currently locked). Each class is pretty standard. You have your warriors, healers, magic users and rouge classes. I played as the melee DPS class because I like to wear big armor and deal serious damage. I also rolled a secondary mystic class, which acts as the general spell caster. After you choose your desired class, you can then customize their facial features and choose an alliance. Neither alliance is really good nor bad, but depending on which one you choose you will receive slightly different perks and, more importantly, a unique list of companion characters you can acquire. More on this later.

Once you’ve jumped into the actual game world, you’ll likely find its ambiance very familiar. All your characters’ skills are pretty much standard and share most stats/descriptions with any World of Warcraft ability. Mages will cast fireballs while warriors will take bigger swings. That would be fine and dandy if  the skills weren’t so boring! In a game like Aion or World of Warcraft, skills and abilities are played up with flashy effects and cool animations. Gods & Heroes, not so much. Most of the animations in the game carry the off-chance of breaking or not triggering at all. Meanwhile, almost all the skills I actually got to use lacked the sparkle you would find in any other MMO. It’s fine for a game to add a realistic grit, but there’s a certain way to do it. Age of Conan is more life-like than not, but it adds hefty blood effects and cool finisher moves.  Gods & Heroes attempts to do the same thing with much less success. When using skills, your character will have a random chance to kill an enemy with a special kill move animation. As cool as that may sound, these animations are unfortunately sloppy and unless you’re fighting a single opponent, they often get you killed. Unlike Age of Conan, there are no bonuses for executing one of these moves and there is zero skill involved in performing one. To add insult to injury, once you’ve started the animation, that’s it; you’re stuck until it’s over and will be vulnerable to any hits dealt within those few seconds.

When picking up a quest in Gods & Heroes, just look for the exclamation mark. If you know questing, then this game will be no different to you. The only difference between questing in this game and questing in most other recent MMOs is that this is much more painstaking. Gods & Heroes will give you little to no direction when accepting a quest. You almost always have to read the full description, which are never the most entertaining things to scour over no matter how the game rates overall. Then, once you actually know where you’re going, it turns out that all you had to do was kill a mob around the corner or some other simple task completely unworthy of your time. The majority of quests you will face are simply “slay this” quests, which tend to get very dull and disappointing. It also doesn’t help when the rewards for doing these quests seem to be completely random. Experience point distribution is all over the place, never consistent and often a let-down.

Now for the good part of this mess of a game: eventually, quests actually become worth doing. Throughout the game, players will have the opportunity to earn companion characters. These companions act as your little sidekick. They all have their own abilities and class type attributes. As you progress through the game your companions will progress with you. These guys are very useful, especially if you want to solo certain things. So, essentially, if you’re a DPS character and die often, you can bring a healer companion with you on your travels to insure your safety. In order to obtain new classes and better henchmen, you can do certain quests that will unlock them in your party selection screen. The whole companion system can be easily related to Guild Wars although Gods & Heroes’ take is much less elaborate .

Apart from this added system, the game is otherwise generic beyond belief, and not in a very good way. The mobs are repetitive, the quests are boring, the skills are lackluster, the graphics and bland and dated and the game as a whole feel unpolished. A small reprieve involves the game frequently throwing large and interesting enemies at you. This does keep the game slightly interesting, but only enough to find out what the next large monster might be. That alone is not enough to warrant a full price and a monthly fee. Hopefully, in the near future, we will see some large updates to the game in general and just maybe give us a glimmer of hope that this game could one day compete with the rest of the market. Until then, I believe that Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising should be a free to play title and remain a “pass” on everyone’s MMO list.

Rating: 5.5/10 – Very Mediocre

3 Comments

  1. After reading this so-called review, I come to realize that, you must be new to the mmo universe. This review was completely biased and alot of half truths, yes, SOME animations are broken, and SOME graphics are alittle dated, but compared to wows graphics, it is far superior. I find it funny that you think combat in wow is more flashy, all wow does is you see your character swinging a weapon so slowly that most people end up falling asleep, age of conans combat was very well done, but comming from the beta of conan and countless other mmos, that, you probably didn’t know they existed, had alot of broken animations from the start. I find it appalling that you call this a review and yourself the reviewer, everyone knows, that a mmo is like a fine wine, it gets better with time, this is not a review, but some rant by
    Some person who has no idea what a mmo is or how they work, grow, expand. Next time before you give a ” review ” get through the newbie zone and play the game, or better yet, don’t play the game and let the players review the game themselfs because , we, they have more mmo experience then you. You might want to find youself anew job, perhaps flipping burgers? I rate this review a 2.3/10 utter failure!

  2. I take issue with two things:

    1. The graphics are not “blurry.” I suspect you might need to adjust your graphics settings. If your gameplay does not resemble the screenshots (which look very good), something is wrong on your end.

    2. The Minion system is, without question, more elaborate that that of “Guild Wars” There are 100+ minions to collect, each with different feats and abilities. It allows for tons of different combinations and strategies.

    Personally, I liked the more subtle spell effects and animations. When every sword swing sends you leaping into the air, followed with a fireworks display – it gets old. The animations and effects fit the overall aesthetic quite well. God Powers, however, do have some spectacular effects – setting them apart as the powerful attacks they are intended to be.

    You didn’t address the God Powers or the Estate system in your review. This leads me to believe you did not get very far into the game.

  3. I agree walrus, it’s reviews like this that piss me off, they get to levels 4-5 and comment on the game as a whole .

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