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R.Y.L. (Risk Your Life)
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Developer: Planetwide Games RYL gives you the chance to select between two races, Humans of the Kartefant nation or the Orc like Ak'kan of the Merkhadian nation. Players are giving a selection of hairstyles and faces to customize their characters, the choices being pretty basic and fairly similar to one another. Humans must choose a starting class, either being a Fighter, Rogue, Mage, or Acolyte. Upon reaching tenth level they are then allowed to further specialize in one of two subclasses, usually focusing on offense or defense. The Ak'kan class is determined by the character's sex with the male Ak'kan taking the role of the more offensive Combatants while females take the defensive or support roles as Officiators. Once the Ak'kan character reaches tenth level they are presented with three classes instead of two for further specialization.
Players are given two modes to control their character. Mouse mode commands the player by pointing and clicking for movement, interaction and attack. Keyboard more controls more like a first person shooter, using the WASD keys for movement and the mouse for looking around. Both modes of control take some time to become fully accustomed to. I tended to wrestle with navigation in Mouse mode, finding it difficult to break away from an attack at times. Keyboard mode faired better overall, however lacking an option to invert the mouse look. Neither control setup allowed for custom key binding.
Once inside the game world you start standing at the docks of the God's Pirates city, which is the only city you will be seeing for a long time. The game doesn't offer much to point you out in the right direction. Key characters will have their name's highlighted but can be easily overlooked. It's easy to wonder off from here into an area full of monsters of much higher levels, thus getting you killed. Getting on track with the early quest will get you familiar with the shops and services of the God's Pirates. Level progression goes pretty smooth until about tenth level. From there quests begin to deteriorate into random goose chases, bouncing you around between the same four of five characters to relay messages. The quest then start getting few and far in-between levels, sometimes you'll finish a quest anywhere from five to ten levels away from being able to do the next quest. This forces you to spend hours level-grinding in the same bland fields, killing the same bland enemies that you've already been fighting. Once you're finally able to take you're next mission you'll most likely be sent back to kill those same monsters you've been grinding on, yay fun…..
PvP is the main focus of RYL. Players are able to form guilds and build fortresses that allow members to make purchases from these towers or respawn at these locations. They may also build siege weapons to take down fortresses established by other guilds. Unfortunately PvP doesn't really come into play until players reach high levels. The starting map is considered neutral ground, where players are not able to leave this region until you hit level 60. The only crafting comes in the form of combining and improving weapons or collecting materials for siege weapons. So between that, there isn't much else for players to do other than to go back to grinding to reach these levels.
Graphically the game doesn't push any boundaries, and design wise most of the player models and creatures just look generic, with the humans being the worse of them. You'll be hard pressed to find any real difference between a level 10 warrior and a level 50 warrior. The Ak'kan's designs are more original and unique. However, they still find the same problem the humans do, and end up looking far too similar to one another. A number of graphical bugs seemed to come up every now and then. At times objects on screen would either not display correctly or just not display at all. The Audio in RYL is mostly forgettable since the sound effects are average and the music feels out of place at times.
Evolution Factor: Low. The market of MMO games is already full of far superior titles. For those MMO enthusiasts looking for another game to try, you're time is better spent looking elsewhere. Even if you must, it's hard to justify paying a monthly fee for this game. Players new to the genre will find getting into RYL fairly difficult. It's not to say that RYL is a bad game, just an utterly average game at best. Even then you get the sense of only playing half a game. The basics are implemented; you are just never given much else to do. The lack of side quests and crafting means you won't be very busy in between the main quests. Making it worse is the fact that you'll be doing the same whole lot of nothing, all within the same area for far too much time. At least the disc can be used as a coaster.
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