Maple Story - Do it Sideways
 It's
rare for any game to approach its genre from a radically
different angle. People approach a first person shooter
or an on-line RPG with certain expectations of how it will
look and play, and very few games make you blink. Maple
Story is serious double-take territory. Yet when all's said
and done, it's less different than it looks.
Maple Story is a free MMORPG. The first thing you're going
to notice, after the bit where you didn't have to fork over
any cash, is that it's side-scrolling. It's more like an
old platform arcade game than a standard RPG, in play as
well as graphics. It's strongly reminiscent of Super Mario
Brothers, Ghosts and Goblins, that kind of game, except
of course the graphics are better. And it isn't just the
time you spend staring at the right-hand side of your character
as you run along. You're going to be jumping, a lot. Jumping
from platform to platform, climbing ropes, crossing bridges,
failing to jump over monsters...
 But
to cut to the chase, this big 'feature' of Maple Story is
also one of the things that lets it down as a game. Being
side-on DOES affect the gameplay. You know how crowded an
on-line RPG can get, right? Now imagine you can't go past
anyone. If you're trying to go somewhere, and there's another
player in your way doing two points of damage a round to
a massive monster for half an hour, you have two choices.
You can sit down and wait, or you can run in and kill-steal.
KSing starts to look good even to players who wouldn't normally
dream of it. You can't go around monsters, either. If it's
in your way, you can fight it, or try to jump over it, which
is probably going to get you hurt anyway.
 Perhaps
fortunately, there isn't much questing in Maple Story. Or
at least, the quests don't take long to do compared with
how long it takes to go up a level once you get to about
level 25. Because the quests will only take a couple of
hours, you end up with a lot of level grinding, killing
the same monsters hundreds of times just for the XP. And
possibly kicks. There is a pretty straight-forward and functional
party system, and while you can play the game solo fine,
partying up does help deal with that annoying kill-stealing
thing.
Character creation isn't enormously customisable, but there
is the pretty much standard variation of being able to mess
with hair and change clothing and equipment as you go. Still,
when you first start playing, you'll see plenty of clones.
There's a wee tutorial on Maple Island, and then you're
off. Once you reach level 10, you get to choose your job.
This means heading off to the appropriate town: Henesys
for Bowmen, Ellinia for Mages, Perion for Warriors, and
Kerning City for Thieves. Each city has its own unique feel
in graphics and music, which is a nice touch. All professions
branch again at level 30.
The balance in the professions, though, isn't so great.
Mages seem to get better a lot faster than others early
on, so there tend to be a lot of them about. Other classes
come into their own later on, but a lot of players simply
never persist that long.
Bearing in mind that it's a free game, (and really free,
not a beta version of a pay-for-play), Maple Story is a
good game. The graphic quality is good, and because of the
style of graphics, the download is nice and small. The atmosphere
of the game is bright and breezy without being cloyingly
cute. The music is less irritating than a lot of RPGs, and
there's a good and often amusing variety of sound effects.
With one race and only four classes, replay value might
be a bit limited, and aspects of the game-play are irritating.
Basically, it's a good game to play for a while, while the
approach is still fresh and before the hard-core level-grinding
sets in.
Overall Rating: 7.5/10
Try it yourself here http://www.t45ol.com/play_flash_us.php?ID=1047
|
