MU Online - Fifty more spiders, anyone?
Shame about the name... Anyway, MU Online is a fairly generic
hack-and-slash MMORPG, with the always-redeeming feature
of being free. Like many free online RPGs, it's still in
development, and has been for a couple of years now. It
can be downloaded from its website, installed and played,
even by people who don't own credit cards.
One of the areas where MU Online might seem a bit lacking
compared to other Fantasy RPGs is the limited character
creation. You have three choices to begin with; Dark Knight,
Dark Wizard (both male), and Elf (female). You'll unlock
a third character, the Magic Gladiator, when you reach level
220. You heard me, TWO HUNDRED and twenty. At this point,
you may just wish to keep going with your Level Humungous
character, though the Magic Gladiator is a nice combination
of the strengths of the Wizard and the Knight. At level
150, you get something of an upgrade, and you can convert
your basic character to a Blade Knight, Soul Master, or
Muse Elf. (You either love or hate the elf already, right?)
Your choice of beginning character decides where you start:
Noria for Elves, Lorencia for the other two.
All the characters of each type look the same. Fortunately,
the game compensates for this by changing the appearance
of your character when you equip weapons and armour, much
like Diablo. So, pretty quickly everyone looks different.
This is one of the game's strengths, actually: the variety
of weapons and armour is huge. You're always going to be
able to find something that's tempting enough to change
an old favorite for, rather than getting that cool sword
at level 30 and keeping it all game.
Also, the graphics are really good, especially for a free
game. The character models and monsters are detailed yet
animate smoothly, and the background are great. MU Online
even features a few of those great little ambient background
effects that just make a game, like wind that moves the
grass.
The sound, however, isn't up to the same standard. The
sound in pretty much any game gets annoying over time, especially
something you're going to play for hours. The monster and
combat effect sounds in MU Online, though, are something
special. Throwing the headphones special. The thing with
sound, though, is that unlike graphics, it switches off.
MU Online has innovative systems for dealing with some
of the perennial problems of MMORPGs. Too much player-killing
will get you branded a murder: merchants won't sell to you,
and if you should get killed by another player, you increase
your chances of dropping an item. (Somewhat oddly, killing
a murderer brands you a hero.)
Player balance is helped by the party structure system.
There are bonus experience points for any party that includes
all the character types. So that elf is going to come in
handy anyway. Also, you get bonus experience for each player
in the group, but experience is divided according to level.
So it's actually in high-level players' best interests to
drag along a couple of n00bs.
However, MU Online is worse than a lot of other games for
grinding. Simply, there is nothing else to do but kill monsters.
The developers have been working on this and adding quests
and special events, so it is improving. Largely, though,
levelling is going to come down to killing monsters over
and over again. Late in the game, going up levels can be
excruciating.
The server set-up for MU Online is a bit odd, too. There
are two 'global' servers, but also many private servers,
and the game is actually slightly different on each one.
It may pay to look around a bit first before signing up
to a server to see what suits you. Some, for instance, have
harder monsters but a higher item drop rate.
MU Online is nothing stunningly original. Gameplay is pretty
limited and repetitive, and while that doesn't necessarily
make it a bad game, it may limit its long-term appeal.
Overall Rating: 6.8/10
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