Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Dashed Hopes, 10 Jan 2008
Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars
I really wanted to like Tabula Rasa. I bought the game, loaded it up, and uninstalled it three days into my trial subscription.
The key problem with Tabula Rasa is that it's not really an MMO. There's very little interaction between players, and most of the players I encountered were immature and not much fun to be around. Because the game has a military basis, there's very little distinction between players - everyone is wearing some form of battle armour, and it's impossible to tell if someone is of a higher level than you from their appearance, just as it's virtually impossible for you to stand out as a better player in that way. Given that the basis of most MMOs is, to some extent, a loot-and-show-off one, Tabula Rasa doesn't really fit with them.
The combat system has been well-reviewed, but after a few days, it starts to grate. Most characters seem to play in a very similar way, and combat revolves around repeatedly clicking on enemies. There's more to it, of course - you need to crouch to steady your aim, and fire from behind cover to reduce damage - but in my three days as a soldier I never once had to use any tactic other than crouching in front of a group of enemy soldiers with a chaingun and holding down my left mouse button until they were dead. There's no sense of challenge in the game, and since combat boils down to repeatedly clicking on enemies with less AI than a carrot, it gets old quickly. The reasoning behind the combat system was, clearly, to escape from the usual MMO mechanic of click-the-attack-button-and-watch-your-character-do-it, but it fails because it somehow manages to be more dull and less involved than that system.
What else ... right, equipment and crafting. The crafting system is a joke, revolving essentially around producing upgrades for weapons and armour that nobody will know you have and that you don't really need. The game also expects you to invest ability points gained at level-up to improve your crafting skills at the expense of your combat ones, which is ludicrous - the only way to be a very good crafter is to set up a dedicated crafting character, but having invested every ability point in crafting at each level-up, the game would become incredibly difficult as your combat skills would be weak.
Technically, the game is laggy and a resource hog - I have a dedicated gaming system that hasn't struggled to run anything released in the last year, including other MMOs with vastly superior graphics, and I experienced regular stuttering and lag. There's also only one European server, which is generally somewhat crowded and thus has additional lag. This is the first MMO I've played that expected me to wait in line for a place on the only server the developer could be arsed to set up.
Finally, the community. In my experience over the last week, Tabula Rasa doesn't really have a community. The general chat channel was full, every day, of fanboys arguing the relative merits of the XBOX 360 and the Playstation 3. I have no idea why. The one or two people I met to group with were friendly, but there's no general community and no real meeting places for players. Coming to Tabula Rasa after another MMO with well-implemented community functions - Eve, World of Warcraft, and Lord of the Rings Online all come to mind - highlights dramatically just how isolating Tabula Rasa is. In the above games, I felt like part of a community of gamers even when playing solo, and would occasionally run into another player on the same quest as me and form an adhoc group. Tabula Rasa? Hardly ever met another player, none of them spoke to me when I did, and the only groups I managed to come up with were from a looking for group message in amongst the Great PS3 Debate.
I'm sure that Tabula Rasa could have been rewarding if I'd stuck with it for a few months, levelled up my character some more, and waited for the game to be improved, tweaked, refined, and generally turned into a decent title. Frankly, though, why should I - or anyone reading this - waste their money and time in the hopes that sometime in the future, this will be a decent game?
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
What a disappointment, 20 Nov 2007
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
This game looks good, feels good, and IS good. Nice GUI, interesting story line, no real feel of grinding through the layers, you need to think about what you are doing... it is all wonderful until it goes wrong.
I have a decent gaming PC, top end last summer. It should run this without problem. But:
The game locks. Or the game runs too fast. The game stops letting you use some commands. The server claims to be unavailable, even though it is there. I have had to uninstall and reinstall 3 times. That means repatching too. Forum searches imply that others have had the same troubles, but noone has the answer. Account support is more complex than the ingame puzzles (up to level 10 at least) and I'd rather play a game that works.
A sad waste of time. It is the first game I have ever sent back for refund. I accept it if a game is not to my taste. This game really is to my taste, but the uninviting support and in game problems are too much. I might come back in a year and see if it is fixed.
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18 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best, 17 Oct 2007
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
Ok, firstly I am writing this review on the basis of the Open Beta test and the first few hours of play, but I am not writing it before the release having yet to play it. It is in essence a preview but for lower levels the Beta is relativaly bug-free and gameplay is smooth. I envisage few changes to this stage before the game ships in a couple of weeks. Being as it is a constantly evolving online world, this review may well be out-dated soon as the game is patched and transformed according to consumer demand. However, I have tried to mention few specifics and review the basic framework of the game as I perceive it.
Tabula Rasa is a science-fiction Massively Multiplayer Online Game (often MMO for short, though also MMOG) set currently on two planets in an unknown area of the universe. The story is summarised in the product description, but this sci-fi theme essentially means using guns instead of the more traditional swords (in this type of game), and using 'Logos' (some kind of psychic power) instead of the traditional magic. Don't let this fool you into thinking, however, that differences are merely skin-deep as game makes use of a few innovative systems to incorporate them effectiavely.
If you have never before played an 'MMO' then this game may to some extent drop you in the deep end at the start, through a combination of minimal explanation and adrenaline stimuli which cause you to ignore the information that is given. Hopefully, however, that sparked your interest. Unlike many MMORPGs (MMOs in the Role-Playing genre), this game focuses on quick kills and often numerous enemies, and the indistinct targetting system (in short, you don't set a target and let the computer fight it for you) gives the impression, at least, that what your character does is basically only what you tell it to do.
If your reading this having played any MMOs before, and considering a new purchase, Tabula Rasa compares well against the initial stages of other games. The previous comments about ammo relate to an issue that has either been resolved, or never existed: Ammunition is cheap and readily available from numerous supply officers. Anyway, in terms of combat gameplay which of course takes up most of your time online, it's basically a matter of pointing your character towards an enemy with the mouse, and then left-clicking to fire shots, while 'logos' and other abilities are selected by cycling through different abilities with 'E' and fired, or used, by right-clicking. Similar controls, in fact, to a third-person action shooter.
This sounds simple but the complexity lies in the different tactics presented by different enemies, and these are well varied. A good early game example are 'shield drones' which require you to run right into the enemy group to destroy the drone before the enemies around it can be hit. Of course other games have highly tactical combat (not least World of Warcraft, or 'Wow', the first major hit of the genre to which all MMOs are now inevitably compared). However, this game combines these tactics with a action-intensive fast-paced combat system, in my opinion one level up on WoW. It is not a full first-person shooter, as damage is calculated to some extent through dice rolls (though also according to distance in some cases), but the combination actually works well. Massive battles are manageable and don't demand too much, while any lag is not as devastating as, say, in Planetside, a full-on first person MMO in which internet lag in large battles causes player warping and can ruin the experience.
This game is easily the most varied and interesting MMO I have yet played, and the first in which i often find myself forgetting that my character actually levels up at all. Levels determine the general strength of a character and the abilities she can use. Higher levels = better. Levelling, as a quick aside, often turns into a monotonous process in many MMOs, as players place themselves in an area and click on monsters, repeating the perfect sequence of abilities before moving on to the next monster, to maximise levelling rate. Here this game has so far bucked the trend, and for that alone it shines. I find myself wanting more enemies to kill, but the designers, in their genius, offer them as a kind of treat so that you hunger for more. This may be a strange personal affectation, but it's only one among many elements that combine to make Tabula Rasa a cut well above the average. If you don't feel put off by the monthly fee, a common feature of most large-scale MMOs, then this game has the widest and deepest appeal, from the parts I've seen, of any MMO yet.
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