Age of Armor MMO 2nd closed beta

[Gilvan Blight]

MMORPG is offering 5000 of it's members access to the 2nd closed beta for Age of Armor, a Sci-Fi Transforming Mecha MMO.

You just have to log into MMORPG.com and check out this page:
www.mmorpg.com/betas/ageofarmor_beta.cfm

I'm currently downloading the client now, so I will let you know how the game looks.

Here is some info on the game:
" In the middle of 20th century of Western Time .Against the background of a wide-range of immigration among human being and of the disappearing of boundaries between races, one of the most influential revolutions broke out as gGlobal Independence United Governmenth, sponsored by a number of developed countries and based upon United Nation , comes to being .As time goes on ,more and more nations join the organization. And the first united government on the earth comes to exist in human being historyB

Human being have their own residences on the moon, on the Mars and on the astrospace. Living environments around these residences proved to be dissatisfactions .And authorities on the earth are discriminative of residents on the astrospace. The deteriorating conflicts ,based upon unfair wealth distribution, backward welfare system, resource distribution ,combine to give rise to revolt among residents on the Mars .They form their own government and make full use of robot-operating skills developed during operation time in the astrospace to defeat the army, equipped with backward weapons ,which is sent by Global Government"

www.aoaus.com/index.htm

[Gilvan Blight]

Alright a nice quick install on this one.

Have it running in another window so will comment as I try the game out.

First thing, first big thing, this game's english is some of the worst translating I have seen in a game. It's so bad that reading the into to the character types hurts your brain. It's like the just tossed everything into Babelfish Korean -> English.

Account set up was pretty much non-existant, you get an email when you sign up with a username and password, and you just use that to log in. No setting up an account, giving personal info or anything. That was a nice touch.

Once you are in you get 4 worlds to choose from, which are servers. The screen has like 50 of them, so it looks like they plan on being big. Each world has it's own background story and then lists what type of server it is, PK, RVR etc.

For the Beta only two are open. I chose the Earth vs Mars server which has Natives of Earth vs Settlers wanting Freedom on Mars.

Then get char creation. Seems it may be server specific which is cool, as I got to pick earth or mars. Choosing earth, I get three more options, Natural Human, Enhanced Human, amd Neo Human. Each has an engrish description but not much info to chose from as lines like "The conciousness of pilot can control armour optioinally" doesn't really tell me much to make a choice with.

A quick note: thus far the music is on a loop, a bad loop, with a definate start and ending. It's annoying.

After picking you get your typical pick a face screen and then get to spend 10 points on stats. The stats are Stamina, Reaction, Perception, Spirit, Willpower, Jugement, Intelligence and Charm. The number of 'social' stats is promising.

The characters have a very anime look. Like what you would expect from a Mech game. Think Gundam Wing with a bit more age on the chars.

Options for hairstyle and face, but not colours is odd. Only three different hairstyles, of various colours for one of the races. Only four different faces. Hmm at least for your out of armour character, everyones going to look pretty similar, though I think this will be like AutoAssault where your mech will define you more then what you look like in town.

Ahh found a way to change clothes... that at least adds more options. Each of the three races has a different look but they are all similar (I did chose human though). Okay chothes option sucks, only two choices. They better expand that.

Looks like the three races choices determine class. Enhanced Human appears to favour fighting stats. Neo human Perception and sprit, and natural human social and inteligence. Now backing out to swap to Enhanced human as a fighter is usually an easy choice to play for a first toon. Nope can't do it, they all look to girl/boy, back to natural human.

Wow they really want you to specialize. I decided to try taking a couple points in stamina and got: Wilpower, Judge, Intelligence and Charm are useful for human. Improving Stamina is useless to the Character. We advice you not to improve Stamina!

Next is a screen I can't figure out as the text hasn't been added yet. I think it's a list of skills but I'm not sure.

Next I make my Mech. Oddly there were 0 options here, they just had me click and drag pits onto a player map, like dragging equipment in Wow or Diablo. No options whatsoever. the game could have easily just went, here's your first mech.

Each bit has a ton of stats. Type, Max Armour, Max Energy , Electromagnatism resistance, Explosive Dmg resistance, Radar type, Radar Intensity, Needed CI, Needed Power -> that's just the head. Stats very by slot. There are 10 differnet slots to place bits in.

Wow that totally sucked. I finish everything, and get an error - "Name contains Illegal Character" then dumped to the world screen with no char made. That sucked

So second time. Chose Martian this time and was disapointed to see the same 3 races to choose from. Clothing is different but that's it. That is lame. Maybe other servers would have more options but I doubt it.

Seems the problem was the fact I named it Gilvan Blight and had a space. Finally into the game, and It's pretty nice looking.

Odd keys. Keys for attack: J K and L for Hand, left shoulder and right shoulder weapons. F and G for locking on. ZXCV and for targeting.

You get more xp when in a party.

Some rather nice help screens, one amusing one that shows you hot to get more powerful "The Relational Graph of Character and Armour" Of course it basically states kill monsters to get xp and level up to get more powerful, and kill monsters to get more armour parts to upgrade and get more powerful, so that you can kill more monsters to get more armour and xp. But that's pretty typical of an MMO

Here's a shot of the first thing I saw in game. This is compressed of course, it looks quite a bit better irl.



The totorial was uber short, just kill three thigns and then get warped to town. Combat consisted of targeting baddie then clicking to attack. then waiting until target was dead.

Okay no mouse walk is driving me nuts, you have to use wasd to walk.

There is an always avalible shop screen. This leads me to think this will follow the Korean Pricing scheme. Where the game is cheap to free to play and you can pay real cash for in game items and power ups (like double xp for one hour).

Got a ton of free stuff from the first npc, guessing it's for the beta. Lots of healing itesm and bonus xp items. And a huge gun, all say "For Game Event"

Wow I thought the game start Engrish was bad, way worse when talking to npcs.

Will play for a bit then report back when I have figured more out.

[Gilvan Blight]

Okay very quick report.

The Engrish really really sucks. You can't even figure out what you are supposed to do on misions due to the horrible translation. What makes this even worse is that it't not 'meant to be' a grind game. You get way more xp for completing tasks for npcs then you do for spending an hour killing stuff around your level (which would be great if you knew how to complets those tasks).

Enhancing your original Armour aka Mech really sucks. It took me at least 4 plays to figure out how to build a better mech. This was mainly due to the fact that the starting mech bits can't be 'redesigned' aka removed from your mech to replace them with a better bit. This means that to improve your initial mech, you need all of the bits just to make something you can use. I don't have the game open, but this is like 10 differnent bits from the head and torso to the legs and co-processor. Now you can use n00b bits you can get cheap, but then you can't upgrade those later. This makes early gameplay difficult and confusing as the chalenges get harder but you can't figure out, or even if you can figure it out, can't find the bits to make a new harder mech.

Biggest problem so far though, beyond the mech building issue. It's all pretty boring. No exactly sure what they got wrong, but you just kinda run around, and then hit J K or L to attack, then heal up and repeat. The kinda neat mechy thing is J is your hand weapon, K your right shoulder and L your Left, but stil you just hit it and watch the enemy take damge. Sure the mechs look kinda cool, a good mix of Gundam meets Transformers, but the rest is so far uninspiring.

So my rating thus far would be: still definately in the works, a pretty cool looking mmo but the only thing they do different is that the charters are mechs, nothing else has changed. This may have been a cool enough reason to try a new game, but there are so many issues with english translations and incomplete text verbage that the game turns into a sub par beat 'em up that can be found in every other mmo.