Today has been a great day. I've been having a rough time in EVE, so I decided to get back onto my feet and get into Archlord again, so I made a new character, on the same server. He's basically the same as my last one, Krist, but I wasn't happy with the name of the previous one, so welcome Urmokh

I've gone out there and done quests and grinded for most of the day now, and am just about to hit level 8. I'm hoping I can get to level 15 and beyond real fast, and get a taste of PVP in the game before my reviewer trial runs out, but if not I'll just buy a month.

Archlord is a game where you only get fun out if you put effort in, much like EVE, but I'm now extremely excited about finally getting a bounty on my head in two games ^^

More soon...

After a week or so of playing Archlord, it's time to tell you a few of the things I've seen of the game so far. I haven't spent enough time on it yet, but that was beyond my control ( real life issues ). What I have noticed, is that it follows a mould similar to a lot of the free, korean MMORPG's out there.

Namely, it doesn't tell you what to do at most places. It drops you in the middle of things, with no tutorial and giving you no idea of what to do with yourself. Whilst this is extremely annoying and should be fixed whenever possible, the game is fairly easy to pick up the basics of. It follows a similar design to World of Warcraft, in that you spend a lot of your time zipping around, having been told to kill 5 spiders or collect someone's stolen ring.

My main problem with the game so far is it's clunkiness. It has several missing animations in the movement, and the default movement method (the traditional WASD keys) are suicidal to use - they hardly work at all. Although I would prefer this method, the point and click movement is far easier to use in this case and is what I find myself slipping into. But the problem with that, is that the pathfinding is probably the worst I've seen in any game, ever. I'm not kidding. If you tell your character to run to a point in the ground 50 feet ahead of you, he'll turn around a few times and then run into a tree which will often not be easy to get out of.

The animations that are there, however, are extremely well done. The game relishes in it's slightly cartoony graphics style, and the animations are very impressive - similar to those of World of Warcraft. The graphics are pleasing, with several different options for scaling them up and down, and it helps you immerse yourself a lot.

The combat is what I've been doing most so far, and it's fairly fun. Nothing too different from what we've all seen before, but it has a style which can help to put you in the action, and I'm fairly impressed so far.

Tune in next episode...

Hey, I'm the latest blogger on the block here, I'm doing a review trial of Archlord and have been asked to post my experiences about it. I've started off as an Orc of the Warrior class (here called Berserker), and have so far got to the pitiful level 3 ^^ (under the name Krist on the Brumhart server). I'll post my thoughts about the game over the coming days and you should get some idea of what the game is like - from certain viewpoints at least.

In other MMORPGs, I've always been a PVP focussed person, and I expect the same to come from Archlord, but I haven't found out what the scene of PVP is here, or how to access it, so till then I'll have to try to research.

Anyway, that was the quick introductory blog, I'll see you all once something exciting happens.