Review: Aion

PC

By James Heffield / Tuesday, January 26 2010

It’s not often you get to engage in mid-air sword fights or fly through dusty canyons in a MMORPG, but in Aion, it’s all part of the fun. The addition of flight adds a whole new dimension to combat and massively expands game zones by allowing you to explore areas up cliffs or on top of buildings.

When you first load the game to create your character, you’ll have to choose between two opposing ‘races’ – the angelic Elyos or the more demonic-looking Asmodians. You can make your Elyos or Asmodian a warrior, mage, scout or cleric, and customise their appearance down to details like height, neck width and foot size. Finally, you can view your creation in all his or her glory, rotating them to ensure their haircut is just right and their bum doesn’t look big in those newbie training leggings.

Typical of the genre, you can expect to be emasculated when you start out. You’ll fight pitched battles against small lizards and struggle to overcome harmless-looking flying insects as you edge closer to completing schoolboy tasks like picking up veges for a local farmer.

Luckily, as you level up and gain new combat skills and magic spells, things get a little more interesting. You’ll work your way through wolves (called ‘Worgs’ in the game) and other creatures like sword-wielding spirits, before getting your first chance to engage in player vs. player (PvP) combat in the Abyss, at level 25.

Although we never reached these dizzying heights during our month of testing, we get the feeling that this is where the game could really come into its own as players are given the opportunity to battle opposing Elyos or Asmodians for control of Abyss fortresses and regions. NCsoft has provided plenty of different imaginative monsters and an unending string of mini-quests, but it’s the PvP that we feel is likely to keep players coming back to Aion.

You see, apart from flight, Aion plays much like EverQuest or World of Warcraft when you’re still a lower-level character, but with less downtime. An increased healing rate, particularly while resting, means you’ll be waiting around for seconds between fights rather than minutes as is the case in many similar games. The other timesaver is flight, which you can use once you reach level 10 and ‘ascend’.

The ability to fly also allows you to fully enjoy Aion’s breath-taking graphics. From glistening forest ponds to grand mountain ranges complete with waterfalls, it’s tempting just to stop and admire the view whenever you visit a new region. The battles are beautifully animated too and although there is no blood ‘n’ guts, the magic effects are varied and it’s just plain cool to see arrows remaining in a target’s body after you’ve hit them.

Perhaps the most graphically stunning aspect of the game is when you fly between villages with the help of a flight transporter – Aion’s version of a taxi. Instead of just teleporting to new locations all the time, you can pay a flight transporter to take you on a jaw-dropping flyover of the countryside. You can even watch other players rushing about beneath you as you flap on by.

One of the game’s few disappointments is the lack of AI creature movement and the absolute abundance of resources. The AI creatures repeatedly re-spawn in the same spot, and the abundance of resources tends to cut down on the social aspect of the game as you can play just fine solo without having to team up as often as you’d need to in other MMORPGs.

Fortunately, these small flaws don’t take too much away from the game and if you’re a fan of the genre, this one will have you ignoring your friends and neglecting your girlfriend for months.