Order & Chaos Online: WoW on the iPad
Yesterday, Order & Chaos Online was released by Gameloft. Gameloft copies any successful game concept it can gets it hands on, but does it so well that people don’t mind (heck, what’s wrong about bringing the best games out there to iOS, even if they are blatant clones?). Order & Chaos Online is perhaps their most ambitious game yet, as it’s basically World of Warcraft. Thor helps us all….
It’s a fully functional MMORPG, complete with a huge 3D world, 4 races, 4 classes, armor, weapons, magic, monsters and all you’d expect. $6.99 buys you the game and 3 months of online playing, and after that it’s $0.99 for a month, $1.99 for three and $2.99 for 6. On top of that, you can buy rune stones and gold pieces via in-app purchases. I have no clue what rune stones do and only seen gold pieces used for expanding the inventory, so at least they’re not requiring that costly currency that many places.
As for the game, it’s good. I’m not a MMORPG guy and have never touched WoW, but I thought I’d give this a shot. Graphics are excellent and the game is very advanced, including everything from a wordwide chat system and messages to guilds, teams, player-vs-player and so on. You start off as whatever race and class you selected and then make your way through the world by taking on quests and killing whatever needs killing to finish said quests. You’re going to be slaughtered a lot in the beginning until you get a hand of it, but after a while you’ll be using one goblin to beat another with.
The game isn’t bug free though, and some of the bugs are quite peculiar. First off, you’re using touch controls which frankly works very well in this game- more so than in any other 3D world game I’ve tried- but it has its drawbacks. For instance, if you suddenly need a potion while fighting you’ll likely be dead before you can navigate to one. Looting corpses can also be annoying as you try to select them and get only the virtual analog stick instead. Moving the camera is sort of the same thing, and you’ll end up accidentally selecting targets quite often when you’re just trying to look around. I can’t even count how many friendly, decorative squirrels and rabbits have died from an arrow in their ass as I accidentally select them as a target while moving the camera and instinctively shoot at anything that’s highlighted.
There’s also a lot of work to be done on the in battle/out of battle system. The game defines you as “in battle” when an enemy is attacking you or vice versa, and certain actions are either only available or not available while that’s the case. The thing is though that enemies auto-heal if you “run away”, that is get far enough away that you get the “out of battle” message. This is an issue for me playing an archer as I often run off to shoot them from afar (and we’re not talking THAT far here, you could still throw rocks at the enemy from said distance without using much strength) and suddenly the thing has healed. One of the minibosses in an early quest did this all the time, leaving me to fight the same health bar over and over until a bunch of players nearby decided to help out and the thing died too quickly to get away.
Team work is definitely going to help a lot here, which is basically what MMORPGs are all about. The first player who is designated “in battle” with an enemy is the only one who can loot the corpse afterwards, so often you’ll have groups of people who aren’t really teams or guils work together to kill a hard enemy one after the other (they respawn) until everyone has gotten the loot needed. If you have people to play with to form teams or guilds, that’s even better.
All in all, Order & Chaos Online is a great game and really shows how far the iOS platform has gotten, gaming wise. Here we have a game that give players a full MMORPG experience for a fraction of the cost of normal MMORPGs. Very well executed controls (for the most part) make you forget that you’re playing on a tablet and hours can go by as you sneak around shooting wolves in the ass to level up enough to take on that bloody troll that has killed you 28464 times. Check out the gameplay videos from YouTube below to see what it’s about.
