We take a spin through the early content of PWE's newest title!

Ah, Perfect World Entertainment (PWE). I have a love/hate relationship with the US subsidiary of the Chinese Perfect World company. This will be the fifth game I’ve played from them (others are Ether Saga Odyssey (ESO), Forsaken World (FW), Rusty Hearts, and Champions Online), and it falls into the same genre as ESO and FW. Players take the role of a character attempting to revive Odin and save the world, and we find a lot of the same mechanics present in other PWE games with some uniqueness as well. If we’ve held your attention so far, read on for our review!

The graphics: Not too shabby, although customization options are a tad limited.

A review of a free-to-play game encompasses many aspects. In the same vein as a single-player game you have graphics, music, and content. Typical to F2P MMOs you have player interaction, the effects of the cash shop, and soloable/party areas. I’ll start this review with an aside about how I see the differences between “eastern” and “western” MMOs. Thanks to PWE, I now equate most of their games as “Eastern”. In a game like, say, World of Warcraft, the leveling starts off pretty quickly. Players will gain their first level within minutes, and within hours will be 10 levels in and have acquired several new abilities. While the game slows down, it still retains a relative speed until a much later date (say, 80 levels out of 85 maximum), when it slows down again to force a player to go through its newest content. Maybe War of the Immortals does this as well. All I know is that within 4 hours, I had hit level 45 and had FLOWN through the content. In the first 20 levels, every quest had leveled me up (this included quests that said “Walk 20 steps and talk to the quest-giver”). I didn’t hit a wall on leveling quickly until about 3 ½ hours in and level 40, when the next quest informed me “You need to be level 41 to accept this quest!” Well dang. Time to stretch my legs and review what had happened.

Lighten up on the "Thou's" and "Thine's" please?

First, there’s the story. Welcome to War of the Immortals (WOTI)! The game boasts 3 regions with several servers each; and once you’ve selected your server, you have a chance to make your character. WOTI has eight classes total; the only restriction is the Enchantress class, which is female-only… a feature I disliked so much that I made a Heretic called EnchanterX. Heretics for gender equality (but seriously; Beta reviews said the class was enchanter. I have no idea why they changed it to female only). Anyway, starting my Heretic threw me immediately into a story of Norse mythology; Valkyries flying around helter-skelter in a summer swelter, shouting that Odin needs reviving and Loki is coming back to stir up trouble. Ok, I can go with that story. What threw me for a bit is when you get out of the immediate introduction and NPCs are throwing around “Use Apollo’s arrow!” Uh… I thought we were going with Norse mythology, not Greek. Trying to deduce the where, why, and how of the storyline quickly becomes convoluted and tedious. Suffice it to say, you’re a hero, you do quests, and get stronger.

A dramatic cutscene, made less dramatic by poor speech bubble type-setting

How exactly do you get stronger? First, through leveling up. Levels come quickly and easily in the beginning; NPCs assign you quests, you finish them, and voila! Instant levels. As in most PWE games, you level much faster through questing than through simply grinding; but at times the quests contain much grinding. For example, at level 45 I have a quest that tells me to kill 60 enemies and I’ll receive 35,000 experience. Each enemy gives 450 experience (as I have a level booster active, this might change it a bit). That works out quite well… but that’s a repeatable (bounty) quest. Some main quests that advance the story line have something as simple as “Kill two Eye of Khars and the Servant of Khar,” which would award a piddling thousand or two of experience… and hundreds of thousands of experience when turning in the quest. Long story short, so long as the main storyline quests last, leveling is incredibly fast. They lasted until level 40.

This quest literally comes down to "Talk to this guy, get 217,000 experience." That's roughly equivalent to killing about 500 enemies.

By level 40, I consider the tutorial pretty much done. At this time the player has experienced the basics of battle, a good bit of the story, and even some instanced dungeons (specially, the Sunken Dungeon). The instances are actually rather interesting; while the Sunken Dungeon is done solo (scenery mode, as it is called in the game), later dungeons require groups to complete. Each of these dungeons can be done once a day, and rewards experience, coin (the in-game currency) and a strong equipment reward. Players also have the opportunity to choose the strength of the dungeon, thus allowing smaller groups to complete it if they cannot acquire multiple players.

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