ArchLord (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 1.0 stars Terrible
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 2.7 (1.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Andrew Park
• Reviewed on: 11/22/2006
• Released on: 10/03/2006
• Originally published on GameSpot: ArchLord (PC) Review

ArchLord can be summed up with two words: "dull" and "repetitive." Unfortunately, this game doesn't have anything to offer massively multiplayer veterans, and if you've been playing these games for a while, there's a good chance you've already found something better than this.

Like other games of this sort, ArchLord lets you create a single character to adventure in a persistent world, fighting monsters and performing quests to gain experience levels and in-game wealth to upgrade your character's items and abilities by purchasing new weapons and armor or new magic spells to cast. Yes, ArchLord is a fantasy-themed game, but it looks and sounds generic. The environments are bland, the character models look rough and blurry and offer hardly any customization options, and the game doesn't sound that great.

You can play as a character from one of three races--orcs, elves, or humans--and play as such professions as hunter or sorcerer. No matter what choice you make, you'll always end up wandering off into the world to find monsters, pounding on them until they die or your character dies. And you keep doing this until you gain an experience level. Then, you go back and do the same thing again, eventually against stronger enemies, but hopefully you're high enough in level to purchase a slightly bigger stick to beat enemies with. If you were making sweeping generalizations, you could arguably make this kind of criticism about most massively multiplayer games to date, but in ArchLord, this boring hack-and-slash combat really is the focus of the game, and it's so bad, you'll notice. Your character's individual power doesn't scale well against monsters, so you'll need to either sit and rest or run back to town for more healing and magic potions more frequently over time, unless you "farm" lower-level monsters that pose little challenge. Considering how many recent games have introduced much more lenient combat systems with minimal downtime, the grind seems outdated as well as tiresome.

So the good news is that every few levels or so, you might qualify for slightly better armor or a slightly stronger magic spell. The bad news is that it's boring to repeatedly kill or be killed by monsters, especially since the monsters, your character, and your weapons tend to make only one sound sample apiece--and they all sound like cheap, public-domain audio files you'd hear on a bad TV cartoon. Considering that your character and the monsters also repeat the same animation over and over again in battle, this might be the best way to describe what a battle in ArchLord looks like--not an epic struggle with a human warrior fighting for his life against a vicious monster, but two cartoon characters repeatedly whacking each other on the head for hours on end. The game's subdued, faux-opera soundtrack doesn't help either; listening to a generic-sounding song with a trilling female vocalist doesn't add much to the experience most of the time, and when it's laid down behind the same two looped sound samples of your character playing whack-a-mole with a giant spider, it's kind of embarrassing.

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ArchLord (PC): $49.82

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