Lineage: The Blood Pledge (PC)

Reviewed by

Ron Dulin

on 01/09/2002

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Page 2

But even though getting to higher levels holds a few benefits, the game's fundamental problems remain the same. The combat is still bad at higher levels. There is very little motivation to get to elite levels, and even the superficial reasons other like-minded games give you (such as good-looking armor and equipment) are nonexistent. The highest-level knight looks the same as the lowest level. All the character classes have only two models, male and female. Your weapon may change. Bladed weapons, bows, and axes look different, but there are only generic models for each type. A dagger looks the same as a broadsword.

Lineage doesn't look much better in other respects. The game's world is cluttered and hard to see. The graphics don't look much better than those in Ultima Online. The animations are simple; most of them consist of only two or three distinct frames. Seeing a dog doing little backflips as it attacks you is silly. The audio is equally simple, consisting of nondescript music and sparse sound effects.

Lineage's combat system can become too complex at times.

When Lineage gets complex, it is too much so. One of the game's strong points is that you can tame animals to fight for you. Once you have them, they make Lineage's combat considerably better. But taming them is an exercise in frustration. To tame an animal, you must fight it and get it below one-third of its hit points. And for starters, there are no health indicators for enemies, so you can't tell exactly whether you've damaged the animal sufficiently or whether you're about to kill it outright. As stated previously, you attack by clicking on the monster. When it is low on health, you must take meat from your inventory and drag it onto the animal. You must do this with the mouse as well, and unless you have a dual mouse setup on your computer, this is cumbersome. Once you drag the meat onto the target, you must type the number of pieces of meat you want to feed it. Usually by this point, you're dead or the monster is dead and you just want to shut down your machine and take a break from the game. Luckily, you can buy pets from others. It's worth spending the money, which itself is scarce in the game, to avoid the frustration of doing it yourself.

Lineage has some good ideas and a large player base. But the game's large player population is a mixed blessing, because you will constantly be subjected to inane bickering and bartering in the chat window, to which everyone on the entire server is always privy. The game may appeal to those who want to be more actively involved in the combat or who find the finely balanced automatic combat systems of other online RPGs a bit too abstract. Though the game is free to download, the monthly service charge ($12.95) is equal to the service charge for the much-superior Dark Age of Camelot. Those who miss the glory days of Ultima Online or who want a more persistent online version of Diablo II may enjoy Lineage, but that's not to say it's as good as either of those games. Lineage looks and plays like a much older game, and unless you can drum up some fake nostalgia, you most likely won't make it past the free trial period.