You can buy the game for peanuts at the store and get the first month free, or download the game for free off their website and get an eight-hour trial and then be forced to pay the 10-dollar monthly fee. It’s a refreshing change to go to a developer’s forum and not see a significant amount of whining. The game subscribers are very helpful, and the community alone is free of the bad sports you might find on the "bigger" games. There’s also a great backbone to what one day might be a great game. The developers obviously care about the game, and there’s a vibrant, helpful community on the boards. I did manage to find some things I liked in here, though. Likewise, the space zones aren’t hard on the eyes and do a decent job at immersion. The space stations and ships, while they look generic, are well done. The graphics are fairly decent as well, especially the asteroids. Most of the time, you’ll just plot your course using the navigator, move out of range of inanimate objects, and engage the jump engines to head to your destination. The game uses the WASD keyboard scheme and you can also use a joystick if you are so inclined, but getting around space is fairly boring, though. The interface takes a little getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll find it works well. What I want,though, is a reason to keep on playing, and running the provided missions didn’t do it for me. Granted, from a small developer I don’t expect a game that’s got the production qualities of an EverQuest or a World of WarCraft. These failings add up to a game that’s not very addictive, a curse in an online game. Sure, you can group up to get tougher missions, but you can’t trade with other characters. The lack of tradeskills underscores another big weakness in the game: little to no reason to interact with your fellow players. Granted, tradeskills aren’t a requirement in the game - City of Heroes proved that point - but having player crafted ships and weapons would have been a great boon to the game. One of the things that’s sorely lacking in the game is any sort of tradeskills you can get missions to go out and mine mineral that just end up being handed in for coin at the space station. You’ll fly around killing things gaining xp in weapons skills once you’ve gotten a certain amount of XP you’ll unlock a certification for a better weapon. You won’t find any classes in the traditional sense, either. It is refreshing to not hit auto-attack and walk away I just wish the AI was a tad smarter. It’s twitch based, so you can dogfight, although most of the time combat seems to involve more colliding than shooting (seriously, it was like playing bumper-spaceships). The missions reward you with credits which you’ll use to purchase ship upgrades. You’ll spend most of your time navigating from one jump point to the next, rinsing, lathering and repeating along the way. The missions are the usual kill, deliver, retrieve missions found in every other MMO. There you can get missions and buy new components or ships, and as a bonus, your ship is repaired for free when you dock. The central nexus to the game are the space stations scattered throughout the galaxy. There’s no plot advancement as you work your way up a quest ladder and dispatch those evil members of the Other Side into their own hell. None of the missions have anything to do with the story. You choose one of the three factions, do missions for that side, and maybe if you happen to run across a player from the other faction in one of the PvP areas you can fight them. There’s scant (read: no) reference to it in the game. The big problem is, it’s a waste of talent and paper as that’s the only major reference to the conflict. The manual reads like a history text, with a detailed timeline of major events of the war. Almost ¾ of the 64 page manual details the conflict in which three factions - Serco, Itani and Union of Independent Traders - are engaged. There is a fantastic backstory to the game. There are a few things Vendetta Online got right. Instead, it feels more like a watered-down version of Freelancer, a single player game. With some more development time and the Three Great Things I mentioned above, Vendetta Online would have been a great game. I don’t care if you’re Blizzard or two kids in a basement: If your game doesn’t meet those three things I listed above, the game is Not Going To Be Good. You can use your imagination to put the obligatory "gosh, are a small house, let us acknowledge the plight of those who compete against Blizzard and SOE" comment here. I found none of these things in Vendetta Online - simply put, this is one boring excuse for an MMO I look for three things in MMOs: the fun of playing with other people the sense there’s a point to affair and a reason to stay up too late.
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