Lineage II: The Chaotic Throne - The Kamael

Saturday, 23 February 2008 00:00

Venturing into an MMO can be either a good or a bad thing. Good if you have a general idea of what to do and what it's all about, bad if you have no idea.

I'm not particularly a competant MMO player, but I have tried a few before for a while, but I got bored after a while. Lineage II: The Chaotic Throne - The Kamael actually garnered my interest quite quickly in the way that the early stages of levelling up were fun to do. Once you've chosen to be male or female and styled them to your desire, the small tutorial takes you through the basics and you end up defeating a gremlin to obtain a blue stone.

As you reach town, there's a Newbie Guide of whom can give you any info you may need and can also cast a protection spell on you which stops other players of higher levels from attacking you, quite handy for when you have to go out into the wilderness a bit later on and some idiot that's 10 levels or more above you tries to attack. The Newbie Guide tells you to go and level up, which just means going back to a field where there are fox-like creatures that are easy to beat in order to reach level 5 of which you need to be in order to then go and talk to a Vice Hierach.

That's just a brief description of what goes on in the early stages of the game, once you reach higher levels, more missions become available to you. That's a bit of a no-brainer as most MMO's do that and as is the standard, the missions get progressively harder.

I have a fairly low spec PC by today's standards, yet was able to run it well at 1280*720 and medium settings, so for anyone thinking it needs a beefy computer to run, you'd be surprised. It's not really that graphically intensive in the sense that although the environment looks very nice, you don't need to max out the settings for it to look good enough while still being playable. The visual effects are rather nice, but again, nothing that's going to dramatically decrease the gaming performance.

Sound isn't too spectacular, but then again, do MMORPG's really need to have an extensive soundtrack? When you're busy playing the game doing various stuff, you hardly notice the ambient background music and especially when reading what the NPC's are saying to you.

Something that needs considering is that Lineage II is a pay-to-play MMORPG, so once the trial is over, you'l need to fork out a monthly fee to continue playing. Another thing worth noting is that Lineage II: The Chaotic Throne - The Kamael is a 7.59 GB install (including updates), so make sure you have enough space before installing.

As the Kamael is a new race to the Lineage world, they bring some new skills with them too. Once you have aquired the amount of levels needed to progress, you then have to choose which path you're going to take. The Kamael are a Dark race which is why you get the choice of Soul Breaker or Berserker, it's better to choose quite early on, so that you can hone your skills towards what you want to become. Weapons can be converted in to Kamael weapons which gives them a more unique flavour and once you reach up to level 75, more sub-skills become available to you.

It's pretty difficult to review an MMORPG since there's so much involved with it, way too many items and places to mention and it's an ongoing thing, there isn't a specific ending to the game. Fighting monsters, upgrading armour and weapons, completing quests and generally levelling up is what it's all about, how you do it is totally up to you.

Lineage II: The Chaotic Throne - The Kamael is newbie-friendly for those that are looking for an MMO to get into, the interface is well laid out and easily accessable without needing a NASA control center to figure out what's what and where. I found it nice and easy to get into and had some fun playing it, but since I'm not a major player of this kind of game I wouldn't pay to play it, but for those of you looking for a good enjoyable PvP/PvE PPM MMORPG, I would certainly recommend it.