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TERA Online Review
TERA was widely hailed as the cure for the mundane combat in many MMORPG games today, but were the claims true? Following the recent announcement that the game will be turning to the free-to-play business model we took a brief look during our TERA free-to-play introduction video. Now we take you on our full text and video review for the entire new player experience in TERA Online.
It doesn't take long for TERA Online to leave a good impression. In true MMORPG fashion your first action is to create a character and TERA Online boasts a rather impressive character creation process. Players can select from an impressive 8 list of classes including Aman, Baraka, Castanic, Elin, High Elf, Human and Popori. Each class is unique in appearance and each also has access to racial abilities and passive buffs, such as increased health or better stamina. Although the racial skills are quite obviously designed to compliment certain classes; players are not restricted class choices depending on their race, offering complete freedom during character creation.
Accompanying the impressive list of 8 racial choices are the 8 available classes. Ranging from Sorcerer, Warrior and Ranger archetypes, every class can appeal to a different kind of MMO players. Each class has an impressive list of skills and abilities but they also gain access to a variety of combination attacks, rewarding abilities that provide extra damage and side effects should they be executed successfully.
The combat is arguably the most defining aspect of TERA as it promises to provide players with an action-based combat feature that steps away from the typical hot-key approach of regular MMO games. There is no auto-attack feature, players have to control ever swing of their sword or firing of their bow. The LMB acts as the main attack key while the RMB works as a dodge feature. Many enemies have powerful attacks that can easily defeat an unprepared player quite quickly; so you must be fast enough to use the dodge and evade these powerful attacks.
There are a good variety of abilities for each class and in true MMO fashion, you unlock more abilities as you progress through the game. Certain abilities can also be linked into combos for extra damage or effects on your enemies. This system can either be triggered manually by using the skills in quick succession but an on-screen prompt also displays giving the user the chance to combo the attacks with a simple press of the spacebar. This is a great way of learning what skills you can combo and when to activate them, taking away the boring task of memorizing all the linked abilities and giving you the opportunity to focus on the combat.
Crafting takes on a familiar form, gathering resources from nodes before using them to create new items. Each item can also be enchanted to offer more stats and bonuses on each of the items, although quite a cool feature, it's nothing we haven't seen before.
Sadly the new player experience drags on for some time. There's not really any dungeons available early on and the critically acclaimed political system doesn't come into play until much later in the game. For more information on the advanced features and end-game of TERA check out our game summary article here.
Pros
- Fast-paced combat - Real-time dodging mechanics - Innovative political systemCons
- Boring quest system - Texture loading issues - Repetitive monster modelsRating: 7.0
by Blaine Smith
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