Rift (PC) 3.9 5 10 11
A solid game with a familiar feel. Rift is the newest MMO adventure to grace the PC market. With it you will feel both drawn in with a new world, but still feel right at home with the similar mechanics that it carriers with the world's most popular MMO, World of Warcraft.Rift take place the original fantasy world of Telara, telling the story of two struggling, yet opposing factions trying to save the world from the take-over of the six elemental planes: Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Life, & Death.Graphically, Rift is one of the nicer MMOs on the market, its colorful, but not overdone. It may take a a video upgrade for those of you with an older system, to run the game smothly, espessially when a lot player are on screen.The audio is hit and miss, and unfortunately nothing worth getting excitied about. For example, while the music is generally nice, the sound effects, espially during battle, seems underwhelming and a little too subtle.Rift bears some very strong PvE as well as PvP. The questing, dungeon, and raid systems, all aspire from simular systems in other MMOs (with perhaps the exception of raid-rifts). PvPers will feel at home with Warfronts, simular to battlegrounds or scenarios from other MMOs, as well as the likely future addition of RvR (world PvP with objectives)Whats makes Rift so unquie compaired to other MMO are, in fact, Rifts (surprise). While adventuring in the world Telara, elemental Rifts will rip open in the sky, literally changing the world around them to apprear more like their respective element. Earth rifts will erode the land and form mounds of rock and gem, water rift will soak the land as huge crab-like appendages rise from the ground, and death rifts will rot the ground and leave bizzare twitching tenticles about. Each rift will bring creatures of there respective element to Telara to guard the rift, and players will have to ban together to banish them.Rifts left alone will spawn invasions. These invasions take a life of there own and set out in a attempt to conquest. They may attack your local quest hub, killing your quest givers and building a foothold, and forcing you to counter attack before you are able to finish your quest. They may even decide to attack a hostile rift, as a life invasion attempts to take down a death rift.However not all rifts just appear randomly, every so often a plane will make a calculated attack against a portion of telara, opening dozens of rifts, which in turn creature countless invasion, along with a massive creature (or sometimes many of them). When these events occur, players nearby must turn to fight the incursion. And with fighting these invasions and closing the rifts come proper rewards as well.Rift's other ground-breaking feature is its "soul" system. The soul system is essentially how a player builds their character. During character creation, the player chooses one of four callings: warrrior, cleric, rogue, & mage. Each calling is a broad scope of which souls the player may choose from, but each calling has only some bearing and which role the character will take in Rift.For example, if I choose cleric, I am not necessarily a healer, I can build my character up with the shaman soul and become a melee DPS, a cabalist and become a magic DPS, or even go hard into the justicar soul and become a tank.Each soul within a calling has its own flavor, such as the beastmaster; a warrior who can call a pet, the sabotour; a rogue that specializes in traps & charges, and the purifier, a cleric who uses fire to cauterize wounds.What more, is that in any given role (a build for a character) a player may take up to three souls and combine them to make a character of your own liking. For example a mage can take up the elementalist and the pyromancer soul to summon an earth elemental to hold enemies at bay while the mage is free to spell cast fireballs from afar, or a warrior to can combine the paladin and reaver soul to enhance himself with hardened shield techniques while crippiling his enemies with diseases. What more is that each chatacter can have four roles, allowing a huge ammount of flexability.On a last note I should point out the Rift's launch was an incredible success. Most MMOs (yes, including WoW) have serious trouble with server stability and lag during their first few weeks, sometimes months. As far as rift is concerned there first day was 100% perfect, where most games it's a total disaster. Any problems that came up were almost immediately taken care of. While this may not say much to the average consumer, it does speak a lot to the veterian MMO player, and it shows that Trion, the devoloper of Rift really cares enough to make sure that the game is 100% ready to go even before launch.I give Rift a 9.3/10 02/28/2011
Think Adventure, Change, More Adventure If you like MMORPG games, and you want somthing fresh, buy this game.Sure, the quests are the same as every other mmo out there but what more can we do with quests? The upside of this are the RIFT events that are ongoing nonstop throughout the area you are in. If you get tired of questing and want to jump right into some awesome PVE action, go take out a rift!The game really shines with it's skill system. It is going to really diversify the players in this game because there are so many different builds you can do with your toon!Overall the game is action packed with lots of different things you can do. It has everything an MMO should have and then more! I highly recommend this game if you are looking for somthing different yet familiar to play. 03/10/2011
Amazing! Rift is awesome you just have to try it to believe what they have accomplished! It's the best mmo out there and I do believe we are seeing a cataclysm on the horizon if you know what I mean :) *wink* 03/26/2011
Great MMO it is not often a good MMO comes out to the market. There are a lot of MMO's out there, and I have played most of them. This is one of the very few that I can actually dare recommend to a friend or fellow gamer. This is a must try MMO!They are currently offering a 7 day free trial that you can get on their website- but I recommend buying from Walmart because you get the Lil' Wally companion that you can run around with in game. 08/08/2011