by PlanetWide Games
Member Reviews: Review This Game Yourself!
Pros
? tournament with a huge cash prize
? players can own fortresses and real estate
? PvP Focus
? able to create unique weapons
Cons
? huge grind
? horrible interface
? very difficult to install
? overly complex
? PvP does not really kick in until later levels
? cannot connect to login server too frequently
? blocky character animations
? a port of a Korean MMO
The Bottom Line – Unless you are a very patient hardcore gamer avoid this game.
Link: Official Site
Review
Risk Your Life (RYL) is one of those MMORPGs that is filled with great ideas in an attempt to innovate the genre but ultimately falls flat on its face. RYL is worthy of praise for trying to take the MMORPGs closer to a sporting event with the $1 million PvP tournament. Focusing on PvP when gamers are getting sick to death of killing rats over and over again also is a point in its favor. Throw in the ability to create your own unique weapons and own real estate and the game sounds even better.
So what went wrong? From installing to playing RYL displays such poor execution that frustration is inevitable. Just to install this game you must disable your anti-virus programs or it will not install. Since I learned this the hard way due to thinking that I could install any MMORPG easily I thought the game had froze my CD drive. Once the game was finally installed the next bit of fun began when I had to patch the boxed version with the live online version. Without a doubt RYL is not only the hardest game that I have had to patch but also the hardest program to patch period. Without exaggeration it took over 20 times of restarting the game client to finally get all the files downloaded. For some unknown reason RYL’s update server was not sending all the files that it should have and then was giving an error when it should be all finished. Just to get in the game I had to restart the update server in the hope that it would finally send me the needed file. To make a long boring story short the constant restarting allowed me to finally play the game.
Given that it took a huge effort to get in the game one can only hope that the effort was worth the trouble right? Wrong! Playing RYL for the very first time is like losing control of your legs. You know where you want to go but you just flounder around the general area instead. To “control” your character you either point and click to where you want to go or you press ESC to use the keyboard. Pointing and clicking is awkward at best due no control of the camera and using the keyboard is not much better since you can’t rebind any of the controls.
Getting past the control problems you are next greeted by one of the worst grinding treadmills in the entire genre. Doesn’t the PVP help with the grind? No because PvP does not kick in until much later the game. In the meantime you have to spend countless hours leveling your character. Quests do not help much because they are too spread out between levels. Not having a single quest for a few levels simply gives you the choice of either killing monsters until you can’t see straight or to simply quit. After finding this game so troublesome and lacking I would have to recommend the latter. There are way too many quality MMORPGs which actually try to minimize grinding such as World of Warcraft and Guild Wars to waste any time or money on this game.
Game Ogre’s Rating (out of 10):
5.00
RYL: Path of the Emperor seems kind of an obscure MMORPG since I haven’t heard of it before, but it seems to be an MMO from 2004 or 2005. Obviously, the game is pretty old, so it doesn’t bear the best graphics, but it doesn’t look too bad; at least there are blades of grass in the game, whereas in other old games and even some modern games, I tend to see just textures of grass. User interface doesn’t seem that bad other than how it looks; seems like you can position and resize the chat window. PvP looks kind of fun, and from the videos I’ve watched of this game, it seems like the game has a pretty good playerbase, so I guess it’s not that obscure after all. Overall, I’d rate this game a 3.65/5; aside from the old age of this game, the core gameplay seems to be more PvP focused, and it doesn’t seem like the game emphasizes much on other elements that enrich an MMORPG like questing, PvE, story, and crafting.