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Aika Review: Fun For a Certain Crowd - Edit
6.5
| Pros |
 Five nation PvP Free to play Little faerie sisters |
| Cons |
 Battlegrounds need work Needs QA testing & localization work Repetitive, grindy content |
Aika is a free-to-play fantasy MMORPG published by Gala-Net (Allods Online, Luna, Rappelz). Originally developed for Korean markets, Aika’s big draw is its much-touted Five Nation PvP system, which can support epic battles of 1000 vs. 1000 players for world domination and political power.
Unfortunately, Aika more often misses than hits its mark in terms of gameplay, PvE content, and Western localization, and can feel very grindy for those who have become accustomed to engaging combat and unique quest dynamics in modern MMOs. Gala-Net’s game has some fun spots, a neat crafting system and a refreshing sense of humor, but its repetitive quests, elite PvP system and unremarkable aesthetics and story make it hard to get into and even less appealing to stick with.
Aesthetics: 6/10
Aika has some pretty graphics in a style loosely reminiscent of Aion or Guild Wars, with an Eastern military-cartoon feel to it. It’s very colorful but has a distinct sameness to a lot of its art assets, which kind of blend together after playing the game for a while. Character combat animations are pretty spiffy, which is nice, but as you’ll be using a lot of the same skills over and over again, you’ll probably start to find them as repetitive as the environments.
We would also like more choices for personalizing characters. All of the six classes are gender-bound, meaning that your Warrior alts are all going to be dudes and your Clerics are all going to be ladies, and they’ll pretty much look alike as there are very few customization options other than a few types of hair, preset faces, and the like. There aren’t any sliders, so if you like your characters short and squat with a honking nose and purple sideburns, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
The music in Aika is appropriately heroic, but there’s very little of it and gets repetitive pretty quickly. There’s a little bit of voice acting and combat sounds are ok, but otherwise there’s nothing remarkable here.
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Get used to seeing boars. You'll be fighting a lot of them.
Gameplay 7/10
Aika has a fully realized world that offers a lot of PvE content as well as several PvP modes. There’s certainly a lot to do in the game, but not much of it is particularly compelling.
There are six classes to choose from, ranging from the fighter types of Warrior and Paladin, to the Dual Gunner and Rifleman scouts, and the Warlock and Cleric spellcasters. Combat is standard hotbar skill-based stuff, and your class fortunately gains a lot of abilities to fight monsters (and other players) with as you level up.
Aika uses an RPG-style dialogue system to present quests instead of chat boxes, which is kind of fun but tends to break any immersion you might experience in the game. When you click on an NPC, the camera squares you off against that character with a chat menu and switches between the NPC and yourself as you discuss the quest. The dialogue tends to be pretty humorous, but the quests themselves are very repetitive and send you to take out the same mobs you’ve been grinding for the past five quests. The quests loosely tie into a main story line that has a lot of history behind it but isn’t very engaging.
At level 7, you can undertake a series of quests to link up with your first Pran. She’s kind of a like a fairie little sister sidekick that follows you around with snarky commentary and can give you stat boosts and even has some skills. It isn’t weird at all to suddenly have a little elf child following you around and berating NPCs for stuff that they say. Seriously. She’s kind of funny and can take on different personality types, and you can customize her skills and gear. The Pran system is a little random and we’re not sure why you can’t have a little brother or Gila monster instead, but it’s a fun quirk in an otherwise generic-feeling game.
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Aika has an easy-to-use and useful crafting system.
PvP is clearly Aika’s main draw, as there are several different opportunities for face-punching in the game. You’ve got your basic instanced Battlegrounds, which you can enter at low levels, but in which you’re likely to get wiped by high-powered players even though there seems to be some kind of level balancing in place. There’s only one battleground, with one mode, team deathmatch, so far, which seems pretty thin on content compared to other MMOs that don’t even put PvP as their main attraction. There are daily Arena matches between teams of up to 100 players as well, within different level brackets.
Then there’s Castle Siege, Relic War and Altar War. Castle Siege is a weekly battle between the top guilds (and their allies) to achieve political supremacy over a Nation for a week. What is a Nation in Aika? We asked the same question, and had to figure it out from the main website as it’s not explained very well in-game. When you reach level 10, you can complete a quest to become a citizen in one of the game’s Five Nations, which each have distinct outlooks and goals. Rather than being distinct geographic locations, they’re more like affiliations that have their own instances or channels of the game world, which you can travel to by talking to an NPC.
So, Castle Siege pits the best of the best high-level guilds against each other to determine who can lead a Nation for a week, allowing them certain political powers like adjusting tax rates. Relic War and Altar War are more open-world PvP objectives between Nations, which result in Nation-wide boosts and bonuses depending on who controls or steals from certain objectives in different Nations. As we’ve mentioned, Aika supports 1000 vs. 1000 players in PvP, but we haven’t seen this to verify how well it works or how fun it is. We can say, however, that every time we’ve logged in, there have only been a few battleground matches going, mostly between very high-level players.
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Battlegrounds leave a lot to be desired, but combat animations are pretty neat.
Aika also has a very easy-to-use crafting system, which is great for its ditching of level requirements. You don’t get any experience for crafting, which means that you can theoretically create any item available as long as you have the proper materials. This can be really useful for some craftable quest items, which can generally take a long time to grind otherwise. Some items don’t seem to drop off of quest mobs very often, so it sometimes makes sense to head over to the remarkably well-designed auction house, grab some materials, and make the stuff yourself.
Aika's number one problem is character feedback. I just didn't "feel" good playing or moving my character about. It felt tedious and boring. Matter of fact, I have that problem with 90% of these eastern FTPs and even some western games.
The game seems to have been made by developers who were given the peramaters of the game. The drones then made the game. Once done...no thought seems to have been given to acessing weather the results were fun and changing or dropping elements.AND THE RESULT....boring.
It's...another F2P MMO, who'd have thunk it?
Korean gameplay says it all.
Nice Graphics, Exciting PvP promisees, but you have to slave like a dog to get there.
Nothing different expected from Korean "traditional" gameplay Design, NCSoft is only starting to learn new ways now, immagine all the smaller Korean Designers. They all use the same model, and that does not appeal outside Korea, and even in Korea it is starting to work less and less because of Competition from other places.
I know many Koreans who jumped over to WoW from Lineage II when it came out and were very happy to expose how Fun it was back then. So in a way, it is not really a quuestion of Demographic as we are let to beleive, Korean players are Human beings like us not Aliens from some other Planet.
They too, do not appreciate Grind, but when you have no choice and all the games available use the same model, you then choose the one that has the most appealing graphics or other features. And this may explain why Korean Devs are actually very good with graphics, because they are competing on that level for Player Appeal..but at the same time, they are very attrophied in terms of Gameplay Design and cannot compete on that level outside of Korea.
Anyways, just my observations and deduction.
"Move allong peeps nothing else to see here"
You should mention the awekward running. It feels weird and glitchy.
Isnt the main feature of this generic garbage that you get a little girl pet?
Hate gender locked classes in games :(
That plus reading that apparently all five factions use the exact same city and areas, it just seems to sound like a shortcut? Instead of making five fully developed kingdoms that each have their own style. Could even maket he pet different for each kingdom to add more to it.
Nonetheless, glad to read the review, this is one I have never gotten around to trying but it has always been like at the very far edges of my radar as a maybe someday if bored enough.
tried it.............WASD poorly implemented , gameplay is generic , another grindfest
and yup the 1 of the main features is a "girl" pet that grows ...........
6.5 ? , 3.5 is more realistic
RE: so we can easily recommend trying it if you’re interested in an Eastern-themed fantasy MMO with a heavy emphasis on PvP (and faerie sisters).
That about sums it up. GF and I played it for a while, a couple weeks actually. From a coder's standpoint the pran system is pretty interesting. The concept of adopt an NPC works well and could easily be expanded upon. Also the game runs nicely for as modern as it looks. Too often "pretty" means it runs slowly. This didn't.
My GF loved the questing and the prans. I think she'd have stayed playing it, but I was bored and getting irritated by not having a feeling of progression or change of scenery.
Overall as a "cute quester" it's better than most. If you like that sort of thing.
Lol, I love the photo that is used for this article. Oh wow, killing boars eh? That seems so fresh and exciting! I have never killed boars in a forest before. Maybe this game has The Sword of Thousand Truths in it to??!!?! The asian f2p market, such innovation there.
Originally posted by Scot
It's...another F2P MMO, who'd have thunk it?
thunk?? wow I'm learning new words today. Thank you for enriching the english language!
I AGREE 1000000000% I never have or will be one those G.I.R.L just me but I can't stand it when customization is limited it's the biggest turnoff but what's even worst with games like Argo for example it's age locked or apperence locked and gender locked.
It doesn't come anywhere close to EQ or EQ2 for that matter.
It's just a korean grinder that hides behind "huge pvp battles" that is just a bunch of havoc of like 50 players mobbing another group of 50 players randomly for points or camping the entrance to their side, while VERY occasionally actually being about controlling the items for buffs.
Throw in a stupid "pet" that is just a little girl that slowly grows up while annoying you 24/7 and functioning more as a barbie doll to dress up/pedo bait, you're really not left with all that much.
Classes may feel "different' but that's because there's so freaking few with no room for specialization beyond "Who payed the most to have the best gear" which really shines in the massive content. The paladin with max enhancements to her gear only takes 1 damage from each of the 40+++ people hitting her at once? F2P, what did you expect?
It's all stupid, it really is. Throw in all the "global controversy" with all the BZ's and Asian players that ruined the original release of the game and you see why people still have a horrendous taste in their mouths from trying the game..
Well if we stop the hate because it's not rift and start playing the game here's what i liked in this game:
The graphics, especialy the panel of colors, look like a fairy tale, somehow like the beginning of fable.
I also liked the overpricing of equipment with the npc, and the quests not giging you much, you will have to craft them or trade them with other players, +1 for immersion here starting to look at the auction before level 10.
The dungeon with selectable difficulty is also cool, you can start it at lvl1 and like get out of it at level 10 . The dungeon is also cool because if you die in there you can't get back, unless you use a special item i heard about, but you have to care about what you're doing in there not reading mmorpg.com at the same time.
And it's funny to see the quests "cut scenes" criticized why everyone is so happy about it in TSW or SWTOR.
hmm what else... oh yeah! There are sandworms!! Real sandworms that you don't see at first and that move underground from time to time! It really is a good asian style game with awsd control and jump to please the western gamers.
Does the game have zones..?
That is the only thing u need to ask, if the answer is no... then support the developer. If yes, then pay no interest in a developer who is trying to rip you off.
I think you go the Picture subtitles mixed out. o_o
Mediocre at best, a scam at worst. I refuse to play any games that have an item mall.
I completelly agree with ur score. Anyway:
http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/4118/1315159660139.png
Grind?
took me 1 month to get in decent PVP level range (over level 60) Thats not much of a grind for any mmorpg.
key is you have to quest. quests give huge xp boosts compared to just killing mobs.
its probably the best free pvp mmorpg.
paid pvp mmorpg? i've not found one worth paying for since Shadowbane. :(
gee a paladin with a skill that gives temporary invulnerability... never heard of that before... but wait, my warlock has a skill that can ignore that invulnerability as long as i don't mind sacrificing my health to do it... interesting.
mmorpg reviews are like asking a kid who just finished Army Basic Training what military life is like.
Fun For a Certain Crowd... Pedofiles!
this game probably has more going on than Aion and Tera will, when tera come out.
I honestly had a ton of fun with this game. There was a lot of things to do, IMO, and the relic wars were so exciting.
But then again, I did play it amost 7 months ago, so things might have changed since then.
I think it had a lot of potential, but I felt it wasn't advertised as much as it should have been.
I msut not have been part of that certain crowd....I was bored by level 10.