Currently in Open Beta, Galaxy Online is a free-to-play MMORTS. This means you don’t pay for the game directly, but through optional purchases of “points” to be spent in the game. A business model that never seems to work long term, but always attracts interest from the community.The game itself is truly quite massive. With hundreds of star systems to conquer and build up, there is no end of things to do. Except for the first month or so – where there is almost nothing to do.Yes, you read that correctly – for the first month of playing Galaxy Online you can expect to do nothing but build up resources and research sciences. It takes a solid week just to get comfortable in the game, and after about three or four days you begin to realize what you’ve gotten yourself into. Resources are painfully slow to collect, and you require such a vast amount of...

In the past I’ve given some pretty harsh criticism to other MMO games. They deserved it. Today I’m going to do something I’ve never done before – recommend a MMO.Warhammer Online (WAR) is the kind of game that your wife or girlfriend will make fun of you for playing. It’s a D&D style dorkfest that is as much a guilty pleasure as it is addictive to play. WAR puts you in the tried and true medieval era world that MMO fans have come to love and feel comfortable in. Elves and knights are here, and so are witches and dwarves. Orcs are present and there still aren’t enough people playing as healers. As for the story and enviroment, there is very little here that you haven’t seen before. The difference is that it is all done as well or a little better than before, and it just works.Unlike other recent MMO titles (Tabula Rasa, I’m talking...

After spending some time with the Beta of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, I can say that it’s the worst in a long line of flops in the venerable C&C series.Let’s get this out of the way up front – I don’t care that this is a Beta. I’m judging it, period. I don’t feel that anything will be significantly improved or altered for release.Path finding is terrible, the unit abilities are a joke and you hardly have time to use them in battle because everything is over before you even realize it. The inability to zoom out to any level further than you could in the 90’s is a sad development choice by Electronic Arts. You can’t queue up buildings, meaning each has to be built and placed one at a time. Units often get stuck on each other or buildings, and the unit AI chooses targets extremely poorly. Your troops won’t fire on nearby...

After years or hype and fan boy drooling over screen shots, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is nearing launch. I have played in the Tech Test and several of the BETAs and I’m here to tell you it’s not worth playing.The game is slow, boring and unimaginative. The graphics are decent at higher levels, but when turned up that high the game slows to an unplayable crawl. Though my system far exceeds the requirements of the game, I can only play at the “Low” settings, which means textures that look like Quake 2 and boring effects. For a game that consumes 24GB of hard disk space you’d really expect more on the visual side. Even when set at “Low” I frequently have to stop moving to let things “catch up”.Even worse, I can never play for more than an hour before the game crashes. This is such a common issue that they even address it in a...

(This is simply an extension of my Tabula Rasa review posted at IGN.com.)Tabula Rasa has been out for a whole month now, and a few days more that a month for those of us who pre-ordered. I have put around 170 hours into the game in the past five weeks (sadly, that’s about five hours per day on average), and I am now level 41 in the game. What this should tell you is that I know what I’m talking about, unlike most of the “professional” game reviewers who have given Tabula Rasa such high marks without even playing the game through to level 30.Anyone who has achieved level 30 or higher in Tabula Rasa can tell you that this game needs serious work, and should not have been released when it was. There are missions that can’t be completed, UI quarks, stability and lag issues, bugs galore and most importantly a serious lack of high level content.I discussed quite...