First Impressions

Aion is not an innovative MMO. Anybody will tell you that. You have your quest hubs with quest givers who task you with killing everything in the vicinity. Classes start off with four archetypes (scout, mage, priest, and warrior) and split at level 10 into eight subclasses (ranger, assassin, chanter[shaman], cleric, gladiator[berserker], templar[paladin], spiritmaster[mage pet class], and sorceror[wizard]). And these work exactly as you might expect, in essence. Sure, there’s a whole combo tree where you can buy and equip skills to make devastating combos, but since they kindly have made a one button combo system – you hit the start combo ability, and then hit it again for the next ability in the combo, and so on – you usually aren’t pressing more than a couple of buttons. You never actually stop pressing buttons. ...

See, this is exactly why you can’t do “first impressions” on an MMO. What does my couple hours of time in Atlus’ newly relaunched MMO NeoSteam tell me about the rest of the game? Not a lot. On the face of it, it’s nothing more than a reskinned fantasy MMO with an anime style similar to Dream of Mirror Online and other games of that ilk (though without, thus far, DOMO’s strong story). You have two nations at war, one with a technology bent and the other magical, though at first glance, this doesn’t lead to much difference in game. Six races (four human or human-like, two monster), four professions, and not much avatar customization. ...