izigame.me

With a decent amount of time spent in a game, it's always hard to justify a negative review. To me it feels like if you really want to enjoy it, you need to go all in with ROI. In my opinion, this game isn't designed for casual players but since it's F2P, give it a try and decide for yourself :)

Lets start with the positive aspects

- Graphics & Story:
Characters and mounts are well detailed. The majority of the map aswell. I like the shiny overall look. The story is above standard and the rare cutscenes do look nice.
- Mounts & Idea:
It was refreshing to see a game that focusses around taming mounts, collecting them and fight with them. You can also turn them into a pet to accompagny you in dungeons and special zones. Aerial Combat truly makes fun.
- Dungeons & Fighting:
The Dungeons differ from eachother and are interesting. You can choose between: Guardian (Tank), Priest (Heal), Assassin, Mage, Ranger, Berserker and the controversial Trickster class (DPS). The skills and combos are nothing special but far from beeing bad and do look nice. Since i've picked a priest i can't really comment how good or bad the Action Combat is (where you aim with your cursor). But many switch to standard mode in aerial combat.
- Guilds:
Guilds are the bread and butter in Riders of Icarus. It's important to be part of an active guild in order to progress, not only in the endgame content, but in general. The playerbase declined significantly over the past few months and thus also the grouprequests in the Party Finder Board, nowadays it's hard to find enough "randoms" for anything. Since taming heroic mounts requires to bring their hp down to a certain point it's always nice to have friends to help you out with it. Same goes for strategy elaboration for the Titan Raids, Worldbosses and legendary dungeons which is impossible as a lone wolf. So do yourself a favor and search an active guild as soon as possible.
- Leveling & Exploring:
Don't rush the content! Do all the sidequest and explore the big world as this is by far the best part of this game. The gamemechanics are explained step by step and kept me interested while advancing. If you see a new mount, try to tame it or check what you need. The levelcap is raised up to 60 so lack of content really isn't a major problem in Riders of Icarus. Crafting seems standard but it bothered me, that you didn't have a complete list somewhere. The obtained recipies itself were strangely ordered that you had to look twice before finding what you were searching for.
But once you've reached that point where you are max level and saw everything, it really becomes a chore to progress.

The devil is in the details

- Taming mechanic:
What appeared at first as a nice minigame, where you have to hit buttons to successfully tame a mount, turned out to be solely dependant on your own level (or lets say the level difference between you and the mount) and the mount's rarity. Skill is at no point needed to tame which is very frustrating when trying for a heroic mount around your level. It often happens, that you've filled the failbar to 75% before even having the chance to impact the process. And the marks aren't cheap/fast to obtain. Common and Elite mounts are rather easy to get as long as you have a higher level. Very sad and frustrating as this is the unique selling point of this game. Basically, it's RNG (Random)
- RNG:
It's omnipresent.. You sometimes need to run a dungeon 30-40 times to complete you armorset with stats that actually benefit you (Strenght or Dexterity on a priest item for example is not uncommon) or finally drop the item to unlock a quest or get the skillbook for your class. Taming heroic or legendary mounts is pure RNG as mentioned above. If you are able to tame a legendary around your level with 100% Success and fail a mere heroic Familiar thats 25 level under your own directly after under the same conditions, something can't be right, right?
- Grinding/Balancing:
Be it running the same dungeon for the 40th time to get what you want, or hitting a simple Elite Mob for 5-10 mins due to insane HP/Regen to bring it down. Or farming the same thing over and over for ages to eventually get 1 piece of a 3 piece Set to tame a Heroic. For some heroic mounts you need to tame 3-5 other Elite mounts to craft the mark. For these Elite mounts, you need marks to tame aswell. Neverending process the further you get into the game. And i'm not even starting with the Equip tempering/refining which is a scam in my opinion.
- Recycling of Content:
From the 250+ tamable mounts, there are actually just around 70 which are completely different with the others beeing copies with another color/special fx. And if you think the heroics or legendaries are excluded then you are wrong. This also goes for many sidebosses and the PVP-Zone is a darker version of the first big zone. Sometimes less is more ;)
- Debuffs everywhere:
You die? well you continue with a 10min debuff or use a scroll. Travel to a new zone? Get a permanent debuff (except on heroics) or tame a zone specific mount. Want to do the Titan Raids? Get an additional debuff unless you have the 3 Titan Pieces that drop from worldbosses/titans only.
- Performance:
It's a very demanding game, even on newer systems. Severe server issues takes several days/weeks to fix. Since launch i'm only able to exit the game with the Task Manager
- Company/Publisher:
Overall, WeMade (Devs) provide a nice product, but there is no fun if it's balanced just to keep the player grinding. The overall Nexon game-policy is tailored more and more to the paying progress player while casuals are left-over: Noone prevents you from trying, but if you truly want to experience the Endgame, you actually need a big wallet, or an immense amount of time. Additional to that they use unorthodox methods concerning their cashshop, like selling mounts for 15-20$ that they, 2 months later, include in a free! preregistration package. Granted, you can't buy stuff to directly push your character (Pay 2 Win), but you can sell those items you get with Real Money for skyhigh prizes in the ingame auction house and with that earned gold buy the stuff to push your character. The Circle closes and i'd call it indirect P2W.

Elluns as a special mention

The whole game is castrated! You can obtain Elluns (ingame currency beside the typical Gold/silver/copper) either through ingame achievements and dailies or they can also be purchased with real money. If you don't plan to spend money in this Game, use them on Storage expansion (Mounts, Stash, Inventory) to improve your ingame experience for as long as possible. Don't use them to revive, reset a dungeon or purchase boxes from the shop, it's truly not worth it.

Conclusion

Don't get me wrong, i had a ton of fun in this game and still don't regret purchasing a founders pack. Riders of Icarus is probably one of the better free2play MMORPGs out there and it's really nice up to a certain point. But once the "new game hype" wears off and knowing how it evolved over the past year with the declining playerbase because of that down-spiral they created with their decisions, i cannot recommend this game, nor suggesting you to spend money on it. And all thats left after 850+ hours is the experience of too much RNG frustration. I'm done :)
If you have any specific questions about the game or need advice, i'll happily answer them in the comment section as i run out of Review Space :) Constructive critism is also well appreciated as this is my first in-depth review.

Thanks for reading!

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