Swords of Legends Online Review (Mendhak)
I'm struggling to recommend this one, though I did enjoy playing some of it. Having just played Lost Ark online recently, I found this game to be a lot better and engaging. So I don't get the praise for Lost Ark when compared to this one, perhaps it's a recency bias.
👍The environments are beautiful, and enjoyable to run around in. It does take its toll on your GPU and is well worth it. It's Chinese fantasy landscapes and they are well done.
👍Character design is pretty good, for the most part, and it's easy to see why, to sell cosmetic items from their store. And to be fair, the cosmetic items are well designed, and they feel like they fit in with the fantasy setting. Combined with the character animations and actions, it's not something I've seen this well done elsewhere: there's a triple jump and you 'glide' like a Chinese wuxia character, the fighting actions and magic actions are all grace and flurry.
👎There isn't much variety in the type of character you can create, and there aren't any races except human. It's generic pop star boy or generic pop star girl, so everyone looks the same. Well, there is one other 'race', so you can play as a 'fox mage', which is outright a loli race. I found this addition to be creepy.
👎The drops suck. For a game that's oriented towards selling cosmetics, it does nothing to sort-of-kind-of give you decent looking gear. You just get crap looking gear.
👎Overwhelming clutter: activity streams and dialogs and popups and notifications. There are a lot of chores/dailies type things to do, and they're in different places, and there are various point systems to keep track of, and it's all scattered about. The UI could do with some consolidation. The HUD does have some ability to hide things but there are some parts of the HUD which just can't be hidden away. I've noticed this in a lot of eastern MMOs, instead of letting you enjoy the environment, clutter is the default preference.
👍The Chinese voice acting is mostly good. The English voice acting is terrible, definitely use the Chinese voiceover. There are some quality issues, sometimes the same person's lines will be whisper quiet and the next line is very loud. Not a huge deal. But there's plenty of voice acting. There are even dialogues that occur as you walk by people, which lends a real atmosphere to the places you visit. Nicely done.
👎The quests are unimaginative. It'll usually be many screens of dialogue, many are even voice acted, which is great actually. But after all that, you just end up going to a place 5 feet away to pick up a basket and hand it to the person.
👎 When you do get to fight, the fights are short, and the mobs barely attack you, they just stand around waiting for you to win. It's as though they've realised that theirs is a simulated existence and have given up on even trying.
👎The story starts out quite well actually, but becomes quite dense and confusing quite quickly, I had trouble keeping up with what was happening and which was the main storyline, and eventually stopped caring.
Ultimately it's the story which let me down, I wanted some sense of achievement or progressio;, the beautiful environments could only get me so far, but the confusing story and poor quests made for an uphill struggle. I notice others have similar observations about the game, and "the real game starts in the endgame" just won't do it.
I'll still recommend this just because it did get me through 20-30 hours which I enjoyed.
tl;dr - If you like a visually appealing game, and story isn't super important, and you like endgame content, this is a good one to pick up. If you like story and progress, probably not.