Does anyone remember the MMO game Martial Heroes? It was released around 2004 and, unfortunately, shutdown last October. Though I never got to personally see the game (or even know it until now), the developer, CR Space, was ambitious enough to create a follow-up of its previous demise. Aptly called Martial Empires, CR Space reflects on the demise of the previous game and makes everyone feel that this is their game debut instead.
The introductory movie will keep everyone afoot on Martial Empires' story. It's a simple premise of light versus darkness or good versus evil. Thankfully, the world you're traversing is evident of the chaos that the darkness is causing. Still, despite the ruckus, Martial Empires Gold still manages to make your character look good enough to kill by seduction.
Character creation and customization is a bit more than just selecting hair, face and eye color. Advanced customizations, such as height and limb length, can be adjusted via its corresponding sliders. It's not as complex and detailed as Perfect World's customizations, but at least there's a semblance of uniqueness for the character. There are, of course, class selections available: Mage, Warrior and Ranger. Each class has 3 weapons to choose from as well, with different combat/support specializations. In this day and age of fully customizable characters, it did seem as a disappointment that the classes are gender-locked. Females can only have access to the ranger class, unfortunately.
Going around the world is a rewarding experience in Martial Empires Gold. The whole game is packed with quests from different NPCs. Of course, it is still the usual monster-killing, item-hunting, or message-delivering job. But the salvo constantly-active quests could prove to be nonetheless fulfilling. Most of the quests are introduced by cutscene monologues from the NPC. Not that impressive, but it changes the pace from the typical long text readouts. Quests also have a quest tracker window, which is handy enough to know your progress in all the active jobs you have. Quest markers will conveniently hover above the NPC or monster for your guidance. For the first few levels also, you also have the newbie advantage of having the quest locations automatically waypointed by following a series of blue lights. One minor setback is the lack of a formal tutorial session at the beginning of the game. But as the word "minor" implies, it won’t hinder you from playing it by ear. There’s no steep learning curve anyway.
