RF Online review

RF Online is my cat’s favourite game. Actually, it’s the only game my cat likes me playing. Normally, she gets dumped off my lap when I’m trying to play anything else, on console or PC, and she doesn’t like that. She demonstrates this by clawing my neck. This is very funny for all my friends on Xbox Live, who have taken to saying hello to her whenever I scream during a session.

Doc, the cat in question, likes me playing RF Online because she gets to sit on my lap and get stroked. This is because I have nothing better to do than stroke the cat when playing RF Online – the only game I’ve ever played where I died regularly because I kept forgetting I was playing.

Doc is going to be very disappointed because, having written this review, I intend on taking the disc from my DVD drive, putting it back in the slipcase, putting the case back in the very pretty box, and then I’m going to drop it down a well. Normally, I give games I don’t want to the son of friends of ours. However, I want them to stay friends of ours, and giving their son RF Online would make them hate me.

Chicken Killer

Let me put my baffled hatred of RF Online in some context. Just before the review code arrived, I had spent a weekend dabbling in the free account version of a very basic MMORG called Rune Scape. It really is basic, but I had a strange kind of fun playing it. When telling my wife how I’d spent about three hours one afternoon happily improving my fishing, forestry and cooking skills, she gave me her ‘That’s nice, dear’ look and wandered off.

Yes, catching shrimp, chopping down trees and lighting fires to cook the shrimp might appear dull, but it was oddly fun. Levelling up meant something. It meant I burnt less shrimp. It meant I could chop down trees quicker and light fires more successfully. After a while, I graduated to chickens and cows. Farm animals across the land quaked in fear as I passed, let me tell you.

Where was I? Oh god, yes – RF Online…

Light At The End Of The Tunnel?

Before anyone complains that I obviously didn’t spend any time with the game, let me reassure you I did and that I want that time back, please. Two weeks of playing, on average, two to three hours a day, every day bar one. I ended up with a level 19 ranger of the Bellato Union – sort of space Hobbits with the acquisitiveness of Ferengi, apparently. In all that time, I still didn’t reach the real meat of the game because, as I played, the goalposts were being moved.

Imagine you’re walking through a long tunnel, trying your hardest to reach the end. Unfortunately, a large machine up ahead is adding more to the tunnel and it’s doing it just slightly faster than you can walk. Try to run, the machine speeds up. That’s what it’s like playing RF Online.

Grrrrrrrrr!

The sci-fi setting of this game sees you battling it in one of three factions – Bellato Union, Cora Holy Alliance (psychotic, religious elves) and the Accretian Empire (living battlemechs) – for the control of the Novus sector. Each race has a little back story, but it doesn’t really count for anything.

The game looks pretty enough, but nothing spectacular. Spell effects are nice. The characters in each race all look basically the same but, like the critters you torment in the endless quest for experience, are animated quite well. Sound is limited to dull anime orchestral music (trying so hard to be worthy) and uninteresting spot effects. Actually, the ‘voice’ of one critter – the Vafer Nipper – did raise a smile, as it sounds like Father Jack shouting “What the f**k?!!”.

There’s a tutorial to introduce you to the basics, but it’s a terribly slow affair. Mine crashed out, dumping me into the game to find things out as I went. Fortunately, the controls are fairly instinctive and can be sussed with about five minutes of general poking and manual reading. After that, your ready to explore the ‘safe world’ that is your starting point and the hub of your races’ operations. All that’s left is the fighting.

And that’s all there is.

See? There’s Nothing To It!

There are no attempts to hide the fact that this is no living, breathing world, or sector or whatever. Everything is just about fighting. You fight to get better at fighting, so you can join others to go off fighting to get better as a group at fighting, so you can go and join in the big fights between all the player characters. Those big fights to control one of a small number of settings on other worlds are the meat of the game.

I saw one once. It consisted of a confused mass of fighting characters, all of whom seemed to be standing still. Every now and then, someone would teleport in and join the mass. Then I was killed by something I didn’t see. That’s ok though because, at the levels I reached, death just means you get sent back to the safe world.

No. Really. There’s Nothing To It.

To have an impact on the big fights, to get to the meat of the game, you now need to be at least level 30. That’s according to the experienced players I met. Even folks at level 25 are getting one-hit-killed on a regular basis. That would mean that, playing at the rate I was, you’d need to devote a month to the game before you could reach the ‘interesting stuff’.

Frankly, there’s nothing in RF Online to make you want to do that. The ‘interesting stuff’ is just more fighting. There are so many other, better MMORGs that offer what RF does and a whole lot more besides. Some players I spoke to said they liked the simplicity of RF Online. Quests just involve killing a certain number of creatures. Nothing more. If that’s all you want, fine, but most folk are going to want more out of a game.

Gameplay, for example.