Anarchy Online is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Because it was released a long time ago, it is quite different from today's MMO games. This is both good and bad. The good thing is that over time the game has grown to be more complex. The bad thing is that it has out-dated graphics and some gameplay elements might seem a bit complicated for new players.
First, you'll need to create a character. A pretty nice cinematic will be shown and then you can choose between 4 different breeds. Each one has different perks and looks quite different from all the others. After that you can customize the appearance of your character. There are quite a few options here, however after this you'll need to choose between a wide variety of professions. There is a total of 14 professions and each one has different armors, weapons and play style. Another nice fact here is that a difficulty level is shown for each profession, meaning that some are much harder to play than others.
After this you'll enter the world and begin playing. Right away you'll notice just how different the game is from all the others. Non-playable characters (NPC) who might have a quest for you, don't have anything to indicate this fact (something like a highlighted exclamation point, which is seen in other games, is not present here). Instead, you are left to explore the world, discover quests, kill mobs on your own. It also has a pretty strange tutorial: each time you'll encounter something new, a pop-up window will appear describing what it is. Usually this type of tutorial works just fine, however it's not very optimized here and can cause some problems.
The gameplay can seem really slow, because of the attack animations and difficult leveling up. After receiving a quest, there is a possibility to add it to your map which will act as a quest helper, indicating where to go. I tried and tried and wasn't able to get this to work properly. So questing can get pretty hard sometimes because you don't know where to go. A thing that I really liked about the game was the fact that you're given some evolution points when leveling up. Most games nowadays just do all the changes for the new level automatically, however this one is different. Like in the old days, you can really customize your character's strengths and weaknesses. This can seem difficult at first, but there are a lot of guides on the game's forum which can help you with a specific build.
In the end I can say that I liked it. It doesn't mesmerize you like the newest MMO games, however it has a classic feel to it. Everything in it also looks more complicated than it actually is and this makes the game a very interesting one if you enjoy exploring. If you can manage to ignore the out-dated graphics, this game is surely worth a shot.
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