Jet Packs:  Look, it's just fun to run up to a battle, and then hit my jump jets to get up high, to fly away from trouble, or to get behind some cover.  They don't overdo it – there are no infantry fights in the air – but it's still a lot of fun.

The Talent Trees:  Unlike other MMOs, GA's talent trees are very simple.  Also, investing one point into a talent makes a noticeable difference in gameplay right away.  This is very, very different from WoW, where you have dozens of talent points to spend, and you have to unlock something lame to get to the talent you really want, etc.  Again, good design decision by Hi-Rez.

Character Customization:  Horrid.  You can play as a human, a human, or a human.  In the modern era of MMO games, this is as exciting as vanilla milk toast served up with a glass of lukewarm water.  Why they did this makes no sense whatsoever, when simply designing some alien heads for the characters would take a team of coders a few days to implement. 

When you design your boring old human, you have a lot of faces to choose from, various hairstyles, and you can tweak the eyebrows and earlobes of your character just so.  The problem is that the range of these tweaks is really quite small.  I tried, for the life of me, to make a deeply ugly human with an misshapen, oversized head.  It can't really be done.  I mean, my guy has a jutting jaw and spikey hair, but he's not even really noticeable in a crowd.  Bad design decision.

Gameplay:  The game, overall, is really very fun.  Mind you, these are all just impressions, and I'm just a noob, but I'm having a good time.  That is huge.  In most of the other sci-fi MMOs I've played, I've always had, at the back of my mind, a bothersome little....something.  There was a voice saying, “Don't be awed by the cool background, or the ugly aliens.  The gameplay is monotonous.”  In every case, that little voice was correct.  I'm not hearing that little voice when I play GA, so that's a good sign. 

Of course, I'll update you more as I play more.  If you enjoyed this little exploration of MMOFPS space, feel free to visit us over at WanderingGoblin.com, where we spend waaaaay too much time in fantasy universes.  But for now, ciao!

If you'd like to see some footage of Global Agenda gameplay, check out our earlier videos which walk you through the tutorial, and give you an idea of what awaits you on a PvE co-op mission, both with full commentary.

Comment

Add a comment using your Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google or OpenID accounts.
blog comments powered by Disqus