Free Realms
The sweet sound of success.
The Miner and Chef crafting jobs are superb, however, making the best use (alongside the members-only Blacksmith) of Free Realms' excellent tile-matching game, a riff on Bejeweled that allows you to draw long, snaking lines of over three matching tiles to collect or eradicate them as the job demands. Chef and Miner add a series of point-click-and-draw against-the clock mini-games for making your items, and they even have complete sets of equipment to collect along the advancement path, with meaningful performance bonuses for the mini-games attached. Free Realms generally does loot very well - i.e. there's lots of it, it keeps coming and it looks cool.
The Card Duelist job I can't comment on with any degree of authority, other than to note that SOE's work in this area - with its EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies spin-offs - is respected by those in the know. Which leaves the combat jobs.
Free Realms' combat is a loose, click-happy affair, blending ultra-simple MMO skills - only a maximum of five for each job at present - with plenty of enemies and a need to hammer away at your basic attack, Diablo-style. It's punchy and enjoyable, and the combat scenarios, from simple maps to mini-dungeons and full-blown labyrinths, are well-made and varied - although there aren't enough of them that you won't see some several times over, even levelling just the one job.
The problem is more the odd distribution of jobs across the free game and membership, and the fact that the simple combat engine doesn't allow for a lot of variety. Only Brawler and Ninja are available to free players, and these are both classes that basically involve running up to things and bashing them. Members-only jobs are Warrior (running up and bashing, with some light tanking), Medic (running up and bashing, with some light healing), Wizard (shooting and bashing) and Archer (shooting).
They all work well enough, but Brawler - presented first - is the obvious template for all the others. It's noticeable that the furthest removed, Archer and Wizard, work least well. Furthermore, restricting the only healing class to paying players seems an odd move, given how important (and usually underpopulated) healing classes are. But you'll be doing a lot of your playing solo, anyway, and so spending plenty of in-game cash on the rather expensive health potions.
They're also available from the StationCash real-money item shop, along with cosmetic gear, pets, karts, and a small number of pieces of genuinely desirable and useful high-level job equipment that can be used from level 1. Priced at a pound or two each, these might be hard to resist, especially those weapons and tools that come with a permanent buff to the rate you gather cash or experience, designed to ease the pain of grinding (which are better value than the usual limited-time XP potions, at least). The same might be true of the base attraction of carrying a sword that's on fire, or a hammer with fuming exhaust pipes. It's not the cheapest item shop we've seen, but it is a well-judged one.
Playing Free Realms you'll experience a strange blend of obsessive compulsion - the need to collect and master familiar from any MMO - and attention deficit disorder, because the game's myriad treats and attractions are all so tempting, but so fleeting. There's nothing that really lingers in the mind here, but does that matter, when there's always something else to do? Probably not. It's been enough for two million people already.
So the game's only real problems are a lack of a sense of community - due partly to the fact you can switch servers at will, partly to the young audience, partly to the understandable lack of a general chat channel - and some threadbare patchiness in the jobs and questing. Much of this can be fixed in time by SOE and we're quite sure it will be, so assured is Free Realms' debut. In the meantime, it's an effortlessly light and addictive indulgence - just don't expect it to nourish you.