Sword of the New World

To The Hilt

In other MMORPGs, you kill two enemies a minute and quests ask you to kill twenty of them. In Sword of the New World, you kill ten enemies a minute - so the quest asks you to kill a hundred of them. (And that's a charitable example, plucked out of the air; we encountered many, many quests which asked us to kill hundreds of foes and proceeded to take an hour or two of slaughter to complete.) What, in the end, is the difference? None, you'll be forced to grimly conclude as you wearily click on your 70th demonic chicken.

If the game itself is tedious - and frankly, it really is tedious, for a fairly large amount of the time you spend playing - then surely it must make up for it with its rewards? Not so. If you play MMORPGs because of a horrendous addiction to Phat Lewt, you're looking in the wrong place; in the early levels especially, Sword of the New World has remarkably few carrots to hold out for you, and those it does extend are distinctly unappetising.

Once you get a bit further into the game, the loot on offer does pick up significantly (although good stuff will still drop depressingly infrequently) - allowing you to bedeck your assortment of Victorian fops and Whitechapel prostitutes with a wider range of hats, swords, lace handkerchiefs and opium pipes. Well, perhaps not opium pipes. However, at this point you'll run into a couple of further issues which are likely to kill any love affair you've been having with Sword of the New World up to this point.

Firstly, at level 50, your characters stop coming back from the dead when they're knocked out - instead, you have to resurrect them manually with a Scout, or respawn back in the town you started from, potentially losing hours of progress. This is an enormous difficulty spike which vastly slows down the rate at which you move through the game, and turns merely tedious encounters into outright frustrating ones.

Secondly, after the first fifteen hours or so, you're suddenly faced with some of the most bloody awful English translations ever to grace a videogame - which is particularly jarring after remarkably solid translation work up to that point. It's as if the translators hired a native English speaker to do the first dozen hours, and just accepted the raw transcripts of a Korean translator (or Babelfish) for the rest; it's painfully awful, to the point of being downright confusing on occasion.

This is thoroughly disappointing in some respects - not least because Sword of the New World is one of the most beautiful MMORPGs we've ever clapped eyes upon. Nearly every zone in the game is a visual feast, and although the characters themselves are probably an acquired taste for some, we loved the steel and lace faux-Romantic aesthetics of the game. It's Versailles meets high fantasy, and all the better for it - although that does bring into question why the generally good music insists on occasionally dropping into generic, awful Eurobeat sections.

On the plus side, however, Sword of the New World does have one huge inducement in its scabbard - it's entirely free to download and play, with the firm planning to make its money back by convincing players to buy gold and items for real cash. Make what you will of the business model; it does certainly mean that you can try the game out at minimal expense, though. It's almost worth it just to see the lovely visuals, and the moderately interesting party mechanism in action - but on our list of our favourite things about Korea, this is coming in a hell of a long way below kimchi and curry doughnuts. (Although still above Bae Yon Joon.)