Riders of Icarus Ranger’s Fury DLC Review for PC

Overall I personally enjoyed playing the ranger class more than any other class currently available due to the versatility of ranged and melee attacks and the variety such a system offers in terms of playstyle. The only concerns that I had were that the lance abilities seemed to be really strong in comparison to the ranged crossbow skills, which made battling some mobs very face-roll in comparison. On that same note, the ranger had significantly less cast time and the advantage of movement compared to a wizard. Although I didn’t get a chance to engage in PvP combat on the PTS, there may be concerns with balancing such a scenario. I rate the Ranger’s Fury DLC a 7,5/10.

In this review I will be discussing the title Riders of Icarus published by Nexon and developed by WeMade Entertainment. Riders of Icarus is a 3D fantasy and combat MMORPG game that heavily focuses on an aerial combat system, exploration, gathering, guild combat (PvP) and solo/group dungeon encounters (PvE). In Riders of Icarus you can choose from six unique classes: Berserker (melee 2h weapon and aoe), Guardian (sword & shield class—tanking), Assassin (combos & dual-wielding), Priest (healing class), Wizard (classic fire and ice ranged spells) along with the new ranger class available December 15th 2016. Another unique thing about Riders of Icarus is that there are no other races besides human. While this may be a turn off to some players, I find that for gameplay purposes it enhances playability by completely avoiding balancing multiple racial passives or unique abilities.

Immediately Riders of Icarus impressed me with its customization and loads of variables in the character creation menu when selecting your character’s appearance. For an MMORPG, the game developers seemed to really want the player to feel “unique” in the respect that you can really change your character in a lot of both realistic and surreal ways. For example, you can make your character’s head massive whilst having a small body as well as fiddle with the proportions of other characteristics such as eyebrows, cleavage, and even the scaling of the characters lower and upper lips. I find that these options are quite standard in Asian MMO games, which pride themselves on such—nevertheless while Riders of Icarus does offer a nice amount of character customization options, it isn’t the wildest or most comprehensive MMO I’ve encountered.

In terms of the combat system in Riders of Icarus, you’re able to select from two modes, standard mode and action mode. Standard mode is the classic MMORPG control mode. Choose a target with your cursor and trigger skills with your hotkeys. Action mode on the other hand requires you to aim a reticle at your target and use either mouse buttons or hotkeys to cast abilities. It’s also nice to note that before you select a mode the game suggests which mode to choose based on which class you are playing. I opted to go for the standard mode, using a tab target and selection based combat system. Immediately playing as an assassin I felt that the sound effects, combat animations and spell effects were seamless and executed quite well. However as I began to progress into a more “open world” and encounter other NPCs I found that the dodging attacks was quite hard while using the standard mode with the assassin class. It was suggested that I play an assassin using the action mode which seemed fair considering the assassin has a lot of mobility through escapes and diving abilities. Yet I was unsure of how balance would work given the two different combat modes, particularly when it came to PvP. I think that by implementing both combat systems the developers hoped to appeal to both types of players who enjoy tab target selection or a less rigid action combat style of gameplay. However, in my experience having both in the game created a sort of mediocre middle ground between either mode and I found that even when I was clearly dodging with the standard mode I would still be hit be melee NPCs from a distance which really broke the realism and gameplay. Although the redeeming factor of having two different combat systems was that depending on which class you play, combat feels less static compared to other MMOs and therefore less of a grind. One last thing to note about gameplay is that it wasn’t necessarily easy either. As an avid player of MMOs, I personally enjoyed the difficulty level of fighting mobs—pulling multiple mobs at once almost always meant certain death; which helps add a bit of strategy and decisions making into the game rather than simply “pointing and clicking” to win.

When you first enter the game you are exposed to a flying mount within the first five minutes. This was a clear sign that mounts—flying especially, would be central and if not necessary to progress in this game. Right away after the initial story mode has commenced, the player is introduced to more mounts such as a unicorn, wolf and even a strange kangaroo that help you get around the game. More notably, I simply enjoyed the sheer diversity in types of mounts, which made exploring the game’s different zones all the more interesting. The only cons I could attribute to the mount aspect of Riders of Icarus is that sprinting on mounts causes them to run out of stamina, which for me seemed pointless, especially coming from other games such as World of Warcraft where you gained a flat movement speed increase while mounted. Additionally, while on your mount in Riders of Icarus the particle effect that materializes when sprinting seemed like I was on a spaceship at warp speed, yet the mount speed only seemed to increase marginally. Moreover, when using flying mounts I was sometimes dismounted when flying too high and fell which seemed strange considering the game is based around flying mounts.

In terms of the aesthetics in Riders of Icarus, I would have to say that the graphical design is really well done for an MMO title. While I had the graphics set on their highest setting, there were a few weak spots in terms of textures when it came to some rocks, but overall I would say that the game is actually very beautiful to play and discover. In addition, the combat sound effects and spell particles were fantastically well done and aside from the design of the combat system really made playing the game and fighting NPCs all the more satisfying. The voice acting in Riders of Icarus should also get some praise as they don’t cut short many of the NPCs voices, which shows that they really put some effort into the story line.

As a free to play game, Riders of Icarus really meets and exceeds a lot my expectations in terms of graphics, audio quality and questing progression. Aside from that, I think that the only real setbacks are the differences between the two targeting modes and the fact that dodging (at least when not on a flying mount) feels almost pointless due to the attack range of some mobs. In addition, the UI in the game seemed quite large and without any option to scale it down it felt slightly cluttered. Overall Riders of Icarus plays alright—aside from the mounted combat system which in my opinion really added an additional element to the genre. In this respect, I give Riders of Icarus a 7 out of 10 points.