Adventure Quest Worlds | a Review
originally published on 13/12/2024;
Hello everyone, I am the worldly, adventurous quester, G.E.M.Simov, a hero of Lore so immaculate that I am, essentially, like ten people at once, and I have come to tell you all about the game “Adventure Quest Worlds” (henceforth AQW).
Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point from my own self, depending on my experience with it.
Gameplay
AQW is a flash game with the properties of a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. In it, the Player controls a Character who runs around, fights enemies, completes quests, earns experience, gains reputation and collects items. On occasion, the Player might find themselves in a situation that requires the involvement of other Players or the expenditure of legal tender.
So, let me begin with the basics. The Player Character (PC) is dropped into a ‘room’, which is a 2D environment of varying complexity and description. In more detail, it is made up of a painting and a set of invisible walls that the PC cannot pass through, thus creating an illusion of spatial existence. As an example, a room could be a cliff - that would mean that the painting features a cliff and then some air beyond the cliff. There would be an invisible wall along the edge of the cliff, disallowing the PC’s passage through, so as to simulate intractability with the environment and to maintain some sort of plausibility.
The Player can move their Character around the room by clicking on the spot that they want to have their PC go to. The PC will attempt to run in a straight line towards the clicked spot, and, if there is an invisible wall in the way, marked by some visual element in the painting component of the room, will get stuck on the wall, requiring more clicks around the wall so that it may reach the desired location.
Additionally, most rooms feature indications on their edges, marked by yellow/gold arrows, which convey that by walking over the arrow, the PC will be transported to another, supposedly adjacent room. If the arrow is yellow/gold, that generally indicates that the room beyond is in the same area as the currently occupied room. If the arrow is gray/silver, that indicates the room that will be entered is in a different area.
The difference between a room in one area and a room in another area boils down to the fact that going from room to room in one area does not feature a loading screen, whereas going from one area to another requires that the Player goes through a loading screen. In addition, being in an area might bring up certain User Interface(UI) elements that are unique to it.
Lastly, areas can be traveled to without being adjacent to them, whereas rooms in an area need to be traveled to by making use of adjacent rooms to reach them. The way inter-area traveling works is either through opening the Map screen and selecting an area, or using the chat functionality to input a text command (starting with a “/”) to go to the desired area.
With that said, what can be found in a room? There could be enemies in it, there could be friendly “non-Player Characters” (NPCs) in it, or there could be both. Now, it is important to note that, with one single exception, in AQW there are no NPCs aside from enemies - because everything else that might be treated as an NPC is an object in the painting (of the occupied room), and does not have stats or a means of interacting with the PC.
Thus, NPCs refers to objects in the room’s painting component that feature a red circle with a yellow exclamation point inside it - which could be buildings, wells, walls, toilets, animals or humanoid entities. The way interaction with NPCs occurs is by clicking the red circle, which brings up a menu with some text and a number of other red buttons, if any, which can be clicked for either access to a store, more text to read, a quest board, transport to another area or a cutscene to watch.
Out of those, two are relatively understandable. Cutscenes in AQW are animated sequences that appear whenever the Player reaches a particular point in their currently inhabited zone (with a zone being a loose conglomerate of areas, or a single area, tied by narrative context and visual similarities than actual gameplay). Some of those can be skipped, others cannot be skipped - and they require clicking, all of them, because the game does not feature voice acting, so the Player must click a “continue” button whenever a line of text appears during a cutscene.
Stores are UI elements that come in two varieties. The first, and most common type, is that of the Gold and Adventure Coin store. In it, the Player is presented with a number of items that they can purchase in exchange for Gold, which is the normal currency in the game, or items they can purchase in exchange for Adventure Coins (ACs), which are this game's premium currency.
That store variety makes use of the Inventory UI, with the slight difference that it features a pair of buttons/indicators. The Inventory menu features a list of items that the Player has in their possession, as well as a number of options to sort through those items. Additionally, it also shows, under the list of items, the quantity of ACs and Gold the Player has. The store interface adds the aforementioned pair of buttons right above the AC and Gold quantity, with one, when pressed, indicating that it is pressed and displaying the store’s inventory (purchasable items) and the other, when not pressed, indicating that the Player can press it to display the Player’s inventory, with items within it being sellable.
One other thing that the Inventory menu displays is the number of inventory slots the Player has at their disposal. Having mentioned the existence of a premium currency, this was only a matter of time, but here we are, dear reader, having arrived at the first instance of making the game inconvenient for the purpose of incentivizing the Player to spend money.
So, the Player starts off with 75 free Inventory slots, and can buy inventory slots with Adventure Coins until they reach the maximum of 450. Each inventory slot costs 200 ACs, and 2000 ACs can be purchased for 9.95 dollars… But it does not end there. There is also a Bank system, which allows the Player to deposit items in another Inventory (the Bank), which also has limited slots. The Player starts off with 45 Bank slots and can buy slots, at the same price as Inventory slots, until they reach 650.
Lastly, there is also a house Inventory - for items related to the Player housing system in AQW - which features 50 slots for free and can be expanded, for 200 ACs per slot, up to 250 slots total. So that's 375 Inventory slots, 605 Bank slots and 200 House Inventory slots for a total of 1180 slots for purchase, costing a total of 236000 Adventure Coins, which translates into the meager sum of… Well, that's rough! The biggest bundle of Adventure Coins on sale contains 40,000 ACs and costs 100 dollars, so to get all the Inventory slots in the game, the Player needs to spend around 600 dollars. And those are just the slots - which, mind you, dear reader, are insufficient to house even a tenth of the items that exist in AQW - as there are more than 2000 items meant for the Back slot exclusively.
So, simply put, there is no collecting that will happen. Actually, no, maybe there is, but it is very particular, and I will get back to that in a bit.
I spoke of the first type of store, but there are two. The second type of store is not one in which the Player spends Gold or ACs to obtain items, and is also one in which the Player cannot sell their items. It is an exchange store, in which the Player can select an item, is shown the items that need to be exchanged so that the item can be obtained, and can then exchange those items to obtain that particular item. Mind you, dear reader, the items that the Player must have in their possession, so as to exchange them for that thing in the store, are actual items that often take up Inventory slots!
So, stores not only feature items that can only be purchased with the Premium Currency, they also feature additional incentive for the Player to buy that Premium Currency, so that they may end up actually engaging with the game's mechanics and doing the things that this game is all about - which is collecting things and grinding other things, so that the Player may collect more things. That works due to the fact that items bought with ACs, or marked as being AC items, do not occupy Inventory slots.
I am not done yet, not with the stores - because aside from there being items that cost Gold and items that cost ACs, there are also items that can only be bought by Legends. Legends are those Players who pay a monthly subscription fee for bonuses in the game - and those bonuses are substantial.
Being a Legend allows the Player to access special zones and even areas that only Legends have access to. Being a Legend allows the Player to purchase a lot more items - some of which are otherwise only obtainable with ACs. Being a Legend gives the Player access to items that are exclusive to Legends - some of which are ones that directly affect the PC’s power, thus making them stronger. Being a Legend also allows the Player to get themselves a free boost of some variety every day, increasing their experience gains, their class point gains, their Gold collected or their reputation gains - overall, being a Legend is very cool!
So, this game not only has a Premium Currency that can be used to buy power - because ACs are the only other way of obtaining those aforementioned boosts, or of obtaining particular items (Classes) that are leagues better than free Classes - but it also has a subscription that also increases the power of the Player. Did you know that, according to game theory, if the game features “exclusivity” and unfairness, it is not a game? That's something to think about…
But alright, enough of that - there is more than sufficient indication that this game has some problems, and I haven't even been able to get to the good stuff.
The last thing that the Player can do when interacting with NPCs is getting access to a quest board (mind you, there are also quests and entire quest boards that are exclusively for Legends). The quest board features a number of quests, some available from the get go, others requiring that a preceding task be completed. The quests have some text relating to the narrative, as well as a condition for their completion. Most often, those conditions are to kill a certain number of enemies or to bring a certain number of “items” obtained from slain enemies (fortunately, most of those items are stored in a temporary inventory, which temporary inventory is infinite).
Some quests require that the Player go somewhere, others require that the Player speaks to an NPC. Some require that the Player go to a location and click certain things (that appear and becomes clickable only when the Player is on that particular quest). Very rarely, there are some quests that necessitate engagement with a particular mini game.
So, the Player goes and fulfills the condition for the quest's completion. The Player can then open their quest log and complete the quest from wherever they are situated, receiving the rewards at the spot - those rewards most often being some Gold and Experience, with there occasionally being Reputation and an item thrown in for fun. That somewhat shatters the immersion, but it is doable.
In addition to that, a large number of quests are repeatable, meaning that they can be completed once and then accepted again, so as to be completed again. Some quests are one-time ordeals, though, and those are typically the ones that require walking and clicking, rather than combat with enemies.
One other odd thing that can be said about quests - those that do grant items do so in a manner identical to how enemies drop loot - the item appears on the screen, in a special UI element, informing the Player that it has been discovered and asking whether the Player wants to keep it or not. If the Player says no, the item is destroyed, and the only way of obtaining it again is through completing the quest a second time. There are also some quests that provide one random reward out of many options, which is just stupid, and there are also quests that feature multiple rewards that the Player has to pick from.
All of those are very problematic if the quest is not a repeatable one.
But, that said, what's the deal with reputation? It is a value that starts off at 0, and has no effect on gameplay at all. What it does do is that, by increasing the Player’s reputation level (with there being 10 possible levels per reputation, and there being many, many reputations), the Player gains access to more items from a certain store.
Naturally, the process of acquiring reputation is lengthy and bothersome - essentially taking the stereotype of the MMORPG(Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Game) and amping it up to eleven. The Player gets reputation by completing quests - some of which are only doable once per day, others once per week - and those quests typically involve the killing of many enemies, many times over. The average amount of reputation that a quest might award is on average 250, or if lucky, 500, maybe even 1000 (for those daily quests). However, to get to reputation 10, the Player needs to accumulate a measly 302,500 points of reputation.
That means hundreds of quests and potentially thousands of enemies killed for a single reputation at 10 - and the only reason the Player is grinding out reputation is so they can get access to the good stuff in the store, which are items, which the Player might not even have space in their inventory for! Naturally, as mentioned, the Player can buy a funky reputation boost, which doubles reputation gains for a certain amount of time - but that costs ACs!
So, as expected, the game introduced more and more means of making itself inconvenient and bothersome, purely for the purpose of them selling a solution to those problems. The game is made bad on purpose, so that the stuff that makes it good, or at least average, can be sold. That's dreadful.
With that said, let me finally go on to combat and enemies. Most enemies are simple goons who just attack the PC and deal damage with every hit. They have a certain amount of Health and deal a certain amount of damage, appropriate (or not) to their level.
Upon killing an enemy, the Player receives some Experience, some Gold, some Class Points and, depending on the enemy, maybe even an item. The Player decides whether to keep the item, and that's that. If the Player is already at rank 10 of their Class, they will get no Class Points, which is also the case for Experience Points if the Player is at the maximum level (as of writing this review - level 100).
What about the PC? Well, the PC has a certain amount of Health - based on their level and on the enchantments of their items. The PC also has Mana - 100 of it - and a mysterious green resource that is… It's stamina and it is useless.
So, the Player goes and fights some level 1 enemies (when the PC is also level 1) and kills them by just clicking them twice, which first selects the enemy and then commands the PC to attack them. The PC has a basic attack which can be turned on by either Pressing the 1 Key on the Player's keyboard or clicking the first option on the toolbar. When activated, the basic attack is going to be performed at a certain interval, dictated by the Player’s class and what kind of buff affects their PC. Ultimately, that is the game - standing and waiting for the PC to hit.
At level 1, which is when the Player's Class would also be at rank 1, the Player has access to that Class’ first ability, which can be activated by pressing the 1 Key on the keyboard or clicking the second option on the toolbar. That spices up the normal gameplay, by allowing for the occasional button press, though every ability is on a cooldown, requiring a certain amount of time before being usable again.
With the PC’s abilities being dictated by the currently equipped Class, what winds up happening is that the Player's power is decided by their level, loosely, and by their Class, predominantly. That is so because there are some classes who have the potential to deal 1 million damage, or can make themselves almost impossible to hit for a nearly indefinite period of time, or are simply unable to miss their attacks. Funnily enough, those classes are all either gated behind obtusely long grinds that can take upwards of a month of constant action, or behind a paywall.
Even more amusing is that the strongest classes in the game, without a doubt, are those that can be obtained by buying a calendar and registering the code that it comes with, which allows the Player to access a store, in which there's a lot of free stuff, with that free stuff being some variety of “-mancer” class, which is just obtusely powerful and can kill almost anything by itself (with potentially 2 exceptions).
By contrast, the starting classes that the Player gets to pick from when making their Character are so laughably weak that they MUST group up for bosses. The same applies for most of the classes that are available to the Player in the earlier stages of the game, which does something very odd. It actually creates the conditions for social interaction and the opportunity for the emulation of an MMORPG. Players group up and go fight bosses, together, as though the game is an actual multiplayer experience!
However, that is only so in the early stages. Later on, the Players will come to realize that playing with the basic starter classes is not that fun, and they will want to change their class. Fortunately, that is quite easy, due to the fact that a PC’s class is just an item they equip. So the Players will get themselves new classes, figure out that they can actually kill bosses by themselves now, and suddenly any need to engage with the social aspect of this “MMORPG” disappears without a trace.
But let me go back to the aforementioned thing - enchantments. This is how the Player increases their Health and their damage done. When the Player gets an item, that item might have an enchantment. Items have enchantments if they are Weapons, Classes, Helmets or Back items. The item could have an enchantment, meaning it can immediately be equipped and used, or it could have no enchantment.
Items that have an enchantment will also have a level (of the enchantment) which indicates how strong, roughly, the item itself is. The enchantment’s level, and type, affects how much damage the weapon does and how many stats it provides to the PC. If the PC is level 50 and their item has an enchantment level of 30, then they need to re-enchant it.
To do that, they go to a store that sells enchantments, they pick out the highest available level of enchantment (there is not always an enchantment for every level, and then every normal enchantment is followed by two enchantments that are available only for Legends - so if the Player is level 28, they can buy an enchantment for their weapon that is level 25, or they can pay the subscription fee and buy the Legend only enchantments that are either level 26 or level 27), and enchant their item.
All items that the Player is using should be enchanted with as high a level of enchantment as possible, and they should also be considerate of the class the Player is using, as certain enchantments are good for certain classes. As an example, there is the Warrior enchantment, which provides a lot of Strength and Endurance, which increase damage with basic attacks and health. This would be good for the warrior class, which relies on basic attacks and also has abilities that use Strength. However, for the Mage class, this would not be that good, as the Mage does damage, mainly, with abilities, which scale with Intelligence, rather than Strength.
Every stat does something different, but the rule is that if the class uses it, then it is good - otherwise, it's gimpy. The only exception could be considered the Lucky enchantment, which gives a little bit of everything (far less than other enchantments) but also gives a lot of Luck, which other enchantments don’t touch. Luck increases the chances of critically striking and also the amount of damage done with critical strikes, and it also works for healing, allowing for some funky situations in which a PC with 1600 health can heal itself for 3000 or more health.
Ultimately, however, what winds up happening is that there's no point to engaging with the system. The thing that should be done, and has a point to being done, is to pick the enchantment that the game recommends and to be done with the whole ordeal.
Ultimately, AQW is a game in which the Player runs around, does quests, grinds reputations and levels, collects things, but not all the things, or even half of the things, or even a quarter of them, and does more grinding. It's a game that is supposedly meant to be played with other people, but its main draw - that being collecting things - is walled off behind mundane and repetitive grinds that go on forever and are incredibly uninteresting to do, even with a group of players. In fact, doing them with others is worse than doing it by oneself, which is even more obtuse.
The only thing going for AQW’s gameplay is the curiosity of discovering the funky mechanics that the various classes have, and going through the story. However, is that worth it, when any semblance of progression that might have previously been appealing and satisfying is gone, and all that's left is the overbearing ennui of standing in a room and clicking a button for hours on end? I don't think so. 1/3
Presentation
AQW is a game that lacks consistency. That might be owed up to the fact that it is a game that has been in development for more than 13 years, or it could be owed up to the fact that the artists working on it have changed, be it physically or in regards to their style. However, at the same time, it also lacks consistency in a number of other areas that cannot be associated with just the skill and number of artists involved.
But let me begin with the positives - due to the fact that AQW is a game that relies on paintings, most of the rooms that can be observed in it are incredibly nice. Well, maybe that is not the correct word to use, but there is definitely something about them that gives off a good vibe. The majority of locations and environments the Player gets to visit and trudge through look very picturesque, and as a background for adventures they definitely hit the mark.
There are, naturally, some that miss, but the great majority looks better than what I would consider the average, and then there are some rooms that are absolutely breathtaking in their spectacularity. Alas, this is where I can start pointing at inconsistencies. There are rooms that feature incredible amounts of detail and tell a story, just by merit of being observed, and those particular rooms are only visited once, with almost nothing urging the Player to go back to revisit them and re-experience them again. At the same time, though, there are many other rooms that lack that peculiarity. These other rooms appear vacant or tacked on, slapped together in a most haphazard manner and left to be.
Then there’s the matter of enemies and how they are drawn. All enemies are presented as 2D sprites to the Player, and they might have one or two animations associated with them. Some - such as bosses - feature more animations, but that’s not that important, though it is not a bad idea to mention that this game’s animations are on a very rudimentary level. That is owed up to the fact that the sprites in use are not as flexible as they could be, and the fact that every single Character is presented in pseudo profile leaves little room for wiggling.
Regardless, the main issue here is connected to the appearance of the enemies, which issue is also present in many of the backgrounds. That is, comparing an old area, such as Chiral Valley or Dwarfhold, to a newer area, such as, say, Haku Village, yields interesting results. Things are darker, it could be said that they are more intense and more serious… It’s as if the game is progressively getting edgier and edgier with each subsequent release, which also coincides with the increased detail that is added to everything.
However, when I say detail, I do not mean it in as good a way as I meant it in relation to backgrounds. The amount of detail here is in regards to definition, as if everything is trying to look high quality, as if this game, which starts off its story in an incredibly campy, satirical manner, and it keeps going in that regard, in an attempt to maintain a particular tone and vibe of not being all that serious, wound up transitioning into earnestly wanting to be serious.
Perhaps I cannot describe it, but the presence of whimsy and the worldliness of things winds up dissipating, and instead of having stories that are somewhat simple and, in a sense, harmless, what shows up are complex and grand sagas, which take away from the feeling of the casualness that AQW starts off with. In addition to that, the world becomes more and more disjointed, with areas only being accessible through esoteric chat commands and finding particular NPCs after performing particular acts, whereas in older areas it is all as simple as simply clicking the arrow and going somewhere.
Those issues could be moved either to the Gameplay or the Story section of this review, but I would argue that they are most heavily related to the game’s presentation. It clashes with itself, it winds up in a strange contradiction with what it is, and ultimately loses itself in the process. Everything transitions from high fantasy that’s more akin to a fairy-tale to some gritty, almost dark fantasy thing.
Enemies are menacing and threatening in appearance, they’re dark and evil in a harrowing manner, they look as though they’re wrong and bad, whereas enemies in the earlier stages of the game look as though they’re figments of someone’s imagination. The vibe changes as the game goes forward, and that, which is lost, is not found again, whereas that, which is gained, was an object of ridicule in these earlier phases.
Now, due to the fact that this is a flash game, it does not have much in the way of sound. What it does have, however, often works quite well - many of the sound effects that are used sound very good. Meaty, impactful - in particular the sound of attacks that land, and attacks that are critical strikes. There’s some kind of intensity to them that really adds to the otherwise unimpressive experience of going through combat.
The game also has a vast array of musical tracks, with some of them being downright annoying, to others being very neat, although very clearly short and looped. There are cases of music that works quite well being ruined by the fact it is a twenty-ish second loop that starts grinding away at the Player’s psyche as it is heard for the fifth time. However, at the same time, there are also tracks that manage to avoid being that painfully looped, or, rather, work far better as loops, as a result of which they sound fantastic - an example could be Mythsong’s theme, or that one song that’s associated with the lords of Chaos and is very prominent in scenes featuring the earlier few, such as Escherion, Vath, Wolfwing.
However, the game also has a bunch of issues with sound - there are times when particular sound effects are far too loud, there are times when music does not play, even if it should, there are times when there should be audio - such as voice acting - during a cutscene, but it does not play, or it’s just… Cringeworthy.
That said, the game keeps having issues with consistency - such as the issue of arrows on the ground in rooms, the one mentioned in the Gameplay section of this review. These are supposed to be a constant that indicates what’s what, but then sometimes there are no arrows, yet the room can be walked out of via a particular edge. Alternatively, gold arrows lead into other zones, when the game’s visual language indicates that gold arrows should lead to other rooms exclusively.
Then there are times when arrows of that variety are obscured by things that should not obscure them - such as UI elements or by enemies. In fact, enemies often wind up obscuring a lot of stuff, which is quite problematic.
Additionally, there's also an issue in regards to the games tutorial, and the way information is presented to the Player. In a decent number of cases, there is no indication as to what something or is not - as an example, hovering over one of the resource bars for Health, Mana or Stamina, does not bring up a little text box that says what it is that is being hovered over. Similarly, when the Player takes a look at an item’s stats, all that is visible are the stats - there is no indication as to what kind of effect the stats have.
However, at the same time, there are a few items that have a funky little icon under their set of stats, which, when hovered over, does provide some information, which is consistent with AQW’s inconsistency.
One of the most problematic elements, I would say, is that a vast number of important things is not well conveyed. Some items have effects that do not stack, and then there are other items with effects of a similar nature, which do stack. Nothing indicates that the effects stack, of course, aside from the change in numbers that can be observed post factum.
There was an effort to integrate the official AQW wiki, featuring a button that opens the Wiki on the page for the item through which the button was clicked, but that's not that good a solution, because it takes the Player out of the game.
Overall, though, AQW’s presentation, albeit inconsistent, has more merit than not, as a result of which it is a joy to behold, and also the insane quantity of items (almost all of which are types of armor and weapons) allows for the discovery of some really neat looking things. 2/3
Story
As the reader may have gathered, the story in AQW starts off being very satirical in nature. It plays with the tropes associated with fantasy and its heroes, it likes to degrade or amp up certain elements for comedic effect.
It starts off with the PC, who winds up being THE hero of Lore, standing on a hill and looking very cool, only for a lightning bolt to strike them and cause them to tumble down the rocky hillside in a most unflattering fashion.
Over the course of the story, loads of things happen, cliches and tropes are turned on their heads, but then other cliches and tropes come into play and are used as a means of solving particular situations. The game does not take itself too seriously, allowing for a very varied and nonsensical, barely coherent story.
However, that comes into play and causes problems. The medieval setting with magic starts, on occasion, featuring technology, and then again winds up featuring technology, and time travel to dimensions with loads of technology, and then technology comes in and does loads of things, and then there’s travel to alternate dimensions and… Well, there’s a lot of stuff that shows up, conflicts with the theme and setting, even if the theme and setting are meant to be relatively unserious, and keeps piling on and on.
This also happens with the tone of the story. There are many times when the story is lighthearted - especially near the start - with villains being dealt with in a non-lethal manner, or, at least, in a manner that does not directly revolve around their destruction at the hands of the hero. However, the further the story goes, the more serious things start becoming, and alongside that seriousness the story shifts from whimsical and fantastical to dark and intense.
That is not a bad thing, but it is something odd, it is an inconsistency that bothers me greatly. Sure, the moments that show up and are dark and out of place are striking, because of the fact that they are so out of place, but at the same time when they wind up becoming the norm, and when everything transitions into being insanely edgy - on account of the game’s story going from a hero getting his footing to a hero being a hero to a hero battling intergalactic threats who can destroy the world in an instant…
There’s the issue of power creep and power scaling, and the stakes can only be high if they are raised higher than they were before, which makes it difficult to have high stakes without having a world-ending threat to deal with, and that requires seriousness.
Aside from that, AQW also has issues with its Characters, in the sense that there is little room for Character development, and then there are many side Characters who are simply there, or who simply have one single trait that is all their Character is (even down to their name). There’s a general desire to avoid killing important Characters, and there’s something in the way the story is written that makes it very unflattering to the villains, who constantly fail yet, simultaneously, succeed.
There are oddities that leave me perplexed, but overall it’s more good than bad. 2/3
Legendary Point
Does this game get the Legendary point, so craved and wanted by all and none at the same time? I have this funny feeling that the answer is a resounding YES, and let me explain why. This game, although it has all those issues, particularly with its gameplay, is also incredibly entertaining - mainly because of its story, but also because of its presentation. The vibe, the feeling, the theme of it is so bizarre, yet at the same time so familiar and so pleasant that it wins me over.
In addition to that, it is one of the few MMORPGs with easily accessible botting software that is not violently persecuted, as a result of which it also allows for some funky circumventions of the bad mechanics. On top of that, though, the game really tickles my fancy in regard to the humongous amounts of things to do in it, even if it is all, unfortunately, limited by inventory space. 1/1
Conclusion
6/10. AQW is a neat game that I would recommend to fans of MMORPGs and aRPGs, to those who enjoy lengthy grinds and nearly pointless endeavors. I’d say that it is also a very good option for folks who like going through whimsical, parody-rich stories. However, it is definitely not a game for everyone, and if one does not find themselves enjoying it by the end of the fifth or tenth hour, it should be dropped.
In the bag of mediocrity I will throw this oddly shaped precious gem, for it might have seasonal value, but that value is more like the price of a car - it keeps going down as time passes.