This week we tested Clash of Olympus, the new fantasy-based team building browser RPG from LeKool Games where players can choose from one of three different classes, take on various quests and progress through a story driven free to play MMO revolving around key events in Greek Mythology. We’ve played many games like this before so were interested to see whether it would offer anything new. After a quick account registration through the official website we logged straight into the game.
Straightaway we faced the choice of six different characters, broken down into three different classes with both a male and female version for each, like many RPG’s of this type there were no character customisation options in terms of the available avatar and profile pictures but simply choosing to name your character. The choice was between the classic Knight, Mage or Archer; it was a least promising to see that each class actually had a description to give you a little bit of information about them and how they would play, something which is typically missed from these types of RPG’s, and choosing the female Knight stepped into our adventure.
The first thing we noticed was, as ever, the poor English translations; as with practically all of these types of RPG’s it’s as common as having the same Battle Rating system, Tavern to recruit Heroes and automated gameplay that you might as well call poor translations a feature of these types of games. It’s not just LeKool, there are very few Asian imports from this genre that actually have accurate English translations but it is the first thing we always notice and so deserves a mention.
As soon as we were into the game we were already “auto-pathing” from NPC to NPC to pick up our quest, a single linear story arc that was extremely narrative based, the main focus of early game content being the story driven plot, though what exactly was going on was a little confusing and the script won’t be winning any awards any time soon. Speaking to the Gods themselves, including the mighty Zeus, the dialogue was pretty cheesy and these mighty deities argued with us like petulant children.
Our biggest annoyance was that we played the game for close to 30 minutes trying to reach a point where the game changed up a little, for 30 minutes we had the same World Tree background where we would speak to our quests which led to a portal where we would engage in combat. After around 10 battles with only seeing two different combat backgrounds and the same enemies (albeit renamed) over and over the game started to drag. Combat is completely automated and completely pointless, our “Battle Force” (BR in other games) was always so far beyond the curve that we were logging into battles and killing the enemy in one hit, it literally took longer to load into the instanced based area than it did to actually fight the enemy within.
One rather annoying moment in the game was where we spent lots of our earned silver to buy all the armour gear in the available shop to then only complete a quest a few minutes later that provided us with all of those very same armour pieces in the shop as a quest reward. It just felt like laziness that the developers didn’t even create different armour for the quest; everything about the game used rehashed and reused elements, mechanics and graphics. Even the two main deities, Chaos and Zeus, used exactly the same graphics (albeit slightly modified and horizontally flipped)… It just feels like the game was completely rushed out of development to bring in another free to play MMO that players who love the genre will spend a little cash on then drop it and move onto the next game with the same systems.
All in all the game could have been the same as every other RPG in the genre, it offered absolutely nothing new content wise, to the point where even after almost 30 minutes of gameplay and reaching level 10 it had still not open up any new features in the game for us to explore and it was a tiresome grind to reach even that point.
