Guild Wars Faction

Metachronos overall score = 8.7 / 10

Positive
# Intriguing action RPG gameplay gets your pulse racing but keeps you thinking
# Enormous gameworld offers a ton of competitive and cooperative action
# Interesting and dynamic new mission types, including frontline alliance battles
# Stand-alone game that's substantially enhanced if you own the original
# Great presentation and a sleek game engine

Negative
# Despite the multiplayer focus, communicating with other players feels clunky
# The most enticing new content caters mostly to the hardcore
# Too bad it's not an MMORPG

Last time's game that combined most of the best aspects of online role-playing (without any monthly fees attached), action role-playing games, and competitive gaming in general is back in a similarly huge and interestingly complex follow-up. While Guild Wars Factions is inherently similar to its predecessor, and saddled with some of the same relatively minor shortcomings, it still delivers a deep, addictive, and satisfying experience on many levels. The game is ultimately best suited for social, competitive players (like fans of the original), but it effectively weaves together solo, cooperative, and competitive content in a way that's undeniably impressive. It's worth noting that for as much as the game pushes you to get yourself into a guild, it still doesn't do a particularly good job of letting you interact with other players. As a testament to Guild Wars' worldwide success, outposts and towns tend to be teeming with players...but they're also filled with "noise" in the form of a constant stream of text chat messages, mostly from players hurriedly trying to form teams. The random PVP arenas automatically throw players together into a team, but the story missions leave you to your own devices, which can be frustrating if you have trouble finding good people to play with. Guild Wars Factions doesn't have as much content that effectively caters to solo players as the original, so unless you've already got a willing group of friends to play with, you'd best not hesitate to start looking for comrades early on.



Last time's Guild Wars stood out partly on account of its gorgeous visuals and slick game engine, which let you boot up and quit out of the game in moments. The ability to get into and out of the action so easily is still a great asset, and the visuals have held up nicely. Excellent character graphics, imposingly huge monsters, and impressively rendered scenery are everywhere to be found, though the action tends to noticeably slow down in larger battles, except on very fast systems. Character animations are decent but unremarkable, though overall, Guild Wars Factions is a great-looking game. Some good musical compositions make the fantasy world feel more vibrant, though not all the music fits the Asian theme as well as the rousing title track for the game. Solid sound effects round out the audio in a game whose presentation quality more than lives up to the ambition of its underlying concepts. Having both the original game and Factions installed adds still more layers of complexity, by letting you experience the content from the respective continents in new ways, with characters who originated on the other side. Like in the first game, just the sheer number of things to see and do in Guild Wars Factions is quite amazing, and there are enough different styles of gameplay available that you'll more than likely find aspects you really enjoy and get hooked on. In some ways this is an imposing, complicated game, but since it doesn't punish you for experimenting (apart from the possibility of a tongue-lashing from fellow players), and since it doesn't saddle you with monthly fees, it's really quite hard to resist.

a friend of mine plays this its great that you don't have to pay monthly fees