Boundel: The Second Era Reviews

It's a fun little fantasy MMO. No quests or missions, all you do is kill different types of monsters for xp and loot and explore the world. Be warned: There are some nasty creatures that lurk far from the castle, and even nastier PVPers. However, since there are so few players, chances are you won't get attacked while out training and exploring. I've been killed once in the 7 hours I have played and it was right outside of the safe zone. Pros: + Relaxing + Casual game mechanics + Easy to learn + Hidden treasures (Hint: Explore more.) + Ability to host private server Cons: - Public server is down A LOT. At least once a day for the past 3 days. NOTE: Hosting your own private server is still doable. - BUGGY. Enemies will come after you and just stand there, not attacking, like statues. - Shop items are overpriced. (Personally, this is not a con, but I've seen complaints on forums about it, so...) - Lack of party system. There is only local player chat.

Before saying anything about the game i must note that the game seems to be still in early alpha state of development. if i can describe the game in one sentence i would say "full of bugs and lack of several key features". Pros Big zone to explore (i ssume there will be more in the future or this is just the first island) Lot of equipment items Lot of mounts Open skill choice (you can chose to use any skill starting at level 1) It seems they are giving you the power to name the map zones (runebook) It feels nice just go and kill whatever you find (you found a turtle? go ahead, kill it, it may drop a dark lizard mount if you are lucky) The game is still on development Cons The battle system is not good enogh (or maybe not good at all depending on the player) There is no map so you have no idea where you are and how to find things Really hard to find out how dangerous is an enemy (usually the level is not displayed) Server disconnection (i got disconnected several time god knows why because is not my ISP) The interface is really bad (and i am being nice about it) Is not sandbox but either have something to follow (no story, literaly the quests mentions you as a hero, god knows why, and expect you to kill or collect something or both, and usually they are bugged and are unable to complete) No ingame bug report system making even harder to colaborate. Almost no players (should be fun to play with friends) Could be more but i cant remember everything i saw The game is not expensive, you could try it without espending lots of money like many other games, so if you have doubts about the game just try it and if you dont like it remember that steam lets you get your money back before the first 2 hours of gaming or 2 weeks of buying. Hope this help you decide. EDIT: After some more hours of gameplay I finally finished exploring the entire map, it is not huge, is not even big, could fell big at the beginning but is really small, most of the land is empty, no monsters, no trees or something else. Found a "secret" location (you can only access through the (I think) only usable door/portal in the game, inside was an enemy named "Satan" and it was impossible to kill for me at level 70. It was kind of disappointing, I was hoping to find a portal to another place or something, maybe I need to kill Satan first. Anyway, I recommend the game only because it could be better in the future.

I do not have a lot of playtime. I picked this up a long time ago and tried it a few time when it was still a multiplayer game. It was never bad but it was just there. It really never got me to want to keep playing. It had a small file size and the system requirements did made come back to check it out a few times but with the quality of other low-end mmo out there it just couldn't keep me invested. I just went back as combing my backlog and see that its a single player game now with mmo functionality and systems. I'm sure there is a lot who like this game especially it being free to play. It has working systems and for those who just solo in mmorpgs anyway it isn't that big of deal. For me who actually paid for this as its always annoying when said product goes free-to-play and then ditches the overall scope of the game. I love rpg ad have played a number of mmo but if you stripped a mmo of its multiplayer it doesn't make it an enjoyable rpg. Its a single player game with multiplayer mechanics and that is not enjoyable in my opinion. On top of that it was a barely average mmo to start with with minimal player base. I can't recommend this but if you want to try it at least it's free now.

Pretty terrible example of an MMORPG. So bad in fact they had to drop the MMO, i'm not sure who wanted this as a single player game but it's just not working out for me. Hard pass.

PROS: Cheap No Microtransactions Combat is balanced Community is friendly (for now) Loot system is balanced Levelling system is balanced Open world CONS: Small community No narrative Graphics aren't all that great. (Not the worst mind you, could be better however) Can't talk to NPCs Bugs aplenty 6/10 Eh. The game will get better as it grows.

I hadn't heard of this little gem before but glad I saw a friend post some screenshots of it. First off let me say that this game is still in very early access. Also even when playing local your internet connection must be stable for you to play. I found this out the first few times I was trying to play and I had something downloading in the background. I disabled the background download and then was able to connect with the local server. I have plans on picking up another copy for my daughter for us to play LAN with once I try it out some more. As of this writing I have about 90 minutes in the game. I will say at this point don't go into the game expecting any fancy graphics, currently they are very bare bones. Your character is going to look off, but I am sure that will vastly improve over time. Also there isn't any hand holding in the game yet. You are going to have to experiment. One of the things I found out very quickly is that there are a mixture of mobs all around. You might be fighting a level 3 Zombie one moment and then a level 15 Zombie Lord shows up. The first time or two this happened I had my butt handed to me but I quickly learned the game is currently all about kiting. Once I started doing this I was very easily able to takle mobs way above my level. At level 5 a level 18 witch wasn't much problem as long as I paid attension to the attack queues. One of the things that took a minute to get used to but now I love is that this isn't like WoW, you don't lock onto a mob. You have to manually make sure your spells are aimed at the mob. Missing is a very easy prospect if you are not careful. But I like this as it adds some more realism (well when talking a fantasy game, as much as it can be I guess). Still if you learn to kite and watch the attack warnings you can easily kite a much level mob without much problem. Performance wise, the game is what you would expect for a $5 game that has just been released to early access, however I didn't have many performance issues that were not network related. The rig I played on was an i7-860 2.8ghz, Nvidia 960 with 16GB RAM so no where near type of the line. Framerates were low but once again this is in very early access and $5 invested. I will say that the game pulled me in after I got the ropes. Still not really sure what I am doing past the kiting of mobs, but fun none the less. I recommend the game, even at this stage, $5 already better than many $50 games I have tried. I haven't checked to see if there is any crafting yet. I didn't see any indication that if there is going to be that it is implemented yet. Crafting isn't really my cup of tea. None the less crafting aside, I will say that I enjoyed this more than I did with Wurm Online (stand-alone) which I ended up getting a refund on and paid a good deal more money for. I am not a great reviewer. Often I just ramble. But let me close with saying that $5 is worth a chance on this game, even if you let it sit in your library for a few months. I have a feeling that it is going to shape up to be a nice little niche MMO/LAN RPG.

Completely unplayable at this point due to the developer having set it up so the game phones home even when you try to play in solo offline mode. Pity this no longer works, Boundel was relatively playable on your own versus AI mobs. Oh well, another developer to blacklist.

- Original Review after a couple of hours of play - The server was moved after several days of being offline, and I was finally able to give the game a try. My impressions - Positives: + Good variety of creatures + Leveling seems fairly easy, at least in the beginning + Can pick the skills you want to use + No quests means you can really go do whatever you want Negatives: - Mob AI is pretty bad. Lots of them just stand around while you hit them, others kill you off with no warning or follow you forever - Mana regeneration is very slow, at least in the early going, which means you spend a lot of time just kiting in circles or standing around doing nothing - Abilities need better descriptions and equipment/skill points need explanations - Server stability - The server went down and/or I was booted at least 5 times in the few hours I played - Toxic community - I was pk'd by two different people multiple times that could oneshot me, as they obviously outleveled me by a huge amount (had mounts and everything, so there was no way I could run away either), and just rode over and attacked without a word. I also had numerous other people decide to grab the loot that the mobs I was killing dropped, and/or "help" me kill something that was nearly dead only to grab the loot. Verdict: Considering the cost, I'm pretty impressed with the framework here. The game has potential, but until some of the issues are fixed (especially the "free" looting issue and the fact that there seems to be no penalty for killing people that are trivial to you multiple times, both of which I can only see getting worse with a higher population), I can't really recommend it. - Updated Review - I've been playing some more, and did manage to find some people that didn't try to kill me on sight, and even a couple of generous players who offered tips and a mount, which was much appreciated. Having said that, the community is still an issue. Though this has become less frequent after gaining a fair number of levels, I'm still one-shot killed at times, often by people I didn't even see approach despite watching for them (I have a feeling this is due to the "recall" points, as people pop out of thin air when they recall), and I've been killed while still logging in several times as well. I'll readily admit I'm not much of a fan of pvp in the first place, but I can't really understand how "pvp" where one player kills another in one hit over and over again would be fun for anyone. I'm also finding (in line with what's mentioned in the comments) that there's less variety in mobs than I originally thought, as a lot of areas are just empty, and the pve seems to be pretty repetitive, as even though I'm still at a fairly low level compared to a number of players, unless I aggro a huge group of ranged mobs or fight a dragon, I'm already not finding too many challenges. Having said that, I'm now close to 20 hours into the game, and have been enjoying it more than I was in the beginning, so I'll change my recommendation to a "yes" with the caveat that there are still a bunch of issues with the game that hopefully will be addressed in the future.