Dragon's Nest

Since we were on the topic recently of free rpg type games, I figured I'd talk about Dragon's Nest, since it's new enough.

My brother pointed me out to this game a couple days ago, and I was a bit skeptical about it at first. Another Nexon game... Maple Story got old pretty quickly, and I'm kind of over the whole Korean F2P MMO deal. I tried it out anyway, because really, there's no reason not to try out a free game.

I gotta say the combat is a fresh twist. Live action. Fast paced. I'm liking it so far. I'll admit I've only done the first quest, but it was pretty sweet taking out those groups of goblins. I like the fact that there's normal attacks, special attacks, AND abilities. Lets me chain together my own combos.


Taking a look at the classes, there's class branching (which I'm a fan of), and one of them is a Swordsman. Yeah that's got me written all over it. Greatswords and gauntlets? I've got a thing for both.

I'm pretty stoked to see how this goes. So far it's pretty awesome. There's micro-transactions obviously, but from what I've read and heard they're not required to advance like Spiral Knights. Don't get me wrong, I still like Spiral Knights, but I'm not a fan of the idea of having to spend about $10 whether I farm crowns or craft the gear myself, just to get full tier 5.

I know, I know... it's a one time deal, but that's on top of buying energy so I can play for more than what seems like 20 minutes per day.

Hopefully Dragon's Nest will kick my skepticism in the nuts. So far it seems like it's going to do just that.

Click here if you want to check it out for yourself. It's pretty sweet. Wish the characters were a bit less chibi though.

Spiral Knights

For the past couple days I've been checking out this new game that released a couple weeks ago called Spiral Knights. I'll admit at first I was drawn in by the cartoony look and the fact that it was free.

After installing it I began to play and noticed right away that it reminded me of classic Zelda, kinda mixed with Bomber Man (though I don't really know where I got that portion from). Noticing Sega made the game kind of explained why it felt kind of like Phantasy Star as well. Started playing it with Slib and we were having a blast.

Dungeon crawling with our little knights while collecting money and materials to transmute new armor. It was sweet. The only draw back is that since the game is free, it costs energy in game to go into the dungeons and also to craft.  You have a Mist Energy bar that has a max value of 100, and over a period of about 22 hours will recharge completely.

The way the game makes money is through micro transactions of purchasing Crystal Energy, which is used in place of Mist Energy, once you're out.  It's really cheap, 750 Crystal Energy is only $2.49. We both decided it was worth it and after spending $5 we split 1,600 energy and jumped back into the dungeons. Seriously ran  to the bank at 2:30am so that I could deposit money into my checking account to get the energy. I was having that much fun.

Just hit tier 2 last night. Shweet.

For such a simple game, Spiral Knights is actually really fun, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for some sweet co-op arcade action.