Allods was great for about 3-4 weeks, but done with it.

I never even wanted to try it as it looked EXACTLY like a wow clone given their artistic style and colour tones, but I did.  And I was overall pretty impressed. I played a psionic which is a really fun class combining cool CC abilities and great 1v1 damage in pve and pvp.

Level 1-4 was a great intro. Voice overs for quest givers, a cool story hook and the game presentation is generally pretty clean and easy to take in.

The game dips around 5-10 as things really slow down, but at 10th you open up the grid system which is like extra talent trees for customization...and you can really specialize in alot of different things.

Lvl 13ish theres this thing called a "bag raid". This was the first time I was tempted to quit hehe. You see you start with like 18 bag slots for items INCLUDING quest items in the game, and this "bag raid" is actually just a raids worth of people all in different areas killing mobs for these rare drop ingredients for a new bag quest reward...24 slots i think. What the raid does is increase the drop rate by a couple %...still takes anywhere between 6 hours and 5 days or so (depending on your time and level). Otherwise if you dont want to waste this time mindlessly grinding mobs while running at a snails pace, you can use the cash shop to buy a virtual bag that will cost you around $7US...yah you could buy a real bag for that much.

But I sucked it up, got my bag, and continued on. I was looking forward to the pvp at lvl 23 when you hit your first really contested zone. By level 20, I still had yet to do an instance dungeon with a same level group as the bored 40's (top level) are easily available for runs. Guess I would have to wait till 40 to enjoy playing a part in a group?...hmmm.

So 23 came...off to Asee Teph...the Holy Land, I could smell it. Finally some pvp action to test out all my uber skills...Sadly I found out that when another player is about 2 levels higher than you, you can basically just roll over and die in the fight. So I looked for even level or one higher fights.  Well by level 28 I realized that there would be no matched pvp, or very little.

Theres a couple places where you are sure to find people your level to fight, and so everyone heads there.  SWEET! you finally find some people around your level and start some combat, then poof...you are dead. A level 40 has one shotted you from behind as he sweeps through the lvl 23-28 zone. But is it just one? no its all the 40's becasue their zones are ghost towns and this is the only way they can get their pvp fix. For days I tried and a couple times even got into some really fun skirmishes with like level players...but all very short lived, basically anyone 5 levels higher than you can cream you to pulp...and they do. Both sides just slaughter the lowbies of the other side like some festering revenge for having to go through the same initiation when they were low level.

Lots of people quit this game at 23, and I can see why.  I gave it 5 more slow levels, tried to enjoy it, but just can't bring myself to enjoy being killed in one shot while trying to do anything.  Some people might say I can't hack it, and I say you are right...I'm not that masochistic. If they wanted a game that was meant to be played at 40, then forget the leveling bullshit. I'm not about to just 'scrape by' until 40 just so I can do the same thing to other lowbies in order to call the other team to pvp. Bad design there.

Wall of text, but I just wanted to give tribute to a game that had a lot of potential as a premium title game, sadly, given the pvp, and the way that the patch changes are going to increase dependancy on the cash shop by nerfing classes more, I'm another one who's out. I would suggest everyone try the game, but save your gPotato buying for level 40 before deciding...oh but also hope they dont just erase your character irrevocably. Too bad really...makes you wonder how you can spend so much money on screwing something up so badly.