NetEase games have finally allowed selected regions to play their newest mobile MMORPG titled: “Crusaders of Light“, with players from Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand and the Philippines having access to the game since its soft-launch last April 20, 2017 and an upcoming worldwide release coming later this year (rumored summer 2017 in North America). The game is marketed as:
“Crusaders of Light delivers an authentic PC-quality MMORPG for mobile phones and tablets with over 300 hours of available gameplay at launch! Featuring dungeon raids of up to 40 players, Crusaders of Light bands adventurers together with their friends in real-time to beat epic bosses and unlock legendary gear. Those who enjoy cooperative play can engage in ranked 1v1, 3v3, and 5v5 PvP arena battles, while sharpening their skills in 25v25 battleground fights. Guildmates can also take advantage of the Integrated Voice System as they climb the ranks by battling other guilds for glory and work together to enlarge their territory.”
With tons of content for both PVE and PVP currently present in the game, it does seem overwhelming but it is indeed doable, I have been playing since it appeared on the App Store (you can also go ahead and get the Crusader of Light APK to install on your mobile) and managed to get to level 31 upon writing this first impression/review article and the game does look promising and could possibly be one of the games to play if you do like the MMORPG genre or just looking for something to occupy that huge chunk of unused storage space.
THE PREMISE
“The desolation wall has fallen after 700 years of peace, it’s now up to you and your allies to battle the demon hordes occupying your land!”. The main quest is divided into chapters which include typical gathering, kill “x” quests and boss fights with some quests offering the chance for players to decide what happens to some of the characters (eg. Do you expose this NPC or do you cover it up?).The premise is pretty much as basic as it gets and there doesn’t seem to be anything special here, while I do understand that this is just a mobile game, I don’t find it excusable for it not to have a proper or at least a solid story. On my play-through of the game, there are some surprises but none of them are too significant to have that “shock” factor even on those moments that you could decide which action to do and thus leaves this section of my review moot. I hope that they at least add a solid story down the line especially since the game isn’t “officially” launched yet.
GAMEPLAY
Since the game is a Massively-Multiplayer-Online-Role-Playing-Game, there are options for the player, the first of which is what class do you want to play a Warrior, Ranger or Mystic which after you have a reached a certain point/level in the game will be able to switch into three more specialized “paths” or sub-classes (in my Mystic play-through, I could choose between being a standard mage class, a crowd control specialist or a full support healer), the best part of this system is that you can switch between any of the sub-classes, however each path does have its own skill tree that you will need to upgrade through earning Talent or Character XP, Silver (the most common in-game currency) and later on with the a special item requirement. This is pretty much a great system, however it does lack the depth that it intends to create as it is basically very easy to max all these trees with only the item requirement being the real thing that will slow down your character’s progress and assuming you get everything needed means that eventually hardcore players will have the same set of skills available to them. However I will have to criticize the lack of character customization in the character creator, while the appearance do change (gear decides appearance including hair & hair color) it still is a pretty weird decision to proceed the way NetEase did.
Gearing is probably where everyone will have a huge difference, obtained through the standard quest reward, crafting and boss rewards, there are gems that you could embed in your gear that provide different boosts that affect different attributes of your character. Gear is also ranked depending on their quality from standard to epic (legendary?) which greatly affects the innate stats it has.
As for content, the game has a ton to offer for both PVE and PVP enthusiasts, for PVE there are currently 4 dungeons and 4 raids available in both Normal and Heroic difficulty (bringing the total to 8) present in the game, there are dailies that need to be done as well such as completing a set of repeatable quests that range from earning character experience, faction reputation or guild funds. Same goes for PVP, the most basic being the Tournament which allows you to select an AI-Controlled player character (basically a “ghost” of a different player) to fight with in a 1 v 1 battle, which rewards Honor points and increases your character’s server rank. There are also different sized group battles that range from 3v3 to 5v5 and so on.
However some of them are only open at certain times which means that you will indeed need to organize beforehand and hopefully you manage to clear as you cannot enter it again once the time has lapsed. There is an in-game calendar that shows which event will be available for each day. Add the fact that the game also only allows a certain limit for you to do some of the activities (eg standard Tournaments can only be done 5x per day) which means you should also make each attempt count, some PVE activities also have a certain time limit but most of them are usually up to you, with some penalties as having lesser rewards etc. These restrictions do make me feel uncomfortable as it does take the control away from me as there could be a specific time that I could only play but could not access that specific content because of time constraints. There are also activities that are locked to the guild but with the high cost of creating a guild and the character member limitations, it is pretty hard for some players to get the full content of the game and I hope NetEase decreases the cost of creating a guild.
Combat is pretty basic, you do have a basic attack and have 6 slots for active skills (2 of them however are for special skills), with 4 of them being changeable with the other skills your character has unlocked. The game uses the old tab-targeting (in this case, “touch”-targeting) and you can also use the “Next Target” button just in-case you can’t select which monster to kill. Monsters/Bosses with special skills also have a telegraph that indicates where the attack will happen which should obviously be avoided.
The game’s UI is pretty crowded as well, I play on an iPhone 6 and I still find the display either too compact or the font being too small, with the virtual D-Pad on the lower left and skill/attack buttons on the lower right and the chat window in the middle of it. I do like that they did implement a built-in voice chat in game with the only problem being that sometimes either your message will not be sent or it is delayed. Mount collecting is also present in game from the standard Horse, Ram to Magic Carpets and an uncontrollable flying dragon for teleportation/delivery quests. The game’s map is decent for a mobile game and hopefully they do have the option to add more to it as currently the map only has ten major zones. There is also a “Trade” section available in the game which covers all shops from standard potions to item-mall items which does save a lot of time since you will not need to find every NPC to get the item you wish to get. However the feature is not explained clearly and should be improved. Another concern is the lack of option to organize Raid Teams, 40-man raids are compromised of 4 teams each with 10 players, with no ability to organize the team, it makes it harder for the leader to put which healer/tank/dps should be with the proper team.
On your Character’s tab, which has displays your current stats, there is also the term “Reserve” that is beside the HP/MP bars which are confusing on what they do. The Stamina bar is what you “consume” upon entering raids, speaking in world chat, crafting and gathering materials however the way that it is replenished is confusing as well.
The Item Mall at this point, looks fairly innocent but reading into it seems that most of the items there aren’t really what I would consider “Pay to Win” but rather “Pay for Convenience”, hopefully there won’t be gears for sale at the Item Mall to make the playing field fairer to everyone. The biggest concern for me however is the denomination available for gems (the premium currency obtainable with real money), while most of the items in the premium shop are reasonable I don’t see myself spending a lot in this game but upon checking for some reason there is no option to top-up only a specific amount of gems you need instead, you can choose between 3 options ($4.99 , $9.99 , $49.99 and it is a bit imbalanced as at the point of writing the Magic Carpet mount is worth 998 gems. I don’t see why I should (if I wanted to) spend almost $100 just to get that mount. I hope NetEase “eases” up and realizes that a virtual carpet should not be more expensive than a real one (of course the real one doesn’t fly).
One of the most controversial features of the game is the “Auto-Play” function, almost everything can be automated for this game, heck, you can run dungeons or do PVP with it and the AI could possibly tough it out but I suggest only using it if you’re busy and doing basic dailies. I tried running this function in the higher dungeons and my character died as it does follow a set path of actions and will launch all the skills that are not on cool-down as soon as possible as some encounters need proper timing in the usage of skills. While some people hate having “automated” experiences, I do believe that it is a good addition for some people who can’t always look at the screen or just want to take a break from holding their devices for a while.
Over-all the game could have used a better tutorial or explanation on how things work, as it is today, NetEase’s “Help” page, found at the start of the app isn’t very clear on most parts of the game and should be improved before the official launch in order to avoid confusing the players.
VISUALS/SOUND
There is not really much to say in terms of the visuals of the game, it does look decent and probably even comparable to a very low version of older AAA MMOs out there, character animations are solid, skill effects are decent with some minor artifacts visible on certain parts of the game. The audio however is a little bit lackluster, while it does have the “fantasy” vibe checked in, there doesn’t seem to be a ton of tracks used in the game with some even falling out of place. Honestly, I don’t expect much from a mobile game however I do understand that since this is a mobile game, they would have wanted to allow as many people to play it as possible.
VERDICT
Crusaders of Light is probably a good contender for the best MMORPG out there with some minor tweaks needed to make the game a little bit more friendly to its users. As it is a free to play game, it is up to NetEase on whether they will make the necessary adjustments for the game to reach its potential or continue the current trend of making mobile MMORPGs just not worth doing/playing.
2 Comments
Since the big update in early december, bulk of CoL players have had issues with the game crashing, blank screens, or are unable to download the game on facebook game room. Almost 3 weeks into it, we were promised a fix to the crashing affecting device users. FB Gameroom users have been ignored as their main focus is to get device users up and running first. Time to ask for a full refund. Lay a complaint with google and facebook. Getting ripped off. Was able to play for months until there last update almost 3 weeks ago. NETEASE, has the most ignorant dev team in gaming history. Completely useless.
Crusaders of Light is constantly plagued with problems. Some of thier updates have caused devices to be no longer compatible with the game and or facebook gameroom pc users have been locked out of the game for months.
NetEase no longer offers support for Crusaders of Light, reading their forums you can see the complaints from other players complaining of all the cheating and hacking in the game.
Main issue is compensation. Players whose games were not affected where over compensated, players whose games where affected by bugs where under compensated. Other gamers affected by bugs where ignored.Those that were unable to login due to crusaders of light botched update were not compensated.
We complained on crusaders of light twitter and fb and their own forums about support not responding, but they told us to contact support regardless.
Main issue is NetEase and how they keep pushing new content when their whole game has major bugs and issues. Google need to take a look and remove this from their game list. Game is plagued with issues.
NetEase games needs to be pulled from facebook and google apps. Until they sort out their support for their games. Forums for their games is full with the same complaints. No support, lack of compensation or unfair allocation of compensation. They don’t actually look at you’re account. If you look at the complaints on their forums you will see that all you need to do is say you lost all your top items and they will give it back to you without checking. I think this is why they won’t respond to any complaints now.