Allods Online

A more serious criticism of Allods' early game is that at the moment it seems bizarrely easy, which is never something you'd expect from a game which plans to make part of its money from selling combat aids. Yet as an Animist (one of Allods' interpretations of the damage-focused Hunter class) it isn't just that I have no trouble defeating bosses by myself, it's that there is no threat of death, no need to carefully manage my abilities and no danger, and therefore no excitement. The only time things ever get difficult is when a mass of players swamp a rare monster spawn. I try to speed things up by heading into higher-level areas, but even as a DPS character I find that once monsters start getting dangerous the time it takes to kill them makes progress tedious.

That said, by level 8 harder mobs, serious group quests and instanced dungeons are starting to make a very welcome appearance. And in any case, Allods' gorgeous art means questing is never quite a chore, and the engine allows the kind of detail WOW can only dream about.

The visual design here is fantastic and enjoyably Russian - elves float on glittering wings in the shadow of a castle boasting the onion domes of an Orthodox church, and orcs wear odd medieval interpretations of WW2 secret service uniforms. The Arisen, Allods' re-imagining of the Undead, deserve a special mention. Imagine the dead brought back to life not by magic but by fantastical steampunk Egyptian technology and you're there.

It's this same almost out-of-place tech that powers the Astral Ships which are Allods Online's most interesting feature. Allods, specifically, are islands which float in a huge, purple nothingness known as astral space (falling off an Allod and into astral space being the number one cause of death among new players who get careless with the autorun toggle). There's an assortment of public ships and teleporters you can use to jump between these islands, but travelling to distant, high-level Allods mean you're going to need either your own ship or a friend with one.

How this is going to work isn't totally clear at the minute, but the tutorials for both factions consider giving you the chance to run around one of these huge vessels very important, and it's confirmed that dozens of players will be able to travel on the same ship.

But this isn't EVE. The specific phrase from the developer is that Allods Online "won't be about the ships, but the people on them". The idea is that you log on, get some friends together or put the word out to your guild, form a crew for the evening, pick a captain, then go soaring off into the deep, dark astral unknown in search of loot and adventure.

That adventure might take the form of reaching a distant Allod and completing a quest on it, battling with some giant monster right there in Astral space or engaging in PvP with an enemy ship and even boarding it. If the Astral Ships in this game are done well, and players are given a real sense of this ship being theirs, this could be absolutely spectacular.

To think Allods Online might make a dent in WOW's 11 million subscribers after years of watching other MMOs fail would be a feat of truly heroic optimism, but this game could be something special nonetheless. There's an awful lot of people on this planet who'll play bad MMOs if they're free, and it makes you wonder: what on Earth happens when they're offered something that's not just good, but this good?