Neverwinter

Must play free game - Beware, addictive!

With this being the first MMORPG I've played, maybe I'm not the best person to review it. But maybe it just gives me a different angle on the game. Here goes.

First point is, it's free. You will hear a lot of people saying that you HAVE to spend money to play it. But in reality, spending money just progresses you through the game quicker. Anything that you can by with real money (in game ZEN), can be earned through normal play as well. Astral Diamonds (the main currency of the game) can be swapped for ZEN at any time via the AD Exchange. I haven't spent a single penny on the game and really don't feel the need too. Although the game will often try and make you feel like you need to, but like I said, if you are enjoying a game enough, why pay to get through it quicker.

Graphically, I'll be honest it's not great. But I don't feel it detracts from the gameplay at all. Now frame rate issues can be a problem, especially with upwards of 20 players, companions, a dragon and ads on screen. It's not massively frequent, but can be annoying when it costs you a death.

The 'Main Storyline', in reality, isn't the main part of the game. Not that you will feel that at the time. The game has you venturing to various areas in and around Neverwinter, to slay monsters and collect items. The game really comes into it's own when you have completed the 'storyline' and find yourself needing to raise your Gear Score to be able to participate in various dungeons and skirmishes, each rewarding better and better loot. Then you have the 'campaigns'. At the time of writing only the Tyranny of Dragons is available to us on Xbox One. Which is another way of earning more and better gear for your character. These revolve around five sets of daily tasks, involving slaying dragons and disrupting the Cult of the Dragon in other ways, this becomes available at level 26.

As mentioned the game really does revolve around getting your Gear Score up and being able to team up with like minded players to try and acquire the next upgrade for your character, which at any given time can be any number of things. From enchantments for your weapons, better weapons, artifacts, armour the list goes on. The character variance is good, I've only used two of the available characters and enjoy them both. Some of the other options seem really good too. Although unlocking more character slots will require some currency.

I haven't touched much on the PVP side of this game in my review, as I haven't played it too much. Only to grab a few astral diamonds from the daily challenges. But this is where you can see the power of certain characters. The balance in PVP isn't great, the maps are even worse and it just really feels tacked on to me.

But that doesn't affect my score for this game, 5/5, I can see myself playing this for a long time to come, I still have a few achievements left to pick up, one of which is for killing 1000 dragons. But even after picking them all up, I can still see myself playing it a lot. I would recommend this game for everyone to play, but only if you have plenty of time to invest into it, because my bet is, you'll become hooked like the rest of us. And with 5 more free expansions on the horizon, this could well be my game for the whole of 2015!

P.S. There are currently three broken achievements on this game, I'm fairly confident that the devs will fix those soon enough. They were broken in the last patch.

This is my first review in any capacity and I'm sure there are areas of the game I should have touched on, any questions please ask and I'll try and integrate them into the review. Thanks!