Monday, May 10, 2010

Parallel Kingdom – Age of Emergence




Parallel Kingdom, Age of Emergence is a free to download MMORPG for the iPhone and Android OS smartphones. Parallel Kingdom is an interesting take on the MMO genre as it uses Google maps as the virtual world to play in. Now having played my fair share of MMO’s for several years previously, I was somewhat intrigued on how the MMO genre would work on a platform such as the iPhone. I wasn’t expecting anything ground breaking in terms of graphics, but I was interested in how they incorporated Google maps into the game and the iPhones ability to locate you pretty much anywhere in the world.

When first starting PK you’re given a quick tutorial before being relocated to your actual location in the real world on Google maps in the game. The tutorial is very basic, but intuitive thankfully. You learn that to move your character in the world you simply double tap to where you want to go. You also quickly realise that a lot of the actions you do in game, have to be done through a menu. Understandably the iPhone screen isn’t big enough to display a lot of information like PC MMO interfaces but I found the PK interface to be decent. Your health points are displayed as a green bar under your character, world chat at the very top of the screen and a menu button at the bottom. Everything else is Google maps. Unlike many mmo’s where there are quests, storylines, different races and lore to the world you play in, PK is all about claiming territory, resource gathering and overseeing your flourishing Empire.

The game uses flags and buoys as markers of territory. Each flag claims a circumference of territory from its point of origin and as you place more flags you can expand your empire. Flags aren’t free though, eventually you will run out of the materials needed to build them and as such you will have to go gathering the necessary resources to build more flags. This involves chopping down trees for wood and killing animals for leather. Mobs randomly spawn everywhere on the map and your character can engage in combat to kill them, gaining experience, loot and gold. From what I’ve seen your character can wield a single weapon such as an axe, cross bow, sword etc, armour and a shield. Your character is displayed on the world map as a face icon with small icons representing the weapon, armour and shield you are wielding. Sadly there is no player customisation at the very beginning, but as you level and obtain rare loot from caverns your character starts to look more Epic, for a lack of a better word.

Instances or Dungeons do exist in PK, but as caverns that randomly appear on the maps. Caverns can be accessed by having the right equipment to gain entry. In most cases a fire torch which must be crafted first before given access to enter the dungeon. Once inside, you’ll fight against high level mobs that drop better loot and the end boss will usually drop something rare, either a weapon, resource or both. Sadly combat in PK is rather dull and non-strategic. To attack an enemy you simply tap them, select attack and let you character go to work. You can eat berries which heal you over time while you’re fighting, but aside from that there is no work involved in combat. It’s a shame because it would have been good to see some diversity in player’s characters such as classes. The warrior, healer and dps roles usually seen in MMO’s are non-existent in PK. Just as long as you have enough armour and firepower to dish out to the enemy and enough berries to keep your health at 100% you should come out alive. You can however party up with a friend and go on the grind together. However chatting in game requires the channel and keyboard to appear obscuring the screen completely. What’s even more annoying is the iPhone vibrating every time you’re attacking in game while navigating the menus.

When you do die in PK, you lose experience and a certain percentage of gold. You also drop items which can be picked up by other players, so be careful if you ever come under attack by another player in game. Thankfully NPC’s seem to only pick up items dropped from other mobs that you have killed. For example, if you kill an ogre and he drops a sword, be sure to pick that up fast before his ogre buddies pick it up and go to town on you.

PK is very much a passive MMO. Tasks such as resource gathering and flag placing all take time in which you just have to wait. For example when placing a flag, a progress bar appears with a countdown timer. Forcing you to wait until the task is done. I find myself multi-tasking between studying my Japanese vocabulary and tapping on trees to cut down in PK because there is a lot of down time in waiting for tasks to be completed. This becomes even more apparent when your most important resource; food, runs low. Food is required to level up your character after accumulating enough experience. I recently found myself stuck at level three because I was unaware at how food was obtained until I required it to level.

Although PK is a free game to download, the food resource can only be acquired from purchasing it from the makers. For example 100 food costs £2.99 while 1000 food costs £24.99. Considering that most MMO subscriptions are around the £10.00 mark per month, I was amazed at how expensive it was to acquire food. Yet by then most players are too invested into PK. They’ve already built a small empire in their hometowns and want to keep going and see how big and how far they can expand their empire. But the prices were just too steep for me. If I wanted to pay that much money, I’d play a more mainstream MMO on my PC. However, after asking a few people on the chat channels in game, I soon found out you could trade with other players. I recently traded 100 wood for 100 food. No easy task considering trees spawn randomly in the world.

Determined players however can plant the healing berries in order to make seedling trees which after 5 days will grow into a full size trees and can be harvested for wood. The only reason all players don’t grow their own trees takes us back to how passive PK is. Every resource or building action takes a certain amount of time to complete. Cutting down a tree takes around 20 to 30 seconds. Multiply that by 100 and you’re already looking at about 50 minutes of repetitive mundane work. Understandably the more hard-core players in PK purchase food, but the limitations and passiveness of the game experience as a whole didn't make me want to buy food, in fact rather the opposite.

The passive play of PK is actually what keeps me coming back. The game is so easy to play and an excellent time killer. The ability to relocate your character to where you are in the real world on Google maps is great fun. You never know what you’re going to find. It’s great on long trips on a train, I found myself relocating my character every time my train stopped at a station and quickly placing down a flag. Travelling in PK however is rather limited if you don’t travel a lot in the real world. You can only move within the territory of a flag. If you wish to enter into another territory owned by you, you must click on that flag and select visit which costs feathers, a resource used for moving your character. As your empire expands, it becomes impossible to see all of it due to the field of vision limitation on your character. You’re unable to zoom out of the map like you can in Google maps, so you have to scroll your screen until you reach your range of view limit and select a flag to visit to move long distances. As you come across cities, you can visit them again through the menu rather than travelling to them directly, but again at the cost of feathers. You also have your own hut which you can build, destroy and rebuild at will providing you have the materials and this can also be visited through the menu, again costing feathers.

Feathers are purchased from non-player controlled ogres which also attack you if you start cutting down trees. Interrupting your cutting progress and giving you a difficult decision of either A) standing your ground and killing the ogre so you can continue cutting down your tree, but preventing you from being able to purchase feathers from all ogres for 24 hours or B) retreat into a different flag zone and cut down trees there, assuming there aren’t any ogres there to disrupt you. You can only see what is in a flag zone once you visit it, which is somewhat annoying, especially when you drop in on an infestation of lizard men wielding spears!

I’ve played the game on and off casually for about 3 weeks now and although I have been coming back for more. I find myself continually doing repetitive tasks to gather resources, placing a few new flags in unclaimed territory to expand my empire and go hunting into unknown areas with my dog. You have a dog in game that allows you to explore random areas to hunt, harvest and place flags if you wish. It’s an excellent way of coming across mobs, trees, gold and materials but it’s completely random where you end up, but usually just outside the boundaries of your territory you were previously in. I would recommend the game to anyone who would find it fun to see just how big of a territory they can make in their home areas and even where they’re at work. Anywhere you go in the real world is a place you can visit for free in PK. But prepared for the repetitive tasks that take time for each action and the somewhat large reliance on difficult to obtain resources that are required to pretty much do anything in the game.

Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. WadeMay 10, 2010 at 10:21 PM

    The game has an interesting premise, but I think forcing players to pay to level up throws away my interest to play the game. On top of all of that I hate grinding so even the free route sounds annoying. I'm still waiting for that iPhone game that makes me want to pay for the app.

    Good review by the way!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JohnnyUKMay 12, 2010 at 8:17 AM

    Yea I know what you mean. Forcing players to pay to level up your character is a cheap move! But what's this about still looking for an app for the iPhone worth paying for. Plenty of good games on the iPhone that I would buy if my old gen iPhone 3G 8gb would run them smoothly. :(

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)