Requiem: Bloodymare Review

Requiem: Bloodymare
Free to Play MMORPG.


If I had to sum up the entire game into one sentence it would be this.

"Cyborg Elves with rocket launchers shooting mutant feral Zebras in half."

Try to get your head around this setting. a fantasy world goes all futuristic and ends up nuking itself to hell.
A couple hundred years later you play as one of the only four sentient races to survive the blast, fighting to keep yourself breathing amid the armies of now mutated fantasy creatures and derelict steampunkery.
Despite the over use of brown, gray and over the top violence, I dug the setting.
Other then Humans who seem to be immune to awesomeness no matter what, the other 3 playable races are all fantasy gone twisted. Orcs are now big gray spiky dudes with Wesley Snipes hairdos. Dark elves are now over sexed bioweapons with massive demonic talons, and High elves have thrown out all their hippie crap and have turned themselves into machines.



The gameplay for the most part is pure WoW mimicry. Kill X number of Z quests, Battlegrounds, flightmasters, hell all the games classes even play as remixed versions of the classes from World of Warcraft.
Now one could try and debate that WoW's classes cover such a large range that you would always have overlap in another MMO. To which I would mostly agree, but when the “Warrior” class does the exact same Charge ability and has a taunt that uses an icon that almost looks like a recolor of the one from Warcraft, one does start to come to conclusions. Not that mimicking the most successful MMO on earth is a crime, and it's not that the game does not bring in a few interesting twists of it's own, kudos to being one of the only traditional style MMOs I have ever played that allow you to move and cast spells at the same time. Also Kudos for the ability to target both a friendly and a hostel target at once, as it makes it the first MMO I have ever seen where the main healer can toss attacks between healing without ever having to switch targets. The games raid UI also surprisingly far more useful and robust then WoWs default setup.

Unfortunately even with the positives I can not recommend Requiem for two reasons.

Number One: the game has a level 70 cap, yet only has 30 levels of actual content.
Meaning from level 1 to 30 you can happy quest at a fairly brisk pace to gain levels, however after 30 the number of quests and “finished” dungeons pettier off until you have no choice but do nothing but grind mobs for hours and hours on end. The last time I checked I was pretty sure we were completely over this kind of garbage around 2005.

Number Two: The game has not been given any major updates bug fixes or patches in almost a year.
The developer of Requiem, Gravity Interactive (also the developers of Ragnarok) are in serious financial trouble over the development of Ragnarok 2 a game that has been stuck in development hell for nearly 2 years beyond it's original launch date. For lack of money and resources they have all but abandoned poor old Requiem.
Compounded with an ever shrinking community bringing in less and less money, the future of Requiem is almost as bleak as the world it's set in.

Requiem was a solid foundation that never got built upon, which is a damn shame because it could have become something great. Don't let my words stop you from trying the game though, just don't get too attached to it if you do.