Civ VI: Gilgamesh Forever

[Part of the Civilization VI story]

It must have been a grim sight for the German knights as my army began advancing on their territory. With tanks, helicopters, a battleship that could fire missiles from their harbor and a bomber based in nearby Baghdad, their cities and the city-states allied to them felt the full force of Sumerian might and quickly fell prey to our superior firepower. Oh, and one village fell to the our allies in the city-state of Kandy. Yes, they got Kandy crushed by the knights of Kandy. Hahah!

Somehow the German capital was repelling us though, through the combined efforts of Gustave Eiffel, Alfred Nobel and general Napoleon Bonaparte - managing to destroy an entire tank column on their own. It was only when we dropped all the bombs and fired all the missiles at the same time did the city, and the civilization finally fall leaving me, the magnificent and most perfect King Gilgamesh, as ruler of the world... with my best buddy Enkidu!

"Kill more people Gil... Kill more..."

But this cannot be... my buddy Enkidu demands more WAR! More foes to defeat! I immediately instruct our top scientists to research space travel so that we can find enemies on other planets that I can conquer for the great crab! I must become the Master of the Universe!

Insight: Helicopters can't "fly" over water as they get packaged up in a transport ship  but are otherwise more free moving than planes.

Futuristic Medieval Fantasy: Atlantica Online

Finally a game where I can drive up to a centaur shaman in a bright yellow sports car and then whack it with my sword, magic and cannons then go pick up Joan of Arc, Anck Su Namun, Napoleon and the spartan Leonidas to take part in the Battle of Red Cliff in China. I think that sentence sums up the WTF time travel factor that's going on in Atlantica Online. Despite age consideration, almost everything in the game feels clunky and the constant popups of other people winning / doing stuff that have to be manually closed don't help. I do quite like the music though, and the combat system is... different.

"Different" doesn't always mean "good".

Each fight is an instance where you and your enemy take turns to command your team (of up to 9) to annihilate the other. There's a small level of tactical play to be had but I can't really say this is an improvement to the standard combat present in other MMO's. It actually reminds me a bit of the old Final Fantasy games complete with lack of useful terrain but with more importance on positioning. I understand that there's a second mode of combat that expands on this which hopefully is better but I haven't reached it yet being only level 56 (out of 150 I think) as of this post. At least leveling is fast, I mean you even get XP from idling. Powerup by going AFK?

Quests are as basic and grindy as you can get, with no branching paths (so far) most of which involve being a courier or to kill a number of fairies/robots/fairy-robots combination and a lot of long distance running. Huzzah for the auto move feature. There's even an auto fight feature if you want the game to play itself for you I imagine. I don't think Atlantica has a whole lot going for it, but for some unfathomable reason I keep wanting to follow that sparkly trail to the next quest just to see how much more whacked out the game can be. Still, I can't really recommend it. If you really want to play a F2P Nexon game give Mabinogi a try instead. It's way better. :)

Update: I just got to the main world map and it is hilarious. The map pretty much tries to emulate the real world (scaled down) with cities and all, specifically during eras of unrest. From Babylon, to Troy, to Yggdrasil, to Sydney and Uluru (yep, Australia is one of the hardest zones. Lol!). The overland zones are strangely very sparsely populated with enemies too (they make up for it in the hostile dungeon zones).

Also it's very funny to be selling stuff to Colombus and chatting with Caesar while an army of players mounted in tanks AFKs nearby. Similarly while wandering through the Troy battle field I turned a corner to find someone chilling in a Ferrari. Lastly there is a housing system of sorts but it looks a lot more like a customizable warehouse than an actual home, the one I went into anyway.