I’m a wandering hermit when it comes to free mmos.  Whenever I catch a new one coming out to beta, I like to sign up, give it a go, and see if it gives me something else to dabble with when WoW fatigue sets on.

Atlantica Online is currently a closed beta, free-to-play, cash shop-based MMO.  It mixes a bit of real world and fantasy (without dabbling in dwarves and elves) to create an interesting romp through a mash of history and mythology, making it feel refreshing.  The plot involves your search for the lost city of Atlantis, it being the key to saving the world.  And when I say the world, I mean a whole expanse based on real world locales.

Update: I’ve started playing Open Beta to see if anything neat has come of it, and to just try it out.  Will be doing a few reviews from there too.  Check out the first of them at MMO Review: Return To Atlantica.

Basically, the world consists of cities such as Rome, Beijing, London, Manila, etc, just in some kind of dream alternate dimension.  The world isn’t built to scale, but it is vast, and you run into real life landmarks, such as walking around on the Great Wall of China. Each region is tailored to its culture, so when you’re in Shanghai, the structures will look oriental as opposed to the stone buildings with their colosseums dotted around Rome.  And all the areas have their own flair to them, so it’s not just a generic building dotting the landscape.  Pretty columns, statues, and whatnot are littered throughout the world as well as decorating the dungeons.

The music is both engaging and not too harsh on the ears in terms of repetition.  I can’t say the same for the character voices, on the other hand, which tend to grate on one’s nerves after the bajillionth “I’ll cut you” phrase is uttered.  Check out the site’s music download page,  where the game’s original sound track is available for download (the only drawback being that you have to download each track one at a time).

I’m glad to say the actual landscape and feel of the world is just as great as the concept and wallpaper art on the website.  The scenery is gorgeous, and it makes adventuring around feel worthwhile just to see what landmarks you come across.  Even the NPCs have a similar cultural flair to them, spanning time and place, running across folks like Shakespeare (who’s your book crafting teacher) and Marco Polo.  At least the named NPCs look interesting, but unfortunately, there are still a few NPCs that travel that all look like clones of each other.

Monsters are varied (at least in a sense that they change in every region, but expect to see two to three variants of the same mob in a room or dungeon).  They’ve lovely textures and vibrant colors and range from textbook human archers or sky fairies, to oddities such as female otters with a knife-like weapon strapped to their backs.

The game’s interface looks neat enough, but the chat box could use some working on.  You can only type around two lines before it gets cut off, both in the chat box and in the whisper message boxes.  And the word associations for stuff like world chat (peer chat) need a bit more clarifying and adjustable colors (not a big fan of pink).

There were shortcut keys for practically everything, but I personally prefer mouse clicking.  Character movement works both ways, where one can use either WASD or mouse pointing.  The spacebar’s functionality is rather useful, because it brings up an important window which shows all your mercs, their inventory (inventory is split between mercs, so if you store that merc, whatever that merc is holding gets stored away too), their quickslots (two for items and three more that concern guild and town that I’m not sure of, seeing as I haven’t joined a guild…. yet), their current equipment, and has a button to access their stats.  You can tab through the characters corresponding to their number keys (not the number pad) or by clicking on their portraits in the window.  This all-in-one window was quite handy and can be brought up at any time (though items can’t be moved around while in battle, or used if not already equipped in a merc’s quickslot, and spellbooks can’t be learned unless it’s in the associated character’s inventory slot.

The auto-run for quests is fantastic to get to where you need to go without having to figure out where it is on the map, but stopping an auto-run sequence can be tricky, since it doesn’t stop automatically, requiring you to confirm stopping.  The tricky situations can come about because if you run into a monster, you’ll automatically go into battle with them, not to mention the pathing sometimes takes you where you need to go in a roundabout manner.  Still, my lazy self loves auto-run even with its faults.

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