Tabula Rasa review

Tabula Rasa is a new MMO with impeccable pedigree, coming as it does straight from the brain of MMO supremo Richard Garriott, Lord British himself. As such, it's been eagerly awaited, even if the beta met with mixed opinion. So now it's finally here how does Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa stack up? We have a full review in this issue of MMOZine, and while we're disappointed to see some basic MMO no-nos cropping up, we're happy to report that on the whole this is a game we're impressed by. Find out more in our Tabula Rasa review, plus grab your chance to win Tabula Rasa goodies, including a collectors' edition of the game, in our fantastic competition.
Click here to read our Tabula Rasa review now!

Tabula Rasa review
Was NCSoft nervous about the potential for Tabula Rasa to succeed? With the exception of Eve Online - and early Planetside - there hasn't been a brilliant pure sci-fi MMO: lasers and force shields have been brutally cut down to size by the swords and sorcery brigade. Nothing, from Star Wars Galaxies to Neocron has quite lived up to expectations. Sci-fi simply fits the play mechanics of twitch or strategy games. When I fire my disruptor beam at something, I want it disrupted. I don't want to wait until it's my turn to pull the trigger and be unable to influence the direction of the resulting fire beyond a vague ‘over there please' .

Even though the design team realised this simple truth and gave TR's combat system the twitch feel, this is ‘Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa', in a way WoW was never ‘Bill Roper's World of Warcraft'. Was it only by referencing the name of a man so above us he's literally going into orbit next year (www.richardinspace.com) that NCSoft thought people would take TR seriously?

Having the fear
Maybe: the beta wasn't particularly well received and even the release version commits many tragically typical MMO sins that will put off newcomers in the first few hours of play. Here are a few. The interface is buggy, badly laid out, but locked into position so you can't, for example, move the chat window if you find its position uncomfortable. There are a total of just nine action buttons which soon fill up, so you have to scroll through load-outs in the middle of a battle to heal yourself.

Click here to continue reading our Tabula Rasa review now!