Soul of Guardian

“Guardians” have always been depicted as the righteous heroes and saviors in fantasy gaming world. Without the presence of theses majestic heroes, game are far less than complete. Guardians drive the plot as well as dark factions in such kind of games. Inspired by this, a newest title called Soul of Guardian was just rolled out by China-based WSgame.com. The game boasted exciting adventures, diversified quests, glamorous graphics and challenging instances, which provide a grand total “refreshing gaming experience”. The producer just launched the open beta test on March 16.

Review:

Soul of Guardian features the traditional 2.5D isometric graphics with real-time point-and-click combat, which are overwhelmingly abused by game producers. I have been playing games of this genre for many years while only a minor portion of them were a blast, the majority of them do have become monotonous and end up with failure. So I was a bit skeptical about this game. Sadly, my concerns came true. Soul of Guardian is nothing but another replica of those lousy Chinese-esque games – how would you imagine a game that borrowed tons of mechanism from outdated martial art-themed ones and was re-skinned with fantasy setting to be like? Actually, the game looks almost amazingly identical to Heroic Odyssey and Crystal Saga, which received blunt criticism.

Firstly, the game is nice to the ears with soft melody playing background. From visual aspect only, the complexity in graphics makes this an above average web-browser game. Besides a craftable mount and pet system that changes their look, you also witness variety of character clothing, wildness landscape, or skills and buffs effects when you travel around the game world. However, the interface is a bit bloated, and small icons and buttons scatter around the screen.

Fun as it is, this is the second time that I have seen such kind of “newbie-friendly and considerate” game which directed me soaring to Lv.40 and beyond in no time. You go to where you must after clicking to accept the quest. You won’t get lost, no doubt thanks to the auto-pathfinding system, and the legworks take up the major portion of game before you reach Lv35, alternating with the easiest combats you can imagine- the dumb AI armies just stand in formation until being provoked first. A new monster instantly re-spawns at the same location where the previous was killed. The combats are done automatically by simply clicking on their names displayed in mission description; then your character aims them automatically; after that your character returns to the mission instructor automatically. All these happen just in an eye-blink, and I didn’t even need to click buttons.

There are some other ridiculous things which I’ve witnessed for the first time: on a certain level, my character portrait morphed from a girl to a panda. I thought such a change should be linked to the quest, but I didn’t even bother to read these carelessly translated texts. In this case, I didn’t realize it was me before I was killed by and was sent back to town; it remained the same appearance until I rebooted game…Ah, what an exotic and amazing game. Furthermore, they assigned some GMs serving as “professional newbie guiders” in the game, but it is proved that except spamming annoying sales promotional advertising info in world chat, they appeared far less than competent at handling real-time problems and each time I got robot-like responses, so I sent a web ticket request instead of attempting to finding a resolution myself, but so far I still cannot hear anything back from them.

Overall, Soul of Guardian unfortunately falls under those lame and lousy games originally made by Chinese peddlers, who have thrown tons of crudely made products into market in succession to start making money. Maybe they have achieved huge success in domestic market, but throwing some western fantasy skins into their weak MMO can by no means give players “refreshing gaming experiences”, and it is doomed to failure.

You may be interested in our partner site’s review: Soul of Guardian at DotMMO , Soul of Guardian at PoPMMO and AnyOnlineGames