Air Rivals – The MMORPG without the RPG.

Every now and then, the gaming industry produce something so unique, so innovative that it redefines an entire genre. Air Rivals isn’t one of them. This free-to-play, dogfighting MMO set in a pseudo- space environment seems to have the grinding aspect of RPGs well integrated, but all other aspects (the ones that actually makes RPGs fun) remain severely lacking. It makes good entertainment for those that wish to fire endless volleys of colourful missiles, or those that just doesn’t have the funds to play a proper space orientated MMORPG.

Background
Air Rivals was originally a developed by MasangSoft, a Korean company, under the title Ace Online. Gala-Net Inc. obtained the international license for the game and released it in North America under the title “Space Cowboys Online”. This was until Masang Soft was purchased by Yedang, and sold the rights to Yedang. This forced Gala to shut down it’s North America server. Currently, Yedang, the owner of all Ace Online’s license, run a single server “Quasar” for North American players under the title Ace Online International, while Gameforge 4D, a German company, host the European servers “Helix”, “Orion” and “Auriga”, under the title Air Rivals. Initiately, during closed beta testing, Gameforge wanted to call the game “Flysis” but ran into some copyright issues and had to launch under it’s current name “Air Rivals”

Gameplay
The ships and characters in this game all have an anime feel to them, and inevitably, they follow the Anime Laws of Physics. Nah not really, I just wanted to slip that article in some cos it was so hilarious.

Some bimbo that sounds more annoying than the announcer at the airport.

Anyway, back to gameplay. In Air Rivals, you can choose one of 4 ships, called gears, with gameplay varying depending on the ship you pick. With your gear, you complete mission, kill hordes of alien mobs, and after earning enough money from scams profitable business ventures, perform various cosmetic surgery on your gear.

A Gear
Something like a flying tank, with the only negative buffs in the entire game. Playing this gear is like playing Battlefield and camping the tank for 5 hours, only without the satisfaction after getting a kill.

B Gear
The designated bomber in the game with a tendency to one hit K.O. nearly everything in the game. Playing this gear is something like walking up to some guy on the street, punching him in the face and sprinting away.

I Gear
Something like an interceptor or a fighter. It deals a lot of damage with its dual missile volleys. Specifically made to kill air units, and considering how 80% of all enemies are air in this game, it’s saying a lot.

M Gear
The support class ship in the game; plays much like any medic/priest in other MMOs. It’s is also especially impossible to level considering there is no exp sharing and half it’s skills require you to be in a formation (party) to use. That’s either some attempt at injection more teamplay into the game or just some bad programming.

The game is divided into two nations, the ANI and the BCU, with any encouter between gears of opposing nations quickly descending into an intense dogfight. There are also Strategic Points that randomly gets generated on a map, which results in a battle royale on the specified map. Killing gears of enemy nations and capture Strategic Points increases the Nation Contribution Points for your nation. Once the points reach 10000, the mothership of your enemy will return from orbit (how that makes sense I’ll never know), and the two nations will have to either attack or defend it depending on which mothership spawned. Together with PVP arenas, skirmishes in this game certainly provides an exhilarating ride.

Okay, one of them has definitely broken copyright laws.

Anubis, the BCU mothership

While the combat aspect of the game is quite well made, everything else leaves much to be desire. The game only has a total of about a dozen maps (not counting mission specific maps). However, considering the game is split into two nations, only half of those maps can be entered by any one nation, that is unless you want to be horrible shot down by a dozen enemies gears. With the limited map number, changes in scenery is hard to come by, in fact players often find themselves grinding for 20 levels on the same map. This shortcoming is exacerbated with the lack of monster modules in the game. You often find enemies you meet in the new map are the same ones you were grinding on in the previous map with a new name, a bit more health. The result: an extremely tedious and repetitive grinding experience.

I guess crawling rock crabs are pretty alien.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this before?

You say this is different, but my eyes beg to differ.

With any good MMORPG comes a large and extensive array of weapons and armour. Unfortunately, Air Rivals doesn’t have this. Their solution? Introducing weapon prefix and suffix gamble cards! When used these cards will tack on a random prefix or suffix to the name of your weapon, and add bonuses to one or more of your weapon’s attributes. Thus, giving the illusion that the game had millions of weapons, well it does if you count all the combinations.

Okay fine, maybe we should stop bashing this game, seeing as how it’s providing players with hours of entertainment for free, or does it? After play playing for a few hours you start asking, “cool how do you get that cool looking emblem over your head?” It is then you realise a small button on the bottom right corner of the screen called “Item Shop”, full of goodies that you have to buy with real world money. Goodies that’s designed suck your wallet dry, like “Super Gamble Cards” that may have a chance of giving you a better suffix or a prefix. The chances are you’ll probably get a worse suffix than the gamble cards you bought from ingame credits.

Don’t like poker? Air Rivals has a solution for your gambling needs.

And just in case you got a crappy suffix, the item shop has a solution for that too. An item that can remove the suffix so you can waste some more money and try again.

Then there’s the abundant cosmetic surgery you can perform on your gears.

Love thy enemies to death!

If the absurdly colourful gears and weapons aren’t enough to blind your opponents to death, you can always start shooting trails of love hearts at them.

Graphics
Graphics-wise, this game isn’t spectacular at all, the gears and monsters look kind of blocky, and the landscape is rather ordinary. However, the game does feature some breath taking load screen art.

You can find me ingame in the ANI as Yitza.

If only the game graphics were as good as this.

Sound
The game boasts its own soundtrack, but once again, it’s rather ordinary. To compensate, the developers included an inbuilt music player with little to no features a good music player should have. Thus, rendering the feature entirely useless, as it would probably be easier to run your favourite music player in the background than to figure out why the inbuilt one goes silent for 5 minutes and then abruptly starts playing again for no good reason.

Random wtf
Alright, basically each nations elects a President periodically to lead them into battle. The developers probably thinks this adds realism to the game or something. Here is the ANI’s President.

One of the perks of being President is that he get this giant swirling, glowing emblem on top of his head. (which he carries into battle) Sure it helps the nations locate their leader in the chaos of a battle. Problem is the enemies can see it too. It’s like the general of the army going to the front line waving a giant sign saying “Shoot me!”

Conclusion
Air Rivals is a good game if you play Battlefields but got pissed off that you don’t get any reward after pwning the hundredth noob… not really. Air Rivals is a good game if you always wanted to play EVE Online but thought the mining and the economic corporations were just too complicated… not really. Okay, Okay, Air Rivals is a bit of everything and a whole lot of nothing that will entertain you for the first few hours and then bore you to death once you realise there is very little depth to the game.

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