This game is one of the most oversimplified, poorly coded and boring games of all time. The first thing you will encounter is really long load times on the program launch as they attempt to hide the program from outside utilities. Despite this Silkroad is by far the heaviest macroed MMO of all time because they also sell a premium client with it built in. You had better get used to that load time though because unlike most MMOs when Silkroad gets disconnected it does not attempt to reconnect it just closes the entire program.

Graphics - 6

Sure the game looks pretty when you first log in but after a short period of time you will find more graphics errors then all other MMOs combined. You had better hope you have the most reliable graphics card in history because this game uses so many shedders it can cause ANY graphics card to overheat. The game itself uses all but no textures, everything looks like it really should but instead they randomly generate it dynamically so only the most powerful of video cards can run it.

Sound - 1

If you are looking for good sound, don't bother looking here. While the tiny bit of music they have sounds good the two 30 second clips that repeat infinitely get very tiring very fast. The sound effects at first appear well done, but since they are used so often before long you will be disabling them as you are sick of hearing them every quarter second.

Servers/Lag - 1

Silkroad is in a constant attempt to get new servers, only they are doing it far too little and they are far too late. Connecting to Silkroad is an experience you will never forget no matter how hard you try. After you have spent 30-40 minutes relaunching the program because it gets disconnected from the master server and closes on every login attempt you will find that most of the time you have very high latency. Sometimes Silkroad is able to hide this because it delays the start of your action by about a second to give the server time to respond (which just makes the client look high latency). More often then not you find yourself issuing a command seeing yourself start it, then jumping back to where you were, waiting a few seconds then doing it.

Gameplay - 1

The gameplay system in Silkroad is very underdeveloped. I will start with the character creation system. When you first create a character you will notice that there is only 1 race, which is not a problem though it is expected from something free. When you try to pick and customize a character it just gets worse though, as you look through the list of maybe 8 selections you quickly realize that they are all the same, the only difference is the skin color. After that you try out the height and volume options and then you notice that they don't actually do anything, they are completely unimplemented. At first the 3 different types of armor seem like they could provide good versatility and allow for a variety of characters, but then you have your equipment choice out of the way get into the game and look at your potential skills. What do you find? While there is elemental skills there is no such thing as a mage, you are either a melee fighter or an archer. All but the highest level skills require a silk road gold equipped to use them and those which don't are either buffs or debuffs (status conditions). You take a look at that and think, "Well it could still be good", but then you see the combat system first hand. You start a combat by double clicking a guy and then you sit there doing nothing. That is right no interaction is required or helpful to combat, all you can do is activate an element and sit there or use the occasional healing ability. After some time doing this you will explore and start to find the quests. You will quickly find that every quest is to do exactly what you have been doing to level. Go kill enemies or occasionally go kill enemies and collect a special drop that doesn't drop till you have this quest.

If you somehow manage to make it to level 20 before you get sick of all this and you expect the jobs system to make it any better you are mistaken. The job choices are a merchant (run back and forth killing thieves), a hunter (kill things while trying to find thieves), and a thief (kill level 1 players at random while looking for merchants). None of them add anything interesting to Silkroad none of them enable you to do anything that you otherwise couldn't. The only purpose of them is to horde massive amounts of silkroad gold that there is no real way to use since you have long since had the best equipment out there.

Problems with the Game... And believe me there are many of them.

The first thing you will notice is with the text in the game, spelling errors are rampant and most of the descriptions are almost nonsensical. The farther into the game you get the more things you will find in the descriptions that are just plain wrong. There are quest descriptions that tell you to kill the wrong things, many of the descriptions give the wrong directions and overall it is just not translated very well.

Overall - 2

This game looks nice but the functionality is simply not there either in the gameplay or the engine itself.

Tags: silk road gold          silkroad gold