Massively multiplayer online role-play games are very much hit and miss. Every year there's around 50 to 100 announced as being in development, but of this number only ten or so actually make it to the markets - and of those ten, maybe one or two will actually catch on with the consumer. So you can see that the world of the MMORPG is a very difficult and fickle one. With World of Warcraft as the MMORPG of choice with millions of loyal fans playing the game daily, it's going to have to take something pretty stunning to be able to compete with such a huge following. However, with ArchLord promising that one player can gain control of its whole world per month, to be the ArchLord of the game, could that be the hook to garner peoples' interest? Surely one novel idea can't be enough to sway the WoW gang to spend some time online in another fantasy world?

ArchLord doesn't start off great. As you enter your life in the game world of Chantra you're given no background information whatsoever - no text introduction, no FMV, absolutely nothing - so when you arrive in this new and exciting world you're completely at a loss as to where you stand in the land's history and what the hell you're expected to do. Prior to this, when you're choosing your character, the lack of decent customisation options is absolutely criminal, considering that on even the most basic MMORPGs five years ago you could do more tinkering than in ArchLord. Here you're only allowed to choose human, moon-elf or orc races and pick from a pitifully small range of class types. Surely things will improve as you play on though…

As I'm sure you all know, the idea behind an MMORPG is that you start off at the bottom, killing the lamest animals like rats and birds, then you start to get the hang of it, kill a few bigger foes and, before you know it, you're on the way to developing into a super being of unrivalled strength and ability. You achieve all of this by battling, learning, crafting, exploring, questing, forging alliances with friends online and so on. Fans of these MMORPG games often gripe that levelling up in these games, killing the same damned creature after creature, takes so long and is often used as a substitute for the developers providing more time on imaginative quests and gameplay. ArchLord hugely suffers from this. Granted, you might expect this kind of gameplay at the very start as a way to grasp the basics, but with ArchLord the same monotonous kill-collect-deliver missions haunt you for a long period of time. You'll find yourself doing these mundane tasks all the way up until when you're tough enough to start fighting some of the bosses, so yeah, it could take you a very long time indeed, by which time you've probably quit the game already.

As you progress in the game you can upgrade your character's armour and weaponry, as well as learning more spells. Everything you would expect is in here, from magical swords, shields and rings, to fire and frost spells. The environment is also dotted with magical artefacts that you'll either find during quests or on the corpses of your downed enemies. So once you're all tooled up, you have ample opportunity to try out your new gear, as there are plenty of things to do. For example, you could head out to conquer a dungeon network, pillage rustic settlements, make your fortune by haggling with the market traders or escort a wealthy merchant along a bandit trail, to name but a few. It's entirely up to you what you do actually decide to do and there's never any time spent twiddling your thumbs.

One huge downside however is that ArchLord permits free PvP combat within only a few levels, so you've been working hard to build up your character when all of a sudden another human character comes along, kills you and nicks all your loot. To be fair, the game tries to deter this from happening by branding those who murder characters more than four levels beneath their own as villainous, so that NPC traders might not deal with them - oooh, what a deterrent! This still doesn't offer any kind of incentive for people to stop doing it though, which means you spend a lot of your time being bullied by more advanced characters - particularly when to right the balance and restore your reputation all you need to do is kill a few monsters and all is forgotten. Whilst the idea that one person can become the ArchLord per month is really cool, it's really not enough to keep the gameplay interesting. What happens in reality is that a small group of die-hards rule the game who spend their time beating down on everyone else, so to get anywhere near being the ArchLord you're going to have to put up with a whole lot of crap and endless hours of run-of-the-mill gameplay.

There are some positives however; the combat in ArchLord is actually quite cool, offering a much more engaging experience than you usually find in an MMORPG. Fluid and lavish animations depict the world's characters, inflicting damage on each other in close range real-time, while both the physical and magical attacks look and sound absolutely stunning, although this is let down by a hideous system whereby you have to click the mouse a thousand times a second to really kick some ass. It's also quite easy to lose track of your target, which involves a lengthy re-adjustment of your bearings and likely a huge loss of health. At least it looks and sounds pretty - that's better than nothing. One downer on the combat system is that you don't encounter a very wide range of enemies - I played for 20 hours or so and all I came up against were oddly subdued clumps of random monster groupings, pretty much always comprising of black clad thieves, rock-like tree monsters, bats, wolves and gargoyles. I'm sure there're more impressive enemies out there if you ample time to look, but I couldn't find them.

There's also plenty to do if you're willing to put in the time. The one problem is though that you're going to have to put in an inordinate amount of time to get anywhere. There's no denying that the developers have created a vast and varied game world that's extremely attractive, with scenery ranging from wide-open desert plains to barren tundras and everything in between. Unfortunately the environment in these areas is not hugely interactive so whilst everything may look pretty, there's not a huge amount you can do with it. As you would expect, there are also plenty of towns and cities to visit and these are very beautifully rendered, with lots of NPC characters dotted around. The musical score that accompanies these luscious visuals is grand and atmospheric, but unfortunately it loops frequently and so can become pretty grating after a short time. There's also some reasonable voice acting on offer, but it doesn't particularly add to the gameplay, as it's pretty bland, which is probably down to the poor script writing. It's a shame that they didn't spend as much time working on the gameplay as they obviously did on creating the environment and overall presentation; you probably won't get to see much of the landscape either, given that the time between starting the game and becoming completely and utterly despondent is likely to be only two to three hours max.

I personally wouldn't recommend ArchLord to anyone; there are much better games out there and much better ways to waste a few hundred hours or so. I'm afraid this game is not going to set the MMORPG market alight - only try this if you really, really love MMORPGs and even then, be prepared for one hell of a struggle.

Reviewed by Ross Alexander for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).