Soon to wash ashore on a virtual beach near you is Bounty Bay Online, the first MMORPG that takes place in early historic times where you can sail across all the seven seas. In this adventure you can choose a career from a farmer to a ruthless pirate and receive quests to perform, which can lead you to fame and power - or infamy and power!

Bounty Bay Online is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game set in a realistic view of the 14th to 16th Century. The game allows you to choose what you want to do; there are guilds to join or you can set one up yourself, teams so you can fight together or if you want you can even go it alone! You start off by choosing one of four characters and changing their features so you have your own unique character and name. Once you have your character, you head to Athens or Alexandria to begin your journey. In the beginning there are tutorial sections available to help you with the basics of the game, like buying provisions and interacting with other characters. While this is helpful, I do feel that the tutorial could have been handled a little better, perhaps by first taking you through all the details shown on your screen, as initially things can feel quite overwhelming!

One of the first tasks given to you is the delivery of a letter to a guy name Langer, who suggests that you need to rebuild your ship. After this the tasks depend on where and what you decide to do, as there are many paths you can take, such as becoming a pirate at sea, a farmer, a fisherman or even becoming a merchant/trade dealer; the choices are endless. At first it's hard to get used to your surroundings, but there are plenty of other players around who are generally more than willing to help if you're feeling lost at sea! There's also online help available, which is a useful and thoughtful addition for newcomers. When wandering around you are sure to bump into some NPCs, who will share information with you that can help you learn how to go to sea or buy equipment and can even inform you of secrets that can lead you to a tidy sum of treasure.

From the first moment you begin playing, you'll doubtless be impressed by the incredible graphics, which must have taken a lot of time and effort. While at sea the water movements are extremely realistic and your ship is scaled to an accurate size. When on land you can view landmarks such as the Egyptian Pyramids and the Parthenon in Athens; from the moment you start walking towards a landmark, you can immediately recognise what it is. However, there are some graphics that given time need to be improved on, such as the look of the characters, who don't have much detail in their face and clothes, making them look a little out of place when compared to the rest of the graphics in the game. Once the game is out of beta testing, the developers have said that the graphics will be improved. Sadly, the luscious visuals come at the price of performance though, and you will almost certainly run into the problem of having the game run slowly at times. It can become a bit of annoyance, but it is worthwhile when you start getting involved.

Something that I believe doesn't need to be worked on any further is the sound. When walking around the music is harmonic and very much in tone with the time period. The music changes for the different predicaments you are put in; when in battle the music becomes more upbeat as gunshots ring out while shooting at another ship (or being shot at!). While fighting, your character uses appropriate sound effects and when using a sword you can hear the swishing sound it makes as you tackle your opponent. The graphics and sound combine to create a convincing atmosphere. When attacking a ship at sea, you hear your cannon fire and then see the cannonball shoot off towards your opponent's ship; if your aim is true then you see and hear the collision with some wonderful animation and sound effects. There are many wonderful touches like this that serve to really draw you into the experience.

Each player starts off in a good position, as you are given your own vessel, which allows you to explore and visit over sixty different cities and ports all around the world, from Australia and Africa to America and Europe, with over 1500 discoveries to be made and plenty of landmarks to see. While you explore you can even come across famous landmarks, such as the pyramids of Gizeh. The game personalises your adventure by noting your discoveries in your logbook, which you can read through at any time. The logbook is a great way to keep track of your adventure, so you can look at everything you have found while exploring the lands.

Once you've been playing for a while, you will have earned enough money to buy a bigger and better ship, with a crew of your choice. With this ship you have the option to explore the world, fight other ships at sea or even transport cargo to and from cities. Battling at sea is fun the first time around but soon becomes a little tedious. The animations and sound effects are realistic and appealing, but once you hit the attack button there's a long wait until something really interesting happens. It seems to me that the ships just circle around each other for ages until finally they are lined up with each other and the battle commences. During the end of a battle you can board your opponent's ship and begin sword fighting with them, but for me personally, fighting at sea is not one of my favourite career choices.

When you want to start fighting an opponent, all you do is click on them and your character runs up to them and attacks. You can fight people and animals, which include crabs, deer and even turtles! Once in a fight, a small image of the opponent appears at the top of the screen with their health bar; each time you hit your opponent successfully they lose some health and when your opponent hits you the same happens, with your health bar shown on the top right of the screen. If you win the fight then a box appears to show you what you've gained from the fight; this can range from money to turtle shells!

Luckily for you, you generally don't get attacked by anything unless you start the fight yourself, so if exploring and battling don't appeal to you then you can have an easy life and enjoy a bit of fishing, tailoring, alchemy or even mining. A popular choice is becoming a trades dealer; you can buy and sell provisions around the cities available to you to turn a profit. You can also set up your own guild, based upon anything, such as a guild for crafters, fighters or even for helping newbies; the possibilities really are endless.

When you're on dry land, you view the action from a third person perspective, where you move your mouse pointer to the far side of the edge of the screen to manoeuvre the camera. I found this control method odd though; instead of using the obvious left click to move, you right click to move and left click to talk with other characters, which confused me for a while although I got the hang of it in the end! Other players can be seen wandering around and they can also talk to the NPCs at the same time as you. A good feature of the game is that characters don't jump to a position when it runs slow; the screen pauses and then carries on with what you were doing. There are shortcut keys at the bottom of the screen where you can add your own shortcuts for searching for treasure, making a team and more. I personally don't really see the point of having so many shortcut keys, but it's nice to have the option available if you want to make use of it to speed up the action.

As this is a massively multiplayer game, you can chat with other online players and it's handy that all of the chat boxes are separate. Chat boxes are available for general, public, guild, private and team - so if you just want to see your private chats then all you do is click on that tab. Keeping up with all these chats in different windows can get a bit tedious though, as you find yourself flicking back and forth from each window.

Once you become familiar with how everything works, you'll begin to experience more and more of the features on offer. Firstly each character has skills that include precision, attack, medicine, fishing, navigation, mining and so on. You can increase the level of your skills by gaining more experience in performing various actions, which in turn makes your character more powerful. Some skills can actually give access to sub skills once you reach a certain level. However, the more work you do at a given time, the more energy you use up. Each character has a given amount of energy to use for fighting and special skills like lumbering and mining. All you need to do is have a little rest though and it will soon regenerate, while your energy level can be increased by raising your medical skill. Each city enables you to enhance each of these skills, so if you like the look of one city then you can stay there for awhile without getting bored or needing to go elsewhere to boost a particular skill.

When you have gained experience in certain skills you might want to have a go at some of the quests, which are given to you when you start talking to some of the NPCs. If you choose to accept the quest then you're given instructions on how to complete it. Some quests can be harder than others, depending on how much experience you have. One quest given to you is to find two different types of shell on the beach at night. Once on the beach you can see shells; all you do is click on one of the shells to pick it up. Once you pick it up, a screen comes up to let you know what type it is. After you find them, all you need to do is authenticate them and you receive some experience and money. There aren't a lot of quests at present, but as for most of the game you just need to wait awhile until they update the game and add some more.

Bounty Bay Online is a well rounded game with lots of features to keep you busy for many hours. It runs a bit slowly at times and has too many features to grasp at the beginning, but these are small problems considering how huge this game is and will be! There are a lot of MMORPGs out there, but this is one of a kind and a real fresh of breath air when it comes to originality. This online experience gets thumbs up from me, but sadly the price tag doesn't; you'll have to pay a monthly subscription of about £6.79, which I don't think is a reasonable amount considering that it still needs work. Once the beta testing is over with and the game has had more additions however, I feel this will become a new favourite for many and be well worth the subscription - with the whole world as your playground and endless activities to partake in on land and at sea, there really is something here for everyone.

Reviewed by Gina Harrison for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).