If you like tedious chores, this game is for you! — Albion Online
Developer(s): Sandbox Interactive
Publisher(s): Sandbox Interactive
Year Released: 2017
Platforms: Android, Linux, GeForce Now, iOS, PC (Windows), PC (MacOS)
Reviewed on: PC (Windows)
Many of us have been subjected to the insistent adverts about these MMO exploration games, games that supposedly play like an RPG, and look just as stunning as anything made for the single-player market. Albion Online is one of these such games. It is a game that presents itself as a sandbox RPG with cartoonish graphics and a whole world to explore at the click of a mouse key. The world it presents is vast and open, allowing players to explore the far reaches of its perimeter and beyond, encouraging players to encounter everything the world has to offer them. You, as the player, are one of a number of adventurers who sought out the land of Albion for a new life, wealth, fame and fortune. Albion is an unknown land, and it is up to you to discover its life and make one for yourself in return.
When booting up the game for the first time, you’ll be entranced by the impressive opening cutscene that introduces the player to the premise of the game and immerses you into this wild and chaotic adventure. However, after a few minutes of gameplay, it will start to become apparent that any semblance of an exciting story or any storyline within the game is completely forgotten and non-existent. Instead, Albion Online focuses on the feel of an MMO, rather than the appeal of an RPG, therefore falling short of creating an exciting and engaging experience for players. It is clear that the sandbox genre was the main genre that Albion wished to fall under, but decided to rope in the term RPG to seem a bit more appealing to wider audiences. Whilst this may have gotten them more attention, I felt a bit catfished by the whole endeavour.
Through my gameplay experience, I found the graphics to be too childish and cartoonish for a sandbox MMO RPG, and it all looked rather lacklustre in its presentation style, reminding me of the early designs of World of Warcraft with its constant point-and-click style gameplay. Much of what players will encounter in the early aspects of the game is engaging with the crafting and collecting mechanics of the game, spending the majority of their time collecting resources and then crafting their weapons and armour from those resources. In order to craft different levels of equipment, you need to invest in your skill points, which I believe is the most confusing and mind-boggling part of this game. The skill tree system, and its incoherent method of skill points, is a gameplay mechanic that would take me much longer than I am willing to invest my time into to be able to understand. Its display for the players is not very user-friendly, looking rather plain and unappealing, which only adds to the confusion of everything.
Luckily, you don’t have to play as a named character for this MMO, but you do not get much choice in the creation of your character. You will find that the character creation screen is severely limited in what it allows players to create, and instead, you’ll be choosing your character’s appearance from a set list of presets, and choosing the hair colour and style, in the most limited way imaginable. However, from the blocky, cartoonish style of graphics, it shouldn’t bother you too much as it would be hard to tell whether you had put any time or effort into the smallest details of your character's face. Also, you won’t get much of a chance to admire your character’s appearance as the angle and distance of the camera from your character will make them nothing more than a 4–5cm tall bundle of colour on your screen, signposted by an overbearing gauge of health and your character’s name. But this will only become an issue when you start interacting with other players, whose names will overlap with your own when you are all standing on the same spot. The nameplate system instead creates a chaotic landscape for players to navigate their way across, especially in overcrowded hub areas.
Interacting with other players in the space is something that I try to avoid, after all, they are strangers over the internet. But Albion has a small chat box in the corner of the screen, well disguised among the HUD to the point that I barely even noticed it was there until my tenth minute into gameplay. It doesn’t overcrowd the HUD, nor does it distract the player from gameplay, and it is merely there only for players who wish to interact with it. As another handy feature of the online aspects of the MMO, players can invite other players to their party and invite them along on their quests, helping them in combat, and generally travelling with them across Albion. Although a nice detail and handy aspect, the issue I have with this is that players don’t need to be acquainted with or friends with that other player to be invited, which is an issue with MMOs that always discomforted me.
However, one main feature of the game that I can almost guarantee you will be utilising if you decide to play this game, is your mount. For the first few hours of the game, you will be limited in the kind of mount you can acquire, only being able to ride around on a small mule, but soon the vast array of mounts will become available to you to aid in your quests across the landscape of Albion. Your character moves significantly slower than a mount, and therefore, in order to get places quicker, you’ll find yourself relying on your mount to move across the world easily and quickly. They do not aid in combat situations, so don’t expect your mount to be willing to sacrifice itself for your life, these mounts aren’t your average Skyrim horse with no sense of self-preservation. Instead, these mounts are mainly added to help players venture across the landscapes and find new areas to discover. And for the first few combat encounters, as a low-level combatant, you’ll be desperate for the escape you can get.
For what I played of Albion Online, which was not much and not enough for an extensive look at such an open-world game, I did not find my experience to be very engaging. It felt very much like a generic MMO RPG, but Albion seemed to fail in creating an interesting or invigorating game for me to lose myself in. Instead, I was relieved to exit out of the application when I felt like I had had enough. There is little to say about this game that wouldn’t seem insulting, and I do admire the effort that had clearly been put into this game to make it what it is, and I did enjoy the combat. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem that much different from many other MMO RPGs that I have encountered before, and so I struggled to define it as something new and intriguing.
