tl;dr Don’t bother downloading this game.
So I’ve been playing Martial Empires recently. Several things about what I read drew me to it, namely the character customization, the wonderful graphics, and what is purported to be realm vs realm PvP, something which I never saw any evidence of. Those are the good things about this game and sadly they are not the reason why I felt compelled to write this. To put it quite simply, this game is inconvenient to play. At every turn where it seems as though other ways exist to make things less tedious, the designers of Martial Empires choose to look the other way.
There is a crafting system and it’s nice in that you can actually make things that are very useful to yourself and others almost from the start. Collecting supplies is a chore but I looted enough off my kills to do some. But there is a problem with that, some things you need can only be looted. And if you are not in the level range of that mob you won’t see any loot. So if you are not crafting while leveling and keeping on top of it you will soon find yourself having to make a new character to go back and pick up the items you missed to keep your crafting going. Sure you can buy them but these items are priced expensive on the auction house as one would imagine.
The auction house itself is a chore as well. First off I didn’t even know there was one until I did a search on google for it. It is located in a single place, the main city of the game. It’s called the main city but you only really ever have a reason to go there once briefly around level 8 and never have a reason to return that I can see aside from going to the auction house. It’s inconvenient because you have travel there either buy running, taking one of the vehicles, or paying through your backside for a teleport.
On top of all this the game suffers the same faults every other MMO on the market does these days. It follows the World of Warcraft quest-based advancement model and despite hitting level 15 I never saw the need to group or interact with other players in any way, shape, or form. There was this random battle ground feature that I played a few times, at low level it is a cooperative PvE raid that was just a laggy zerg-fest. I don’t play online games to play alone and I already work a job that is essentially data entry, I don’t want to do it for fun as well.
Nothing new, nothing innovative, the character customization seems good at first but you quickly realize that everyone ends up looking the same anyway. Nobody plays together, no reason to, boring grind that seems endless. Excuse me while I go hit Add/Remove Programs in my Control Panel.
