I’m surprised Blizzard hasn’t taken Perfect World to court.  After playing Forsaken World, the similarities between World of Warcraft and Forsaken World are too numerous to list here in this review.  The biggest similarity is play-style with Forsaken Worldcasting spells and effects by using the common leveling system between classes to defeat mobs and bosses.But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Forsaken World is a high-elf fantasy MMORPG using the standard races of Humans, Elves, Dwarven, Stonemen, and Kindred.  Similar to World of Warcraft, each race has the ability to be a specific class, with the exception of the Stonemen who can only be male and Protector, which is the World of Warcraft equivalent of Tank-Warrior.  The classes consist of Assassin, which is similar to a Rogue in Warcraft, the Bard, which uses area of effect damage and boosts like the Paladin, Warlock, and Mage. There’s the mage which is very close to the WoW equivalent utilizing the elemental powers of ice, fire and, wind to do damage, the Marksman, which is similar to a Marksman Hunter, a Priest (self explanatory,) a Protector which is the tank class in WoW, a Warrior who is the close combat melee specialist and finally: Vampire, which is more along the lines of the undead race.  As I said before and I’m sure I’ll say it many times in this article: Forsaken World is a giant rip-off of World of Warcraft down to the crafting system, storage-bank-auction house, and guild systems.

This is not to say Forsaken World isn’t entertaining to play, quite the opposite.  The graphics in Forsaken World are far superior to those of Warcraft, and small little twists on the game itself such as being able to click on the target’s name in your quest book to automatically run to the person in question save time and make questing fun and in doing so makes leveling seem almost like cheating.  You also have your jobs and cooking quests and so on, but the main point I want to make to those of you asking if you should play Forsaken World is this: If you’ve ever thought about playing WoW or used to play and don’t want to spend the fifteen bucks a month to play, Forsaken World is a great way to get the Warcraft effect of questing, leveling and collecting useless crap while making friends – for free.

When I first downloaded and installed Forsaken World through Steam, it wouldn’t let me create a new account, telling me I had already signed up for Perfect World.  After going to the website to find out what was going on, I quickly found the reason: Rusty Hearts is a Perfect World game.  For signing up with Rusty Hearts, my user name was already available for the rest of the games Perfect World produces.  After looking through their catalog of games – all of them free to play, I signed into Forsaken World and was reminded how much I used to play Warcraft.  I have since downloaded Perfect World the game, thinking it would be the alliance side to their Forsaken World and was smacked in the face of one of the hardest MMORPG games with none of the hints or tricks Forsaken World implemented into their UI.

A cool little side-note: Forsaken World gives you an option of setting up your own store you can leave in the middle of the Town Square so players can check out your wares and buy stuff when you’re not online or don’t want to use the Auction House.

Bottom Line: If you liked any of the following games: World of Warcraft, Everquest, Guild Wars, Ultima Online, or similar fantasy MMORPG’s, try it out.  You won’t be disappointed.

- Chris Tallant