Rakion

Overview

"Rakion" is a unique 3D MMOFPS similar to "GunZ", but with a fantasy-themed twist, allowing players a combination of shooting and fantasy.

Features

• Summonable pets
• Multiple attacks per character
• Varied game modes
• Built in messenger & clan features
• Good music
• Shop has dozens of non cash shop items
• Optional tutorial

Review

Character creation in Rakion involves choosing one of five classes; Warrior, Archer, Blacksmith, Mage, or Ninja. Each class has a unique attack style and a different distribution of six stats: Attack, Speed, Defense, Grip, Creature, and Range. The game then offers players the choice to complete the short tutorial. The tutorial explains the basics of movement, combat and summoning pets though I couldn'€™t get the pet feature to work properly. All classes in Rakion are capable of melee and ranged attacks. Players can switch between ranged and melee mode at any time. Players can preform various attacks through different combinations of right and left mouse clicks as well. Rakion has a total of 6 game modes including Death Match, Team Death Match, Boss War (kill the opposing team'€™s leader), Stage (cooperative missions), Basic Mode (level benefits don't apply), and Golem War which is a twist on the Boss War mode but involves hunting down an AI Goldem Golem first.

Rakion may have varied game modes but it suffers from several major flaws. The first is that the game is very unstable. It took me many tries to launch the game and it still crashes at random. Even after managing to launch the game, players must contend with the massive lag. The Rakion client creates a peer to peer connection when players join a room which means if somebody has high latency, the whole game is going to be unplayable. The system tries to work around this by not allowing players into a room if they have high latency compared to another player, but what this accomplishes in practice is to prevent players from joining most rooms. I found my self auto kicked from more than half the rooms I tried to join because the OTHER guy was lagging! Rakion is open to all players and each region has its own separate server the only server with a decent amount of players is the US Server. Players from other regions simply connect to the US server and cause latency problems.

I would have loved to write more about Rakion but after spending several hours with the game, I was only able to play two horribly laggy rounds in a boring ice cavern stage. Rakion could be functionally played as a LAN game or through private rooms online but is hardly worth the effort.