Perfect World Europe Review: Really Perfect?

By Jeffrey Kerkdijk (Hyarume), OnRPG Journalist

Perfect World is an oriental-themed MMORPG developed by Beijing Perfect World. But is it really 'perfect'? Like every other MMORPG out there, the first time you want to play you will have to create a character. Perfect World offers that feature too, but better.  Because in Perfect World you can create you're character just like you want it to be.  Adjust the eyes, the nose, the shape of the face, the shape of the lips; the customization features are almost endless.

Perfect world sets place in a so called Perfect World which makes me wonder why we would need to battle anything in it. The game is fully based on Chinese mythology; the story is about a god of the universe named "Pan Gu" who wanted to create a world. His first attempt failed and went overrun with wraiths. Not a very pretty sight. The second time he chose to create a world filled with humans, wing elves and a feral race named the Untamed. After some more occurances along the way you come in when the three races have formed an alliance against the dark wraiths from the first world created by "Pan Gu". It seems this blundering god needs a little hand.

Every race starts near the capital-city of their chosen race.  Humans start near the City of Etherblade, Wing elves start near the City of Plume, and the untamed near the City of Lost. The game world looks beautiful, there is a lot of detail and everything looks great. The game runs great on a low end pc, if you adjust the settings that is.

The game offers you WASD control, with the options to use an extremely overpowered jump (or even double jump) and the usual point and click method. Both work great.

The story is pretty bland and makes a good excuse for most of the main quests, which are kill X amount of (insert monster here) and talk to Y. Or the usual get X amount of (insert item that monster drops) and talk to Y. The game doesn't have any variation when it comes to quests. The quests in Perfect world are extremely generic, but give you a lot of experience, and believe me you don't want to grind in this game.

Perfect World feels like an extremely generic game, the game focuses around grinding your way to the top, (yeah, you did read that right, I did say grinding) killing mobs for quest and killing more mobs when you have no quests. There are a lot of quests in the game, but you do run out of them especially in the higher levels of the game.

There are professions in the game; you can become a jeweler, or a craftsmen. Just to make items and sell them. They aren't fun to train, they are pretty meaningless. Also there are about seventy billion item-selling shops (set up by players) for all these useless items which clutter up the main cities and cover up the pretty splendid Chinese design of the towns.

Currently there are two servers one for PvE and one for PvP. Unfortunately PvP isn't a lot of fun in Perfect world due the fact that the game isn't balanced and that some skills are still not translated. I would recommend staying away from the PvP server, for now. It is just not worth it right now.

The graphics in Perfect world really please the eye, the character models are great and the world is beautiful and detailed. The music of the game is amazing, every place you go you hear some music that gives you the feeling you are really there. That and the fact that the movement is pretty smoothe and landscapes keep changing, make it a fun experience regardless of the grind.

Personal experience

I started the game and fell in love with the character customization, the first things you do in the game aren't that different from what you do in other MMORPGs you grab a quest and get going.

So I started some quests and all it went like this: I killed ten monsters and returned to the NPC, who gave me a new quest. The next quest was for me to go to the city, I walked a few minutes and went to the requested NPC in the city, he gave me another kill quest, so I went to kill some mobs again. Then I hit level three, I could get a new skill. And a few kill quests later I hit level 7. And there I was killing mobs at different places.

If there had been more spells or more difficult combinations then it would have been a matter of me perfecting my class bit by bit. But there are just too few to make it a real challenge. It was rather boring and repetitive. I had 3 skills: one healed me, and the other two just attack. It was pressing numbers all over again. F1 for attacking F2 for skill F4 to pick up loot, that's about it.

The game world was the only thing that kept me going, the world is pretty impressive. And to be honest that was about it. I didn't like the game that much due to the lack of challenges that would interest more hardcore players. For casual players who want to immerse themselves and just enjoy the experience, this world is pretty perfect.

Summary

Perfect world is a beautiful game; the world is just perfect the rest of the game is not. The game is extremely generic there is to do is kill stuff and at a higher level you might be killing stuff in a party but that's about how far the game goes. And the final note, the game is cash shop dependant. If you want to be good at your game. You will have to buy some things out of the cash shop.

Pros:
- Visual detail
- Sound and music

Cons:
-Grind (quest grind, kill grind)
-Professions
-Cash shop