Sword of the New World Review: Innovative and Challenging


By Jeffrey Kerkdijk, Onrpg writer

Sword of the New World: Granado Espada is an MMORPG, developed by famous Ragnarok developer Hak Kyu Kim and published by K2 Networks which is also a winner of the Korean awards for best graphics and best gameplay in 2006.

Welcome to the 17th century

…where fast combat, multi-character control and battles with NPCs await you.

As you begin your game, you’ll notice that instead of a common character selection screen, Sword has you create your characters in the barracks. First you need to fill in a family name which will be your character’s surname. Then you can create your characters, and pick one of the 5 classes in game:

Fighters are the main melee class and have the ability to use swords, shields, big swords, dual swords, poles, guns and even one sword and one gun at the same time. Musketeers are a ranged class and stand out in using guns and rifles. Wizards are a magic class, which means they are good at doing AOE’s (area of effect damage) and other magic. Then there are the elementalists, a magic class using elemental powers, which is the best class to do AOEs. Finally, there are scouts, the healer class or assassin class depending on how you want to use it. Scouts can heal the party, buff the party, place traps and it can assassinate monsters and/or players with their deadly daggers.

If that isn’t enough you can get UPC (universal player character) cards too, which are like the NPCs in game but then you can use them as characters. Some have their own unique stances and they can be obtained by doing quests. After obtaining the card you go to your barrack and then select the option to create a new character. Now the UPC is listed as being on your team, and they will travel around with you and help your combat against monsters. Every UPC has its own starter level so it’s not like you have to level them all from the start.

But sadly there are no ways to change faces, hair color, body frame, or anything else until you get into the game and start collecting new armor, weapons, hats and other accessories or costumes.

Play with three characters at once

Multi character control.

After the creation of your first character a tutorial will start giving you info on how to start the game, and what to do next. When you get the message that you can now use multi character control. You can create two more characters and start the game and if you want to you can do a battle tutorial against guards, just to get the hang of things.

That’s right in Sword of the New World you can control not only one character but three characters, this is called multi-character control. This might seems pretty confusing but when you play the game you get the hang of it quickly as its fairly easy.

You move by clicking, skills are being done with the keyboard the first character uses the QWERTY row as its skill bar, the second the ASDFG row and the third uses the ZXCVB row. By hitting the F1 – F3 keys, players switch between there avatars, while F4 brings the other characters to the selected party leader. CTRL-A selects the entire group which you will be using a lot, but CTRL-Left clicking orders the team to Assault an area, meaning they’ll cut through anything in their path to reach their objective. And witch CTRL-SHIFT-CLICK they pick up any drops around the click location.

Now about skills, a feature I really like about Sword of the New World. Instead of buying one skill, you can buy stances which are sets of 3-5 skills and its own style of battle, this allows you to develop each character differently. It’s a good system and works good in Sword of the New World.

Quests are varied from kill-quests, gathering-quests or delivery-quests to instanced missions and even NPC battles. Sword of the New World has a good background story and it’s a bit of a pity that it isn’t showed in most of the quests but the ones that have a storyline behind them are pretty fun and interesting.

Combat is very fast paced and when you see a group of monsters and you can send them flying in all directions, in less than 10 seconds. This makes the game exciting as you go adventuring and completing your quests.

PvP

Royalists versus the republicans, Colony wars or do you like to kill in baron-mode?

The PvP in Sword of the New World is good, it’s pretty tactical but also quite gear dependent, you will notice that when the other has better items it’s almost impossible to win, unless you are skilled and have a good tactic.

There are many different PvP aspects in the game: normal 1 versus 1 PvP, Royalists versus the Republicans (both are factions which you can join) or Colony Wars in which you gain a territory with your clan versus others. Or just go make your own PvP room like in a lobby of a shooter or a room based action game. Go to the PvP NPC and create a room, set the type to PvP and wait for others to join you.

There is also an open PvP if you choose to play on a baron server. After reaching family level 6 (which you just gain by leveling up with your characters) you can PvP with others of that family level and higher. There is however a penalty system: you become a murderer if you killed other players, towns will not accept you and NPCs will be scared of you (not that they’re going anywhere, but they won’t sell you anything). So then you will need to visit a different starter town: a very small wreck hidden in a secret location, where you can buy your things and teleport to other locations just like in the regular towns. The penalty can be lifted once you killed enough monsters but while the penalty lasts you’re a target to all players.

Does it look old?

You’ll be surprised.

The first thing you notice when you start the game is that it looks really good, detail is stunning and the 17th century baroque style of the game fits just perfectly. Towns look really amazing and the buildings and architecture are just incredible. Character detail and clothing is excellent and fits perfectly in the style of the game. Not to mention that the game is easy to run, and even lower-end PCs can easily run this game. The only downside of the graphics in my opinion is the glow effect; it can be a bit overwhelming, but you can turn it off.

Sound of the New World

The music in Sword of the New World is great; it’s a mix between classical and trace, with pure classic music in towns. The music is strong positive part of this game, as it’s very enjoyable and never intrusive. The others sounds are good too, there is nothing wrong in the sound department.

Personal Recommendation

Sword of the New World: Granado Espada is a decent game. I really like the graphics because they are amazing and it doesn’t require a high-end PC to run the game. The music is great, I love the atmosphere it portrays. The PVE has a good amount of quests and things to do, but once you run out of those the game can get pretty repetitive. However, once you have reached a good level and got some good equipment you will find other things to do in this game.

The PvP is fun, I really like how it works with three characters, which make the game tactical and really fun. All in short Sword of the New World: Granado Espada is a good MMORPG.

Pros

– Good story

– Great graphics

– Good music

– A good class development system

– Multi character control

– UPC system

Cons

– The grind that is needed to level

– Character customization

– Quest can be a bit hard to follow

– The interface still needs a bit of tweaking

– Combat feels a bit too automated

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