Reviews

JR "Razor" Sutich has a full review of Pirates of the Burning Sea, the new MMORPG from developer Flying Lab Software and publisher Sony Online Entertainment. This game lets players take it out to the high-seas or one of the many islands of the Caribbean.

Pirates of the Burning Sea had me at "ahoy". As a big fan of PC games such as Seven Cities of Gold, Curse of Monkey Island, Sid Meier's Pirates! and tabletop gaming's Wooden Ships, Iron Men, I had been looking forward to this title since I heard of its development. Besides, pirates are iconic legends in their own right and this is another chance to immerse yourself in that romantic fantasy of sailing the Seven Seas, minus the scurvy.

Read more after the plunge.

Tabula Rasa is the sci-fi MMO developed by Destination Games and published by NCsoft. It launched close to two months ago on November 2nd and I've been playing it daily since the Pre-Order Head Start in October. That's part of the reason why it's taken me a bit to write this review.

Sound

The sound in this game is amazing. I actually left the music on, and for me that is a rarity. Audio in Tabula Rasa is used effectively to make it necessary to listen in order to maintain situational awareness. Several times while I was running around the battlefield I actually had chills when I heard a Bane Dropship coming in behind me. The screech of a Lightbender or the hissing speech of the Thrax will haunt you even when you aren't playing. Tabula Rasa does have in-game voice chat and the quality is quite good. While not absolutely necessary, voice chat does make Control Point battles and instances go much smoother.

Click Read More to see the entire review of Tabula Rasa.

JR "razor" Sutich reviews the new OTTO Digital Gaming Headset in our latest gaming hardware review. He used this with a variety of games, including MMOs like World of Warcraft.

The OTTO Digital Gaming Headset (Model OT-8) arrived at our offices last month and I have been using it almost exclusively when playing online games since then. At first I didn't think I was going to like it, but now I prefer to game with them on.

Read more after the jump.

It's been a few months since we took a peek at DDO and in that time, based on community feedback and the server merges Turbine are doing, we've decided it was time for a second look at Dungeons and Dragons Online. JR Sutich re-reviews the game in this new article.

First off, I stopped using Auto-Attack. I can see where taking a more active role in fighting improves results and makes it more interesting. The next step to making the game more fun was joining a guild. Having others online who are willing to do quests or answer questions made a lot of the difference. Getting run one time through Waterworks on Elite got me Level 3 and I had easy access to The Marketplace.

I had gotten to Level 4 when I noticed something interesting. That total Favor (not Faction, Favor) number that I had been obsessing over wasn't as big a problem as I had believed. Sure, I still think that the whole idea of making Drow and 32-point builds unlockables is a poor one, but I had managed to get 270 out of 400 necessary for the extra race without much trouble at all. I hadn't even completed all of the quests listed for Level 2. The only chain quests I had done were Catacombs and Tangleroot on Normal, and the Waterworks run on Elite. Getting 400 Favor is nothing to worry about. I should have it by the time I hit Level 6 or 7. Now, working on getting 1750 Favor might take a bit more effort, but I no longer see it as a horrible grind. It's still poor design, but not game breaking.

Read more after the click.

Harry Potter WarCry has released their reviews of the 7th and final book in the series: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Lumina offers us two versions, one that is free of spoilers and one that has quite a few.

This is the non-spoiler review.

Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers ahead.
Spoiler review, click at risk!

Since it launched on April 24th, we've had a writer on the ground exploring Lord of the Rings Online. MMORPGs are huge things and we believe it is important to give it much more time than say a single player before we release a review. Now, after several weeks of playing, JR Sutich has given us his opinion of the game.

Player characters can enter The Ettenmoors once they reach Level 40 and engage the monsters for control of several strongholds in the area. The more strongholds you control, the more quests are available, allowing you to gain even more Destiny Points. Player characters can use the Destiny Points to purchase enhancements that work like timed buffs. Gaining more armor, health, or even increased XP for periods of time can greatly improve chances of survival and rate of leveling. I plan to spend a majority of my time doing Monster Play on the side of the monsters. Evil is good.

Read more after the click.

When the first anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach ticked by in February, our own JR Sutich decided to take a second look at the game. While it had launched originally to less than rave reviews, after a year, many MMOs hit their stride. Find out if DDO is one of them in our review.

One of the detractions from DDO that I found was the necessity of repeating quests. The quests are fun and interesting the first time, but after the fifth or sixth time I ran through them, I began to lose my sense of fun. It became even more evident when I found groups and they were just running straight through them without pause and I didn't get a chance to really enjoy much of the discovery elements from being in them for the first time.

Read his full review after the click.

Last fall, Ideazon released their latest gaming peripheral: the Ideazon Reaper Gaming Mouse. This was the company's first foray outside keyboards (ZBoard). It was a solid debut entry and over the last several weeks WarCry Senior Editor Dana Massey has been using the Reaper day-to-day and offers this review.

Its sensitivity combined with its extreme light weight can cause some occasional problems. Most notably, if I sneeze while using the mouse, my cursor flies all over the screen in a way that rarely happened with a more hefty, less responsive mouse. Despite a few easy to undo Photoshop accidents and some disorientation in FPS titles, this is a relatively minor issue born out of the combination of two good things.

The full review is available at the link below.

In our second Zboard keyset review of the day, we look at Ideazon's offering for World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade. Whitney Butts took this one for a spin and came back with a more mixed review then Sutich did for Guild Wars Factions.

You can also get a chance to win your own World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade keyset and Zboard in a contest we're holding.

The overall functionality of the custom buttons seems cheap. They don't always work and there is a bit of delay. You press the button and in game you'll see your chat cursor activate. Once the cursor activates you will see the slash command for the action being entered in the chat window. At times, the delay was so long I likely could have typed the slash command faster than it took the keyboard to enter it in. Overall, the buttons seem like a glorified macro interface for slash commands that didn't quite work all of the time.

Click below for the full article.

Today we have a review of the Guild Wars Factions Zboard keyset. Ideazon, the makers of these keysets, specializes in custom keysets that plug into their own keyboard. These are designed to swap in and out and work specifically for each game. Our own JR Sutich had a chance to review one.

You can also get a chance to win your own World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade keyset and Zboard in a contest we're holding.

Do one thing and do it well. The Zboard is a great example of that, as it chooses to focus on being a great custom keyboard layout for various videogames. The specific layout I had the chance to use was for Guild Wars Factions.

Setting up the keyboard was a fairly simple operation, once I had figured out that the newer keysets were not compatible with older Zboard bases. After installing the drivers, it was only a matter of plugging in the USB Zboard in and letting the system detect it. The Zboard application was immediately able to show what keyset had been used, with a graphical representation of the Guild Wars Faction layout.

The full review can be found at the link below.

In recent years, The WarCry Network has not been a site for reviews. Today, we hope to begin a new tradition by reviewing the biggest expansion of them all: World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.

We've opted to stay away from grading the games we review, as the numbers are too subjective and usually, over time, become wildly inconsistent. Instead, we're going to give you our heart-felt opinion, some pros and cons, and then let you make your own choice.

John Funk took the time to pen this review. So read on to find out what WarCry thinks of The Burning Crusade.

It's taken them two years, but the Blue Crew in Irvine has finally launched the first expansion pack to their proverbial 800-pound gorilla, 'World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.' With two new races to play, a brand-new crafting profession, and a slew of new lands filled with dangerous and deadly beasties that all hunger for your demise, 'Burning Crusade' has rapidly become one of the fastest-selling games of all time.

It is said that "the apple does not fall far from the tree," and the statement holds true for the WoW expansion. Much of what is good about 'Burning Crusade' was good in 'World of Warcraft,' and many of its flaws are from the parent game as well. Even so, Blizzard has jam-packed a whole mess of content into their first expansion pack, and the vast majority of what is there is excellent.

Click read more to find out what he thinks.

The playable demo of Ninety-Nine Nights, a collaborative effort between Q Entertainment and Phantagram, recently went live for download via Xbox Live. Having been wowed by the various movies released over the past year or so, it was something I was eager to get my hands on. As soon as the demo finished downloading here on the office's Xbox 360, I plugged in, closed the door, and prepared to watch numbers on the screen scroll up to ludicrous levels. I was not disappointed.