Tabula Rasa Reviews
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The basic structure of an MMO is to drape a simplified RPG system on top of a real-time yet curiously turn-based combat system, with some side-shows like crafting and god-awful amounts of crank-turning. I assumed that Tabula Rasa would be a low-grind, action-oriented game encompassed by a sweet candy shell. Or at least an RPG system of some depth beyond (this stat makes you punch harder).Cheat Code Central sees some flaws but is still impressed, rating it 4.2/5.
Tabula Rasa manages to get some of this right, while utterly failing in other respects. Tabula Rasa has solid action gameplay, with a lot of jumping and running about while shooting your guns wildly. It's a lot of fun for a while then you'll begin to notice that aiming actually isn't important, as every shot is determined by an underlying dice roll, and all the mouse action is about as irrelevant as the electoral college. Not having to aim and not being punished for moving is nice and all, but they don't actually change much. You can do much the same in World of Warcraft and City of Heroes.
Combat is served as the main course of this game. And while it may seem somewhat redundant at first glance, there is enough depth to keep any shooter fan satisfied. Now remember, I didn't say RPG fan, I said shooter fan. The RPG elements are here, but they are almost on auto-pilot. The more kills you make, the more experience points you earn. These points will help to upgrade your skills, weapons, and a form of ancient magic known as Logos. You will appreciate that fact that you can get up and running in this game almost immediately with so few choices to make. There are plenty of choices to make later, which demonstrates the developers attention to pacing.Eurogamer calls the launch promising and gives the game an 8.
Interestingly, ammo is not unlimited. You'll have to buy it when you run low. This will give you some essence of strategy. It also makes the game a little more realistic. Furthermore, not all weapons will work on all aliens. Some aliens are impervious to some of your projectiles, magic, and skills. So you won't be able to upgrade one super weapon and use it continually. You'll have to experiment with all kinds of weapons, of which there is no shortage. There are various guns, lasers, plasma, and other energy weapons. Magic can be used to make some weapons effective against certain aliens. This has limited applications, but it does come in handy if you only have certain weapons at your disposal, or ammo for them.
It would be remiss not to mention that we also experienced shocking technical problems with Tabula Rasa at first - horrible lag, random crashes and regular pauses in the gameplay, many of which ended up with us staring at our corpse when the game unfroze. A new patch released this week seems to have cleared up most of the problems, however, and we've not seen a crash since then - so for new players, at least, Tabula Rasa gets a relatively clean bill of health on the technical front. We'd strongly suggest a fairly powerful PC for the game, though; a system which runs World of Warcraft at high detail and full resolution may choke badly on Tabula Rasa. It's a memory hog, especially, and any system with less than 2GB will suffer from slow-down and stuttering.
After dozens of hours with the game, though, it's hard not to forgive most of Tabula Rasa's flaws - technical or otherwise. The weak crafting and occasional moments of dullness in its quests are lifted by a great combat system, and the moment when things "click" for you and you start to understand the utility of the different weapon types is one of those great gaming moments when a vista of opportunity opens in front of you. (Actually, there's another minor criticism; the game really needs to educate players properly about the weapons they're using, rather than expecting you to visit the website in order to find out about their differences.)
