Tabula Rasa Review
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Where most games are happy to spawn their orcs in fields to mope around, Tabula Rasa regularly flies in drop-ships to deposit a new attack wave or - at the least - does a sinister teleport flash. When you've got a Bane mothership lurking above the battlefield, it all ties together. It almost feels like Halo: The MMO.
But it still shares a basic structure with the rest of the genre. You get quests from people with marks above their heads. You run off and kill some people, and take their stuff. You sell it to buy some lovely new equipment. You level up. You gain new powers. Perhaps you team up with some mates and go off into a private instanced area for an epic mission. MMO stuff, you know.
Which isn't to say that the game's inventions are inconsequential. Take how Tabula Rasa deals with character development. Everyone starts with identical skills and abilities, but you branch at levels five, 15 and 25. At each of the forks you have the ability to create a clone of your progress so you can backtrack.
Then there's the combat itself which, while stat based, has enough twists to make it more than just standing still and shooting at each other. Partial cover leads to defensive bonuses. Kneeling gives you a damage bonus (but a vulnerability in limited manoeuvrability).
