The world of video games is, let’s not beat around the bush, bloody expensive. Unlike music and films, the price of your disk can cost upwards of thirty-five pounds, and that’s not including the console needed to play it, and the inevitable DLC that might arise. So, it’s safe to say, the market of free gaming is certainly an attractive one for any prospective gamer, but the act of finding quality in such a game is akin to finding some shit in a bucket of crap. Hell, to even get some people through the door of a free MMO you need to wave a nice shiny laptop in front of their face.

Its true though, most are shit, but there are some which do deserve some attention, and one of the bigger companies who provide entertainment for us penniless gamers is Korean company Nexon, and it’s two of their games I’ll be cross examining for you now: side-scrolling MMO MapleStory, and the twitch-reaction shooter known as Combat Arms.



We’ll start with MapleStory. Developed by South Korean company Wizet and published good ol’ Nexon, MapleStory is about as simple as one can get with an MMO. You make a character, you give him a weapon, and you kill everything that moves in this 2D-world in a bid to reach the godly heights of level 120. Ok, so maybe there’s a plot attached – you are a new resident of the island of Erev and newest candidate to join the Knights of Cygrus, a crack team of soldiers designed to beat the Dark Wizard. You spend the first 15 or so levels on this island learning the ropes before you’re plugged into the main world, Victoria Island.

Earlier players of MapleStory, like me, might find that above explanation different from the experience they had, and they’d be right – this is the new Knights of Cygnus expansion pack, and it does give the first 15 levels and choice of class some structure, and also guides you a bit on main Victoria Island. Combat is done with hilarious ease – at first you just move, jump with Alt, and attack with Ctrl, later on you’ll receive other special moves relative to your choice of class. This simplistic combat, in addition to the wholly 2D side-scrolling world, makes the game exceptionally simple to pick up, and, even though the first few fights are just a matter of mashing Ctrl until everything dies, the addictive quality of the game already starts to become apparent. As you progress, new attacks and enemies are given to you and the difficulty curve rises rather nicely.



However, after the mid-20s you begin to see something pretty obvious – every quest you receive is either a kill X monsters, or get X items by killing Y monsters. And in between those quests you train up for higher level quests...by killing monsters. Yes, it’s well documented that MapleStory is very much a grind-fest, you’ll spend most of your time killing monsters. But, of course, the reason MMOs like this are so popular is exactly that – the drip feed of experience you will receive for killing the millions of monsters you will. Unlike World of Warcraft, where kills take at least half a minute, MapleStory could have you kill 20 monsters a minute, and you’ll receive XP for every one, not to mention money and loot. The simple act of hitting a monster, landing the killing blow, and picking up loot from the floor all feel very satisfying and it’s a good job too, because you’ll be doing a lot of it.

This feeling is thanks in no small part to the lovely graphics. The whole world is rendered in brilliant cutesy-anime style, character models all look precious with their oversized head-to-body ratio, and the background environments are also just as pretty and very diverse – you could be in a green leaved forest or a red-stone canyon, both as visually appealing as each other.

But this lovely facade is not enough to hide this game biggest flaw – you’ll only be killing monsters. Sure, you can join guilds, families, and even get married, but you won’t do any of that until much later into your game, and if you do play the game past level 60, you’ll find the experience needed to level is horrendously high. Not only that, the penalty for death is 10% experience loss – in later levels, this could be literally millions of experience points lost. The community is also a bit dodgy – there’s quite a lot of kill stealing and shit talk from the other players you’ll see, but a good feature of MapleStory is the ability to change server mid-game, without the need to log out, so if you’re being abused you can easily hop to another channel.



So, if I were to sum it up in a sentence: it’s got the looks and charm of a Japanese Castle Crashers, but the gameplay can get monotonous if you don’t see the appeal of experience gaining. Now, we’ll jump to the other side of the gaming spectrum: Combat Arms.



Combat Arms, is an online shooter, again published by Nexon but this time developed by the funnily named Doobic Studios. In the game, you shoot other people, and the people you have to shoot depend on what flavour mode you’ve chosen. Elimination pits team Alpha and Bravo against each other in a straight-forward Team Deathmatch, One-Man Army is the standard free for all Deathmatch, Search and Destroy is a shameless carbon copy of the Call of Duty gametype of the same name – one team plants the bomb, the other team tries to stop the planting of the bomb, and good ol’ Capture the flag. These are the bog-standard modes that come packed with almost any shooter, but Combat Arms comes with two more interesting modes, Spy Hunt, and Quarantine. Spy Hunt is a weird mix of FFA deathmatch and capture the flag – there are five intelligence cases scattered around the map, and if all of these are collected, your stats are boosted and you gain an big advantage. Quarantine is, of course, Combat Arms’ way of shoehorning zombies into their game to boost popularity. 2 players are chosen each round to be the first zombies, and the remaining humans must survive three minutes. For a free shooter, there are enough modes to keep you interested, and the winning of money and experience will interest you even longer.

Gameplay wise, it’s not unlike MapleStory, that is, it’s as simple as PC shooters can get. Aim with mouse, shoot with click move with WASD, change weapons with numbers. You shoot who you are supposed to shoot and they die within a reasonable amount of bullet hits. What nice about how Combat Arms works is that it treats every kill as a big achievement – your first kill will be displayed on the screen as 1 KILL!!!! in big stylised letters, and it counts up your kills such like for every kill you get. HEADSHOTS, DOUBLE KILLS and the infamous NUT SHOT are also dealt with in this manner, and it really makes you work for your kills.

Experience is tracked with a Call of Duty-esque military ranking system, and you use your money to rent new weapons. Yes, that’s right, you RENT weapons. Newbies get a free weapon pack, and you also get free rentals after achieving certain ranks, but apart from that, you need to earn money for your own rentals. You can rent them for as little as 24 hours or as long as 90 days, and the system does smack a bit of an injustice – the more skilful players will earn more money, and therefore have access to the better weapons, the rich will most certainly get richer here.



Graphics wise, the game looks okay. Not brilliant, not crap, but most certainly accurate. And that’s really as much as I can say about it, you shoot, there’s bullets, then blood, then death. And it all looks pretty meh-ish. But, with free games is usually the graphics that suffer, especially in 3D games. But is it worth getting? Certainly. The most fun is to be had with Quarantine mode – repelling zombies is always fun, and there’s `a real thrill in becoming a zombie, finding where the humans have hidden, and causing one more infection to fuck up everything and cause a mass outbreak is very satisfying, as is being the last man standing and hiding well enough to escape the infection. It’s a shame there is only one map for Quarantine, but you won’t find that problem with the other game types.

The game, in short, is Counter Strike on the cheap...well, on the totally free. Certainly for a free game it’s quite deep and there are plenty of guns to buy and maps to play. Most certainly worth a download.
So there you have it. I would give both games a 7, and, in my opinion, a 7 is as high a free game will ever receive. All free games will be built on a stringent budget, and so games like MapleStory and Combat Arms will probably never reach their true potential. But, to be honest, if you’re looking for free games with no strings, you’re gonna have to deal with a bit of a quality drop.

Or, you could just flash your Xbox and make your own pirate games. Your call.