NCSoft (Guild Wars, L2, CoH) released a new game some time around last week called
Dungeon Runners. It's completely free to play, and actually doesn't suck. Remarkable! DR takes all of the "stupid" out of the MMO and gets you right to where you want to be: the dungeon.
Good:
You can pick it up and put it down.
Completely free and still enjoyable
Reasonably polished, even though it just came out
Great sense of humor in-game. It's not meant to be taken seriously.
Mostly balanced
Extremely flexible character development
Very little lag. Lots of open servers.
No fatal flaws.
Bad:
Well... this is more of what everyone's complaining about. Nothing is particular bad that I could find. Most of these things are slated to be implemented in the next few weeks/months
No PvP (as of now, slated for release)
No trade (no real need; gold is a joke. You find tons of loot.)
No guilds (as of now, slated for release -I think-)
Camera controls feel a little sluggish and awkward at times
Creating a character is insanely straight forward. Choose how he or she looks, choose fighter, mage, or ranger, and off you go. One of my favorite things about the game so far is that
any starting class can use any weapon (there are only level restrictions) and learn any of the other class' skills. There's also a Respec button for your stats that costs only gold - it's not restricted to paying members, nor does it require some fourty hour quest that makes you relive Dante's Inferno. You can respec as many times as you like, meaning if you're sick of playing as a mage, you can just respec, get some new gear, and keep playing as a fighter, and ten levels later start using bows as a ranger, then respec again back to mage.
Skills are implemented in a fairly ingenious manner also. You have active and passive skills, as in most games,
but your passive skills only activate if you have them on your quick bar. Since you can buy any skills (including the passives) for other classes, this allows you to switch up at any time in the game. You can drag-n-drop your skills to either the left or right mouse button, and as always assign the rest to numbers on the quick bar.
You start in a tiny newbie area with essentially three things: the obelisk (your basic portal archetype), a merchant npc, and a quest npc. That's it. Oh, and the actual portal to the first dungeon (Dew Forest). All of the dungeons are instanced, like Guild Wars, meaning you'll be adventuring alone through the dungeons unless you find a group. There is a world chat though, so it never gets too lonely. The dungeons are also randomly created every time you enter them after leaving the game (the instances will maintain their state until you log out), and calibrated to your level, so they (slowly) rise in difficulty as you level. You can manually reset all your instances at once, generating all new maps, meaning you're never truly exploring the same dungeon twice. I have some mixed feelings about that. The same monsters will stay in the specific level of whatever dungeon you're in, but the layout of the map will change.
Once you get past the newb area and kill the first boss, you'll be in the main town. There's plenty of quests, all of which reward either king's coins or gold. You do not get experience or items as a rewards, as far as I've seen (level 10 ranger, level 11 mage). King's coins can be traded for rares, which are available only to members.
Then we have membership. It's only $5/month, which is a measly fee. Membership allows you to stack and use major potions, have a storage account, use rare items, and grants you priority over free members for connecting to the servers. Item qualities are distinguished by color. Yellow, purple, and rainbow items are considered rare and member-only (which is a real shame). The other three are grey, green, and blue respectively. It's more than possible to hit level 100 (the cap) without a membership.
The best attriubte of the entire experience is the sense of humor that they approached the game with. They came out with absurd item names, quests that are just there for the hell of it, and the personalities of the NPCs are fairly well done.
The community is also fairly nice and generous right now. As always, there's a few idiot spammers on the main chat channel, but /ignore is a wonderful invention. You can also turn off the world chat if you like feeling lonely (damn emo kids).
For my list of "bad" things, check the beginning again. Most of the issues that people have right now have yet to be released.
You can find me in game playing as "MagicalAntelope".
