PC Critic Reviews

It ends up being a fun MMO romp for casual players and a rich PvP hamster wheel if you're sitting out there with an axe to grind. [Christmas 2006, p.84]

Given a year or so, Archlord might be a solid title. Right now though? It's not worth the money.

Archlord is a case of seen it before, seen it better, and the stuff we haven’t seen is going to end up more frustrating and hassle than it is worth.

The game has some rubberbanding (where you bounce back a dozen yards or so while running) but that does not occur all that often.

Whether you'll ever get to see much of it is highly questionable, though, given that the time between starting and becoming completely despondent with ArchLord is likely to be minimal.

Another fine idea choked by the grind. [Christmas 2006, p.72]

Regardless of it being very hard to picture how its tedious, clumsy mechanics could possibly evolve into something fluid and entertaining, any game that puts you through a good 15 or 20 hours of overwhelming despair to get to even a chance of something worthwhile - which the server-wide near-silence suggests actually isn't, and certainly won't be until if and when there are enough players to populate large-scale tussles - is a failure.

Other than the exclusive ArchLord gimmick, we're left with a dated-looking game with limited classes and a lot of grind, and a miniscule chance of something cool at the end if you really throw yourself into it. Not exactly our cup of mead.

The art design is solid, though technologically, the graphics don't impress at all. At press-time, the chat is nightmarish, and the user interface a pale shadow of other MMOs' well thought systems.

I personally wouldn't recommend ArchLord to anyone; there are much better games out there and much better ways to waste a few hundred hours or so.