Musebreakz

Despite what a lot of people say in here, the game's in a pretty solid state for launch, as it is exactly what it aims to be: a solid tactical shooter with abilities to enlarge lethal gunplay. The character design is pretty good, the abilities feel mostly balanced (and when they don't, then developer quickly comes in and tries to balance them), and the gunplay is very, very solid. Kids these days won't understand that this game is all about coordination and communication with their peers, it's not a Battle Royale in which you mostly rely on your solo player instincts and good RNG drops. This game requires a lot more than that. I'd like to see a little more depth in future maps (like CS:GO's), and some more accurate recoil. But apart from that, this game's going to be a hit.

Quick summary: Bless is one of the most disappointing MMOs (and games) I have ever played. My background: Plenty of MMORPGs (Lineage 2, AION, Tera, Guild Wars 2, SWTOR, World of Warcraft [a bit], Archeage, Black Desert Online), plenty of story-based RPGs like SWKOTOR, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and then some of the most known Blockbusters like League of Legends, Fortnite, CS and PUBG. THE REVIEW LAUNCH DAY The game launched with numerous LAUNCH DAY ISSUES, and despite having had 2 downtimes in less than 24 hours, apart from adding some more servers, any other change wasn't noticeable. A good portion of the player-base was stuck in the "splash screen" without even reaching the server selection part, and there was no fix whatsoever from the developers in those following 24 hours (no reply from them on the official boards either). Once you were lucky enough to go through (after restarting the client for the 23rd time), if you didn't log in right at launch, you'd have a queue to join in the server where your friends were, which in my case lasted 48 minutes. NON-LAUNCH DAY ISSUES After getting through all that mess, players got to the CHARACTER CREATOR, which was fine and provided plenty of options for the players to customize their characters, and in this regard I believe that Bless Online rakes up some good points, after only falling short to BDO's character creation options. From then on, you're put into the game world with your new character, and you finally get to see a glimpse of what the game world looks and feels like. My game crashed at this point, but let's leave the app instability on the side now. The TUTORIAL which teases you the basics of the game is written in very POOR ENGLISH, with straight out mistranslations which make it hard for you to understand and complete the steps of the game tutorial (this after 2 minutes of being IN the game with your new character). It seems even the most veteran MMO players were stuck in this step for a while, given the broken English in the tutorial. Reaching the first non-instanced areas, you understand that the game engine is POORLY OPTIMIZED, as I had to lower the graphics settings to the absolute minimum (on a computer that plays PUBG on low-medium settings with 45-60 constant fps) and even then I'd be stuck with plenty of FPS' drops more frequently than not, never averaging more than 45 FPS. Upon reaching the first crowded areas, that's when the real nightmares started, as the FPS drops increased, and the average FPS dropped to 25. One has to wonder what it will feel like doing the Mass PvP in endgame, which seems to be what one of the features players will spend a lot of time on. The COMBAT MECHANICS good, however, the combo-trigger delay that you get after starting the first skill can be really frustrating, as it breaks down the speed of what could be a much quicker combat. I know this is something more of a personal preference, as tab targeting is something I have no qualms with, so I did enjoy the combat aspect of the game. The VOICE ACTING isn't too bad (even though it feels catered to a younger audience than the general young adult/early college student), but some voices sound metallic, like if they had been recorded through Teamspeak by a mid-range headset microphone. The storyline, however, feels uninspired and doesn't really bring the player into the immersion required to feel any sort of interest in the NPC dialogues as they happen. When it comes to UI (USER INTERFACE), it is one of the most terrible I've ever seen in gaming, absolutely bland and with no options to customize it or move windows around. Even something as basic as the game's chat is not simple to work with. FINAL CONCLUSION Bless Online is in a dismal state for a game which had its first launch over 2 years ago in the Asian market and has now been released in the West. Most of the issues that were supposed to have been fixed after 3 releases (Korea, Japan and Russia) are still present in the game (engine's optimization, user interface, client issues) which does not favor NEOWIZ, the developer of the game. Their decision to add 5 more servers in North America and 3 more in Europe only hours after the game's launch is questionable, to say the least, and shows that NEOWIZ did not do its homework regarding player management and launch day expectations. And as the game plays right now, I can't, in any way, recommend it or even say it's close to be worth its $30 price tag. Even if it were F2P, I couldn't recommend it given its current issues. If, however, NEOWIZ does fix the crucial flaws of the game that I pointed out (which seems very unlikely at this point, given their previous 3 unsucessful releases), I will be eager to be trying out the game once again. But right now, it is a NO GO.