Alganon

Alganon Classes

Champion- Your standard archetypal front-line tank. Go first into battle soaking up damage and dealing a solid level of damage while staying alive. Well-rounded for every type of player, new and veteran alike.

Ranger- Solo players rejoice! Rangers are ideal for every situation because they can deal damage and provide support.

Magus- Cast spells and devastate foes from afar with a variety of spells and weaponry, primary damage dealer.

Mystic- The dedicated healer of the group, primarily focuses on keeping the team alive. Can double as a damage dealer if needed.

Alganon Review

By, Charlie Perez

Find yourself lost in the gorgeous locales while fighting hordes of enemies, progressively becoming better at whatever you’re doing while you’re doing it in Alganon. An assortment of choices at the character creation screen will ensure your uniqueness while further differentiating you through a plethora of skills and weapons. Take on the world, but first conquer the game client.

Create Me Like One of Your French Girls

Start your grand adventure by choosing from two sides of an ongoing war; basically, a Horde/Alliance situation from World of Warcraft. Cliché dictates it’s the forces of lights vs. the forces of evil, not super exciting stuff. An interesting difference between the two is the particle effects around the eyes changing based on how powerful you are. Soon after you also pick a family, which is largely inconsequential, and a class.

The classes are as follows: Soldier, the warrior; Magus, the mage; Mystic, the healer; and Ranger, the hybrid. The classes are all fairly archetypical despite strange names like Cabalist. Lastly, customizing your character, like all the options before it, is unfortunately sparse. Take a gander at a few, head, face, and paint choices.

Character creation is dull and lacking in sufficient choice or presentation. The player should be excited, and maybe even a little nervous, about going through the process of making some of the biggest decisions in the game. Instead, you’re left with static backgrounds and boring choices on a no doubt barely functioning client, which can’t be fixed until in game.

Fight for the Right to Play

Players first coming to Alganon should be warned about having to fight the game client just to play. Move it slightly or click on another window and it’ll break; this combined with not being able to see text on the screen makes for a frustrating experience. When you finally get in game, probably with a randomized everything character just to get to the options menu, actually fixing the setting to your liking is a pain. Simply going full screen messed everything up for about five minutes, then waiting for those graphics setting to take effect took another ten minutes. This is unacceptable. Most players won’t have the patience to deal with a broken game client and will move onto the next free to play MMO.

Also to take in consideration is the business model. If you don't pay you must contend with a few limitations like only 20 ability points, 4 character slots, a max of 10 quests, you cannot create a guild, a level cap of 30, and a gold cap of 50g. Even worse are the limitations not being lifted upon the purchasing expansion pack.

Further barring people from playing is the incredibly frustrating seemingly random disconnects. And not just a disconnect at that, it seems as though the entire server goes down as you won’t be able to reconnect immediately. It’s painful to have to fight anything besides monsters to progress through the game—simply unacceptable.

Seek and Ye Shall Find

But! Despite all that noise playing the actual game isn’t so bad. Its controls fairly well, and looks pretty great. Well, not the character models, they look awful. But, the environments, however, look spectacular. The sheer size of this world is amazing, a huge castle-inspired kingdom city, a lush forest, and a dry wasteland greet the player initially with tons more to see.

In conjunction with the size and scope is fantastic architecture, or rather how everything is modeled. The hole-in-the-wall village, for example, is littered with make shift huts and houses covered with stitched together fabrics. Then head on over, from the same map, to a desert across from a grassland changing seamlessly.

Majestic

Starting from different characters will also give access to different starting zones. The evil faction will start in a strange green city; it looks as though carved out from a mountain or something. While, the holy faction takes to a little more fresh air and order, taking up residence in castles and other fine stone-built homes with giant statues of legends carefully placed across the city.

Soon after venturing out from the holy faction you see a forest that could only be described as lush. Tons of trees providing shade, huge rock formations, and a ground covered endlessly with sprouting grass sprouting. Color choice plays a big role in how good these locations look. The forest is a vibrant green while the desert is a coarse yellow. One thing in particular is how color changes over the course of the landscape, for example, the desert transitions into a grassland largely by virtue of a hue change. It's small but makes you feel as if you are truly traveling across a world.

Combat Blandness

Whew, that was a lot of praise for the environments but the question remains, how is actually playing in this world? Well, not great, not bad, but not great. Despite what class you pick you must suffer through stand, auto-attack, press the 1 key, repeat. In both the early and late game monsters have way too much health on top of combat being way too slow, leading to fighting being something you don’t want to do.

Which kind of sucks because behind the combat is a pretty cool stat system. Similar to a game like Skyrim you level up stats based on how often you use them. Go through the entire game with just a sword and you’ll be pretty good at swingin’ it. Weapon are fairly typical with swords, axes, and etc, and so are skills that increase damage by a little bit.

Quests! Calm down there, it’s not that exciting. It’s nothing really—really. Talking to most people, or monsters, is painfully bland: go here because I said so and kill something or talk to someone. None of the quests are interesting and none of the dialogue is worth reading. Speaking of quests, simply finding a quest is difficult. Not because I can’t find quest givers, that’s shown conveniently on the map. No, it’s because most quest givers are level locked, even in low level areas. Why have a level fifty quest near level 3 enemies? It’s silly.

Final Verdict: Fair

Alganon has initial painful issues, like the client and an unexciting character creation, but opens to some of the best environments in any game. Delightfully vibrant and creative locations inspire exploration like so few games can . However, it’s hard to ignore awful tacked on combat and questing as you have to do them. Alganon is another World of Warcraft clone hindered by bland combat and uninspired questing, but it's rich environments are worth checking out if you can tolerate the game's engine.

Alganon Screenshots

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Alganon Videos

Alganon Links

Alganon Official Site
Alganon Steam Page
Alganon Wiki [Database/Guides]
Alganon Facebook

Alganon System Requirements

Minimum Requirements:

Operating System: Windows XP
CPU: Dual Core @ 2.4GHz
Video Card: nVidia 6XXX or ATI X800
RAM: 4 GB
Hard Disk Space: 4 GB

Recommended Requirements:

Operating System: Windows 7
CPU: Quad Core @ 3GHz
Video Card: nVidia 9 series or higher, ATI 3000HD series or higher
RAM: 8 GB
Hard Disk Space: 5 GB

Alganon Music & Soundtrack

Coming Soon...

Alganon Additional Information

Developer: Quest Online
Publisher(s): 3000AD, Quest Online

President and Head Developer: Derek Smart

Release Date: December 01, 2009
Alganon 2.0 Release Date: April 2010
Steam Release Date: May 19, 2015

Shut Down: November 13, 2017

Development History / Background:

Alganon is developed by Quest Online, which is headed by Derek Smart, a self-described "eccentric and vocal personality." By February 2010 Derek Smart would become the president of the company to finish the game by April of the same year. Derek has to lept many of his game's defense, such as the Line of Defense, Universal Combat, and Battlecruiser series. Alganon was released in Dec 2009 with "disastrous results." Quest Online has released an expansion pack, Rise of the Ourobani, and a comic book further expanding the Alganon universe. Alganon shut down on November 13, 2017.