Tabula Rasa Review

GamingHeaven adds its two cents on Tabula Rasa and is pretty impressed overall.

What about the actual gameplay. After all, spending time in the statistics screen or inventory can’t be considered the main part of an MMO (though it is an integral part by all standards). If you are expecting a WoW-like experience you are going to be slightly surprised when you start fighting. The game is far from being a twitch shooter, but you’ll still be moving around and pressing the trigger instead of just sporadically selecting an ability. Long range weapons (pistols, rifles, shotguns and some more high tech arms) compose the greater part of the list and almost all classes use them almost exclusively to shell out damage. With the exception of spy players, who rely on swords to kill enemies, the rest of the cast tends to stay a dozen or so meters away from their target and exchange shots. That’s the theory at least.

In practice, many of the foes are either too primitive (local wildlife and such) to use weapons, or are strong enough to rely on brute force to put you 6 feet under, so they work hard at getting within spitting distance (which is usually enough to swing at you with their huge arms/tentacles). In these cases you can either frantically try to stay out of reach (which often ends with you backstopping into a new group of foes) or switch to a shotgun (if you have one) and keep firing. The more interesting fights are the ones between long range combatants though. While the slight lag often makes real-time jumping into cover almost impossible, firefights still have some tactics associated with them. Unlike in WoW where a rock between you and your foes never prevented them from striking at you, you can step out of harm’s way here, if only to reload your weapon or use a healing kit.

Like I mentioned before, all recruits (ridiculous, I know) get the ability to use Logos. As such swords and weapons only make out half of the combat tricks in your sleeve. If you have already acquired the necessary Logos (I’ll explain in a bit) you can use combat abilities, which range from offensive stuff, to healing and buffing (spells) that are needed in groups. The lower tier classes only get a single Logos ability, but higher up a class gets up to 4 abilities, resulting in a respectable amount of mystical powers a level 50 player has at his disposal.