Welcome to World Zero - Reviews for the hardcore gamer

Every so often, a game comes along that defies all logic; a game that ignores the concepts of accessibility and intuitiveness and tosses the term “user-friendly” right out the window. Risk Your Life: Path of the Emperor is that game. On the surface, RYL is a recipe for complete and total disaster. It’s difficult, it’s virtually inaccessible to the casual player, and it does everything in its power to avoid catering to an audience.

RYL is a throwback to dungeon crawlers of old, only wrapped up in a nice little modern MMO package. Within the genre, RYL is, quite frankly, the bizarro World of Warcraft. The best and easiest way to describe this game is to take everything about WoW and imagine the opposite. It’s ugly, it’s anything but streamlined, and it’s extraordinarily straightforward. Be warned, if this is your first foray into the MMORPG genre, this game might very well eat you alive. Make no mistake, RYL is clearly for the veteran role player. This is really about as niche as it gets, folks.

While recent MMORPGs like Guild Wars and the aforementioned World of Warcraft have unquestionably brought new levels of polish and refinement to the genre, RYL does away with such arguable futility and offers an experience derived solely from gameplay. With lackluster visuals (and that’s putting it nicely) and a difficult interface, RYL will turn more people away than on.

As opposed to giving you the now-standard “click and sit back” approach to MMORPG combat, RYL actually gives you complete and total control. Players have been longing for an MMO Diablo for ages now, and RYL tries it damnedest to be just that. Whether or not this premise actually holds up is debatable, but RYL plays eerily similar to Diablo II in 3D. And not unlike Diablo, RYL is a very equipment savvy game. Like it or not, equipment is more imperative than your character build. Luckily, RYL implements an outstanding and equally rewarding equipment upgrading system that takes ridiculous amounts of time, effort, and money to be successful at. The downside, however, is that this is pretty much all there is to RYL. There are no sub-classes, jobs, mounts, dungeons, exploration, crafting or even emotes in RYL. This game is about one thing and one thing only--combat. While there are a decent amount of in-game quests to be found in RYL, they merely serve as an alternative method of gaining experience or, to put it bluntly, a break from the game’s never-ending grind.

You begin the game in a central town full of merchants, NPCs, and a few basic tutorial quests, and then proceed to grind similarly leveled monsters in an ever expanding radius. Once you hit the edge of this “grind radius” (which is, coincidentally, the edge of the comparatively small map), you then proceed to the game’s second, PvP permissible map and begin again. Grinding, unfortunately, plays a big part in RYL. In fact, this is easily one of the most grind-intensive MMORPGs on the market. However, the monotony is not without rewards; RYL sports some very cool gear. From stylish armor to savage weaponry, RYL’s equipment was seemingly implemented with the mentality of what the game’s own designers would have liked to be rewarded with themselves upon reaching those higher levels. Another (and more imperative) reward for spending all that time grinding is that RYL offers some impressive, large scale player versus player combat. While not exclusively end game content per se, leveling plays a big part in player combat, and you’re just going to get destroyed if you move to the open PvP map too early. Fortunately, the game’s first map offers you optional dueling which doesn’t affect your PvP rank.

Sonically, RYL is possibly the most perplexing video game in existence. On one hand, the game is filled to the brim with some especially repetitive and downright grating sound effects. Yet on the other, it’s backed by one of the most enjoyable soundtracks I’ve ever experienced. A perfect combination of the typical soaring orchestral score and some otherworldly yet ridiculously catchy modernization, this soundtrack ranks up there with some of the greats.

With no real voice acting whatsoever, RYL gives you a lot to read. Luckily, the text here is written absolutely fantastically. The storyline is actually intriguing, and laced with copious amounts of RYL’s own fictitious history. The dialog itself is so well written that a voice actor simply would not have been able to do it justice. This gives the game a great ambiance even if it’s in an outdated--no--old school manner.

RYL doesn’t try to be the immersive, atmospheric, multifaceted experience offered by its competitors. RYL’s content is lacking in comparison, but what little it does offer is very well structured and is arguably better executed. RYL is one tenth the game the average MMORPG is, but what it does, it does better.

Rating	The rating scale in detail
6.5	- Both the environment and character models sport some ridiculously low poly-counts. + Some of the textures are actually pretty decent, and spell effects look fantastic.
8.5	++ Flawless soundtrack that fits perfectly with the game’s style. - Mediocre sound effects fall victim to the soundtrack’s creativity.
7.0	++ An MMO you actually play? Get out of here. -- The epitome of grind-based monotony.
7.5	-- Crap presentation, atmosphere, and user interface... ++ ...But, damn do those character models look cool.
7.0	+/- Entirely subjective. Like to grind? You'll be here for months. Easily distracted? You probably won’t make it to level ten.
7.0	+ An ugly, buggy, mess of a game that somehow manages to be hopelessly addictive and completely enjoyable.