You're probably wondering why I would write anything about a game that's in beta, so I'll preempt all of those comments by first stating that the cash shop is out now and you keep your characters.

Ok with that said the game is a GREAT game, I definitely recommend playing it (It's Free to play!). Then afterwards you should post your complaints on the Nexon forums once you get to the terrible parts, which I'll talk about later. About the greatness... It's a 2d fighter like Final Fight or Guilty Gear Isuka's GG boost mode. There are classes and 2nd job classes and an advance class and each class plays differently and uses different weapons and skills. It's just like a beat em up except you can play with 4 other people in PvE and up to 8 other people in PvP. You can do your moves like in fighting games by entering your directional inputs and then your special key like for Hadoken or whatever the move requires or you can just use a shortcut button. Oh yes, you can play with a joypad or any other controller as long as you reset the hotkeys to your joypad. I personally use a PS2 pad and it is as responsive as a console game. To enter PvE you need to walk to a certain part of town to leave and and then go to a stage select screen and fly there by airplane to your opponent (Just kidding about that last part). You'll then be in a room roaming dungeon in which you'll have to complete by killing the boss or leave and wait out a frustration penalty which is a gradual restoration of your health and mp bar which you can of course pay off. Oh yeah there are kill quests or gather monster drop quests or just complete a dungeon quests too which sometimes give permanent stat boosting items, which I thought was cool.

Oh yes for fighter fans there is no defense in this game, only invinci frames that come from successful grabs and super armor frames in which you take damage but are'nt knocked down unless both people use a super armor skill then whoever performed it last wins.

The towns are bursting with people.. the gameplay is fun so what's the problem? Nexon of America or whatever they're called decided to mess up the exp tables and leave a lot of features out. Ok I know this is a beta, but exp tables? With the cash shop now out?! They're using an old grindier exp table that the Korean version USED to use. Did you hear that? We're grinding harder than the Koreans. This has seriously messed with the design of the game as your quest rewards such as healing items and equipment are not useable for 4 or 5 more levels and the quests do not flow. Starting around level 16~ depending on how good you are at completing your quests there will be levels in which you'll be on a quest completing roll... and then you'll complete all of them and then need to grind to the next level which will offer you some more quest (Sometimes not as you get even higher). Also, the difficulty scale and the monsters you will be fighting will be easier to miss because you will be doing quests not for your level. There are different difficulty levels of a dungeon and some quests require you to fight on the hardest mode (Which has increased miss chance) and if you're underleveled expect to miss more and get killed more.

Of course, some people will say it is because there's a lower level cap and all this is justified. But if you look at the forums you'll see a majority of posts complaining about the grind now that most of the population has reached the grind levels. Of course you can't grind the day away in this game because of a ridiculous system called "Fatigue". It limits you to completing 156 rooms a day. That's right once it gets to 0 and you finish a dungeon you cannot PvE and level anymore. Of course if you are already in a dungeon and hit 0 you'll be able to enter more rooms and complete it, but no more dungeon fighting for you until 6 am Pacific! Why is this bad? Well, you'll be stuck with either hanging out and chatting, leveling another character (In this grind!?), or PvPing. You can hope you'll find a PvP room that doesn't have people that way out level you. Well actually if you're good you can actually kill higher levels because your HP scales up... But they'll have more moves which activate faster and such.

Another problem with this game... Gunners. Gun users in a fighting game!? It's like V-13 in BlazBlue! Almost exactly, well actually gunners are actually good at pushing you back once you get close and dealing really good damage with that push back. No I am not complaining about ranged fighters in fighting games. Mages are stupid easy and are not Overpowered tier like Gunners. Expect most players to be gunners and to see most of the high pvp ranked player with a gun in their hand. Oh yeah and the designers of the game seemed to think that gun users in real life reload their guns every other second resulting in a *Click click click click* everywhere you see gunners.

More problems with this game? Yes, once you enter a dungeon it is no longer hosted by a server but by a peer to peer connection. So unless you have a decent connection and other people in your party as well expect Nothing to get done. I mean nothing, you won't be able to leave the room until all the monsters are killed and monsters cannot be killed unless they are not lagging. Same with players in PvP. Someone with lag powers will just avoid all your hits and slidee around the screen looking ridiculous. Peer to peer probably worked well in Korea with everyone being so close and their advanced internets (For grinding in the same dungeon all day), but not here.

Yeah the bots have come to town here too. Expect them to spam the whole chat log with their gold advertisements along with the little kids who think spamming the same message over and over will get something done (Sometimes with just 10 people on the screen!) Of course to find a party there is the simple button press of ] (Bracket I think it's called) and you can look through the pages of parties on your current screen.

Bots are in this game too, you can see 4 clones of the same character with almost the same name walking in sync. The game's solution? Captcha! When you're fighting in a dungeon there's a captcha! When you're sitting in a Chevy and you're feeling something heavy... There's a captcha! Seriously though, it seems to appear more when you are playing alone and have not logged off for a while. They stop you from doing anything in a dungeon and you'll have to type it in or get kicked out if you fail to input the words correctly. You'd think there would be one for spammers in town, but no dice.

Cash shop in this game... As a player who has mostly played pay to plays or buy to plays these are the most disgusting things you could think of to me. This game has kicked it up a notch. It's like they consulted Emeril. Character customization in this game? None unless you buy a gachapon token and play your luck with a 1/3 or 1/4 chance at getting what you want. For one avatar body part slot! For 10 gachapon machine tokens or whatever it's called it'll cost you $20. Or you can buy coins in smaller amounts but that's the cheapest coin per dollar you'll get if you buy the most. That's not all, for those oh so useful SP resets should you mess up on assigning skill points to your character (You get a free reset at level 18 when you choose your next job)... That'll be $25 for one consumable. Ok... I have to pay $15 for a subscription and $50~60 for a game which has everything in it or pay for all this stuff while supporting the server for all of these annoying players... Although NCSoft's starting to show it's Korean side with it's pay to re-character create and Arenanet's following suite!

So with all that said, it's definitely a game worth playing but there's a lot of things left out of this version as well as the female gunner class, guilds, War PvP and auction house. I would definitely say it was super good fun until I got to the grind in which you just keep playing the same dungeon. So I'm putting this game down for a while, was fun by then the grind hits you and I came from Lineage II.

Oh yes here's an interesting Dungeon fighter video from that guy who made over 9000: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JRPm-KJnU0 Yeah sorry I could'nt get the embed to work.