Mao Closed Beta Review        

        written by: VampireKitty

Introduction

I would like to welcome you to the amazing realm of Myth Angels online, a realm full of magic, monsters, and multiple ways to defeat evil. MAO is a realm full of demons, monsters, robots, and some cute fuzzy creatures too. This game is based on ancient Greek mythology in the land of Gaia. Thousands of years had passed in this realm where Zeus and the 12 gods lived in harmony with the humans. Pandora however eventually got curious about a box that Zeus had once given her and she decided to open it which then threw the entire realm into utter chaos. The once peaceful realm of Gaia is now chaos ridden and being taken over by fear. You have been picked by Athena to find out what has happened and to bring the chaotic realm back into its peaceful and tranquil times of the past. Now choose you class…. Pick up your weapons… and defeat all of the odds and protect the realm that you know and the people that are in it. WELCOME TO MYTH ANGELS ONLINE where our story is about to begin.

Character Creation and Gameplay

First off you must pick a server and a channel

after that it brings you up to the option to make a character. You can pick the gender of the character, the height, color of the skin, hair color and hair style of the character. There are over a hundred ways that you can make you character look.

Before making your character you must decide which class to be. There are 4 classes to choose from… Warrior, Master, Pastor, and Hunter.

After picking your class and making the character you will be transported to Celestial Gate into a ring of 3 NPC’s (Non Playing Characters) and it doesn’t matter which one you talk too because they are all the same. He will go through the basics of how to equip things and how to use the basic actions.

Just follow where he says to go and you wont get lost.  After the first 3 sections of NPC’s you will be transported again and you need to talk to the Guiding Angel and then he will tell you to go find someone else.

The easiest way to find the person that he is talking about in any situation is to press alt+Q and on the screen that pops up it says who and where and has a button that says GO. Press the button and it will automatically run there for you. So the questing system in this game is very easy.

After you keep doing those quests for a little while you will learn pretty much how to use skills and the basics of the game. It is self explanatory so I won’t go through every quest that would just take to long.

Now the long awaited fighting part ^_^ MAO is based on instances these can be strange to get used to at first especially if you are like me and came from the old AO. There is a single entrance to all of the instances in each city and so far it has always been in the bottom right in each city. When you get there you pick where you want to go… the cool thing is that if you have already beaten the instance and it was way too easy… then there are 3 levels of difficulty. General, Advanced, and Superior each with obviously increasing difficulty.  The fighting system is very basic… you have skills assigned to the f1-f12 hot keys and when you pres the respective key it shoots the skill. I will go through the basic skills and gameplay of each build so that you can see the differences.

Warriors are focused on hitting hard and having very high defense.Warriors can either choose to use a shield or too hold another weapon in their hand for even more attack or defense. Warriors can use anything from a Knife to a Sword to a Pike and an Axe and they are very efficient at killing things swiftly.A warrior is close ranged and hits hard with his skills which usually hit almost if not all of the enemies attacking him. When using a shield he will have extra defense and an extra attack called shield attack. Warriors are the best “Tanks” as always. They are a must have in a boss instance unless the other players are high level and have s class gear or something.

The hunter’s fighting interface is very similar to the warriors with 2 major differences.  Hunters are able to use bows, catapults, spears, and Talons which are little knives that hook to each of the wrists. Hunters are based solely on attack speed, dodging and movement speed they can become very efficient with either long ranged attacks with their bows, short swift blows with a talon or strong attacks with a pike. They can use traps to stop, silence, and hinder their enemies.

Then we have the masters which can control all of the earths elements from water and fire to lightning and death. Masters are Masters (no pun intended) of the offensive magic. The master is focused on spiritual training where as the hunters and warriors are focused on physical training.They are the “glass cannons” of the game… meaning they hit insanely hard but also GET hit insanely hard as well. They have pretty bad defense but they can usually kill without getting touched in the instances so it doesn’t really matter unless you are in a battle with another player. Higher level masters will obtain the skill Power shield which forms a protective bubble around them to help them survive a little better. Masters usually use staves however they can also use knives.

  Last but certainly not least we have the pastors which are essential in every MMORPG what ever would we do without our healers and buffers? Although the pastors do not focus on fighting techniques this doesn’t mean that they cannot fight… in fact they can become very very strong. Pastors are very versatile in this game… they can fight with a staff or they can fight with a Talon and a magic shield on the other hand.  The pastor can buff and heal and has damage reducing spells so that a lot of attacks will not even hit them.  Anyone who has played MMO’s before knows that there is always at least one pastor that is very annoying to kill because although they cannot kill u… u can’t kill them. I am always that pastor hahaha but all in all the pastors in MAO are very good characters to make. Since pastors can heal themselves they don’t use many if any hp pots In the beginning their attack spells only cost 1mp so you don’t use many mp pots either. When the pastor gets a higher level they also get an AOE that is very strong to keep the monsters off of him.

Grinding and Leveling Skills

Leveling is fairly easy if you do all of the quests. They give you both normal experience and also job experience. Every time that you level up you will get one skill point that you can use to level up your passive skills as well. The way you level up your skills is way better than the original Angels Online because there is no pot spamming and setting to skill 24/7.  The job experience is how you level up the offensive and buff skills and you can obtain this by killing monsters. That is all that there is to leveling and grinding your skills.

World Content 

When you first enter MAO and have never played the original Angels Online you probably get the feeling of WTF what the heck do I do in this little pixilated world. DO NOT FEAR…. All of the NPC are extremely helpful lol. However if you have Played a previous AO then you will think.. Wow this is smaller. Yes the maps are much smaller and you can go everywhere from the main towns. You no longer have to run 10 minutes to get to the area that you need to do your quest in. There is a lot of confusion at first while trying to get used to the new system but you will catch on quickly. The entire world is fairly similar so here is how it works. When you get to a main city there is a teleportation portal near the bottom that will take you to all of the instances in that city.

Then when you are done with everything in that city you will walk through a little map to the next one and repeat.  The entire storyline is based in these instances, the quests, the boss hunting, all are completed in these except of course the npc quests that just consist of running either between the towns or within the same city. There is a repair angel, potion seller, and usually a few different level weapon and armor sellers in each city.

Now I will actually explain the instances…. Most of these you can do alone however usually the last instance of each main city you will need a team of 2 or more because they have stronger monsters and A LOT more of them. Almost all of the instances work the way that I am going to show you. Usually you must kill ALL of the monsters in your section before another gate will open and a big flashing GO! Appears on the screen in front of you. When you get to the end the boss will appear and after you kill him you have a choice to move on to the next map or to go back to the city. Some instances need you too complete a puzzle before the gate to the next area opens.. for example Pandora’s Altar requires you to touch each totem pole before you can move on to the next area of monsters instead of making you kill each and every one of the monsters. When you get bored of killing monsters you can always go to the main city and try to duel some of the people there. Many people are always willing and ready to duel whoever asks them too.

Guild System

The league system  is much more advanced in this AO than the last AO. As the league levels up it gains skills and buffs that it can pass on to its members. There can also only be one vice instead of 500 of them which is better because now there will not be a power struggle in the league. The league can be ranked up same as the old game. You collect items to donate and then walah it grows.

Robot System 

There is a new robot system where the robots can actually fight and while your character is inside of a robot you can still use your spells and skills. This makes a very useful tool when you are in an instance. The robots are unable to be bought but there is almost always at least one in every instance that you can jump into and kill the monsters with. The only disappointment is that you cannot use a robot to become overweight with pots in this game. Then again since you don’t need to pot spam too skill it isn’t too much of an issue for me.

 Pet System

Personally this is the best part of the game for me because I absolutely love to level and watch my pets grow and change. In the original AO each player was only allowed to have 1 pet on the field at a time and now there is a limit of 10. This takes the limits of what you can do alone instance wise to a whole new level because now instead of only having 1 pet to help you, you can have a bunch. The only bad thing is that you cannot buy the pets from an NPC.. you can only get them from dropping them from the bosses which takes ALOOOOT of time.

Graphics and Sounds

The graphics obviously aren’t as good as a 3D game but what can you expect it is only 2D after all. It looks like a childish game kind of but do not be fooled by the cute little pixilated people riding on donkey’s and hamsters lol. This game is more mature than some…. And the animations of the spells and everything are kind of cool. The movement is fluid and there are no weird looking movements like in some of the ones where it looks like the characters walk like they have something stuck somewhere.

The music is very good but like all MMO’s it gets to be repetitive and annoying after a while so I normally play with the sound off personally. The sounds that the characters make are rather adorable ^^

Conclusion

All in all I think that it is a fairly well rounded game but if you are a person who doesn’t like semi-repetitive things to do and always needs something different every second that you play… this isn’t a game for you. But if you want a game that really is fast to learn and doesn’t take much thinking then this is a perfect game for you. Try it out see if you like it and If you are anything like me you will become obsessed with it ^_^