Noticing the recent feature of Taikodom by Hoplon, I decided to give it a spin.

Taikodom is being published by Hoplon Infotainment, and is in it's early stages of development. Based on the MMOsite article that it is developed or co-developed by Netdevil, but I do not see any mention of such in the main site.

Anyways, moving on.

Taikodom is touted to be a new breed of MMO, with both metaverse social elements and a more grounded MMO simulator game alike Jumpgate: Evolution, which is what Netdevil is working on now.

Let's get on that for a mement shall we?

New Genre?

Arn't most, if not all MMOs like that? Sounds like a "Gee wiz Captain Obvious..."  bullet point on the back of the box to me. But I digress, it's first feature isn't fully implemented yet, as currently, in a Spaceport, a player is in his ship like EVE Online.

Speaking of EVE Online...

The game feels very much like EVE Online, especially while you are docked. All the options available to you feels like EVE Online, ironically, even the current communication features. However, once you get out, that's when things change.

Out in open space

If you had a huge deja vu moment when you are docked, that feeling will wash away a little once you get into space. Flying your ship feels like the newer generation space sims with mouse support. As mentioned somewhere, it feels like X2, Star War Galaxies and Freelancer. The controls are intuitive, and you don't have to worry about a 15 button combo just to pull off a barrel roll.

The Interface is very well done, and I like their "V" push-and-hold button feature, which brings up a menu of currently in range objects for you to target.

Combat!

Combat has so much potential in this game, with, imagine if you will, hundreds of ships engaged in dogfights. However, currently, due to a number of factors like Latency, I am unable to comment much on this. I will eleborate more on this when I have the time to try it out at my work place, which has a much better connection.

Latency

Probably due to my own home connection, which by the way, is stuttering really bad, and I believe my ISP secretly hates me for paying my bills on time or something, anyways, it's bad. And the game currently isn't suited to handling ping spikes (or high packet loss).

Added after trying it at my office: Nope, it's still real laggy. This is quite the bummer!

Summery

As much as this game seems to have taken more from some games then necessary, I don't see that as a bad thing. After all, why reinvent the wheel when there's one out there that uses metal and rubber, instead of your stone/wood one? There is potential in this game, but they are still quite far off from completion.

And they definately need a proof reader for their localization to English.