Guild Wars for Windows

Guild Wars is one of those games that doesn't immediately grab you. Its the type of game where you constantly want to play for 10 more minutes. The story accomplishes what many games do not, it makes you feel like you only have a small way to go to reach the next goal.

Additionally, it provides many, many different character combinations each of which allow for many possible different strategies of play. You are forced to pick 2 professions, each of which has several categories of skills. Necromancers can use curses,blood magic, and death magic. Within just death magic are spells which allow the player to use corpses to summon minions, gain life, damage nearby foes or help a friend's energy regeneration. The fact that you can choose from skills from both your primary and secondary professions give you limitless possibilities to create unique and creative characters that use new and powerful combinations of skills.

The gameplay style itself is actually somewhat similar to that of Diablo II. Living or dying depends on whether or not your group can do a large amount of damage in a short amount of time while managing to deal with the foes trying to do the same. Most of the enemies in the game either die fairly quickly or take out your party fairly quickly. Unfortunately, this can sometimes lead to an almost hack and slash type of feeling. Despite this, you must sit back and plan out how you are going to take out large groups of powerful foes. You can also get many different items. Items are dealt with in much the same way as Diablo II, except they are stored on the GW servers. The rarity of items is shown by the color of the text in the name. For example, an item with light blue text is more rare than an item with the generic text, but still fairly common, while an item with gold text is rarer than both and most likely much more powerful.

Another positive aspect of Guild Wars is the varied and beautiful landscapes. There has been more than one time while playing with friends when we have just stopped and looked around just to take in the view. The types of different environments is also impressive. You go play in everything from war-torn wasteland to snowy mountain peaks to thick rainforest to arid desert.

One aspect which I have thus far neglected to mention is the PvP. You can create characters which start at the maximum level and jump right into competing with other players online. There are even several pre-made characters for you to choose from. When creating your own PvP characters, you are given lists of skills to choose from based on the chosen professions. This list depends on which skills you have found in the story. You are still given an impressive array of skills to start that is enhanced by playing through the game with different types of characters.

I have been able to play this game on both a powerful desktop and a laptop with no mouse and virtually no graphics acceleration to speak of. Both have resulted in a pleasurable gaming experience.

Part of the fun of this game is playing through with a group of real-life friends and then going on to play in the Guild vs. Guild and PvP modes. Despite this, guild wars still gives options for people who would rather play through the story alone or can only find 2-3 friends to play with at a time. In the story, there are "henchmen" which you can recruit for your group. They will take a cut of any money you gain but thats about it. They really are a great addition to the game especially when you are sick of playing with real players who do not play a useful role in your group (the notorious battle monk for example). Unfortunately, the AI for these henchmen can sometimes be quite frustrating. It's can be more than just a little annoying when the healer runs behind the foe you are attacking and inadvertently into the middle of a larger group of foes. It's just as annoying when the healer waits until you are fairly low on health before casting any heals and then using small heals which aren't quite as useful as one would hope. More than once when using the healer henchman, you will start wondering if that life saving heal will come and it doesn't. Overall, these problems aren't enough to make it so that you would be unable to play through the entire story in the game using only henchmen (but where's the fun in that :P).

Oh, and who could forget the best part of this game. It offers the experience of a true MMORPG while not charging a monthly fee.

If you are a fan of this sort of game, it may not offer quite the same depth and length of quests as such titles as Everquest and the like but it offers an ongoing good time.