Eudemons Online review

Let me tell you about my experience with downloading and installing Eudemons, it’s a remarkably similar story to the story I told about RODE last month and it’s just as frustrating. There are four options to choose from when downloading; you can download the .exe file directly from the developer, get the files via P2P or there are a couple of options involving torrents. The file itself is about a gigabyte, not too bad when you consider that the installation comes in at 3.2 gigabytes. So I tried the first option, it got to 800mbs (it took a long time, not because of my connection either) and became “interrupted.”

Eudemons Online : Rough start 

I put this down to bad luck and tried the torrent option instead. It’s not just a torrent though, not like you’d be used to if you know anything about that file type. Instead, it comes pre-loaded with its own torrent program and you find it downloading, at snail’s pace of a few kilobytes a second, through this strange piece of software you didn’t expect to be on your system. No problem, I’m not expecting the publisher of an MMO to give me viruses or anything (although if you Google search, a few people have claimed that the client contains adware) so I let it run, it got no faster. The last option was to let it run via P2P and, at last, we started getting hundreds of kilobytes a second, rather than tens of kilobytes and the installation finally worked.

It's all about patience, sometimes...

It was annoying, I admit, but I wasn’t about to start getting too wound up about it. The key to playing any sort of PC game sometimes is patience and I’m not about to start ranting about something that might be the fault of my line, the fault of too many people downloading at once or any number of other little problems that probably don’t have much to do with the developers or the game itself. I installed, which took quite a while in itself, and started up the file. After a few seconds of patching, an error message told me that I needed to update to the latest version of Flash. I already have the latest version of Flash. This is where the installation of this game got REALLY interesting.

Windows 7 compatibility?

If you have Windows 7, there’s a good chance you’ll come across this issue and there’s no sure-fire way of sorting it out. Without the latest version of flash, you’ll be unable to log into the servers. If you have flash and get this message, there’s two ways it can go; either you’ll carry on like usual and won’t need to muck around or, like me, you’ll be met with a blank screen and will find yourself spending hours on end trying to fix the issue. I’ve read guides that told me to uninstall and reinstall flash, I’ve been told to try it on different browsers (which I’ve had to install from scratch) and I’ve been told to reinstall the client and have done so no less than five times. In the end I ran it as an administrator and it ran fine. The average person would have given up hours ago. And I only go into so much detail on my issues with installing the game because I feel I should share with you the positive bits of my review early. It only goes downhill from here.

Eudemons Online tries to capture the glory days of the early MMOs, things like Runescape, but suffers from a general lack of polish that will annoy anybody who came to the MMO genre with something a little more modern. It’s an admirable thing to want - classic graphics, classic music, classic action – but it’s been recreated a little too faithfully and you’re left with all the same faults that old games had to suffer with thanks to system and network constraints. Those constraints no longer exist, and yet Eudemons manages to bring them back from the dead.

To begin with, there’s a complete lack of variety when it comes to character creation. You have but a few races to choose from and all of them fail to impress and even the art style fails to inspire. From there you can pick a design for your avatar but, again, these are limited and hardly the sort of thing you’re going to want to take ages looking over. Given the graphical style, it’s understandable that you can’t really change much more than hairstyles, but the lack of customization in the early part of the game is quite the let-down.

Eudemons Online has got decent isometric RPG style graphics

When you’re quest has begun, you’ll be offered a handful of tutorials, although they’re fully skippable if you’re already familiar with what you’ll be doing (in regards to controls, the developers take a leaf from the likes of Diablo). After the tutorials, you’ll be let loose onto the world and be given a handful of quests to choose from. Graphically, I quite like Eudemons. More specifically, I like that they’ve tried to pull off something that combines that original isometric RPG style, but that they’ve also tried to build upon it. Unfortunately, the graphics aren’t quite fresh enough to give you the impression that they’re referencing a past time and instead you get the feeling that the visuals just aren’t all that good.

And it’s that that plagues Eudemons, that feeling that the developers wanted to reference a bygone MMO generation and instead became slaves to it. The action, if you can call it that, is commanded by pointing in a specific direction with the mouse and pressing the right mouse button. This simple-to-learn style would have been great - especially considering the amount of times you’ll find yourself surrounded by enemies - but instead you blow over anything you come across like they’re not even there. The battle lacks any real challenge and within my first couple of quests I was being told to go out and grind; “come back when you’ve reached level 6.” MMOs aren’t known for their gripping storylines, but there’s a plot that’s a means to an end and then there’s just the mundane.

Lack of guidance

There’s also a general lack of guidance while playing. There’s quite a nice auto-pathing feature that can get you to almost any destination you care to choose from, but sometimes your quest doesn’t update and you’re left searching for somebody specific without any real idea where they are. This happens more than once and using the quest menu (hidden away at the bottom, you’ll need to search for it) is a must for even finding potential missions to complete, that’s without mentioning actually managing to complete them. You’ll also be given Eudemons to summon and there’s a whole meta-game where you’ll be collecting bigger and badder monsters to assist you in battle. While I haven’t had extensive experience with these monsters, I’ve heard that they level up rather quickly and make those simple battles that much easier.

Eudemons Online is one of the most populated games

What I will say for Eudemons is that it’s perhaps one of the most populated games I’ve ever come across. This is a mixed blessing, but for those of you who love to socialize in your MMOs, there are plenty of friendly people about waiting for you to join them online. This also makes parts of the game madly overpopulated and there are segments that I haven’t even been able to see because of the amount of people around. It’s the first MMO I’ve played where I don’t think I’d have had any trouble finding people to play with and that’s part of the point I suppose.

Eudemons Online review - The Conclusion

I respect the ideas behind Eudemons, the idea of an older MMO for a new generation. I just don’t think it’s been handled very well; from problems with the gameplay, dated graphics and bugs in the software itself, the chances are you’re going to find something to frustrate you while playing. There are too many games out there to feel frustrated by one that just doesn’t really work. If you really want to see how Eudemons is handled. Personally I’d suggest avoiding and finding something else, but you can’t deny it’s a popular game and, for some, that’ll be enough.

4/10