Fallen Earth: Welcome to Apocalypse Review: It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

Written by MarkyX | October 30, 2009

Fallen Earth

The MMORPG market is overcrowded; it’s almost as bad as folks who like to write game articles for a living. With the successes of past games such as “Ultima Online,” “Everquest,” and “World of Warcraft,” many companies, both big and small, are trying to capitalize on this crowd of literally millions of subscription paying players. However, all these games have one thing in common: They are based in stereotypical fantasy settings. “Fallen Earth: Welcome to Apocalypse” doesn’t follow the story of elves, orcs, goblins, or dwarves, but throws you into a world where a good portion of humanity is wiped out by a dire event. Instead of playing a hero, you take a role as a survivor in this dead world, but can “Fallen Earth” survive the competition?

As a tutorial, the game immediately starts you off in the Hoover Dam. You are awake from a Pod and this is where “Fallen Earth” explains small bits of the background story, as well as provides you with the knowledge you’ll need to play the game. It does a very good job explaining the basics, such as interacting with NPCs, looting, and its first-person combat. All of this is done via dialog and interactive scenes, in fact, you have to go through the tutorial to even get to the “real” game. As a taste of things to come, you start at max level and have some cool weapons to use during your brief stay in the Hoover Dam. It’s an introduction that works very well for those who may be new to the genre, but it’s also a great refresher for MMO veterans.

You will not only learn how to pillage and kill while in the Dam however, as you will also learn a bit about the storyline. I won’t give details, but with my experiences in MMO games, “Fallen Earth” is definitely one of the top games in terms of writing. It actually makes sense and collaborates with the MMO playstyle (e.g. you kill stuff and run around the place). This is a very welcome change in a genre well-known to have the writing take a backseat.

Fallen Earth

While writing and having a tutorial are necessities for any game, MMOs need to have an enjoyable combat system to be considered worthy of gamers, especially the ones that have to part with their cash on a monthly basis. “Fallen Earth” has a great combat system, and it’s not because of its littered with hundreds of skills but rather, there’s interaction involved. The entire game takes place in first person, so whenever you need to punch someone, or shoot something, you need to have your crosshairs over them and click. This alone makes the game much more enjoyable than most other MMOs, as you aren’t just selecting a target, auto attacking, and pressing different keys for flashy numbers to show up. Enemies are well aware of this mechanic, so they try their best to strafe around you, and move to make your life harder while they zap away your health.

Combat isn’t the only thing that keeps an MMO afloat, as you also need a good character customization system. “Fallen Earth” comes with a classless system: When you upgrade your character, you are given points to spend on their skills or attributes, consisting of the general attributes that you’ve heard before, like Dexterity, Endurance, and Strength. There is one catch though: There is no option to re-spec or change your skills once you apply them, and no matter what, they stay with your character. Fortunately, there are “templates” that give you recommended attributes and skills to upgrade, so there isn’t much worry about making mistakes if you have a clear idea on what you want to do in “Fallen Earth.”

Fallen Earth

Economy and crafting also play a vital role in “Fallen Earth,” as almost everything can be crafted, and you get parts from salvaging anything from the landscape. Need glass? Go find a car in the desert. Need a gun? Time to head to the auction house, and grab yourself a user created weapon. “Fallen Earth” really places an emphasis on combing through the landscape, and grabbing whatever you can just to make a few chips (”FE”’s currency). It definitely gives off a similar the vibe as the old “Star Wars Galaxies,” where player interaction was more than just creating parties. The crafting system is quite easy to understand, as it shows you what you need, and how much time is needed to craft the item. Yes, minutes, and sometimes hours are spent just to make one item, but fortunately this time is spent even when you’re offline, and you can still do quests while crafting.

While this all sounds like a good concept, “Fallen Earth” is not perfect. It suffers from multitudes of issues, mainly from a technical stand point. Whether this is due to poor testing or the common “launch bugs” experienced in other MMOs is up for debate, but “FE”’s current condition makes it hard to praise it across the board.

First and foremost, the framerate and lag is unbearable. Going into towns is a slide show experience, and considering this is where you need to buy, sell, and quest, this makes a crucial part of the game virtually unplayable. When outside of town, the game runs very smoothly, but can also lose framerate if loads of creatures are on the screen (e.g. half a dozen bandits).

Fallen Earth

The other issue is the grinding itself. This is by no means a fast paced game where you’re moving from one area to another. You will be spending lots of time in one concentrated area, and although there are plenty of quests in the starting towns, most of them require you to continuously go to a handful of areas over and over again. To make grinding even more noticeable, your inventory takes a bit of time to upgrade due to high requirements to use different equipment. It took me several hours before I was able to wear boots that gave me armor.

However, the biggest offender is the graphics themselves. There is nothing wrong with games from indie developers that don’t have the graphics to compete with the big names, but some of the “Fallen Earth”’s animations are the worst I’ve ever seen in an MMO game. Some characters don’t have strafing animation, so when they move sideways the same way they are animated to walk forward. There are even some issues with clipping, as you see creatures go on top of objects by simply gliding over them. In short, this is a game that won’t be used for benchmarking powerful PCs anytime soon.

Fallen Earth

With all this being said, “Fallen Earth” is a decent game if you’re willing to accept its flaws. It definitely has the vibe of the early 2000 MMOs like “Everquest” and “Star Wars Galaxies,” although it contains the same problems as those games. The animation and frame rate issues detract from the one of the best combat systems in the genre, as well as an enjoyable player-run economy. Unfortunately, at its current buggy state, it’s hard to recommend this unless you’re a die-hard MMO fan who wants something more challenging than the silver spoon games like “WoW.” However, if the bugs are fixed and the issues are resolved, “Fallen Earth: Welcome to Apocalypse” might end being a game to look out for as it definitely has some good ideas behind it.

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