Tera is a fun game to play.
Starting out with the amazing graphics and then moving on to the unique characters, challenging combat, and interesting story Tera will win you over quickly. While running into seemingly pointless invisible walls will harm the immersiveness of the game, if you can look past that to enjoy everything this game has to offer you will easily while away a few hours (at least) playing it.
Key features:
- Free to play MMORPG
- Open world
- Dungeons
- Questing
- Crafting
- Mounts
- Player vs player (duels, battlegrounds, open world)
- Flight system between longs distances
- Teleportation across cities
- Fantasy setting
- Over 80 zones to explore
- Battle between allied ‘good’ forces and ‘evil’
- Hundreds of different enemies
- 12 Different classes, each with distinctive look and abilities
- Challenging manual battle system where dodging, targeting, and combos are necessary
- Learn more skills as you progress through the game
The basic quests in the beginning of the game actually relate directly to the story and you will learn more of it as you play through them.
Although they may feel somewhat dull as they are still fairly simple, at least as the story unfolds through the quests and a few cut-scenes you will feel like you are taking part in something that actually matters.
The character choices are a little ridiculous in their artistic interpretations of human anatomy, preteen girls, dog people, and other races however it is all part of the ridiculous fun of video games.
While the whole game is fantasy based and completely unrealistic, it is gorgeous to see. With graphics turned all the way up the detail in the plants, animals, other characters, towns, etc. is stunning.
Just running around the beginner level villages is beautiful and enjoyable.
As you play will learn new skills and obtain new items to use in the game just like most other games.
However, what is fun and different about Tera is that almost as soon as you learn a skill you will be required to equip it and use it in your next battle.
If you don’t…well, you die.
Or at least it is likely that you will.
The battle system in Tera is one of the features that gets a lot of love from all different users.
While most of the beginning battles are not that challenging as you learn the controls, as you come across higher level monsters the battles are much more complex and you need to time your attacks and dodges appropriately in order to win.
Unlike other popular MMORPGs, in Tera you can actually feel a sense of victory when you defeat monsters and enemies because it actually took some effort.
Problems with Tera:
- Lots of invisible walls
- Occasional glitchy/unresponsive controls after resurrecting
Invisible walls include rocks that you can’t jump up on from one side, but can from the other. Smalls hills with a town below that you can’t run down, bridges you can’t jump off of, water you can’t wade through, and many other areas that in real life you would be able to go in no problem.
If you just want to follow the road and not do too much beyond where you are supposed to (don’t want to climb a branch over a creek, climb down a hill to get to the town you were just in, etc.), especially in the beginning, this may not bother you but it still takes away the immersive feeling you get from a game with fun gameplay and great graphics.
While I was fighting the early bosses, the camera would get stuck behind bushes and it was impossible for me to see. Especially after resurrecting the W key to run forward would quit working and I would have to just jump around and hope that it would break loose before I died again. Sometimes I had to restart the game and sometimes it would just randomly snap out of it with some button smashing.
Maybe these are just bugs that happen in the beginning of the game? I will keep playing it to see how the game improves as I go out into the world more.
Why not try it for free?
While the game has a $15 per month Elite Status subscription fee, almost the entire game is free to play with no compelling reason, especially in the beginning, to subscribe.
