Online review of disclosure

There are a lot of free-to-play MMOs that have come out of China over the past decade. In 2017, NetEase threw its hat in the ring with Revelation Online. It remains one of the best games when it comes to frequent updates and timely game events.

But, even with that on its side, Revelation Online has a hard time keeping its player count high. This is likely due to the game’s lack of focus on the story, despite all of its splendid world building.

History

Revelation Online itself is heavily influenced by Chinese fantasy author Jiang Nan and various pieces of Chinese mythology. The game takes place on Nuanor, a wonderfully lush fantasy kingdom. In addition to human characters, you come across NPCs including pandas, tanuki, and characters who look human but have the inhuman ability to transform into animals.

The game does a good job of transforming you into a fantasy element without overloading you with lore. You are given a series of very simple quests for your village to carry out and do, in preparation for a festival. The games introduce various factions when a visitor named Akuta appears next to your uncle.

Visual

The game is as wonderful as you expect from a fairytale fantasy. Windmills spin against the backdrop of trees and colorful banners celebrating the god of the sea. The shimmering oceans are home to boats made for journeys to the mainland. The boats carry goods for trade, as well as passengers looking for a world to explore.

The action is also perfect. You dive off the cliffs to make rotating landings on the piers below, offering a combination of keystrokes to protect your fall. Battles are so much more than a sprite swinging an ax – you can turn to one side to avoid an attack or slide backwards on your feet to regain your balance after a particularly powerful swing. A lot of effort has gone into the graphics here, and it shows.

Diversity of the body

You have the ability to create a gamer character with seemingly endless body diversity options. It is rare for an MMO to allow you to increase the thickness of a woman’s body, for example. You can also see the effect of all of these options in NPCs and other player characters around the world.

Criticism

Unfortunately, Revelation Online’s successes are overshadowed by many flaws. While serving an English-speaking audience for years, many scenes remain exclusively in Chinese, with no subtitles available. That’s a shame, as the NPC characters themselves, especially Akuta, are incredibly engaging when their lines are actually translated.

Plus, there isn’t much beyond graphics to make the game compelling. The story just drags you through an opening and then dumps you into an open world where you aren’t very motivated to do anything about it. There are several factions you can work with and some recovery missions, but honestly there is no real motivating end goal.

Game

The quest system seems built to keep you from having to actually interact with the game. By pressing control + F your character follows an automatic path to your next goal and even interacts with objects on your behalf.

You don’t have to read the mission text or even move your character to complete the game. It might seem nice to have a few keys pressed to simplify your gaming experience, but at the end of the day it reduces the “gameplay” to about four button presses. It takes away that little challenge the game might have provided and makes it monotonous. This is a shame for an experience that gives you interesting skills like flying. It makes you feel like this game could have been so much more than what it currently offers.

Final verdict

Simply put, Revelation Online is far behind the current market. It doesn’t offer anything that isn’t already available, which makes it difficult to access. It doesn’t have a large fan base or legendary guilds to keep you going like some of the other long-running franchises do. Despite its frequent content updates, it rarely adds anything that does much more than encourage players to purchase in-game content.

Revelation Online doesn’t seem complete. For a game that’s been on the market since 2015, it should. Despite being free, Revelation Online is absolutely unmissable.