Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Producer Michael Rowland was heavily involved with Lord of the Rings Online, and it definitely shows through in some of the "deed"-type Combat Medals players receive in Jumpgate. Combat Medals are awarded for various endeavors and open up abilities or provide other rewards. It's just another type of system that the NetDevil developers have been working so long to create.

Plenty of Room to Grow

Speaking of content creation, the game has an immense variety of ships and hundreds of upgrades and specialties that can be applied to those ships. The completionists and min-maxers will have plenty of material to chew on if they delve into this MMO. For the rest of us, the combat is easy to “jump” into (sorry I had to!) and yet the amount of complexity under the hood should provide enough depth to keep our interests high. With the use of space and Jumpgates, the amount of growth is limitless for the game as well.

There's plenty of room for growth in Jumpgate's universe.

As with any game, Jumpgate Evolution will be pitted against the big dogs like World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, and of course EVE Online. Jumpgate Evolution is not "Space WoW" nor is it "EVE Lite" but it is much more along the lines of WoW than EVE. The UI is straight forward and clean (written in Scaleform, a Flash-esque language) and the amount of micromanagement is available, but there is no overwhelming learning cliff like in  EVE Online. The learning curve starts nice and slow. Within seconds of choosing my avatar, I was shooting down enemy ships. The key comparison I can make to WoW is that the game is fun to play from the very beginning. You're in and firing your cannons within an instant.

But Is it Too Fast and Too Furious?

The gameplay in Jumpgate Evolution is amazingly tactile. The responsiveness of the ship is very good with a mouse and I imagine that it's much more fun with a joystick. The physics response is interesting as well; when the ship begins a turn it starts off gradually and then speeds up just as one would imagine a space vehicle doing. The concern I have for the game is that the frenetic combat could wear out the older MMO players (like me!) who are used to some downtime. I may have to train my mouse fingers to be able to handle this much excitement.

If you're looking for even more excitement, the game has consensual PvP zones in addition to all out PvP zones, so there is plenty of room to get your griefing on. In addition to the zones, there will be scenario/battleground type locations with specific PvP objectives that players can fight over.