I’d like to think I go into every game with an open mind. At the official website, I was bombarded by a series of systems that seemed promising. How can you go wrong with a feature list like:
- Open PvP
- Repeatable Quests with consumable rewards to further speed leveling
- Offline skill training
- A fairly original setting of heaven vs. hell over the planes of the 7 sins.
- Free to Play with a reasonable amount of stuff unlocked without any cash invested.

I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve jumped the shark folks, and so we begin our lovely review of the train wreck you can’t help but stare at for a while, Faxion Online.

Cautions

Faxion Online has some fantasy violence and the usual array of chat problems that can go with any multiplayer game. It’s safe for everyone that plays MMOs already.

Gameplay - 55 / 100

Perhaps the first thing you’ll notice
about the game is how
sparsely populated the world is.  NPCs
are few and far between even in Purgatory (the starter city) and mobs
rarely
number more than three on screen at any given time. 
Even though there is only one server for the
game, people aren’t all that common and conversations in trade or
faction chat
aren’t common.  There
are two factions in
the game, Heaven and Hell more or less, and Hell certainly seems to to
have a
stranglehold on the game.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/99045"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 640px; height: 360px;" alt=""
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/99045">

style="font-style: italic;">The world is barren, but
occassionally you'll run into a horde like this.  Does anyone
test these spawns?

There are various objectives in each
zone to conquer, and
each one confers benefits to those in the zone. 
Contesting them alerts all players to try and divert
players to the area
for open combat.  Note
that these
battlegrounds are also the spot for PvE questing, so all hell breaks
loose in a
hurry.

When the combat breaks out though,
things break down.  Cooldown
indicators sometimes show up when
you use abilities, and sometimes they do not, making it all but
impossible to
figure out a rotation or know when a critical skill is back up. style="">  Ranges on skills are all
over the place, and
you have no idea what buffs or debuffs are that are placed on you (the
icons
are there, but hovering over them just gives you a name and duration.) style=""> 

style=""> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 640px; height: 360px;" alt=""
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/99044">

style="">Really?
 Why am I suddenly playing Call of Duty when I take fall
damage?  At least it fades and regenerates just like the game
it mimics.

Almost every spell is instant cast,
which is nice for a PvP
centric game.  It
would be nicer if every
fight in PvE as a mage didn’t devolve into a PvP style fight, with you
running
for dear life peppering your opponent with spells. 
No snares and no roots are given to
mages.  What the
hell kind of design
decision is this—it’s not like casters are more durable than in other
games,
they still go down to a stiff breeze.

There aren’t even any indicators of
elite or boss type mobs
in the game, so knowing the strength of your target is just a crapshoot. style="">  It’s rare for me to wish
for more WoW-style
simplicity and interface copying, but holy crap is it frustrating to
die
repeatedly because of this.  
Sometimes
they don’t even have enhanced health totals, they just hit
like goddamn trucks because they feel like it.
style="">  So the game slowly turns
into ‘grind here,
it’s the most effective’ and kills the variety of the game.

Quests are just “deliver X, kill X”
type quests that have
you running all over the damn place and sometimes don’t even indicate
where the
monster is.  The
daily hunts that have
you going after specific NPCs are frustrating because everyone would
like to do
them, and yet the NPC is on a fairly long respawn timer. style="">  What’s the point of having
easily accessible
daily quests when they’re time consuming and agonizing to complete?

Graphics - 50 / 100

While my rig is somewhat behind the
curve, with an E6600
quad core and Radeon 4870 1GB HD video card, there’s no excuse for
Faxion’s
downsides in graphics.  The
frame rate in
particular needs help, as it bogs down with lots of objects on screen
regardless of how devoid of animation or detail they are.  The character art style is
a jarring mix of realistic
and super deformed.  Needless
to say, it’s
pretty ugly.

This would be acceptable if it
was an Everquest 1 character select screen.  Actually, I'm
pretty sure I've seen fancier models in Freeport a decade ago.

You can’t really expect much from a
free to play game, but
if I could show you a .gif of the jumping animation in this game
without
falling out of my chair laughing, I would. 
It’s that bad.  If
you ever decide
to give this a try, push your space bar a bunch for a good time
guaranteed.

Sound - 45 / 100

The music you’ll experience over the course of this game might as well not exist. Hell, the game would be better off if they had a mute game and focused the sound efforts elsewhere to make at least one aspect of the game remarkable. The music is hardly there at all, combat sounds are generic, and the most notable sound is the blood splatter from falling a long distance. That’s not how it should be!

Multiplayer - 60 / 100

So here’s where the meat and potatoes
of the game are—killing
each other.  In a
PvP-centric game, good
PvP can salvage an otherwise terrible game. 
Just take Ultima Online or
Shadowbane for instance. style="">  Flawed, but fun is the
definition of those
games.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/99046"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 640px; height: 360px;" alt=""
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/99046">

style="font-style: italic;">At least the classes are easily
recognized by how tall/wide they are.  It's a good thing,
because the other visual details and the UI are bad enough that you
might not know otherwise.

With flagging instant aside from a 10 sec invulnerability
upon zoning, and every zone aside from the major cities being a PvP
zone, what
actually plays out is a damn massacre. 
I
stepped outside of the starter city for my first group quest and got
killed by
a max level character.  Fantastic. style="">  If you’re going to have
such a chaotic take
on PvP, you need to at least give players options to reach a
competitive level
without getting demoralized to the point of uninstalling the game that
I was
seeing in faction chat over the course of my time with the game.

Multiclassing is a big part of PvP,
and creating the perfect
blend of traits from the three classes is every min-max fiend’s dream. style="">  Unfortunately, each class
has a different
primary stat and casting without much in that primary stat renders your
attack
negligible, leaving this option good for buffs and downtime heals and
little
else.  With an
increased skill training
cost (from a limited pool) on your second class, the more you
diversify, the
more you gimp yourself.  Why
not just
make three full-fledged classes instead of three that need to depend on
each
other?

Value - 70 / 100

You get a fair amount of content, and an absurd amount of repeatable dailies as a free to play player in Faxion. But you’ll be missing out on bag slots and a bunch of other convenience features. You can of course, purchase things in the cash shop, but that violates the whole spirit of free to play.

Lasting Appeal - 40 / 100

With the appeal not being visual or in the gameplay, the only thing that could salvage your subscription or at least your time is the community. Sadly that’s also lacking. You’ll go entire multi-hour long sessions with nothing spoken in any chat channel and you’ll see a few players at best until you hit the high levels and join one of the high end guilds for beating your head against a wall in the PvP objective world.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

  • Setting is pretty
    good/original
  • No faction imbalance in
    skills/stats, which is
    important to a PvP game.
  • Lots of repeatable quests
    and things to consume your
    time on a regular basis.

Cons

  • …but not a lot of good quests
    otherwise.
  • Abysmal graphics and sound
  • Feels like a continuation of a
    beta test, not an actual completed title.

Conclusion

Faxion is one of those games that is too little, too late. If it had come out in say, 2002-2003, we’d have an original game that could take advantage with a free to play business model, a worthy graphic engine and the resulting income stream would generate a lot of content in a hurry. As is, it’s just another MMO to throw in the recycle bin after you’ve had your fill.

Overall 48/100 - Poor

Metacritic

To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Faxion Online Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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