This isn't so nice, however, if you're reviewing said game, especially when gameplay features are restricted by level. Sure, the first few levels might be really boring, but the game might pick up later on. Alternatively, the game might be really fun at first but could run out of steam about fifteen hours in.

Well, as the old saying goes, two heads are better than one. Sensing an opportunity, I convinced my roommate Alex to share a character with me, that way he could play while I was at work and I could play while he was asleep. Not only would this allow us to get a decent glimpse of R.Y.L. without significantly delaying the review, but the addition of his insight would benefit the eventual review as well.

By level 24, neither of us could bear to play any more. It was at that point we realized that even if the most euphoric gaming experience awaited us at the next level, it wouldn't be worth the effort we had put forth.

Why? Put simply, R.Y.L. doesn't bring anything new to the genre nor does it do make any attempt to. The story is generic, the missions formulaic, and thanks to the two control choices, combat plays just like any popular PC RPG released in the past ten years or so. Pleas for advice and help go ignored by most of the online community, which means that getting to the level where other players will want you in their party can be a particularly difficult and redundant experience.

Normally, I'd spend a great amount of time weighing the pros of a game against its cons and carefully explaining each point, but it's just not worth the effort here. In fact, I'm not even sure the developers wanted me to keep playing as various glitches would dump me back to the desktop or prevent the use of key gameplay features, such as the "revive" function. If you can look past all that, there's some slight enjoyment to be had in R.Y.L., the traditional RPG pride that comes with taking a weak character and customizing/strengthening them up, but please, just trust me when I say this isn’t enough to justify the experience.

I don't think I can make things any clearer on my end, so here's Alex with his take on the matter:

Before I start in on all the things I hated about R.Y.L., there is one thing I didn’t dislike; the art direction. The armor and weapon designs were fairly original, or at least more than just the typical staff/sword/bow variations. The packaging and supplemental materials (booklet and map/character class description sheet) were also pretty ok. Not amazing or anything, but better than the game itself.

Now onto the crap. First up are the character models. Despite the bevy of armor types for your character, all the characters of one class basically look the same, the ones with better armor are just lumpier than other, or maybe just colored differently. The enemies are just plain uninspired. Squirrels, giant bugs, and fish people are just some of the ridiculously generic enemies you get to repeatedly left click on until they die. And instead of creating lots of different types of enemies, they chose to just take the same basic enemy, give it a different name and a different color, maybe make it a little bigger and just up the stats. So in different areas you’ll get to fight a beetle, a rock beetle, and a granite beetle.

Which brings me to the controls and combat. If you decide to fight enemies in keyboard mode you’ll be left clicking till your fingers bleed. If you decide to fight in mouse mode, be prepared to watch your character beat up on something in auto pilot, unless you decide you want to cast a spell, in which case you’ll probably just end up turning yourself around when you accidentally miss right clicking on your opponent. This happens more often than you would think, since the some of the enemies are small and they tend to be constantly moving.

Next on the chopping block are the story and the missions. The story is standard war between races, with an extra “why can’t we all get just get along” group for those players too indecisive to choose one or the other. The story almost seems irrelevant though, since once you start playing, all the missions seem to be either ‘kill x number of monster y that has been bothering someone’ or ‘take item a to person b so I can trust you’. Maybe they get more complex at the higher levels, but with missions like those there really isn’t much incentive to reach those higher levels is there?

And finally we get to the lovely R.Y.L. community. Asking for help in the chat pane will usually get you one of two responses; ‘ghey’ or ‘n00b’. In fact, the chat pane usually reads like a fourteen year old’s IM conversation, with a moderator popping in every few minutes to say some thing along the lines of ‘hey, stop that or I’ll ban you’ and then leaving again.

So in the end what do we have? A boring game with uninspired gameplay, mediocre graphics, stupid controls, and a community that resembles a junior high homeroom. Congratulations R.Y.L.