Allods Online is a soon-to-be released MMOG from gPotato that will be free to play. The game is has been developed by Russian owned company Gala-Net for $12 million. Currently Allods Online is available to a closed beta audience until the 24th of Novemeber. Currently the beta program is open for only the first ten levels and there have no announcement of the second beta program as of yet.

You might be asking yourself why should you try yet another free to play MMOG? You’re not employed by MMORPG.com or Kotaku so you certainly don’t have the time to attempt to play all the crappy games that are released out there. So why should you keep an eye out for Allods?

The elven chicks.

Allods Online’s first attraction has to be the graphic art style. While the graphics themselves are on par with World of Warcraft (minus the lighting), they have their own artistic style that, at least to this player, is attractive. While the world has elves and orcs, it also has flying ships and cannons. There is a definite steampunk influence in this game’s art style.

You start off the game, like any other, selecting your race and class. There are two warring sides in this game, the League and the Empire. The League seem to be the good guys having Elves and Gibberlings (more on these guys later) and Humans, while the Empire have Humans, Orcs and Arisen. All the races seem to be your typical stock fantasy races except for the Gibberlings and the Arisen.

The Arisen are a cool looking undead/robot race with a very unique look. They can be your assortment of caster classes. The one race that’s completely different from anything that I’ve seen in the MMORPG genre, are the Gibberling. When you select the Gibberlings you take control of a group of three characters. You name all three of them, though only you can see each individual name, the lead Gibberling is the name you want people to see you as. Each Gibberling moves in unison. You can not control each individually, but they each perform individual attacks. For example, if you play a scout class that performs bow and melee attacks, one Gibberling uses the bow and another uses the melee weapon.

No matter which race you select, each one looks good and animates well within the bounds of the game’s engine. Over the hours that I played I never grimaced or noticed any out of place animations. Everything moved fluid and nothing stood out as out of place.

The classes are all fairly stock when it comes to fantasy MMOGs and they take a page out of Warhammer Online’s book. There are eight class archtypes and depending on which race you choose they get a new name. An Elf Paladin is a Templar while an Orc is a Reaver. They get the same abilities but they each get different racial bonuses. Do these bonuses balance out in the end? Who knows. Choose wisely!

Before this quick look becomes a full blown review, let me quickly say that the game runs extremely well. There are no hiccups in the graphic engine, the loading times are extremely fast and even the download for the client was quick, going at a decent pace of 1.5MB/s. Combat is fluid and responsive and if you’re comfortable with World of Warcraft then you’ll feel right at home with Allods.

The game is fun, and the classes are interesting enough to try out. But I must say there are a few things that this game has that bother me and may impede me from seriously putting in play time for one character, let alone spending some money in the cash shop.

The game progresses pretty quickly through the tutorial zone. Then as soon as you enter the open world newbie area the brakes hit. The leveling speed is incredibly slow. In the first hour or so of gameplay you can rack up at least 5 levels, then you go to needing needing more than an hour of playtime to hit level 6. When you need 8000 experience to go from level 5 to 6 and you’re getting 20-30 experience per kill and 150-300 experience per quest it does put a damper on your character development. This has been a major complaint with many of the player in beta.

This isn’t the only complaint, depending on your class, your kill speed can be anywhere from 30 seconds to a full minute per mob. Which isn’t that bad however at level 5 you’re spamming one or two attack abilities for the whole time. Who wants to wear out their keyboard killing rats?

For this game to catch on as someone’s secondary MMOG or even primary, they will have to do something about the above two issues.

The only other complaints I have about this game are a few small issues that don’t affect my game play too much. The UI can’t be scaled down, so it’s large and takes up a lot of room on my screen and the floating combat text and the combat log can sometime be delayed.

Allods Online is a great free to play game that you can always pick up and play with the caveat that they need to fix the leveling and combat speed. There seems to be enough there to warrant spending a few dollars in the cash shop if some of these issues are fixed. I’ll definitely be playing in the second closed beta to get another look.

Allods online is slated to go live this winter.