Stone Age 2 : Preview

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My impressions of Stone Age 2 can be summed up in one word: “blah”. For me there seemed to be a large amount of hype surrounding the game, but after playing it I can safely say that I am disappointed. When you start the game you are allowed to determine your character’s elemental affinity, this in turn determines your starting creature/pet/monster/whatever. After that you can catch any monster you want, however you can only use a certain number of monsters in battle and this number increases every five levels or so. You have to keep monsters happy by feeding them and not dying very often, a happy monster performs better in battle and learns new skills quicker. Battles are random and turn based, occurring around every twenty steps or so for me. Characters are given access to a “den” which they can decorate, use to store items, store monsters, and breed monsters. My biggest complaint is that there really isn’t very much concrete information about game play at this point. I don’t know anything about monsters, what abilities they have, etc. Which means I have no actual reason to capture one other than it looks cool (or less stupid than the others). I don’t know what the overall story arc of the game is supposed to be. Am I just walking around fighting because I have emotional issues with animals? But I suppose all that can be excused by the fact the game is still in closed beta. This random battle system, however, is awful. I hate random battles in mmos, and in this particular game random battles get tedious fast. The file size of the installer is 1GB+, which is a little painful considering the quality of the graphics. All in all I expected better of this game. However, Stone Age 2 is in closed beta which means that the game hasn’t technically entered it’s final phase yet, and most of these problems might be eliminated.