What can I say.  Downloaded, changed properties to 'Run as Administrator' which you have to do if you wish to install it on Vista (goes pear shaped if you don't), ran it, and...........

Same as every other sodding game out there. 

Characters consist of three classes which later on at level 10 have the option of changing to one of two specialist careers.  These are your standard fare of assassin, spell chucker and your usual tank.  The character graphics are a bit chunky but at least they gave us the option of a number of hairstyles and faces.  On the whole its ok.

The graphics are similar to the old Tomb Raider games with the odd bit of minor modernity such as flames, groovy statues etc.  This makes it hard to judge on atmosphere, flavour etc.  It tries to stick to the Chinese/oriental theme and on that score it does ok.  Some of the MOBS do seem to be straight from legend.  It has also made the attempt at day and night as well as weather...... well rain anyway.  I cant knock that as most of the games I have played (Metin 2 for example,) cant be arsed with that side of things and to my mind this ommission detracts from a world atmosphere.

Sound wise this game is horrible.  With regards to ambient and creature effects It seems to be comprised of short, and I mean short, looping tracks.  You will hear a bear give a short growl followed by half a second of silence, then the same growl again.  Be close to ten bears and this can really get on your mammaries.  On the music front I found it ok and on that particular point each to there own.

Combat just for the record is your standard fare of setting up hotkeys for specials, point, double click on target (or use keys,) watch it go into auto attack while hammering numbers 1 to 10 on your keyboard.  Graphically the combat so far is average.  It is ok and thats about it.  i am hoping as I play it for longer that this gets better.

MOBS...... same old lifeless bags of exp with "KILL ME I'M WORTH X AMOUNT " in neon above their heads.  I did notice, as a point of interest, that drops from MOBS very rarely have anything for your class.  You can make quite a bit of cash selling equipment which will happen anyway because 99% of the equipment will be for every other class except yours.

Quest are go to location x and kill y number of MOBs.  Nuff said on that one.  It should be noted that travel is from one map arena to another, the locations you want to travel to being selected on a master map (if that makes any sense).  Its not like Oblivion where you wander around one huge world.

Grind it should be noted kicks in relatively early.  I found things started slowing down around level 10. Be warned this one looks worse than the usual fare when it comes to having to commit genocide to progress.

The community is groovy and for the time i have played it thus far I have noticed it's rare for a GM to be absent.  I have also noticed, and this is important folks, a complete lack of spammers, hackers and the annoying gits that set up shop and sit there lagging the game selling crap.  In fact, so far I have not been able to find one single player who has done this.  F***ing Excellent!!!!!  For people who have younguns playing this I also noticed the lack of abusive language in the chat channels.  The worse I came across was 'noob'.

Lag is a weird one. It sort of is there but it isn't.  Sometimes combat will go smoothly and the next time you will have to hit the hotkeys several times because nothing is happening.  You will walk through a crowd of players in town smoothly only to have things stutter briefly when no bugger is around for miles.  Its not a game breaker.....just odd.

Things I have yet to experience......  PVP (haven't had the chance yet).  War, which sounds cool, so looking forward to that.  Item Mall, on which my continued playing hangs.  If it has uber items that unbalance the game or is too expensive then its 'goodnight from me'.  Oh.... Pets and the rest of the world.

On a final note, my apologies for the wall of text.

 niffty sounds cool ima try it thanks for your input

this game is quiet and empty when i played it last year in the summer, there are less features in the game and it just feels like a grind in an empty zone for no reason after a while so i quit

My first Impressions

When i downloaded Sho Online i was desparatly looking for something to kill my free time at home. After the first 10 minutes of logging on i wanted to uninstall it. However i gave it a shot. I am now level 56 and am actualy enjoying it.

Positives:

The community by far is better then any game i have played. I am not sure why this is and i am still trying to figure this one out. I think it is because all the bad attitudes are playing other games like WoW.

The Armor / Weapon / enhancement system. There are plenty of unique items out there for every class as well as all sorts of neet effects and visual effect.

WAR! This is by far the coolest PvP or RvR system i have ever been a part of. There is so much you can do here with seige weapons and other neet little features. I am still some what new to Wars but the whole system is outstanding!

The Slaughter House. Pretty cool little "ring event" as it would be called in Everquest 1. You and up to 4 others are ported into a room and are forced to fight againsted multiple mobs. Each wave is timed and if you dont kill fast enough you will have another wave of mobs to deal with on top of what you have not killed in the previous wave. Its a nice test in teamwork and skill.

Negitives:

Movement in this game is strange. When you are running and try to stop, your character will continue to run for another 5 or so steps. I have not found a way around this but after a while it grows on your and you start to subconsiously account for it. There is also no way that i know of to disable click to move but you can still use WASD.

Audio is pretty bad. Like i read above the mobs have a very limited vocabualary. Being in an area with 10-20 of the same mobs can get very annoying.

Combat is about average but the skill/action execution is iffy. You have to really pay attention to weather or not your skill actually went off. Some times you start to cast but just stop wether or not your fighting or just standing there, I sure this is something to do with casting consentration. However if you start spamming a hotkey your going to end up casting the same spell over and over unless you sit down or run around. There seems to be an auto target self system in place but i think it does not work very well. If you have nothing targeted and try to heal or buff yourself you will get nothing. However if your targeting yourself or a mob then your fine. While grouping in other games you are usualy F1 by default. In this game you are a random F key. For healers, you should definately figure out which one you are befor you start grinding.

Perhaps the biggest downer in this game is the fast that every type of mob looks exsactly the same. Every area/zone has an identical zone down another path on the map. What i mean is, say there are 14 zones on the Yin side of the map. That means there are only 7 unique zones.

All in all this game is above average for free to play games. If they upgraded the engine and threw in some more advanced and debugged scripts and added more "random terrain" this game would probably be good enough to pay for.

I am sorry i forgot to mention that there is always a GM active in game and is always assisting players or comming up with fun little events and random GM buffs.  This reminds me of the first years of Everquest.  How i miss those days.

I also installed it and wanted to uninstall it when I started to kill frogs...  Then I started to get into it when the enhanced items began to drop at a decent rate and I read the chat between players.  The game community is great and GMs are actually present and interactive.

Seriously, try the game out if you haven't already, you'll learn to love it for all the perks and friendliness.

awsome game. i love the war xD

and GM are there to help you and there's always event =)

come and try it

Nice game to play for pvp................

If you are a pvp player ..................

You need to try this game...............

PEACE...................