Environment
It isn't appropriate to call Alganon "cartoony"; many models have a seriousness about them. Yet there are many, like the models for the Ogran, that are so comical you'd have to determine the art style was exaggerated. The environment itself has a sort of softness to it; the textures, while crisp at points, often have a muted feel that detracts from detail and focuses instead on form. At the least, however, the world is populated and dense with everything from mountains down to weeds. No space truly feels wasted. The ambiance, too - from the serious score of music to the chirping of crickets at night - lends a wonderful overtone (although the music did cause serious performance issues for me and had to be kept off).
The real problem with the environment isn't in its looks or sounds, however. It's in its core design. I lost count the number of times I got stuck in roots, or rocks, or a tree somehow managed to catch a piece of bark on my character's tunic and wouldn't let go. Suffice to say that after repeated mishaps with the terrain, I learned to avoid any environmental detail that wasn't flat. The world itself wasn't the only trickster; walls would suddenly give way beneath my feet, displaying that they were nothing more than illusions. Enemies, too, would suddenly spring out from some unknown place; everything from ogres to wild boars had trained ninja assassins to spring up from behind, above, and below and attack me when I was least expecting it. These are issues that were too common to be random mishaps, and should have been cleaned up before release.
Community
It's hard to talk about a community that isn't there. Alganon is a ghost town, and it is rare that you would find another person, even in the main city. Over a month, every weekend and Friday evening, I would check the numbers on both servers, both factions, and no server ever came close to meeting fifty people on concurrently. The Auction House was barren, rarely having any more than ten total listings. While crafting is present - and encourages a player economy - the player economy is virtually non-existent on either server. MMO that it is, Alganon seems more like a single player MMO, with its group content currently offering no more than a few group quests, although instances are planned for release soon.
Despite its small size, Alganon's community retains that kind of fond, small-town feel, where everyone generally is known amongst each other. Friendly help is not far away, and even GMs will chime in on both the forums and the in-game help channel to answer questions and offer advice to players. If you're looking for a good community, Alganon has it. If you're looking for population though, it's far from being found.
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Overall Impressions
Is Alganon simply a copy and paste of other MMOs? There are certainly some arguments to be had about it, from the lore of the gods granting Titans custody over their world, to evidence that the UI once had a non-functioning keyring in beta that some argued was copied directly from World of Warcraft's interface. Alganon plays to be more than a mere copy of its predecessors; it also hasn't tried to reinvent the wheel. There is little new or different about Alganon that veterans haven't seen before.
Alganon is marginally playable: a patchwork game sewn together with thin threads that keep breaking. Although MMO players have come to expect releases to be buggy to some degree, Alganon was clearly released before it had truly gone through enough development to be rid of bugs that players should expect to be handled, such as environmental and server stability, as well as a lack of content, namely instances and multi-player content.
However, I will dare to say it: Alganon deserves more players than it has. It is possible that, if players give Alganon the opportunity to grow, and its developers spend honest work improving the game, it may become a small classic of its own. Alganon certainly has a flavor of its own, even with gameplay that feels too familiar to be fun at this point in time. As Alganon stands currently, however, it needs a great deal of improvement to be worth a purchase, much less a subscription.
