Sep 142011
 

Fiesta Screenshot

Fiesta has been around since 2007; it’s been a free to play MMO from the get-go, designed around microtransactions. The game suffers a bit from the pay to win issue, with purchasable items providing significant combat boosts, however, it is possible to get similar boosts without paying, but you’ll have to work for them, and they may not last as long. The good news is that it doesn’t appear that these boosts are necessary for the usual playing session, although very nice, you can usually handle any level-appropriate fight alone, and there aren’t significant exp boosts for trying to fight far above your level. The pay-to-win items would be very beneficial for attempting to take on boss monsters alone, though, it would seem they were designed around multiple players. The game starts up in a small window, but that’s fixable with a quick trip to the options menu. Aside from that there were very poor descriptions on the class choices in-game, I had to look them up on the wiki to decide which one I wanted to play. For instance, the description of the mage in-game is: “Mages can manipulate the forces of the world with the wisdom of magic.” As you can see, there are no examples of skills a mage can use, his role in a party, or anything else you might want to know when making a class choice. The game is Korean in origin, it sports an anime graphical theme similar to that of other MMOs from the region. Combat I’ve found can be spammy at times, classes with the SP to spare simply spam their damaging skills as fast as possible, although those that don’t have as much SP will tend to rely more on their auto-attack strikes. Soloing can be fairly slow paced, for some classes the only way to regain hp aside from the purchase of potions and such from other players is to rest in their very own mushroom hut. Although very cute, the hut is a fairly slow way to regenerate health and SP. Having a cleric around makes it far less necessary to have such a hut though. Every few levels you can choose where to place skill points, as well as attribute points. Attributes are what everyone is used to in MMOs, strength, endurance, etc. The skill points, however, are not. In Fiesta you can customize your individual skills, increasing their power, lowering their cost, cooldown, or increasing the effect duration where applicable. This makes every player’s abilities unique to that person. The crafting in the game is somewhat simplistic, every character may choose two production skills from a list of only a few. Clicking on a chosen crafting skill brings up a menu; in this menu is a list of things you can make, confusingly though, it lists even recipes that you don’t know how to make, you have to visit the skill merchant, and purchase the recipes for various items before you can craft them (with in-game money that is). Overall Fiesta is a fine choice for your limited gaming time! The game is a fun, fairly standard MMO that is well designed, and not too money-hungry. Create your account for free at http://fiesta.outspark.com/