Wonderking - Review

Little carrot men, high-pitched voices, and giggling are things you'd probably find in a baby-sitting center, but this is the exactly what sums up the cutesy free-to-play MMORPG 'Wonderking' Often called a "Maplestory clone," "Wonderking" has many noticeable similarities to its mammoth predecessor. The world is smaller than "Maplestory's," but the graphics are sharper and visually stimulating. There are even forum battles over which of NDoors' 2D side-scrolling games is "better," and which will ultimately be more successful. Considering that "Wonderking" is still in Closed Beta, comparing the two is rather unfair at this point. "Wonderking's" story is very spiritual and resembles much of the Christian bible. I can't help but notice the likeness between the two. I guess one could say that the story is somewhat unoriginal, but at the same time, it's quite refreshing to see a story that isn't about fairies, tree-people, monsters and castles. Even though the story is a nice change of pace, "Wonderking's" classes are pretty cliche and expected: Mage, Swordsman, Scout and Thief. Moving forward, you're able to branch out to four specializations within each base class. The archetype I played most was a scout, and I became bored within a few minutes. 


All you have to do is press the Control key to shoot, so I just kept mashing the button to grind through quests. As you can imagine, this got old very quickly. The creatures I was endlessly killing were extremely cute, and even had tears coming out of their eyes when they died. That seemed a little messed up to me, and made grinding more painful than it already is... One thing I will make note of is that since this is an early build of the game, there are plenty of technical issues. While logging in, I felt the need to cross my fingers and hope that I wouldn't encounter any errors. I've encountered about four or five different ones in the past week or two alone. There are those who can run the game from the get-go and never have issues, but if you do, keep in mind that they're constantly fixing technical aspects; you can troubleshoot on the forums, but if the game won't work on your system, submit a ticket with the specs, and just hope it gets fixed in the next patch. Even in a closed beta stage, "Wonderking" is definitely impressive -- but it needs some work in order to match up to "Maplestory." But do we really want "Wonderking" to be compared to "Maplestory" in the first place? Some originality and innovation could probably do the game some good.


View the article at MMOgames.com.