Silk Road Online

“The first experience a player shall have is of one large world waiting to be explored and shaken up; a constant progressing adventure.” – Silk Road Online

After researching for various Free-To-Play games I came across links to Silk Road Online quite often. So, I decided to give it a try. As the quote above says, it is a large world waiting to explored.

The game was designed to re-enact the Silk Road trades from the 7th Century. Through the use of the game as a MMORPG, it is based on history, culture and stories of each and every Silk Road trade route. I love history and culture so I thought this would be a great game for me. Plus, the armor was pretty cute - and if you know me I love clothes in real life as much as I do in games!

While downloading the game (which took quite a few hours), I read up on their Cartoon Guides via their official website. They were rather cute and helpful to beginners and quite funny actually. Their website is very informative and if you plan to play this game, I suggest you browse through it while downloading the game as well.

While this is a Free to Play game, don’t expect it to be totally free. Sure, it could be if you don’t want any of the goodies which come via the Item Mall. It seems every “Free” game out there has these and this one is no exception. JoyMax has to make money too ya know!

Once I was finally able to make my character I was a bit disappointed. Very minimal customization was allowed. Then another big bummer came when I tried to login – the servers can be full! I haven’t read a “try again later” message when trying to login to something since the days of dial-up on AOL.

I played my character up to level 10 or so. The server was overcrowded (once I was finally able to get in) which made me quite laggy. The directions of what to do once inside the game were minimal and confusing. The map doesn’t show the full area which was highly annoying.

While I didn’t get to enjoy the possible positives of the game, I will list them here. They do offer a private and street stall to sell items. There is a message/friends tool which would have been quite nice too I am sure. There is also something called a Guardian System which means that high levels can help new players and they are rewarded for doing so.

Overall, the game looks a lot better on their website than it does while actually playing it. I was overly annoyed by this game after just a few hours. However, it is worth a try. It is free to try and who knows you may just like it more than I did.