Re-Visited : Guild Wars - Prophecies

Guild Wars. The pay-once-free-for-life MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) that left huge tremors of spastic joy through the gaming community slightly more then a year ago. Actually, CORPG (Competitive Online Role Playing Game) would be a better term for this game. Only the cities and outposts are shared with other players, and when you leave them, the game creates the whole seperate map just for your party, hence eliminating Kill Steals and TK's and looting. This is called instancing.

After being away from the land of Tyria for almost a year, I'm finally back into it and enjoying every moment of it.

Everything that I loved about it is still here, with minor modifications and improvements that make it all the more interesting to play. Improved network code, better skill animations and minor GUI tweaks make the experience a richer thing.

The PvP, as always is frantic as hell and really random but never managing to feel unfair. It just plays so well!! I had this PvP once and I was a Ranger/Monk with 3 teammates against a party with 2 Monks, one Elementalist and one Warrior. Elementalist and Warrior we downed with relative ease but the 2 Monks were giving us problems. They keept healing each other!!

So finally, it was only me and the two monks fighting it out with the rest of our parties dead. I would attack with my bows and they would heal. When I ran out of Energy, I ran in circles to avoid being attacked. Then the two monks attacked me. Me, being a half-Monk could also heal so I healed and they attacked and they healed and I attacked. For half-an-hour it was a tie. We were just not doing any significant damage to each other. Support monks being support Monks, they had very little firepower. So I could heal as they attacked me.

For 30 minutes this went on, me crippling them making them walk 50% slower while I use my running skills to run and heal myself somewhere further. Then argh!! DISCONNECTED!!

But oh well.. The single-player game is very absorbing although it takes ages to complete it. I took 155 hours to get through it the first time round... It was worth playing every minute of it. Guys, if you're sick and tired of paying subscription fees to games that you rarely play or have a hard time justifying the price, splurge a little bit of money to get this game and you will never regret it. Trust me, I never did and never will. I may cost a pretty penny for now, but it will be so much more satisfying then your standard run-of-the-mill online game.

System Specs
Minimum:Pentium 3 1.8 GHz or equivalent, nVidia GeForce 4 MX 420 or equivalent, 2GB hard disk space, 256MB RAM, dial-up connection

Recommended:Pentium 4 2.0 GHz or equivalent, nVidia GeForce 6600GT or equivalent, 4GB hard disk space, 1GB RAM, broadband

Pros:Very good graphics, relatively lag-less, immersive, good PvP

Cons:Not alot really

Final Verdict: 89%