Then why did you just spend 20 minutes explaining your great plan in excrutiating detail?

While the players can choose how they will look cosmetically and can buy a staggering amount of cosmetic gear or earn it by rising in faction rank, armor is still included in charms that promote the aforementioned role trinity. While you can use your hard earned currency gained from questing or PVP for the greater gear, The Secret World also has an incredibly devious crafting system that will allow you to craft weapons, armor, and glyph attachments. By using raw materials acquired by looting corpses or disassembling items you don’t require and arranging them into certain patterns in your assembler along with the proper toolkit, you will gain a new item. While there are quests that teach you what the different patterns are, the easiest way to discover them is through disassembly. You are even required to use crafting for certain missions.

Being of a certain faction entitles you to a differing storyline of your rise through the ranks, and The Secret World allows players to group with whomever they please and can even form Cabals (Guilds) with differing faction members. However, Player vs. Player has not been ignored, and is a major boon on those who stick to PvE. There are a total of three different battlegrounds that will contribute to faction wide bonuses should your allied teams succeed that include better survivability and greater XP gain. All three play differently, as Stonehenge plays like your average 5 on 5 arena match, El Dorado serves as a mobile capture and defense of sacred relics that gives your team buffs when planted like a banner, and the Fusang Projects serve as more of a free for all battleground similar to World of Warcraft’s Wintergrasp Hold, but faction battles between all three happen constantly, with the buff evaluation happening every 20 minutes. While there is a fear that a faction imbalance could set favor to one of the three factions, it has not made itself wildly apparent yet.

What really makes the gameplay shine is its presentation, which makes the experience even richer. Blue Mountain, one of the later areas of Solomon Island, can become a nightmare to quest in once the night cycle kicks in, as the entire area is shrouded in a funnel of darkness, obstructing the moon. When the pitch black night combines with a severe lack of working lampposts, it makes for some tough adventuring since you don’t know where attacks will come from unless you stay on the lit path. The somewhat stereotypical voice acting of faction members are exactly what you would expect them to be, with the fast-talking Illuminati, the ‘Wise man once said’ teachings of the Dragon, and campy lines of the townsfolk credit the feel of the 1980s B-Movie horror genre. While the game scenes aren’t always of an atypical American beachside wilderness sprinkled lightly with undead and a dash of old god for good measure, but Funcom definitely does well in portraying that which is The Secret World.

Undead and deep ones are a little less scary when you slap on a few sledgehammer blows to their faces drenched in chaotic magic.

That being said, the actual graphics of the game will not win any awards and I can honestly say that The Secret World was the first game where it openly chugged during each quests’ introduction. There have been many (and I’m not talking about a scant few) instances during the pre-order head start and beyond countless times in the beta where my computer would rev up so loud that I thought that it was going to be giving its Last Will and Testament. While it is possible for lesser PC’s with DirectX9 to experience the game in a suitable manner, there still seems to be some problems with character/backdrop rendering.

I didn’t know how to react to The Secret World at first when I partook in its second beta test a few weeks ago, as well as its PVP weekend, but the four day head start cemented my position with the title in question. While I enjoyed the complexities, atmosphere, and, to a certain degree, its combat, I honestly do not believe that I will continue my subscription to the world behind the locked door that mother dearest never told me to open, even after over a thousand words of praise. While the experience was great, I don’t believe that The Secret World will stay afloat with a subscription base, but I will definetly play the rest of the content until my first 30 days are up. I’ve finished 2 out of the 3 major areas in about 30 hours of game time, about a fifth of the time I spent on RIFT or TERA. If TSW was a pay once a la Guild Wars, it would be a definite pick up for MMO enthusiasts, and while Free to Play seems to be hot topic for MMO’s in the now, I honestly have no idea how they could pull in enough money from cosmetic items alone to sate the servers and the shareholders without a massive game overhaul.

The Secret World could fall into the rare category of a gaming “experience”, where you can’t accurately describe it due to so many crazy unknowns that the game throws at you, or it changes the formula for its genre so drastically and works. The gameplay is solid, while the slightly campy story thrusts you forward into a mythos that most gamers haven’t seen before. The title’s foundations, while a little shaky in some places (User Interface), are balanced out in others (Assembly, Tutorials), and the feel of dread from the darkness, sun, and shadows makes the experience noteworthy, almost timeless. However, unless you are into PvP, The Secret World is a short experience (despite the inclusions of a major dungeon in every area)…but there’s no denying it’s a rich one.

The Secret World was purchased by Blistered Thumbs for the purpose of review and the campaign was played through to 2/3rds completion on a PC over forty hours. 

If you think that James’ written video game review is comparable to a Dunwich Horror, you can leave him a Selected Letter at his E-Mail, or you can wgah’nagl fhtagn over to his Twitter and partake in a little of his mundane insanity in 140 or less.