Heading into Los Angeles, I knew of two Massive Multiplayer Online games that I had high hopes for, Webzen’s Huxley and PlayNC’s Tabula Rasa. Both of which come from companies that I consider in some part to follow a trend of throw away game experiences on par with the Korean gaming market. Over the past few days, I found myself touching both of the booths multiple times, both having me already sold on their products, the only question was; which game is better?

Webzen’s Huxley

There has been plenty of talk about Huxley, essentially, its an MMOFPS that isn’t bad. Lets forget for a second the massively multiplayer online failure that was Planetside. Huxley adds in fresh new graphics, a game engine that feels similar to the Unreal Tournament games, and a persistent online world, offering player versus player first person combat that is on par with most other small scale shooters.

Huxley allows players to create their own gear load outs, giving the player plenty of options on how they chose to play the game each sitting. Most MMOFPS games have an issue in the character class dependencies, as well as an overall unplayable physics system that just isn’t fun for the competitive crowd. Huxley changes that.

I found myself mowing through the opposition in the instanced player versus player battlefield. The play area available was an urban town, with a surprising amount of space to move around. The opposing sides compete for control of various towers around town. As I said above, I had no trouble killing my enemies. I didn’t feel overly squishy or paper made, but I felt rewarded for spending the time to aim and choose shots as well as pick my fights.

Above all, I saw a game that I would definitely be interested in becoming apart of. As I even type, I feel the urge to head back and play a few frags out. The only problem I saw that a bit of choppiness in the demo system. This could be attributed to the use and abuse of a public demo PC, but it looked more like a memory leak to me, as well as the graphics requiring a beefy system to really flourish on.

Gameplay: 5/5
Graphics: 4/5
Sound: 4/5
Controls: 4/5
Concept: 4/5

Overall: 4/5

Huxley has a community participant in me. The game was both addicting, and interesting, two things that believe it or not, don’t always go together. With all of the hype I’ve read for the past few months, I wasn’t let down even for a second. SUN is a different story though.