Metascore

Mixed or average reviews - based on 22 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 144 Ratings

  • Summary: The spectacular space combat, commerce, and exploration game, whose breathtaking graphics, special effects, and intricate gameplay provide an experience unlike any other. Played on the Internet, this massively multiplayer online persistent world game takes place in a universe teeming with life every hour of every day. Take on the role of a spaceship captain cruising around the universe, trading, fighting and communicating with other players and create a life beyond imagination. Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 13 out of 22
  2. Negative: 3 out of 22
  1. A robust tutorial. Classless character builds. Overwhelmingly open-ended gameplay. Ship designs you’ll need to wear a bib for. And a breed of PvP that’ll make adrenaline junkies sign up for rehab. Sci-fi worshipers: This is your Mecca.
  2. A fresh breath in the MMORPG genre. In some respects it's ELITE on steroids.
  3. You must have patience and be excited about non-structured gameplay in order for it to be worth the price of admission. Action hungry thrill-mongers will do themselves a favor by steering clear of this one.
  4. 40
    While it's not the unplayable mess of the "World War II Online" debut, Eve is still firmly in the beta stage in all respects except monthly fees. [19 June 2003]

See all 22 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 47 out of 69
  2. Negative: 17 out of 69
  1. A really milestone MMO. I'm playing it for more than 5 years and it does not became dull. I like it sci-fi style and sandbox mechanics. However since it is not theme park MMO you need to be able to put some effort in the game to make it fun. Expand
  2. 8
    incredibly deep and would take months to experience enough content to make a sufficient review. combat and the game in general may be a little slow paced, but that only contributes to the careful and calculated atmosphere the game promotes. Sci-fi fans eat your hearts out, because this is the best space MMO out there. Expand
  3. Pros: Free content upgrades about every 6 months, a lot of gameplay potential if you can find it, good graphical quality for ship models and stations (however the backgrounds and most of the effects are still very lacking).

    Cons: Terrible community, terrible tutorials (there are jokes about how the game has a high learning curve, how ever this is only because the tutorials are rubbish and 99% of the community are too retarded to help), boring game mechanics, scams.

    There is a point where having it possible to do scams in a game adds a new depth to the game, but when every single contract, market offer and person is trying to scam you, it gets old incredibly fast.

    The game is a sandbox, which would be good if there was a lot to do, but really there isn't. There aren't really any goals even hinted at. You can set yourself goals but chances are you'll quit the game before you achieve them. You can pretty much either go into Industry, Missioning or PvP, but they all play out pretty much the same. Lock onto target, activate modules, wait, then repeat or warp out.

    You would think that a game set in space would feel huge and open, but EVE Online is possibly the most claustrophobic game I have ever played, when warping between things, it feels like you're in a small room crammed in with a load of other people.

    Over all the game is worth a try, because 300,000 people can't be wrong, the game can be fun. How ever most PvP results in who ever has the bigger blob wins, industry is all about who can sit around in a belt wasting all day, while they make as small a profit as possible thanks to macro miners ruining prices of minerals and products. Missioning results in you asking for a room full of NPCs, warping to the room full of NPCs, killing all the NPCs in the most mind numbing combat any game has ever made and then warping back and asking for a new mission.
    The game really needs more focus. I just don't understand why anyone would really want to play EVE "Spreadsheets" Online all day, with pretty much you're only reward being more ISK, or a destroyed ship.
    Expand
  4. This game has what seems like some nice pros but there are some big cons, and after awhile you realize the pros are actually cons too. There's a steep learning curve, very steep. The game doesn't teach you everything, and there'll be things you still don't understand after six months of playing. You virtually cannot be successful by yourself in this game, you have to join up with corporations (their version of guilds) at one point to have any chance. The drawback to this is most of the time these corps (guilds) is just a method of the leaders to get the lower members to do all the work for their own goals and they reap most of your rewards. Also there's a lot of scamming and theft that goes on within corps and in the game in general. It takes incredibly long to do anything in this game, we're talking days and even months. Skilling your character to the top levels of one skill can take months, and there's lots of other skills you need. A max skilled character take years, while a decent character will take six months at least. There's no way to really make it go much faster as skilling takes place in real world time. For example, you pick a skill you want to level up and after one day or whatever (whether you're playing or not) you get that level up. It might not seem so bad, but there's high skill levels that require 30+ days for just one skill level, you're going to need multiple skills like that. It's very time consuming loading out your ship, you have to put multiple components into it. When you die, you lose everything on your ship. You have to start all over from scratch building your ship again. Factor in that you can't just get your ship and all the components you used in one place, you have to go all over the place to buy everything again. Travelling around takes forever too. Ship combat, while graphically looks good and appears quite complex is actually pretty boring. You target the other ship and set your weapons to fire, then you watch as the ships exchange fire back and forth until somebody dies or runs away. This might be alright in other games, but you're usually always outclassed by people playing the game longer than you because they can fly better ships. It's not because they have more resources than you either, it's only because they've been playing longer. You need certain skills levels to fly better ships and use better ship components. What's worse is even if you've been with the game for years and have the best ship possible, it doesn't matter because if you get jumped by 30 or 50 people in smaller much inferior ships, you'll still lose; once your awesome ship is destroyed you may have to spend a lot of time and resources to replace it, assuming you haven't gone bankrupt at that point. In real world terms, it's virtually your house burning down and you have to rebuild from scratch. Getting jumped by a lot people happens all the time. People wait in groups at the entrances to areas for people to wander in to attack them. If you come in with a valuable ship or a smaller group, they will lock you down so you can't run away and they'll call for all their buddies online to show up. It's happened on many occasions where really valuable ships get caught and hundreds (yes hundreds) of ships show up just to destroy it. The only way to move around is to try to sneak through or moving in well armed fleets, no guarantee though. Also due to the game mechanics, big ships have a hard time killing smaller inexpensive ships. This means even if you're flying a big mean ship, you can't kill the little ships so if enough of them are swarming you, you're dead. This means the fleet you're traveling with must have ships that can handle them. Again meaning you can't really do things on your own effectively. People also hunt you down if you're doing stuff in their controlled areas, constantly interrupting you from doing things. Much time will be spent trying to elude people. The social environment is horrible as well since the game is rife with scamming and distrust. You pretty much only trust your corp members (who some actually do try to steal from you or the corp or are spies for other corps....seriously this happens often). Anybody you met at random, you can assume they're going to try to kill you and they're going to assume the same about you. The game has no real ingame story and purpose, it's a sandbox. While great since you can come up with any goals you like, realizing those goals are very unlikely. It is exceedingly difficult to get ahead as the game is setup that way and the competition from others who've been playing the game longer than you. The worse con is everything takes so incredibly long because it's a subscription based game, you have to pay monthly to play. Trying to pay for the subscription with ingame money is too hard as you have to be decently skilled up (6 months at least), know people, and be playing constantly for that month to make enough to pay for that month. This game is a trap! Expand

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