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- Nexon
- Nexon
- Nexon
- Nexon
MapleStory 2
Released On: Oct 4, 2018
Metascore
Available after 4 critic reviews
5.7
All Platforms
Is MapleStory 2 worth getting into right now? Yes, it is. There is an awesome event going on, Mapleoply, where you play a version of monopoly that has various rewards on the board. One being "Roto Air Taxi" walkies that allow you to take a free helicopter ride to any map. No better time than now at the launch of an MMO to just level and have fun then when there are a bunch of people around to do dungeons with. If you can find a class you enjoy playing or something you enjoy doing give it a try for that.
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 20 User Ratings
5.7
40% Positive
8 Ratings
8 Ratings
25% Mixed
5 Ratings
5 Ratings
35% Negative
7 Ratings
7 Ratings
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 20 User Ratings
5.7
40% Positive
8 Ratings
8 Ratings
25% Mixed
5 Ratings
5 Ratings
35% Negative
7 Ratings
7 Ratings
It is an RPG game made in Korea.
It's a pretty well-made game.
I think Minecraft and RPG games are combined.
When you think of Dragon Quest Builders, it's easy to understand.
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Honest Review - Short and Sweet
Reminds me of the day I got an N-64 and played Mario 64 for the first time. Pure joyful exploration covering a surprisingly complex MMO skeleton. Worth a play, or even a shift in thought towards what the future of MMO Gaming will become.
Pay Structure: Free to play the game with the option to pay for pricy RNG outfits or the more useful functional add-ons - ( Bot fishing and Easy Gathering through a badge purchase and/or Unlimited Teleporting and other benefits through a well-priced premium service).
Combat: Fun and interesting combat. Well thought out combat trees that are complex enough to satisfy the tactical itch without requiring a think tank to figure out the effects of one skill over another.
Visuals: A fun departure from the norms. It feels like Minecraft had a baby with Mario. This game runs smoothly in most situations with the exception of world boss battles which will bring even an RTX Card to its knees due to the 200 plus people attacking a giant boss.
Endgame: Worth hanging in there until the end. Hard mode content requiring 10 man groups with coordination. More content expected for the future, but pure and simple this game will keep you busy and fill you with some sense of accomplishment within the realms of the game.
Summary: Give it a shot. You will reach Max level in about 25-30 hours and then the game will begin - Socialize, Hunt Trophies, Play Mini- Games, Defeat Bosses, Grind fun and Powerful Gear, Enchant with reasonable RNG, Build your own House and Invite your friends to complain about your creativity. All around a good game.
DMOB
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[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]
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Combat: 7/10
The combat is smooth and fun to play but lack sustenance. No talent tree, the skill tree is extremely simplified and other players of the same class will most likely play exactly the same way that you play your character. Simply put, there is zero room for diversity outside of there being different classes. You cannot make your character shine brighter than another of the same class by customizing the way your character play.
Graphics: 7/10
The game looks great aesthetically but that's it. it is a cute cubic world filled to the brim with chibis and cute monsters that doesn't exude any kind of fearsome presence. This, however, results in a lack of "epicness" when it comes to boss battles and there was never a moment where I was "Woah! This monster looks way too strong for me to charge head on.", I was more likely to try to cuddle and hug the big bad dragon than to feel threatened by it. While some may enjoy this cute paradise, this style of art become tiresome after a while if there isn't any emotional moment to break the monotony of cute teddy bears and rainbows.
Story: 6/10
It was okay, nothing more, nothing less. The game started with a nice story tailored for each class but after the tutorial levels are done, this "class story" is completely gone and you are left with a single storyline, making leveling other classes more of a chore since there is no variance in story. The story itself is interesting enough at most, plain bad at worse.
Overall content: 6/10
There is a truck load of things to do in Maplestory 2, that much is certain, but what deters from it is how poorly implemented a lot of it is. The main issue lies on how pay to play or pay to bypass the grind a lot of activities are. For example, fishing will require either a tremendous amount of time and effort spent grinding or a credit card to pay for the auto-fishing feature. This is just one example of many bad design choices. This is a game we are talking about, not some maid service. Games are supposed to be fun to play, not a chores that you want to pay someone, or something else, to do for you.
Leveling: 4/10
It's way too fast, empty of meaning and without any epic journey to becoming a great hero. You follow the main storyline, which takes a few hours at best, and you reached engame level (50). The game holds your hand so much it's almost as if it was trying to play for you. With constant free teleport to the next objective, you will be done with the story with grayed unvisited areas on your world map because they've teleported you across the entire continent for free without making you do the actual journey there. Killing monsters is a complete waste of time as the game insensitive you to skipping as many fights as possible as they reward close to nothing, it would take you hours of murdering monsters of your level to do the same amount of experience that you gain from a quest that literally just ask you to talk to the NPC next to the NPC that gave you the quest.
Endgame content: 1/10
By far the worst part of this game and why Maplestory 2 is a terrible MMORPG. The endgame content is gated behind dailies and weeklies, which means you have to play the endgame like it's a job you have to do every single day rather than a game you play when you feel like playing. Want to spend your entire Saturday grinding dungeons for gear? You can't! 10 dungeons max per day, up to 30 a week, after which point you gain no gear from doing dungeons, only basic money currency and some experience. You want to level up that prestige level (which is basically the leveling process after reaching max level) ? Sorry you can't do that, you are limited to 1 level a day at normal leveling speed, after which your XP gain is reduced by 99.9999% until the daily reset. Oh, and make sure you do your daily missions, which range from tedious tasks to impossible to find object in other players housing.
Basically, Nexon took the "limitation" design philosophy that a lot of MMO have to the very extreme. There is zero insensitive to play past the 3-5 hours a week you'll need to run out of dungeons and the rest are just tedious dailies.
PvP: 0/10
Not. Even. Worth. Trying.
Absolutely ZERO skills involved. It is 100% gear dependent.
You will be fighting Credit Card warriors, not players.
Social: 10/10
This is the only place where Maplestory shines bright. The social aspect of the game is amazing. The game tries its best to help you get involved with other players, and it succeed very well at it.
The user created content also help boost the player interaction with other players as it is easy to show your content to other players.
Overall score: 5/10
While the social aspect of the game may be great, the game fails to deliver on the most important aspects of an MMORPG, the content itself. Even though it is packed with stuff to do, almost everything when it comes to gameplay was poorly implemented.
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What's the point of making your game an MMO if the best leveling method is a tedious single player story mode that lasts about 10 hours?
Exploration feels discouraged. While there are teleports between cities, there's no universal teleport.
So if you go out in the field, you're forced to walk all the way back.
Ah, except for Rotors Walkie Talkies, a one time use universal teleport which you can purchase for the low low price of 0,05 euros.
I tried asking in world chat if there was a free-to-play way of teleporting around, but the game demanded I pay 30 cents to send a message in world chat so I guess we'll never know.
This is Nexon so I expected microtransaction hell.
What I didn't expect were vouchers that fish automatically for you.
They actually recognize how dull their games is and are trying to get you to pay to not play it!
The game has a social focus and that's nice but there are a few issues.
You can play music, but there are "music ranks" and you raise these by playing music.
This means the moment you go to a city there's 10 people stacked on top of eachother spamming Clair de Lune.
You can also purchase a voucher that plays music automatically. No comment.
The only decent things are the minigames but those are scarce.
They also give mediocre rewards and they're based on your level so again you're pressured to waste 10 hours doing the story.
MS2 is trying to be both a social game and a dungeon crawl game, when there are games that do both of those much better.
Could be a decent game but needs to focus more on its social aspects and minigames.
Do away with predatory microtransactions and the instanced story mode, and make mobbing viable.
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BEWARE OF SPENDING ANY MONEY IN THIS GAME
Luckily me and my son where banned before I was just about to spend money on this game buying me and my son the transparency tokens to hide certain bits of armour. Im pretty glad it happened before hand as the tokens are a bit of a rip off at nearly £14 each to hide ugly armour or female looking earrings with stat boosts on your male character (seems like this is intentionally done to make people want to buy the tokens) .
I had only played the game for about 3 days with my son and not even spoke to any other players yet. Me and my son had just been working through the main story quests to level up before joining other players. Then day 3 came and I got home from work and my son wanted to play some games with me and both of us are unable to login.
I contacted their support to appeal this and was just advised they would not un-block the account as apparently my account was in violation of the policy regarding player behavior. That's it no other explanation so I cant see what we apparently done wrong to cause this and personally cant think of anything I could have done to cause this.
After reading several forums this seems to have been a common problem and even with people that have spent allot of money on the game and then to lose their progress and money spent.
I have now raised multiple tickets with their support to politely try and find out what we apparently did wrong as we have only been playing through the story quests together. Anyway all you get back from them is sorry you were in violation of our terms we will not un-block the account, thank you for understanding. Thats it, no actual evidence or advice to what you apparently done wrong.
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+ Player created content
+ Fun to play
++ Casual friendly
--- Predatory micro-transactions
--- P2W
--- Bugs, glitches and general errors
--- Toxic community of edgelords
--- Bots are out of control
--- Poor balance in classes
--- Hackers
--- Events cause severe server lag
--- Gear score system doesn't work
---- RNG for progression
*10/30/2018 update
After playing for a considerable amount of time now, and levelling up nearly 7 classes to 50+, I can see a strong pattern that many classes are really out of balance, Archers, Rune Blades and Thief classes are **** and need buffing and/or significant changes, very frustrating to level especially Thief which requires the patience of a saint in order to get to the 50s and only then starts to become somewhat 'good'
Hackers are out of control, score boards are filled with script kiddies using cheat engines and Nexon seems not to care and its not even been a month yet, bots are completely swarming the game destroying any dungeon runs. I see that problem in that Nexon, just doesn't know how to deal with the bots and lets face it, this game failed in Asia - personally, the poor class balance and the hacking situation is probably the reason.
*11/11/2018 update
Lowered review score down from 4 to 2, cDev update is horrendous and shines a very clear and bright light on how much RNG is emphasized for progression, meaning the player has to spend a very significant amount of time to grind out hard dungeons for weapons and armor with good stats, then more grind to get the materials to enchant, enchanting gear to +13 requires an insane amount of luck at 15% per attempt, each attempt costing over 4million meso in materials and as long as an hour per attempt with limited attempts per day with failure after failure are causing players to abandon the game, the players that are left are either haves or have nots which causes even more issues as running dungeons becomes more tedious, harder to find groups, guilds lose members and generally, this game is dying very rapidly.
The gear score system is a joke, it doesn't work too well. Far too many stats to micro-manage and its a common problem to have a lesser piece of gear with better stats than an epic or legendary piece leading to more grind and re-rolls in the hopes that RNG will favor with a better stat thats actually useful.
Let it be known that for all new players looking at these reviews, your LUCK/RNG is directly tied to your characters progression. Nexon keeps making the community angry with non-sense fixes or blindly refusing to fix the core issues, all the time - top guilds are selling carries for ridiculous amounts of meso, which invites too many players into buying from gold faming sites, everything is a crap shoot now.
PvP - is a train wreck as well, the class unbalance seriously hurts this department as well, classes like Archer are just not PvP viable period whilst other classes like Assassin and Wizard dominate with little or no skill required.
Maplestory 2 is a fun game, don't get me wrong but its filled with nickel and diming micro transactions and other offensive predatory transactions, such as paying $15 in order just to 'hide your helmet or cloak' - think about it for a second, your paying money to actually remove something.
Sooner or later, Gatcha gambling boxes will appear too, which will bring Nexon back into its glory as a nasty predatory publisher known for its vile business practice of milking everyone. Gone are the account bound items, almost everything now is character based - you purchased $99 founders package, all the fun stuff is just for one character - unlocked all that on a character you didn't care about or even deleted? Too bad, its gone to waste and you'll never get it back.
The actually game can be fun, although it is quite buggy and many aspects make little to no sense, the gear score system alone barely works, it is quite possible to have an inferior item with a higher gear score in fact, it is a very common problem. Already has a severe bot problems, gold spam is extremely bad and the game hasn't even technically launched yet.
Some boss fights make no sense, some of the boss mechanics are overpowered or extremely boring with massive HP pools to feign any real difficulty. That being said, the game can be fun to play outside of all the issues, which unfortunately does affect the experience. As for everything else, expect your usual issues such as P2W PvP too which will hurt the game for sure.
Player created content is a nice touch, although the player who created the content only gets a share of the merits assuming they actually sell the item in question. Obviously this is early days for MS2 and things could get better if Nexon want to play nice, and fix some of the problems but lets be real here, this is NEXON we're talking about, things 'could' get better if they could monetize that.
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