It starts slowly. The free trial takes you up to a little above level 7 — that’s the level you will likely be once you have done all the Hawksmouth quests and are about to move on to Aldenvault. I didn’t really begin to understand the game until I finished the newbie stuff which was not really that exciting. But it serves its purpose, which is to teach you how to play. That’s complicated enough.

Now that I have a decent idea of how to play the game and have been accepted into a High House, become a Citizen and can now freely travel through the known Shards of the Enclave, I’m becoming more and more excited about the game.

It still needs a LOT of polishing. The folks who translated the text to English are pretty arbitrary with the distinction between “Spirit” and “Soul”, which makes it interesting to figure out just what they mean when they send you to the Spirit Store or the Soul Store. They probably mean the other one. There are other translation errors, but that one is really annoying. There are broken quests. There is no means of fast travel that I’ve found, so you run a lot and going from one shard to another is a MAJOR hassle, but it probably should be something you don’t do casually.

Folks are friendly and willing to help with quests. It is an explorer and storyteller’s paradise. The PvP servers are extremely busy if you like that sort of thing (I know I would do horribly at it).

The only real downside for someone in the US, like me, is that I have to piggyback on the Euro servers because I can’t wait for Acclaim to get off their tushes and open the game!

If you can play the free Euro trial, it’s worth checking out… but get to level 7 before you say yes or no to it.