The Secret World Review
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Good solo play has been a cornerstone of successful MMOs for years, and quite right too; doing your own thing alongside a world of others is an underrated pleasure. The increasing focus on it in games like Star Wars: The Old Republic doesn't do much more harm than sound the occasional conceptual bum note.Considering that the game has both a monthly fee and a heavy focus on microtransactions, we may see the game go towards a free-to-play direction in the future, much like other MMOs, if the subscriptions don't work out.
But The Secret World's problems run deeper than that. It has the multiplayer content - dungeons climaxing in testing boss encounters (strong), a few player-versus-player game modes (sloppy) - but they're free-floating, connected to the rest of the game by umbilical strands of story but little sense of community and a lack of commitment to the massively multiplayer dream.
When you're asking players to pay a subscription of £11.49 a month, that's a big problem. It doesn't help that the launch game is quite buggy and just scraping the minimum amount of content you need to qualify as a "premium" MMO, although developer Funcom is promising monthly updates.
Is it worth trying it out for that first, free month, though? That's an altogether different question, and the answer is a qualified but encouraging 'yes'.
