The Secret World is… something. It’s an MMO that falls on the Guild Wars side of the mechanical spectrum. That is, a crucial, limited number of abilities you can access at any given time (but can switch) vs. the WoW-style of an abundance of abilities, but most of them range between situational to useless unless you spec into them. The GW-style tends to make combat much harder than WoW-clones, but also more interesting and engaging to play.

Much like Star Wars: The Old Republic, a major focus of the game is in storytelling. Where Secret World has a leg up is in atmosphere and the characters. I’ve yet to finish the first area (I’m in the third map for it), but I can tell you definitively that the characters you meet, what they’re doing, and how they interact with one another is so much more interesting than anything I witnessed in SWTOR.

However, and this is my largest issue with the game. It’s unoptimized as all get-out. Even after playing Archeage, I’ve never seen an MMO this bad. Just logging into the game takes 1.2 million kilobytes (on DX9 with the sliders on 0). And I’ve witnessed memory leaks drag that as high as 1.6 million. I say witnessed, because I know it can get worse, but I never got the chance to see how bad it can get before it crashed my entire computer. I now periodically monitor the game in my Task Manager and reboot if memory usage gets too high.

You’ll also have to frequently tab out or use the game’s built-in web browser to look up what you’re supposed to do, because a lot of the game’s puzzles are ridiculously convoluted. And can bug. I’ve yet to encounter a bug that halted progression entirely. But I’ve had to wait, or repeat steps, or in one instance even log out of my character and back in to get the mission to advance.

I got the game on sale, and it has certainly been worth the price in story and character interaction alone. And as I understand it the game used to be a lot harder than it is now. But it’s still pretty hard.

Edit: I’m looking forward to Bladestorm: Nightmare releasing on Steam!