AION 2 Review So Far

Reviewed on: PC
Code provided by the publisher.

With something as massive as an MMO like AION 2, it wouldn’t be fair to give a full review quite yet, so here we are. Let's start with what usually goes wrong but was somehow avoided here: AION 2 launched with over 400,000 players piling in at once, and the servers held. No queue nightmares, no rollbacks, no three-day apology posts. That alone puts it ahead of a depressing number of MMO launches from the past few years, and it meant the rest of us could actually get on with playing instead of refreshing a status page.

The opening is a little on rails, which had me worried for the first stretch. Stick with it. Roughly an hour in the game opens up and reveals what it actually is, and what it is turns out to be stunning. The world is lush and dense and genuinely beautiful in a way screenshots undersell, with environments that reward wandering off the path. The graphics and sound design are both top tier, and that extends to the stuff MMO players actually care about day to day: the mounts, the pets, the cosmetics. All of it looks great. This matters more than it sounds, because so many recent MMOs have shipped looking gorgeous while feeling completely hollow underneath. AION 2 has substance behind the presentation. It’s truly stunning!

My one real complaint so far is the XP structure. Experience comes mainly from the main story quest, not from killing enemies, and that's a strange choice for a genre where grinding mobs with friends has always been part of the appeal. It narrows how you can progress and makes the world feel slightly less alive than it should. That said, it's not enough to sour what's otherwise a tremendous experience.

Verdict

Either way though, MMO players have been starving for years, and this is a proper meal. We're eating good right now, and if the early days are anything to go by, AION 2 is only going to get bigger from here. I am absolutely shocked at how wonderful AION 2 is already and can’t wait to see what the future holds as I get to end game.

If we had to the score the game up to this point: