Catapulted from the exaggerated anime bosoms of Tencent – China’s biggest gaming company, into a crowded mobile and PC gaming market during the summer season, “Tarisland” arrived on June 21.
The game sprung from the fallout of Blizzard pulling its games out of China early last year, which left Chinese players who were addicted to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like “World of Warcraft (WoW)” high and dry.
It then needs to be said that “Tarisland” is a “WoW” knockoff and an embodiment of the “Can I Copy Your Homework? Yeah, Just Change It Up A Bit So It Doesn’t Look Obvious You Copied” meme, and it certainly feels, sounds, and looks that way.
The game’s story, if you can even call it that, is bad in the sense that it is so uninteresting to the point that having the option to skip the story scenes seems like an act of mercy.
After creating their characters, “Tarisland” opens with a city under attack and plunges players into the heat of the action. After fighting several generic monsters, players get thrown into a big raid-style battle against a dragon.
Following the defeat of the dragon, the game flashes back to several days earlier, showing the events that led up to the opening.
Writing this review a couple of days after experiencing the above, I fail to remember what the flashbacks were about other than, once again, the player character is an amnesiac Chosen One cliche in a very generic fantasy story. Another aspect that I remember is how bland the voice acting was.
Most of the characters have voices that either do not match their personalities or clash with what the characters are doing. Then, there is how lazy the English localization is for the vocal recording, writing, and programming.
In one of the first scenes in the flashback, one character talks to another character about my character. The former’s voiced line asks, “What about him?” while the subtitle reads, “What about him/her?”
The really funny part is that I chose the female gender for my character. This happens several times in the game. The developers truly did not care about putting any effort into the game’s localization. Did I mention that the in-game descriptions are voiced by the TikTok AI?
Beyond that, it still does not look good for “Tarisland.” In everything the game does, other games—as in, its recent competitors—have done better, with more complexity and innovation. Take the recent Wuthering Waves for instance.
It has the same dull narrative and voice acting as this game, but the combat and gameplay in that game are far more engaging with varied mechanics because it is modern. “Tarisland’s” gameplay is a relic of the past, aping off what MMORPGs were like in the early 2010s or even mid-2000s.
“Tarisland’s” “Pick a Class > Upgrade Skill Tree > Do Quests/Raids > Get Equipment to Increase Arbitrary Stats > Repeat” gameplay loop is extremely generic and leaves very little room for innovation.
However, credit where it is due, each class has one of two skills they can choose to specialize in. In group settings, particularly dungeon raids with several players, each class and their chosen skills will aid in team synergy and how well they can succeed.
As I started by choosing the Archer class, the first default skill tree was “Tamed Beast,” which gave me access to poison arrows and the ability to summon a tiger and/or a hound to attack targets while I shot them from afar.
Several hours later, I unlocked a second skill tree that I can switch to called “Hunting,” which focuses only on different arrow attacks and damage amplification, but that’s the extent of the class’ depth, and it is the same for the other eight classes.
Another relatively huge problem with the game is that the equipment does not physically change how characters look. One of the great things about modern RPGs is how distinct players can make their game characters look with the gear items they have equipped.
In “Tarisland,” an Archer with Level 1 gear will look the same as another Archer with Level 50 gear unless they pay real money to unlock costume sets, which is not cheap. One set that I spotted, called the Shadow’s Wrath, costs a whopping RM185 to buy and wear.
To be fair, half of the time, I could never see how my character looked the same, and I can appreciate how messy the HUD and UI are, especially when 100 other players are standing around at the same time.
One problem compounding on another makes it clear that “Tarisland” is dead on arrival, especially with bigger, more unique, and more versatile games released just after it. Within a month, no one will be playing this relatively derivative game, except maybe players from China. Platform(s): Android, iOS, Windows
