As I was saying yesterday, I reasoned that, since I’d quite enjoyed the 5 hours I’d played of Perfect World’s “Rusty Hearts” MMOBrawler, it wouldn’t be entirely outside the realm of reason to download their “Perfect World International” MMORPG.

No, seriously, that’s the name of it.  The “International” in this case stands for English, I suppose, and it’s reasonably good English for a free MMO from China.  There’s the occasional bit of awkwardness in the in-game text but nothing unforgivable, and there are some delightful word choices.

For example:  I’m playing a pet class, and I have to monitor my pet’s happiness level which is closely tied to his hunger level.  One of the hunger states is “Peckish”, one of those words that will evoke a giggle from anyone who’s ever memorized the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch.

Said pet class is called a “Venomancer”, by the way, which is a very odd word.  It’s apparently often referred to as a “Werefox”, for reasons which should become immediately obvious:

Yes, I have fox ears and a tail.  I could have had bunny ears and bat wings if I’d wanted, just so you know.

I’ve also got little butterflies flying around me because I completed an armor set and am getting a buff from it, I think.  There’s a lot of sparkly stuff in this game.

The Venomancer is notorious for being the super-easy-to-level Class Of Noobs, which means that it’s perfect for me.  It’s also probably a good idea if I don’t play a tank class as I tend to take games a little too seriously if I’m playing a tank.

I got sucked in for about four hours on the first play session, which is always a good sign/bad sign thing with an MMO.  Good in that it’s a lot of fun so far and is ticking all the right boxes as far as sending me for quests and giving me rewards and encouraging me to roam further and further afield to find the next quest hub and so on, bad in that getting deep into a new MMO is never a really good idea.

The cash shop is a little more front-and-center than some other f2p games I’ve tried but I’ve been mostly able to ignore it.  There seems to be a lot of in-game-currency to cash shop trading which goes on, which means that in theory I can earn enough in-game currency to get stuff out of the cash shop without spending, well, cash.

IF I keep playing long enough to care about that, that is.  🙂

It’s obviously far too early to give it a definitive thumbs up/thumbs down, but it’s pretty and seems to have an active community.  I’ll be logging back in again for sure..