When Steam introduced the free to play MMO games into their marketplace, I decided to have a look at a couple.
The first is Global Agenda.
From the Steam page:
2155. From the ashes of the devastating Third Great War rose the Commonwealth, an oppressive world government determined to control the entire planet. The few remaining independent factions retaliate the only way they can, with elite teams of special operatives trained in advanced warfare tactics and equipped with high-tech weaponry. The future of humanity is their battleground, where knowledge is power, technology is a race, and everyone has a Global Agenda.
The game has only 4 classes, but there is a lot of flexibility in skills and abilities, to tailor the classes to the style of play you want. Of the 4 classes (Medic, Recon, Assault and Robotics) I chose Recon, the stealth class. The intro quest is rather good, as it has a lot of cut scenes that help tell the story and provides hints of what you can achieve in the future.
The game sells itself as a fusion of Role Playing and First Person Shooter in a MMO format. There is that, as the action is fast and requires that FPS “twitch” ability. Once nice touch is the lack of numerous “spells”, with special effects requiring to be equipped into a slot, that then can be activated by the mouse button (although you can also use keyboard keys). Swapping between melee, ranged and special effect items is as simple as rotating your mouse wheel or hitting 1,2, or 3 on the keyboard.
The locations are expansive and there is a wide variety of missions to help players level up. The missions themselves are tradition MMO quests, go there and kill 10 rats type of thing. But with the deadly combat, you need to keep your wits about you. Movement and combat is also in 3 dimensions, as all characters have jump packs. The flight is limited, but allows avoiding terrain and speads up movement nicely
Global Agenda is using a store based services, providing such things as XP boosts, upgrade accounts to “Elite” (better rewards) and a second in game currency that can be used with special vendors.
As a game, I enjoyed Global Agenda more than the other example I tried (the now cancelled Tabula Rasa). Nothing really new, but the game is well executed and has the added bonus of having a lot of Player v Player and clan based warfare. Well worth a look (and you have access to all the content for free).
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