Recent reviews by Cryonic

It's okay

Cons:
It's pretty dog sh*t the game has bad controls, classes are super broken. If you're support your slow and super squishy. No matter how much boost you use the other 2 classes are faster than you. Marauder is just hella tanky and hard to kill and phantom or whatever it was called, basically has completely useless skills. you can turn invisible and run away for about 5 seconds and then die. Biggest issue is the contols are ABSOLUTE trash, turning radius is a joke at any speed. Flamebreath can not be outrun or escaped, if it hits you, you're dead the end, there's no defense against it. And there's not a single dragon in this game, those are wyverns not dragons. Despite all of that I did fairly decent in the matches i played because everyone else is equally getting screwed by the games shody mechanics, so there is that at least. Game is more about who is lucky enough to get behind you and use firebreath than it is about skill.

Pros:
Graphics are Decent I guess and that's pretty much the end of that list.

Feels like some mobile game re-skin.

I no longer recommend the game due to their choices in direction, the fact that they have mounts locked behind DLC, it's one thing to release story content and quests and such to be locked until DLC purchase. However, releasing something that is QOL an improvement for traveling faster and you lock it behind DLC. It's just a ridiculous display of money grubbing greed. Because they KNOW going into it, it's going to give an unfair advantage to those who have it vs those who don't. Thus, tipping the scales in the balance of the player base. What do I mean by that? Well now you have a pay to win advantage especially in PvP circumstances. If a group of individuals flagged for PvP and you're flagged for PvP run up on you, you can't escape. You can try to run but if they have mounts it's pointless. You're not escaping. They will just mount up and run you down. And this is just one example of the issues with directions they are moving in.

You could say "well just don't flag for PvP" okay well you're basically saying just don't play part of the game that you paid for. Which is ridiculous. There was another game that did this same thing with mounts, not long after it's player-base got so small it had to go from having a box price to play to free to play lol. I see this one going in the same direction.

The game itself on a base level is half-decent, but seems like every choice they make for it's direction they just continuously push it more into the direction of caring more about how much they can squeeze out of you while simultaneously shafting you disrespectfully.

The game is bad, the keyboard controls make no sense and are BADLY set up and can't be changed as far as I can see, making the game a nightmare to try and play.
On top of this, the game content itself is VERY basic and just not good.
I felt like I was playing a game I grabbed out of a $5 bin, that should have been released on PS1 back in the 90's.
Overall, it's just hard to even feel good about having bought the game once you consider the price of the game, feels like you've been scammed having paid that much money for it.
This is a $9.99 to $14.99 game AT MOST, anything beyond that is basically highway robbery if you ask me.

Freezes and crashes often, did it 5 times in the 117 minutes i spent in the game. Not sure if it was a failed download or what, didn't feel like it was worth a redownload to check. So, there's that.

Bought the game, takes 10 minutes to load every window. (which is odd that it loads so slow when I can play cyberpunk without issues since day one lol). Then get to your next loading window and it crashes. Fancy.
Then you load the game back up after having to close steam out entirely and log back in because it messed everything up. And get into the game after waiting another 10 minutes for the loading screen. And you realize within 50 seconds, that you wasted your money and your time downloading this. So you come here to warn others and then seek a refund immediately after lol.

Could only stomach playing a little over an hour of the game before I just hit AltF4 and uninstalled it.

The game worked fine and all of that, it's just super boring to play. SAO as a game... it seriously fell off on this one.

To put it simple, the keyboard control scheme for this game is ENTIRELY trash and makes it not worth playing, unless you own a controller of some kind. Not worth going out to buy one for just this game either as far as I can tell. So, if you don't already have one, then you might want to consider passing on this game.

I know a lot of people seem to be complaining about issues that they have had with this game, but in my experience, I have yet to encounter a single one of these issues. Now, maybe I'm just lucky, I don't know, but I can only go off of what I have played and seen myself. In my opinion, the game is ABSOLUTELY AMAZING, it's phenomenal honestly. I've never had any of the issues people claim exist in the game, not one.

The game is fun, exciting and has an engaging story-line, that you may find yourself connecting with at times. I don't want to give any spoiler, so I won't give any specific moments where this happened for me, but trust me they are definitely in there. Though the game is an RPG first, the combat definitely still feels smooth and fun.

Despite what a lot of people claim, you don't actually need an all powerful PC, I also played the game for several hours on a budget built PC of around $800.00 with 16GB of ram, an RX 570 GPU and a ryzen 3 2200G CPU and the game ran well on high graphics. So, keep that in mind if you're wondering if your PC can run it.

The only issue I would say that the game has, is that it does seem to be missing a few of the freedoms promised before release. Such as entering buildings, many of them the doors are locked and you can't open them. If memory serves, the buildings where all supposed to accessible, I could be wrong there, but I do believe that was a claim originally. It just seems like, some of the freedom we where meant to have, just isn't there. It's not enough to ruin the game by any means, but it is enough to be disappointing, which is the only real reason I can't give the game a 1010

Overall, as the game stands currently, I'd give it a solid 8.5/10

Update 11/23/2022
Game is still dope and many of the issues it did have, have been resolved. It's a pretty solid game, I wont go into much detail, but suffice it to say, I would bump it up to a 9/10

Update: 6/16/2023
Pretty sure they lied to all of us, if memory serves they said that the first big expansion would be free due to how badly they screwed up on launch. Looks like that was a lie after all. Go figure.