Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar Review

Eurogamer’s Rich Stanton has written an incredibly scathing review of Mythic’s free-to-play RPG Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar, which ends with a score of 2/10. Here’s a couple of pretty telling snippets:

The point is not that in-app purchases make this grind easier and faster by giving you better kit and therefore fewer hits to kill enemies. The point is that this is not a fun combat system, whether you’re paying or otherwise – it doesn’t need precision, or strategy, or thought. It’s mindless. Combine this with constant lag, as well as an average frame-rate of 15fps (which can and will drop lower) and the incredibly regular crashes, and you wonder whether this game should have been released at all.

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It’s not going too far to say that Ultima Forever’s design goes to some evil places. Over time (and regularly) your equipment will degrade. This has to be fixed with silver keys in considerable quantities, so is a constant bleed on your mid-tier currency for nothing other than playing the game. If you make the mistake I did, of clicking ‘repair all’ at the start of a dungeon to save time, you’ll find that it uses Gold Keys for the privilege of saving five taps. Such sleight-of-hand is the rule.

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Someone whose opinion I respect told me that this is a game made with love. If love is surface-deep reference, a painted mask to hide behind, then that is true. Ultima’s character has been corrupted and trammelled into a grotesque parody of itself in Ultima Forever. This game is a desecration.

There is an oft-deplored tendency among critics, hated by developers, of reviewing what one thinks should exist rather than assessing what’s there. So I’ll hold my hands up. EA and Mythic; I am truly sorry. But then, I thought I was playing a game called Ultima.