The title pretty much sums up how I feel about this game. Requiem: Rise of the Reaver is a type of MMORPG I genuinely miss. This game has a certain charm about it that just.. left me intrigued that it never achieved greater success than it did.

Requiem: Rise of the Reaver is nothing special. It’s your basic MMORPG: It utilizes a basic tab-target combat system, it has a very limited character creator, and you essentially move from quest hub to quest hub. It’s everything you’d expect from an MMORPG released when it was released, but at the same time, its dark, gore-filled depressing tone has a certain level of charm to it that I’ve never seen elsewhere.

Take the combat for example. Yes, it utilizes a basic type of tab-target combat, but at the same time, while your abilities look fairly average, and the animations are nothing to write home about, seeing every enemy explode, end up dismembered, decapitated or worse brought a sense of anticipation I’d not experienced before. Anticipation to see what would happen to this monster next. Which of their arms would fall off. If the monsters’ head would explore. Whether or not we’d end up with 3 separate pieces rolling down the hill.

Or the difficulty. Dungeons in this game were horrendously difficult. Mrs Stix and I entered one appropriate for our level, and every single monster fight along the way was a terribly difficult struggle. This was with 2 of us and against a single monster – with special gear given to us at the beginning of the game! I couldn’t imagine the difficulty of even outdoor world activities had we not been given those items.

At its core, Requiem is a very traditional MMORPG. And while we only invested approximately 4 hours into this game I can say with certainty that it was one of the more unique MMOs I’ve ever come across. And I’ve played quite a few of them, let me tell you.

I wish we had more developers innovating like was done with Requiem. We need interesting combat systems-varied systems all together to keep us hooked, enthralled, interested in continuing to play.