With the threat of an economic collapse on our minds, Sony Online Entertainment's upcoming massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), Free Realms, is a pleasant distraction. Whereas the competition casts you as blood elves and warriors, this one comes with roughly 20 odd jobs that range from your typical wizard to a mailman and even a chef. Even better, you'll download it for free without using a credit card for registration. Now that's a recovery plan we can get behind.
Thus far, everything about Free Realms impresses us. In addition to customizing a character, you'll receive a personal Facebook/MySpace-inspired page that lets you showcase your achievements and communicate with other players. You also have the option of experimenting with each character type, a welcome change of pace from games like World of Warcraft that force you create separate personas. This allows you to ditch your chef's cooking equipment temporarily in favor of the ninja, brawler, miner, blacksmith and a host of other professions; you can easily swap between characters. There's more to this, however, than simple costume changing. Each profession comes with a series of activities. The mailman, for example, delivers packages, while the ninja goes on stealthy combat missions.
You'll also take part in 2-D minigames to gain experience and complete objectives. To demonstrate this, SOE gave us a peek at a mining game that plays similar to Bejeweled in that you match three or more of the same symbol to make them disappear, except instead of swapping them, you simply drag the cursor across groups of symbols. In this case, we had to eliminate them in order to get a piece of ore from the top of the screen to the bottom. Doing this carried over to a second minigame in which we smacked the ore with a hammer to extract it, and then another minigame where we carefully tipped a container to pour the melted ore into a mold, the goal to create magic wands.
The aforementioned match three formula also pops up in the Harvesting minigame, except instead of mining ore, you make 15 watermelons or 20 vines disappear.
Back in the 3-D world, you're free to race go-karts, attend concerts, train your pet (we've seen dogs thus far), go on quests with friends or explore at your leisure (special warp stones let you instantly travel to another area). Keep in mind that Free Realms is more of an online hangout than a Lord of the Rings-inspired MMO. No sides are at war, nobody dies (instead, your character loses consciousness for a limited amount of time) and you won't engage your friends in a race to see who levels up the quickest.
It's also family friendly. Kids under the age of 13 cannot use a microphone to communicate, and instead must rely on pre-set responses that keep them away from trash talkers and potential child predators; older gamers can opt for voice chat as well as come up with their own character names instead of using a randomizer. And with such a broad target audience, you'll never see blood or need to memorize the controls. You can either maneuver your character using the WASD keys or the mouse to point and click (the PlayStation 3 version uses the DualShock 3 controller).
Unless something goes horribly wrong, Free Realms should quickly become a premier online destination for gamers just looking to kill time and/or enjoy an MMO without a subscription fee. That's great news for folks looking to save some cash. Look for it on PC within the next few months, along with the PlayStation 3 version soon thereafter.
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