With a decent amount of time spent in a game, it's always hard to justify a negative review. To me it feels like if you really want to enjoy it, you need to go all in with ROI. In my opinion, this game isn't designed for casual players but since it's F2P, give it a try and decide for yourself :)


- Graphics & Story:
Characters and mounts are well detailed. The majority of the map aswell. I like the shiny overall look. The story is above standard and the rare cutscenes do look nice.

- Mounts & Idea:
It was refreshing to see a game that focusses around taming mounts, collecting them and fight with them. You can also turn them into a pet to accompagny you in dungeons and special zones. Aerial Combat truly makes fun.

- Dungeons & Fighting:
The Dungeons differ from eachother and are interesting. You can choose between: Guardian (Tank), Priest (Heal), Assassin, Mage, Ranger, Berserker and the controversial Trickster class (DPS). The skills and combos are nothing special but far from beeing bad and do look nice. Since i've picked a priest i can't really comment how good or bad the Action Combat is (where you aim with your cursor). But many switch to standard mode in aerial combat.

- Guilds:
Guilds are the bread and butter in Riders of Icarus. It's important to be part of an active guild in order to progress, not only in the endgame content, but in general. The playerbase declined significantly over the past few months and thus also the grouprequests in the Party Finder Board, nowadays it's hard to find enough "randoms" for anything. Since taming heroic mounts requires to bring their hp down to a certain point it's always nice to have friends to help you out with it. Same goes for strategy elaboration for the Titan Raids, Worldbosses and legendary dungeons which is impossible as a lone wolf. So do yourself a favor and search an active guild as soon as possible.

- Leveling & Exploring:
Don't rush the content! Do all the sidequest and explore the big world as this is by far the best part of this game. The gamemechanics are explained step by step and kept me interested while advancing. If you see a new mount, try to tame it or check what you need. The levelcap is raised up to 60 so lack of content really isn't a major problem in Riders of Icarus. Crafting seems standard but it bothered me, that you didn't have a complete list somewhere. The obtained recipies itself were strangely ordered that you had to look twice before finding what you were searching for.

But once you've reached that point where you are max level and saw everything, it really becomes a chore to progress.


- Taming mechanic:
What appeared at first as a nice minigame, where you have to hit buttons to successfully tame a mount, turned out to be solely dependant on your own level (or lets say the level difference between you and the mount) and the mount's rarity. Skill is at no point needed to tame which is very frustrating when trying for a heroic mount around your level. It often happens, that you've filled the failbar to 75% before even having the chance to impact the process. And the marks aren't cheap/fast to obtain. Common and Elite mounts are rather easy to get as long as you have a higher level. Very sad and frustrating as this is the unique selling point of this game. Basically, it's RNG (Random)

- RNG:
It's omnipresent.. You sometimes need to run a dungeon 30-40 times to complete you armorset with stats that actually benefit you (Strenght or Dexterity on a priest item for example is not uncommon) or finally drop the item to unlock a quest or get the skillbook for your class. Taming heroic or legendary mounts is pure RNG as mentioned above. If you are able to tame a legendary around your level with 100% Success and fail a mere heroic Familiar thats 25 level under your own directly after under the same conditions, something can't be right, right?

- Grinding/Balancing:
Be it running the same dungeon for the 40th time to get what you want, or hitting a simple Elite Mob for 5-10 mins due to insane HP/Regen to bring it down. Or farming the same thing over and over for ages to eventually get 1 piece of a 3 piece Set to tame a Heroic. For some heroic mounts you need to tame 3-5 other Elite mounts to craft the mark. For these Elite mounts, you need marks to tame aswell. Neverending process the further you get into the game. And i'm not even starting with the Equip tempering/refining which is a scam in my opinion.

- Recycling of Content:
From the 250+ tamable mounts, there are actually just around 70 which are completely different with the others beeing copies with another color/special fx. And if you think the heroics or legendaries are excluded then you are wrong. This also goes for many sidebosses and the PVP-Zone is a darker version of the first big zone. Sometimes less is more ;)

- Debuffs everywhere:
You die? well you continue with a 10min debuff or use a scroll. Travel to a new zone? Get a permanent debuff (except on heroics) or tame a zone specific mount. Want to do the Titan Raids? Get an additional debuff unless you have the 3 Titan Pieces that drop from worldbosses/titans only.

- Performance:
It's a very demanding game, even on newer systems. Severe server issues takes several days/weeks to fix. Since launch i'm only able to exit the game with the Task Manager

- Company/Publisher:
Overall, WeMade (Devs) provide a nice product, but there is no fun if it's balanced just to keep the player grinding. The overall Nexon game-policy is tailored more and more to the paying progress player while casuals are left-over: Noone prevents you from trying, but if you truly want to experience the Endgame, you actually need a big wallet, or an immense amount of time. Additional to that they use unorthodox methods concerning their cashshop, like selling mounts for 15-20$ that they, 2 months later, include in a free! preregistration package. Granted, you can't buy stuff to directly push your character (Pay 2 Win), but you can sell those items you get with Real Money for skyhigh prizes in the ingame auction house and with that earned gold buy the stuff to push your character. The Circle closes and i'd call it indirect P2W.


The whole game is castrated! You can obtain Elluns (ingame currency beside the typical Gold/silver/copper) either through ingame achievements and dailies or they can also be purchased with real money. If you don't plan to spend money in this Game, use them on Storage expansion (Mounts, Stash, Inventory) to improve your ingame experience for as long as possible. Don't use them to revive, reset a dungeon or purchase boxes from the shop, it's truly not worth it.


Don't get me wrong, i had a ton of fun in this game and still don't regret purchasing a founders pack. Riders of Icarus is probably one of the better free2play MMORPGs out there and it's really nice up to a certain point. But once the "new game hype" wears off and knowing how it evolved over the past year with the declining playerbase because of that down-spiral they created with their decisions, i cannot recommend this game, nor suggesting you to spend money on it. And all thats left after 850+ hours is the experience of too much RNG frustration. I'm done :)

If you have any specific questions about the game or need advice, i'll happily answer them in the comment section as i run out of Review Space :) Constructive critism is also well appreciated as this is my first in-depth review.


Useful links:
- Database[ridersoficarus.info]
- News & Updates[icarus.nexon.net]
- Wiki[ridersoficarus.gamepedia.com]
- Forum [forums.icarus.nexon.net]

To be honest I've never written a review and also to be quite frank I've held in my opinion for a while. As you can see on my steam play time I've put in the time but it doesn't account for the time I've spent on the launcher so its a bit misleading.

There are a lot of good concepts in the game for instance taming creatures to ride and collect is a great, another is different regions with different gear sets as you progress etc. A decent variety of classes with unique play styles etc. The problem is that those are just concepts, over my years of playing and interacting with the 100's of players I've met, many of which of stopped playing or real life situations took over, just didn't get better. In all honesty they got worse.

This is my explanation as to why it got to the point it is today. First I want to address the store, this being a free to play game they need to support it some how which is completely understandable, until they did what they did. Taming is a huge concept first and for most, in order to progress your gear further you need seals which are the creatures you tamed in item form. These seals give stats which boost your performance, here's where the issue comes into play, the developers started adding different creatures you could spend real money on that completely tipped the balance of the game and made all creatures in game completely irrelevant. Not a single one can compete with cash shop items and those you spent the most easily dominated the server's. Here's the second issue after adding said unbalanced content they changed loot tables in several dungeons as of today still have not been fixed making them even more useless. As an explanation, after everyone got these seals they beat all the hardest contents that would normally take teams and coordination to complete either solo are in 3 man parties. These dungeons were supposed to have all the end game loot and items that nobody could reach since it came out. They had nothing of use even with the rarest and best loot didn't equivalent to money and time spent. My third issue is making content so inaccessible to casual players, I tried my best not spend money but gave in due to me wanting to be somewhat competitive with others. But in the end you can only do so much with in game content where as spending some odd amount of money will easily get you to the top in no time. My fourth issue are the classes, they seem fine at first and then if you gear them up you can see that a few classes have an extreme advantage. It gets so extreme to point that several classes in game become absolutely irrelevant and aren't used at all. There are a few other issues but I believe I've gone on long enough, apologize for that.

I'm sorry for anyone reading this and my rambling is cringe or annoying, it just frustrates me as a person who devoted so much time and effort to be tossed aside because I don't want to spend x amount of money. At the end of the day it's your choice if you want to play or not, this is just my experience, hopefully you have a better one.

I have much more than 5000 hours in the game (using the Nexon/Valofe launchers) and the game used to be great before they made it 100% pay to win. It is evident that the developers completely gave up on the game and I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to shut it down soon. On top of this, the developers completely ignore the player base and the discord moderators either ignore or act rude to the players. This game is nothing but a cash grab that has not gotten a real update in around 2 years. Avoid this game.

Honestly a decent f2p game. I'd like to address a few of the complaints I see:

-P2W: This is entirely untrue. This launch addressed many of the p2w issues in the asian version, and all items that gave an unfair advantage were removed from the cash shop (save for the ones that you can get easily in game).

-Gold spammers: Yeah they exist. So does a block list, and a "global shout" filter. Super easy to not see spammers. **UPDATE** Global shouts have been disabled in the meantime, so gold spammers should no longer be an issue.

-Bugs: Yeah, they are there. So is the tag "open beta". I see many people take for granted the fact that they have to pay $0.00 to play this game, and that "beta" is meant as "beta testing". None of the bugs are game-breaking, and actually many have been fixed in the past 48 hours.

I would recommend this game. A few positives here:

-It is entirely possible to hit max level with great gear all free to play. The majority of cash shop items are cosmetics (player and mount skins), convenience (no transport fees, storage anywhere, etc), and things like that.

-They also upped the amount of premium currency that drops (as compared to the asian version), so even if there is something in the cash shop you want (like a skin), you can get it very fast in game.

-The mounts are visually appealling, as well as the landscapes.

-The class abilities feel engaging, are flashy, and flow well together.

Negatives:

-Lower tier familiars are pretty useless with low energy (although higher tiers are easy to get).

-PvP is only duels currently (game is expanding through open beta, more PvP will be added before July ends).


TL;DR

This game is 1. free, and 2. in beta. Great f2p game that isn't p2w like its asian version.

EDIT: Thanks for the Awards & Upvotes, kisses to all of you lovely people. I will update this review in a while because I forgot to mention a few important things. Otherwise this current state of the review is still my overall opinion, I'll just add a few things.
__________________________________________________________

Alright, so - hear me out.

Before I start talking about the Game a lil' bit - Steam says I have played only about 160 hours, in the Game Launcher its 5000+ hours. I know this Game better than I know myself.

Short "About the Game":
In the MMORPG Riders of Icarus you have the Ability to tame all Kinds of Beasts around the World. You can keep them as your Mounts and fly/walk around with them, use them as your Battlepets - or you seal them and put them into your Weapons and Armor, this gives you better Stats.

You also have many great dungeons to choose from to raid with your Friends / your Guild. There is also an Extreme Dungeon called Scarlet Harbour, for more experienced Players with (now) 9 Bosses.

Also, I should mention the Solo-Dungeon - Elloras Spire.
Back in the Day, when I used to play, it was 40 Minutes and 40 Floors where you went against different Types of Enemies, growing stronger by each Floor. The twist - you cannot die. Once you're defeated - you're out. You can enter this dungeon once a day, and trust me - I did this every day to get at the Top. It was lots of screaming, crying and laughing and in the End I was happy once I finished the 40th Floor for the first Time.
I only barely ever got into the Weekly/Monthly Top 10 of my Server, tho. I played as Assassin/Rogue, for those interested.

I really liked playing this Game, up until a certain point.

The massive Downside of RoI:
You can buy certain Animals from the Cashshop, they switch these Animals they put into Shop up every now and then and several times they've put very strong Animals in there, with like 50% + Strength-Buff or something like that, I don't really remember. People went in and bought 20-something of these Animals (just to mention, one of these was like 30 Euros) and put them in their Armor - and became basically unbeatable.
So just a Heads up:
If you wanna be really good at this game in PvP or even PvE - you have to pay for everything. You cannot farm the currency (Ellun & GCoins) you use for anything in the Cashshop. Only way is, if you buy Premium which was I think 10-15 Euros a Month, you get a few Ellun a day or so. GCoin is the VFun / Valofe Currency, which you have to pay for. Spoilers: not worth it.

This Game was beautiful several years ago, but sadly the Devs got Greedy. Keep this in mind, if you really want to try playing this. You won't be abled to get far without cashing enormous amounts.
This is why I don't recommend this Game anymore, sadly.
I haven't played it for a while now, but I hear it hasn't gotten any better, even worse. Stay away from this. Don't support Pay2Win MMORPGs, please.

Hello everyone,

I'll begin by saying that I like this game, it is worth playing ? perhaps , it is a pretty good gaming experience overall and taming monsters to ride them is Dope, let's not lie.

But i'll be giving this a negative review because of the current owners of the Game AKA VALOFE , and i am hoping many more will follow to denounce their ways of treating their community.

Some servers seems to receive preferential treatment, and the discord bans ( only way to contact Gms / CMs ) can fall way too easily.

Also the support is Non-existant, request stay on hold for 1-3 months before a reply ( if you end up having one) .

Shop prices are sometimes displayed WRONG ( IE price displayed at 2923 Gcoins ( In game cash money ) but you get charged 3990 instead ) , and the lovely thing is that YOU dear player , is in the wrong for being overcharged ( Yes i also have screens to back up this claim ) .

In conclusion, i'll say that Valofe really needs to start being fair and oerhaps step-up in their client treatment behaviour.
but other than that, the game is still good .
This is it for me , have a good day.

Edit : also the discord moderators / GMs seems to give perma mutes on the only working contact method IE the discord without prociding reasons and it can happen even if no rules are broken ....

Well as you can see I played the game for quite some time; Not counting that the Steam-Client itself is buggy af and you're better off with the Nexon client so I switched to it after half a year.
After playing Riders of Icarus for 2 years since the Beta was released I can say: Never a Nexon game again.

The game also had a problem with cheaters since it did not had any mechanics to prevent people from uploading data into the game. It does not has any filter so there were numerous bugs (for example when you had connection problems) like item duplication. So at certain times some people were selling skill modifications for higher damage, no cooldowns, etc.
To prevent that Nexon switched trough different third-party anti cheat software.
The current one is nProtect GameGuard which will prevent many users from even starting the game.
THIS ANTICHEATSOFTWARE DOES NOT WORK AND IS HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE SINCE
- IT WILL BLOCK FUNCTIONS OF DIRECTX AMD THE WINDOWS API
- IT WILL SACN EVERY SINGLE PROCESS ON YOUR PC
- IT WILL FORCE UPDATES AND NEED ADMIN RIGHTS
- IT HIDES THE GAME APPLICATION PROGRESS
- IT MONITORS THE ENTIRE MEMORY RANGE
- IT KEYLOGS KEYBOARD INPUT
- AND CAN TERMINATE OTHER APPLICATIONS.

Game Info:
Well after mentioning some stuff around the game it is time to talk about Icarus itself.
The game was originally a Korean MMO with a Japanese version shortly after.
Afterwards a version for North America and Europe was released by Nexon which is different in some parts to the Asian counterpart.
Game itself was fun in the early days.
An unique system to motivate players to tame and collect all the obtainable mounts and pets in the game combining classical MMO-gameplay with collecting Monsters similar to Pokemon.

Quests and Leveling:
The quest ingame only have two purposes: To level and to do repeatable quests for items.
The level quests are pretty simple: Go to certain position and either collect or kill. Luckily you can accept alot of quests at the same time so you can simply collect a lot of quests while leveling since the side quests will lead in the same area as the mainquest. If you skip quests or dont collect all, including hidden quests or don't have premium service or other EXP Boosts, you will end up extremly underleveled making the questing more difficult. Questing to make new chars or as a new players is incredibly boring since it only purpose is to show you the map and its regions.
Luckily it is fast and with larger questing sessions you can hit max. Level (currently level 60) in 2-7 days.

Account & Character:
Your Characters DO NOT share a storage together and the only way of transfering items is by using the mail system.
Most Items are bound to the character so you have to make sure to collect most daily or event rewards on the MAIN CHAR.

Gameplay:
The game has 7 different classes: Assassin, Ranger, Wizard, Priest, Guardian, Trickster, Dark Magician.
The roles can be taken from the class names since all equipment is class specific so each class is only playable as such.
If you're interested in PVP you will often face a lot of laggs and a Stone-beat-Scissors-system.
It is impossible for a Priest for example to beat an Assassin or a Ranger for example since they will simply get oneshotted.
Otherways an Assassin for example will get bursted down by the Guardian and so on.
You will receive a lot of different Skills during leveling and for the endgame it is expected for you to master all of them especially as a Guardian and Priest.
The game itself wants you to study the mechanics of every boss and will be very punishing for mistakes.
Dungeons runs will be extremly difficult which will result in having good communication skills and learning your class properly. There's also a ranking system in which every player should participate since it gives good rewards.
The gameplay itself therefore is really fun to play except one aspect: TAMING.
The main aspect was on taming but with pure RNG you will never know if you will get what you want. You can spend days/weeks to craft a 'mark' to try a tame on a certain mount... only resulting in failed attempt. Every booster, taming event, taming gear seems wasted since theres no actual chance. Even with 120% Taming chance you will often get a 100% tame fail and sometimes with nothing you will get a 100% tame. By pressing w,a,s,d theres a small minigame for the tame but the result barely influence the tame itself.
For instances you have: Dungeons, Raids and Worldbosses.
Most players will do most instances in 6-Person groups since with 6 people you will have the highest amount of droprate.
Raids are dungeons made for 10 players but in reality theyre completed in 6 person groups or less to maximize the drops since everyone shares the same chest. Worldbosses are the big events where you have to deal a percentage of the boss max health in order to receive anything. With 5% you usally are able to get the big chest with items instead of a tiny amount of gold (accomplished with 1%). A big problem here is GREED. Because of this system most players tend to do stuff solo or in very small groups, leaving newer players or even experienced support classes behind in order to maximize their profit. Guardians and Priests barely get invited to Worldboss-parties but are highly requested for Dungeon Runs, Raids or even buffing people before certain activities. The Assassin is a completely broken unbalanced class having 2 primary weapons with more slots for enchantments since every other class has a primary and secondary weapon (For example: Guardians have primary sword, secondary shield). This is resulting in Assassins to often abandon their Worldboss groups and go for the solo 5% since they can easily put the same numbers as a 3-5 man group without assassin.
This is also only possible cue to a low playerbase but I will explain that later.

Equipment:
Well one of the most important features since you need very good equipment to perfom well in 'Ellora's Spire' (the ranking system is a dungeon with different bosses), but also to perform well in Dungeons and at Worldbosses. Each gear piece has different stat and you always want the current legendary equipment. Theres no variety and only one piece everybody else uses. You want this set only and it has to have perfect stats and maximum enchantments. Stats are classical stats like 'Strength, Constitution, Intelligence, Willpower' BUT the only stats which matter are STRENGTH for melee classes and INTELLIGENCE for ranged ones. Every other stat is useless since you will get 'All stats' in the Enchantments called 'seals'.
Seals are obtained through taming Familiars, leveling them and afterwards sealing them. Unleveled seals are barely ever used since they barely provide any stats. So you want to sit hours afk on your mounts to level them before sealing, or paying gold/elluns for max. level potions or other ways to boost the level of you mounts.
However the game is insanely grindy and not rewarding at all. You can spend weeks/months of doing daily quests in order to get the needed material to craft the newest equipment; only to craft into a low or very low chance and fail, fail and fail again. There no percentages for doing this and the only thing you can see is normal low or very low. Players have theories if normal doesnt actually mean 30% or lower since the Devs are adjusting it from time to time.
And even if you get your piece its not over. You will porbably have to reroll the stats until you get max Strength/intelligence and also temper it. After you reach +10 you need to use Elluns (cash Shop currency) in order to get it higher. If you dont use Elluns to save the step your equipment most likely will go down one or two stages (for example +19 -> +20: if you use elluns and fail you will stay at +19...if you dont lock it...you will go down to +17)
So it will result in an endless grind until you unlocked all; just to realize that the game barely offered any content.

So after having played the game for a long bloody time, I think i should finally start writing a review.
The game itself isn't that bad.

BUT the problem is Nexon.
Nexon is absolutely incompetent when it comes to handling the game.
It's really sad to see what they are doing.

Let me give you some examples of whats wrong with the game:


Updates:
Since the beta i can not remember a single update after which there has been a game breaking bug. Just recently there was a bug when a achievement resetted upon teleporting to a new area. Each time you got 45 ellun (the paid currency) for free. Of course a large playerbase used it. What happened after wards was not a rollback of like 30 mins playtime, which would habe been the best solution, but a ban and reset of all items for everyone. I will explain later why this is unacceptable.

P2W:
I was a main tank so I know what im talking about. Tanks are completely useless if you dont temper your items to +15. Each time you try to get an item above +10 you have a chance to fail (which is incredibly high btw.). BUT this is where nexon comes in. Why not pay some ellun for it? Seems like a good idea. Okay then lets go. 15 mins later you spent 700 Ellun to get one item to +17/25. Oh and just on a side node: 465 Ellun cost 50€. Well you can grind to get them but trying to do that will take you a couple of months... for one item. Now Tanks CANNOT tank any legendary dungeon viably if you DON'T temper you gear. This is why you should NEVER play a tank in this game.

Classes/Parties:
This is sort of a continuation of the problem stated above. Since you basicially you have to pay with real money for tanks and cannot do anything with them on your own. For example: DPS classes will do solo bosses nonstop and gain alot of money of it. As a tank you can only watch and wish you were them. Same holds true for priests. Now after having heard that. You can probably guess that no one plays these classes. And you're correct. Finding a Party for dungeons takes 1:30h minimum if you only need one of the support classes. Once you need both oh boy you're in for some trouble.

Okay to sum it up:

• Game will have game breaking bugs after every Patch
  
• Tank and priests either P2W or borderline unplayable
  
• Finding Parties is extremely time consuming or nearly impossible

In the state the game is at the moment i can only say that you should probably go and check out "Project Icarus".
That is a private server not managed by nexon.
Otherwise just go and play a different game.
It's really not worth your time and effort to play this.

i have played this game since 2014, so....5 years. i have almost 2000 hours and would have more if i wasn't so screwed over by the negligence of the last company who had the game. I had pumed over a thousand dollars into this game to be told i couldn't get help with my characters previously and during the games migration to this new company who bought them out. I love this game so much that i play simply to enjoy the RP aspect, now that i can never truly become competitive again after losing all 4 of my max level characters and money... to say i was devastated didn't touch how hopeless i felt. I am still currently trying to reach out, if anyone is reading this i hope you have a better experience than i did.

I would of GIVEN this game an decent rating, it is over all a solid MMO, yet, beware Steam user of this game. If you decide to pay for features the Nexon company limits your purchase to $60 monthly, through steam. DOES NOT provide portal access to pre-paid services through steam. Trying to get portal access from support you have to wait 1-2 weeks of back and forth e-mail to identify you account, then additional they ask you for Government Identification!
Secondarily, NEXON will not provide support to the game without you submitting copies of Government documentation.

Acceptable forms of identification include:
Government/State issued photo ID, such as: ,Driver License, Passport, Government Employee ID, Certificate of Birth/Adoption (only if under age 18).

Been gaming over 20 years, NEVER been asked for real life Government documents records to get gaming support from a product I have brought. This should be seriously looked at by steam!