I give this game 4 stars mostly for it's style.

yeah, it's hard to argue with all the complaints leveled at Earthrise but the game is nowhere near as unplayable as it's made out to be. The load times suck, some of the visual effects are are hit and miss, and it's crashed on my more than once but I've honestly played worse games!

Granted, I didn't pay $50 for any of those games but I also didn't pay $50 for this one either ($6, yay for the summer sale) and I sort of sympathize with the poor suckers who did.

The main reason I'm willing to give this game some slack on it's issues is because it's basically an inde MMO from eastern Europe (Masthead is from Bulgaria) running on a self developed game engine, not a AAA release backed up by a major publisher. Looking at it from that angle the game is really damned good, but that is the basis of it's downfall. Earthrise is kind of like a semi-pro baseball player was so good that it got promoted to the major leagues, and promptly fell flat because it just wasn't a very good major league player. Earthrise looks so good that it got lumped in with the mmo big dogs, but looks aside it's still just a home grown product by a rookie developer. I have every belief that the game will grow into something really great, given enough time, but first Masthead has got some painful lessons (just like everybody else who has put out a MMO).

I've only spent a little while with this title, but everything I have seen so far has not been game breaking in the sense that it's all just stupid (fixable) bugs relating from a rushed release with a unoptimized game engine; not bad game designs (which are generally unfixable). If there was one thing I will point the finger at Masthead on, it's the game's release price point. $50 was way too much for this game and they knew it, I can accept that they probably had budget issues and needed to get some quick cash, but selling the game for full price like that was unacceptable.

$50 was too much, $14 is just about right, and $6 (if you hurry while the sale is on) is too good to pass up. Players who can't accept anything except a flawless title should not even think about touching this thing, but if you got a bit of tolerance for a twitchy title and are willing to cut a rookie some slack I highly recommend picking this game up (if for no other reason than to promote an original title).

I was interested in this particular title, seeing as Tabula rasa has been shut down for quite a few years now - I was craving a blend of first person shooter and RPG and this appeared to fill the gap.

Boy was I mistaken.

This game, so far, is incredibly buggy. I'll start with the issues I had. The first one was graphics. It claims to support every card right down to the 7600 GT (nvidia) yet when I tried to log into the game after downloading it, I was rewarded with heavy graphical corruption, with most of the textures being a mess of different pixelated artifacts across the screen, essentially making the game unplayable.

I followed every suggestion and guide I could find on the forums, but none of them would fix this issue, a pretty major game breaker if you ask me. Eventually the blame was levied at my graphics card and not the questionable game engine, despite my graphics card performing flawlessly for every other game

It's a shame too, because the game looked like it would be a solid title. Alas.

My second gripe was that the world appeared to be *empty*. After browsing the forums, it appears I was not the only one having serious issues with logging in or getting the graphics engine to behave.

I couldn't test past the first newbie area, which really is a shame.

I'd recommend avoiding this title, even if it is alot cheaper to buy here than from the developers direct.

Very disappointed by this game. First off I could even play the game for the first day as there's a problem with registration on the Earthrise website. I entered the CD-Key as I was instructed but the automated procedure that should have provided me with a game login and website login didn't work.

This was fixed the next day by support and I was finally able to play. I'm running an Alienware M15x, not a shabby system and it's well upgraded. On first running the game I was a bit put out by the loading times but I assumed they'd disappear after a while, this wasn't the case. Still, I went through the tutorial and was happy with the detail of the game, I was running at medium settings and getting 40-50fps.

Once through the tutorial I got into the starter zone and that's where I stopped, or at least the game did. I went from 40-50fps down to 5fps. I had to lower my settings from 1900x1200 - medium to 1024-768 low. And I was still getting laggy performance, this is by the way with a dual core system, 4gm ram and a 8800M GTX card.

My system fulfils the requirements to run the game but I can only get it to run if I use graphics settings that make it look like an 80's arcade game. I will be trying to get a refund on this product as I don't consider it to be fit for sale.