Review of Cabal

As a free MMORPG, Cabal is one of those games which, as expected, has a lot of plus and minuses. After trying my hand at it, I’ll say there are more minus than plus.

Good news first. The game got a few things going for itself. First off, the music and graphics were excellent. Cabal is one of the better looking free MMORPG on the market with bright landscapes and beautiful characters. The world itself had an alien feel to it which I kind of liked. It is spilt between 3 regions with a portal room connecting all 3 regions. It was interesting to skip between the 3 worlds while doing the quests.

For all the pluses, the game has some serious problems. First off, you can’t download the game from the CabalSEA website. I first wanted to try out the game months ago when I saw it at a games convention but after 3 tries over a couple of months, I gave up on it (hear that Asiasoft!). However I got a free disc for the game and that’s when I finally managed to try it recently. Installing it is one thing, getting into the server is quite another. On 3 occasions I was either kicked out of the game or I was unable to login into the system. The unstableness of the game is a little surprising for me as I never had any problems with Maplestory before, another game under Asiasoft.

The game-play itself was pretty simple. If you had played other free MMORPGs before, nothing here will be a surprise. That’s the problem. The game itself is pretty to look at, but ultimately it’s run-of-the-mill. There’s nothing that really jump out to say that this game is different from any other on the market. Another problem I think the game has is the balance of the classes. Bane of many MMOs, I feel that some of the classes in Cabal are vastly overpowered. The balance felt very wrong. In some classes, I could just walk through enemies like they weren’t even there, while others require careful game-play…very careful game-play.

I also faced some problems with the NPCs. As NPCs are the main givers of the quests, I got into problems when I failed to do the earlier quests. As the NPCs give multiple quests, I found that the quests are stuck at the first lower-level quests. If you fail to do those, you can’t do the higher-level quests even when the quests has nothing to do if each other story-wise. No such thing has multiple quests for you to pick which one to do first in this game.

I won’t say Cabal is a bad game, it does have some points, but I feel it’s more like a work in progress. Nothing in it is really different, so unless there are some vast improvements…skip it.