Forumwarz Review

 Everyone knows the basic archetypes of browser RPGs.

There’s the futuristic RPG in which you are a pilot/soldier/superawesomeguy that does things on a daily basis {blasting up aliens/alien ship/aliens big enough to be ships, perhaps gambling or mining asteroids).. Then you have the medieval style RPG that follows a similar format. While these common themed RPGs are fine and, in some cases, excel at what they do to the point of sheer beautiful goodness, some RPGs decide to take a different route, and have a different theme.

Enter Forumwarz 

s you may have deducted from the name, Forumwarz is a game that takes place in a less-travelled realm; the internet. The game surrounds itself around “pwning” forums, which take the place of mobs in an ordinary RPG. Pwning forums allows you to gain cred, which enables you to level up and get better attacks. These attacks are necessary to complete higher level quests. In addition it allows you to earn Flezz — the game’s currency — which is required to purchase equipment and for drugs to heal oneself and restore one’s mana (called something different for each class).

A player is allowed 4 forum visits per day, with a maximum of 12, if you save them up. This means that regardless of victory, you can pwn ONLY 4 forums per day. You may want to make your forum choices wisely.

This game is programmed with PHP using Ruby-on-Rails. This makes for some interesting effects on-screen, as well as for some cool applications, such as an in-game faux-IM client and an inter-game chat. However, the use of Ruby causes some restrictions as well. For example, my netbook only supports 1024×600 resolution, and the borders of Firefox can make the game somewhat unplayable with the built-in IM client open. I usually have to go fullscreen to play the game reasonably. This isn’t much of a problem on netbooks, but would be for mobile devices.

While I enjoyed almost every aspect of the game, including quests, story, and combat system, my favorite part is the post-storyline. Forumwarz picks up after its quests with a variety of controlled programs and scripts where the very users of Forumwarz come together to make content for the site. This content is usually forums, but I find it absolutely amazing that the creators of Forumwarz have found a way to keep the game fresh and fun for the players, while at the same time, ensuring that newer players join to see a richer game with more forums. Taking place in the creation of one of these forum creations is like running in an election of sorts. People vote on peoples’ entries, and if they receive a high amount of votes, their entry is included in the new forum. It is a beautiful experience, one that alone could warrant playing this game. 

There is a paid portion of the game, too. For real world money, one can buy “brownie points” for use in-game. These allow you to do lots of interesting things.ranging from changing your avatar, to changing someone else’s, changing someone’s name, to various cheats (they discount your character from the leaderboards unless you buy a canceling effect with brownie points). While a minor and optional function, if you wish to spend money on the game, you could have massive fun with these features. Plus, the money obtained by these sales allows the site to run with a minimum amount of ads, rather than the proliferated amount you see on many games and Web pages.

Forumwarz is a truly epic game and is awesome beyond no doubt. 10/10. To sum it up:

Pros:

• Unusual and fun theme
• Not many ads
• Fun game play
• An interesting game post-storyline

Cons:

• Not portable and somewhat unsuitable for small resolution computers

Go play at www.forumwarz.com.

 by Clotifoth