Perfect World International is a free MMORPG that seems to be a suitable alternative to World of Warcraft for people who don’t want to pay a monthly subscription. These are my first impressions of the good and the bad of the game.

The good

Perfect World is very newbie friendly. They provide helpful tips to guide you through the first levels and teach you the basic functions of the game. They also give you an item called Supply Stash that gives you a useful item every 5 levels. At level 5, Supply Stash gave me a token that I could exchange for a good weapon that was much better than the one I was using at the time.

Another good thing is that money is easy to come by, even at low levels. A lot of people don’t even bother to pick up the loot the monsters drop and leave it there. Before long, anyone can pick up the loot from the ground. Just collecting this unwanted loot and selling it to NPC merchants can generate a good amount of coins.

Two useful features included in the game are the Search Mission button and the Coordinate Assistant. In the Quest window, you can click the Find Quest button to display the available quests that you have not yet accepted, as well as the NPC performing the quest. The Coordinate Wizard is a button at the bottom of your minimap that has the coordinates of all the NPCs in the area, and you can double-click an NPC’s name to automatically run to it.

There seems to be a wide variety of great pets and mounts in the game. My Venomancer already went through 4 different pets at level 15, because I keep finding new ones that I want. I started out using a wolf, then went on to a Petite Sawfly (flying wasp), then switched to a Dark Wanderer (looks like a Nazgul from the Lord of the Rings), and now I’m currently using a Crystalline Magmite (a large glass golem). Every day I play at watching someone run, ride, or fly with a new pet or mount that I haven’t seen yet.

One of the funniest things I’ve found about the game is that you can double jump very high and take no fall damage. I’ve already had enough fun jumping off large cliffs and jumping over buildings, trees, and other structures. There have even been two missions that require you to do multiple jumps to reach the top of a building and reach a chest.

The bad

There are some bad things about the game, some that can be fixed and some that cannot. Your inventory is painfully small; You only have 32 spaces to carry all your things. If you were planning to gather the materials needed to craft while doing the missions, you will run out of space very quickly. This was by design, because you can buy Inventory Stones from the Cash Shop which will increase the size of your inventory, up to a maximum of 64 spaces.

One weird thing about the default control settings is that the mouse scroll zoom is reversed (scrolling up with the mouse scroll button will zoom out instead of zooming in). Fortunately, this is easily fixed by clicking System-> System Settings-> Game-> Basic and then clicking the Zoom checkbox in the Attacks category. Make sure to click Apply and then Confirm to save your settings.

A puzzling omission from the game is an autorun button. This is a fairly standard MMORPG staple that was not programmed into the game. You can click a far point in the distance to run for a long time, or you can open the Map screen and Alt-click anywhere to auto-move, but I still think they should have included an autorun. button. Note: you can still move normally with the standard WASD settings, it is not just a point and click to move control scheme.

The bottom line

All things considered, I think Perfect World is a fun and free alternative to World of Warcraft. It might not be to everyone’s liking, but I’d say it’s at least worth downloading to check.