EVE Online www.eve-online.com Review

Overall Rating

Good graphics.
Always being redeveloped.

Online only no single player mode.
You will never catch up to other players.
Documentaion is none existent.

EVE Online (www.eve-online.com) is at the moment the most popular online game. At peak times there are nearly 13,000 people online at once playing this game who all interact in a very large EVE universe.

I will start by getting the graphics and sound of the way, as these are the least important thing in this game. The graphics are superb, a good framerate and some amazing lighting effects. The sound is what you expect from a space game, basic laser sounds, but has some very nice realisitic background sounds when you dock.

You start off selecting one of four races and then selecting which school of expertise you charater will have. After selecting and customising your characters face you are off. You start out in a small ship with a small attacking laser and a mining lazer. You are taken through tutorials on the basics of flying and controling your ship. How to move, what the screen menus meen and how to mine. And then you are on your own.

You can make isk (EVE currency) by mining, doing agent mission or going hunting for ships called rats. They are none computer controlled ships often found at the edge of solar systems at gates (gates are used to accelerate you to another system) or in asteriod belts. You can improve your character by getting better equipment or training better skills.

Skills, are just what they sound like. Skills or needed to operate other peices of equipment or fly other ships. The more you train a skill the better you get at it. You train skills by buying the book for that skill, for example mining, and you train it. You don't actually have to do anything more than activate the training skill to train, as all training consists of is waiting for a certain length of time. When the time is up, you are trained in that skill. You don't have to remain logged on to train skills either, you cannot log on for days and the skill you started will still be going if it takes that long, and some do. While some skills take 30mins to train to level 1, some skills will take 30 days to train to level 5, the maximum level. Many skills need you to have other skills to allow them to train. For example you will need Frigate (Smallest ship) level 3 before you can train to use a Cruiser (A larger ship) and you need cruiser level 3 to start training a battle ship skill (even bigger ship).

Now that I have mentioned ships. There are hundreds of ships which you can pick, depending on whether you have the skills to use them. Each race builds a number of each class of ship (class being friget, cruiser, battleship) and each race has a distinctive style of ship design too. There are about 15 different classes of ships each with their own specialised use. You have to fit your ships with equipment which you can buy or if you are lucky you can find when you blow up other ships. You can't slap whatever piece of equipment on you want. Each piece of equipment has to go into a high medium or low slot, and each piece of equipment uses up your ships CPU and power grid. Each ship has a different number or high medium or low slot than the rest, and a different level of CPU and power. So a nice configuration you have on a Raven (a battleship) won't fit on a Megathron (a different battleship).
When in space your ship runs on something called cap. This is like a large batter powersource, which is used when you active some of your ships equpment, like fire a gun, or activate a warp scrambler. The cap does regarge on its own, as do your sheilds but it takes time. Again learning the right skills makes these things charge up quicker.

You can buy stuff from the market. There are tens of thousands of items on there, split into sub categories. For example armour repairs. There will be 10 different armour repairs, different sizes for different sized ships and ones called "Named" ones. Named ones tend to be better than the standard ones, either, work quicker, or repair more in one go (for the case of armour repairers) of use less power. "Named" ones are more expensive as they can work 3% to 20% better than normal ones.

You can, if you train the skills, make your own equipment or make to sell on for profit. You get mineral from mining or from the market, get a blueprint and start making, guns, ships, ammo, repaires a huge list of hundreds of thinks you can make. It us a little more complicated than that but it is possible.

Enough of what you can do, because I will be here forever. I have been playing for nearly a year and I'm still learning.


You don't have to go solo through the tens of thousands of systems. You can join Corporations or corps. Here you will meet new firends, as you work together as a corp to help each other and to help the corp. The game would be a lot harder with out help from other people. You can mine together or go hunting or do missions together. This way you will feel the benefit of people with more skills and experience than you. You feel safer going into dangerous 0.0 space with others. (Space security ranges from 1.0 very save to 0.0 anorchy) As you get better, you can start to help other people. You communicate with people in a chat box. All your corp friends will have thier own private chat box and you will also have a local chat, which is conversations with people who are in your current system. You can have private conversations with individual people and invite others to that converstation. You can also join one of the other listings of chat boxes or use the Eve-mail where you will also recieve information from your agents.

Now enough about the goodside, lets take about its faults. Don't kid yourself that this is a perfect game. Far from it. I know people who can't say a bad word about it or even allow anyone else to have bad words about it.
First of all it costs about £8 a month to play it, thats nearly £100 a year. You have to play it online and you need at least a 265k connection to play.

Secondly there is virtually no documentation with it. The game is a download from the internet but it has no instructions about the skills, what class of equipment does, rules, NOTHING.

Then there are the skills. Everything needs a skill to be able use or get better at using it. It wouldn't be so bad if the skills didn't keep changing. Development keeps adding in new skills or changing the attributes of ships or equipment.
When you have been playing for 9 months and you think you are starting to get good at your laser skills and thinking you are about to catch up and become a force to be reckoned with to others who have been playing the game for years when a patch comes out and there are now "Tech2" lasers. To train for this will need probably 2-3 months of skill training ontop of your already months of training, if you did them none stop. The people who have been playing for years have already got the other skills needed to train these "Tech2" because they have had much more time playing and they have train most things to level 5. So you have rubbish Tech1 while there are people who can blast you away in half the time with Tech2 lazers.
You stuggle your way through level 4 missions starting to making some nice money, when a patch comes out makes level 4 missions almost impossible unless you have got 2-3 years of skills, or if you do them in packs.
You get a battleship to get some serious firepower, when a new patch comes out and there are ships called Dreads, where you will need 2-3 months of training before you even think about training the actual Dread skill, and then you will need 5billion isk to buy one, let alone equip it. 5 billion will take you years to make.

It is good that the game is always moving on. But 95% of the updates are to give the top players who have been playing for 2-3 years more of a challenge, while new players are left in their wake.

To me this is a large problem as I don't want to pay over a hundred pounds playing a game for just over a year and still not be classed as good. New players will never catch up to the skills or money as the older players, as every update just gives them more chance to pull away even more.

You will enjoy the game to start with, and you will be in awe of how vast the game is. But after a while you will get sick of chasing the horizon and not getting there.
You will start notice you are limited to less than half the EVE universe because the other parts are too dangerous as it is pirated by these players who are experts and are not willing to give up their gold mine part of space.
You will get sick of thinking you are getting somewhere with your skills and another level of them comes out.
You will get sick of the way gangs of player ships will come from nowhere and kill you for no reason, unless you fly in safe space, which is getting smaller and smaller at the moment.

There is a great community in EVE which probably makes most people stay. However its almost eliteist attitude is going to start turning people away, and they will mostly be the new people strying to start out.

Dispite these major faults the game is still very addictive. Eve offer a months trial for free. I say try it if you are happy with the idea of taking a long to get OK at it and even longer to get good at it.
Don't forget that this game is costing you every month.