Dragon Claw Studio - Faith www.dragonclawstudio.com Review

Overall Rating

Excellent community
Proactive and involved development team
Sophisticated and challenging team-based strategy
Great diversity of choices available to players

Difficult for new players to compete unless lucky enough to land with good players
History of critical bugs and imbalances that hinder competitiveness

Almost a year and a half after its official launch, FaitH from Dragon Claw Studio is now what I had always hoped it would be - the most interesting, sophisticated and enjoyable multi-player strategy game online, something I have always wished would be around.

It succeeds at developing a very strong team environment where, while individuals can excel, it is only through kingdom cooperation, planning, innovation and diversity that one can compete with the best in the game. An ingenious strategic twist makes the game about a lot more than just vanquishing an opponent, and the strategy on the kingdom (15 players) level can be very complicated and challenging.

Players choose from one of 7 churches in 3 different religions, and from one of 5 playing classes (Wizard, merchant, Warmaster, Rogue, Jack of all Trades). After 5 eras of tweaking the balance between these classes and churches appears to be quite good and any choice is now valid in a competitive sense. Each church has a different storyline and different units, enabling players to vary their playing experience era to era (an era runs for 3 months).

The technology, economy and city building aspects of the game are well thought out and require some difficult chocies for players to make, while the war engine is sophisticated and allows for a range of strategies.

The community is excellent - very newbie friendly, accepting and generally a whole lot of fun to be a part of. It is more mature than any online community I have played with before and instances of cheating are rare.

I have in the past had reservations of the game in that the adding of new content took precedence over ensuring all of the funadmental aspects of the game and war engine, leaving some serious bugs and imbalances in the game. However, it has reacehd the point where the fundamentals are sound, imbalances are minor and hard to detect and the playability of the game is very, very good. The addition of a real time server several weeks ago has improved the game tremendously and enables players to compete without an extremely high level of activity, in my opinion the biggest single improvement the game has seen

FaitH has reached the point where it has no major flaws and for anyone serious about joinig a strategy gaming community it is very easy to be accepted and successful, however if you only plan to dip in occasionally and aren't bothered to make a decent initial investment in time to learn it, don't bother.