Square Enix and Gamepot have teamed up to bring us Fantasy Earth Zero. It’s not Final Fantasy and it’s not Earth (as far as I can tell) but it’s far from zero. When you first step into the game you’ll choose from one of three classes - Scout, Sorcerer and warrior. I chose a Scout for starters.

Obviously scouts are ranged types, warriors are melee types and sorcerers are magic types. In regards to races you’ve only got one, Human. But you can choose your gender. Once you’ve got your character sorted you then move on to faction choice. There will be five, but at present are only two. This will simply give you a nation to belong to so that you know whom to fight for territory which is one of the underlying mechanics of the game.

Honestly, I’m a bit disappointed in what the game looks to be offering. I had expected far more, some massively interesting story, some unique battle system or some outstanding environments. Instead there are severely restricted environments in which you can’t even meander through the forest which give it a sort of MMO on rails feel. The graphics aren’t that outstanding either and the character models are blocky. The faces look like masks hastily slapped onto polygonal heads and they’re generally less than what one would expect from the likes of Square Enix.

There’s a lot of walking to and fro, as in many MMOs. Fantasy Earth Zero doesn’t give you a run option and there’s no auto-walk so that means you have to spend a lot of time just holding down a movement button going from point A to point B making the game very dull and boring at times. Aha, I found the autorun (it’s not on the in-game controls chart).

Even in many of the instanced areas you’re pretty much walking from encounter area to encounter area. The listed features on the main site say "attack, jump, dodge, run and experiece fast-paced, exciting combat." Well, there’s attack, jump, dodge at least.

The game uses what appear to be multiplayer instances called fields. However, there seem to be some problems with this at present where you cannot always create a field in order to complete a quest. I’m sure it’s just some technical problem that they will sort out over the course of the testing phases.