5 reasons The Secret World is a fail: Reason 2

2. Combat is dull

Combat in The Secret World is dull. There are a couple of reasons for this.

Your pistols sound like toy cap guns.

First, the combat sound effects are weak. Your pistols sound like toy cap guns. Your shotgun has less umph than a T-shirt cannon. Your flame spells sound muffled and lack any sort of sizzle. The combat sound effects in TSW are mostly uninteresting.

Good sound effects can keep a so-so game interesting. Tera has amazing combat sounds effects. Characters grunt and huff and yell. Weapons smash the ground and radiate power as they charge up. The sound effects in Tera help keep it interesting for the players.

Bad, uninteresting sound effects, like the ones in TSW, just makes an already so-so experience even worse.

Very little effort was put into animation.

The other reason combat in TSW is dull is very little effort was put into animation. All the combat animation is static. Your character stands in one place and moves its arms to fire its weapon or toss a spell or whatever. There’s no leaping around, no rising in the air to call down the wrath of the gods, no vaulting to one side, no spinning upside down in the air. There are zero, zip, zilch cool combat animations in TSW.

If you played Star Wars: The Old Republic, you know there were some skills where the animations were so cool you just went around killing things with that skill for about an hour or so (Can you say Death from Above?). There’s nothing like that in TSW. You just stand there, no matter what skill you use, and move your arms. It’s boring.

The Secret World’s combat is neither audibly nor visually engaging. It’s dull.

The Secret World’s combat, a key part of the enjoyment factor of any MMO, is neither audibly nor visually engaging. It’s dull.

(Reason 3, tomorrow.)