Most of your time will be spent taking on missions and attempting to complete them for experience and financial gain. Missions provide a significantly more efficient way to gain experience as opposed to the freelance hunting of enemies, so there is a strong incentive to move from mission to mission despite the fact that they tend to get pretty repetitive pretty quickly. Obtaining a mission is quite easy as you can call your contacts on your cell phone at any time and ask for a new mission. For the most part your missions will boil down to the basic delivery or assassination types prevalent in MMORPG gaming. You’ll get a beacon directing you to the mission location, perform your duties, and then exit the location to collect your reward. There is a story element to the missions, but it is conveyed in small and short text boxes and quite frankly is not all that interesting or engaging. It would not be surprising to find that most players simply bypass the text in an effort to crank through as many missions as possible during the time that they spend online. The mission system is hampered by a few issues that further the feeling of repetition or add to the tedium of grinding out mission after mission. The beacon used to direct you to your next objective works on a direct line of sight and does not account for dead-ends, back alleys, walls, and the like. As you make a beeline for the beacon, you’ll often have to backtrack or try and find your way along a circuitous or meandering route. Once you reach your mission location the beacon is not much help as it does not help you locate the exact location of your objective. For example, if you’re supposed to meet with a contact you can find yourself searching every single room of a three or four story building trying to locate the person of interest. Since floor plans are recycled heavily in the game, you’ll get an annoying sense of déjà vu as you’re forced to revisit the same looking rooms over and over again in a game of hide and seek with your contact or target. The lack of variety in mission types only further adds to the feeling of repetition. It is also through missions that you’ll eventually be given the opportunity to align yourself with one of the three factions in the game. However the conflict between the factions feels underdeveloped in the game so far, so as mentioned earlier there’s not much difference in your gameplay experience no matter how you choose to align yourself.

The game really tries to tie itself into a continuation of the storyline of the movies through its special live events. Periodically, gamemaster-controlled characters will appear in the game – including such famous faces as Morpheus and Trinity – to interact with gamers and drive the storyline. The live events run for several days and provide players a chance to move through a series of story-based missions. It’s about as close as any MMORPG has gotten to capture the old D&D staple of the gamemaster and brings a tried and true aspect of pen and paper RPG gaming to the internet. It will be interesting to see how these live events develop as the game matures and they are certainly a very strong reason for giving the game a try.

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