Review of Planeshift
Ugh. Ouch. Painful. I couldn't even figure out how to get out of the tutorial, the UI is terrible, and the game has some severe faults, so let's take a look.
How does PlaneShift look? Poorly. There are numerous things missing, such as models for about 2/3s of the character selectable races. I chose a lizardlike race with wings, and my body was cut in half accidentally and you could see through me. All of the bugs from 3D games in the mid 90s were here, like seeing through walls when you get too close, or seeing around corners in much the same way.
Sounds - negligible at best.
The game claims it is still alpha, but at 350 megs of downloads, that's a lot of alpha.
The game's UI, as has been mentioned is awful. If I attack a rat, and I am too far away, it just tells me I am too far away instead of moving me toward it or anything. You have to get really close, and I can;t even see it on my screen anymore unless I move the screen down significantly.
You have to click on an NPC< then bring up an interaction window, then bring up the NPC tab, then manually type in your command, in order to get them to respond. So, if I want to talk to one, I have to click on in, bring up the window, hit the tab, and then type in Hi. How stupid.
With problematic animations, UI, graphics, and such, I decided to call it a day. There could be a great quest system under the hood or something. I'm not going to bother to find it. Even after reading the manual, I'm no clearer on how to proceed than I was before.
Overall - 1 out of 5.