Allods… for every Russian advanced gamer this word means a lot. The meaning of this title refers to giant islands floating in the Astral and maintained by strong magicians. These are the islands where a typical farmer’s life passes by, where ghouls massacre the whole villages and where imperial troops are no less successful in the fight against their enemies. On these islands one can find reasonable dragons and subhuman squirrels. Well, it’s a great isolated training ground for a newbie magician or soldier.

Published in far 98 the game appeared to be a riot. You bet! It was a kinda of a Russian respond to Diablo with its own item generator, unusual storyline and progressive magic system. Were there any games at the same level in Russia at that time? Let me say no. So Nival became a happy Russian gamedevs’ hope opposing to the West. .

Sequel released nearly half a year later to retail outlets not only consolidated a success but also served as certain corrections of mistakes. Allods Gold: The Master of Souls wasn’t a full-fledged continuation. Well, still it was something more considerable than add-on. Do you remember the story of Fallout 1-2? Yeah, it’s absolutely the same delightful situation.

Within the next 2 years the development of the sequel was going on. Among well-known features we can name full 3d environment, the protagonist changing the appearance depending on the style of play, innovative magic system, enhanced enemy AI, and what else to say… these are the same old Allods Gold. For certain reasons they had to change the title of the game (meet Evil Islands!) and also to convince poor gamers to replace their PCs with more powerful ones but believe me it was worth it. A monthly run sold out within a week is quite a good proof.
In fact if not to consider an abortive add-on to Evil Islands released in 2006 nothing else to talk about was produced. Mysterious Allods Online were being widely rumored but all the information turned out to be just hearsay. And only at KRI Conference 2007 Sergey Orlovskij, a guru and creator of Nival, by chance let the cat out of the bag and told that the development of MMORPG after Allods was in full swing then.

You can choose from 6 different playable races among which there’re typical russians with khrushevka-style architecture and a representative national flavour. Despite the very similar to World of Warcraft cartoon graphics “Allods Gold” promises to tickle nerves of a hard-boiled online role-player with interesting PvP i.e. colossal open sea battles in the Astral. One should have no doubts about the seriousness of Nival’s intentions of capturing an audience as this company has always had a responsible approach to task accomplishment. After all whom did Ubisoft charge with the development of the 5th Heroes game?