Allods is a grinding, story-driven MMORPG. Your main way of levelling in Allods is through the quests, which NPCs will provide for you. Grinding alone will take a while because the quests provide more experience points. I think this levelling system really forces you to do the quests. A lot of players who are used to grinding will find it unacceptable that you are relying on quests to level up. Though I think this works well for Allods because it emphasizes that the game is story driven. However, relying heavily on quests in Allods may in fact be bad in the long run. Repetitive questing can take a toll on players and can eventually make them quit the game.

If you started the game with the Imperial faction, you've already experienced what a ship looks like. You eventually get to control your own Astral ship. Like in building real ships, owning one takes time and a lot of money. However the benefits of having a ship really outweighs the cons. You get to travel around and see the beautiful world of Allods. You can also experience ship-to-ship battles similar to what you experienced when you started with the Imperials. The Astral Ship experience doesn't stop with just the creation. Astral Ships need to be manned too. Similar to real ships you need to have a navigator, helmsman, engineer, repairmen and of course gunners. I haven't seen how this works in the real player perspective but as far as I can see this can work out especially if you have friends who can man those posts in your ship.

There are a lot of faction centric features in Allods Gold. Most of them concentrate on faction vs. faction warfare. However there is one game system in Allods that doesn't consider a groups faction in segregating players. It's the official alternative for questing, PvE and PvP. It's Goblinball. The objective of the game is to kick the goblin that serves as the ball into the enemy's goal. Similar to soccer your task is to defend your goal while scoring. Goblinball is an enjoyable sport/mini-game to play. It successfully gives players another thing to look forward to aside from the daily grind.

Personally, when I saw the game trailer and heard of the pertinent game features I wanted to jump the gun and play Allods. Now it seems that I was justified on hoping that I would get myself into a great game. I don't think Allods Online will ever topple WoW. However, Allods for sure will provide good competitive encouragement for MMO developers because there's a F2P of this calibre. I cannot say that Allods is a perfect MMO at the moment, because it's just in OBT. The game has a lot of potential and I'd be keeping my eye out for game updates in the future.