Secret World Diary 1: The Illuminati Loves Old School Hip-Hop

Since The Secret World is such a massive game, we've decided to split our review of the game up into several smaller weekly diaries rather than try to cover the whole game based on a few days of play. This week, well be discussing the world of The Secret World and our first few hours of play.

Since World of Warcraft emerged to dominate the MMO landscape over a half decade ago almost every major MMO release could be easily described as Its like WoW, but Even this years massive Star Wars: The Old Republic largely boiled down to Its like WoW, but with BioWare voice acting.

The Secret World has positioned itself as the first MMO to break from WoWs formula for success, and on paper it appears to actively rebel against tradition. Instead of WoWs fantasy setting, Secret World is set in a modern day world where H.P. Lovecraft was right, every conspiracy theory is true and magic lurks around every corner. Instead of WoWs class system and leveling treadmill the Secret World awards players ability points that can be spent to make their own deck of skills from a common pool of abilities, allowing any character to gain any skill in the game.

Finally, instead of WoWs endless series of fetch 10 X and kill 10 Y quests, Secret World promises to change up the formula with a lot of story intensive missions that play off of your chosen faction. My choice of the gun-toting suit-wearing Illuminati and my handlers musical taste inspired the diarys headline. The game also deviates from the grind with stealth-based sabotage missions and investigative missions that require critical thinking and puzzle solving to progress to the next stage of the quest.

Im only a few hours into the game and already the investigative missions are the most compelling part of the game. The first one I stumbled upon required me to follow secret Illuminati symbols scattered around town that led me to a plaque that had a riddle on it that I at least wasnt able to solve off the top of my head.

One of Secret Worlds most interesting features is an in-game web browser. When you first discover the browser you might think its a simple trick to keep players from alt-tabbing out of the game to check their e-mail, but you soon learn its an absolute must for solving investigative missions.

You see, some of the puzzles cant be solved just using information found in the game. In the case of my mission a quick visit to the website for the small (fictional) town of Kingsmouth I was visiting cleared up my confusion. Other missions however might require a quick visit to the Wikipedia page of some of the actual mythological beings and conspiracy theories referenced in the game to better understand what exactly youre chasing after.

Its a compelling and immersive spin on solving in-game puzzles and its simultaneously the most entertaining and least WoW-like part of Secret World.

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Secret World Diary 1: The Illuminati Loves Old School Hip-Hop