It's rare for any game to approach its genre from a radically different angle. People approach a first person shooter or an on-line RPG with certain expectations of how it will look and play, and very few games make you blink. Maple Story is serious double-take territory. Yet when all?s said and done, it?s less different than it looks.

Maple Mesos Story is a free MMORPG. The first thing you?re going to notice, after the bit where you didn?t have to fork over any cash, is that it?s side-scrolling. It?s more like an old platform arcade game than a standard RPG, in play as well as graphics. It?s strongly reminiscent of Super Mario Brothers, Ghosts and Goblins, that kind of game, except of course the graphics are better. And it isn?t just the time you spend staring at the right-hand side of your character as you run along. You?re going to be jumping, a lot. Jumping from platform to platform, climbing ropes, crossing bridges, failing to jump over monsters...

But to cut to the chase, this big ?feature? of Maple Story is also one of the things that lets it down as a game. Being side-on DOES affect the gameplay. You know how crowded an on-line RPG can get, right? Now imagine you can?t go past anyone. If you?re trying to go somewhere, and there?s another player in your way doing two points of damage a round to a massive monster for half an hour, you have two choices. You can sit down and wait, or you can run in and kill-steal. KSing starts to look good even to players who wouldn?t normally dream of it. You can?t go around monsters, either. If it?s in your way, you can fight it, or try to jump over it, which is probably going to get you hurt anyway.

Perhaps fortunately, there isn?t much questing in Maple Mesos Story. Or at least, the quests don?t take long to do compared with how long it takes to go up a level once you get to about level 25. Because the quests will only take a couple of hours, you end up with a lot of level grinding, killing the same monsters hundreds of times just for the XP. And possibly kicks. There is a pretty straight-forward and functional party system, and while you can play the game solo fine, partying up does help deal with that annoying kill-stealing thing.