Silkroad Online received a major update in March, in the form of Legend IV: Tomb of the Qin-Shi Emperor. The update increased the free-to-play MMO's level cap from 90 to 100 and added new high-level skills, quests and a dungeon in the form of the Tomb of Qin-Shi. Since we've not done much with the game since its release in 2007, we thought it was about time we saw what all the fuss was about.

Silkroad Online is set across the "Silk Road", a series of trade routes that crossed China, the Middle East and Eastern Europe 1,400 years ago. The developers claim to have drawn heavily from mythologies spanning the region, as well as what's known about the Silk Road itself, with the game's "Triangular Conflict" PvP system aiming to recreate what the Silk Road was like at the time. When characters reach level 20, they're able to become Merchants, Hunters or Thieves, each of which has a different role on the Silk Road. Merchants are tasked with delivering goods, Hunters are hired to protect them and Thieves try to steal from Merchants. This system is separate from the game's character classes, meaning that however you've built your character you can take on whichever of these roles you want. It's even possible to switch between roles if you don't like the one you've chosen.

The other main feature of Silkroad Online is the ability to choose a range of skills for your character, taken from the whole range of character classes. There's no limit to the number of classes that characters can learn skills from, so it's possible to specialise in one area or become a jack of all trades, learning a multitude of skills from a variety of different classes. In other words, warriors can invest in spells to attack from afar, or even pick up healing abilities to help keep themselves alive.

The new dungeon would look empty if it wasn't for all the enemies.

The "Tomb of Qin-Shi" dungeon added in Legend IV contains high-level content from 70 all the way up to 100. The dungeon isn't instanced, meaning that there's no limit to the number of players who can enter the same "version" of the area at once. This is just as well, as it contains large numbers of enemies on short respawn timers. In other words, the Tomb's difficulty comes from throwing hordes of increasing difficult enemies at players, rather than providing carefully scripted and balanced encounters. Defeated enemies respawn so quickly that the dungeon floor ends up covered in gold and other loot that players haven't had time to pick up. The fact that loot is scattered so widely is surprising due to the sheer scale of the dungeon. It's over 15 floors in size, with each floor taking the form of an enormous room. Unfortunately, this makes the place look a little barren, or at least it would without so many enemies wandering around. There's also a fair amount of repetition in the Tomb, with many floors sharing a single layout. I would've expected a little more variety in the design, given that this is the highest level content currently available in the game. Anyone reaching the end of the Tomb will encounter the half-human, half-viper "BeakYung", who has yet to be defeated on most of Silkroad's servers.

In order to get to fight BeakYung - or experience any of the other content contained in the expansion - you'll need to work your way through the game's lower-level content first. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how many people will actually do this, as the game's not without its problems. Silkroad Online is very much a Korean MMO, which means that anyone playing it will be doing a whole lot of grinding. Every quest I came across in the game's early levels was either a "fetch" quest in town, or someone telling to me kill 20 of a certain type of mob. …Ok, maybe that's not entirely true: I also got quests to retrieve items from enemies with criminally low drop rates. Silkroad has also been poorly translated from the original Korean, with gems like the following cropping up when talking to NPCs: "I thoght there wasn't going to be any chance of getting to my hands." This level of English badly affects the game's tutorial, making it difficult to understand. To be honest, the translation's barely better than that found in Elf Online.

Starting characters can only "auto attack". You'll need to wait a few levels to get other skills.

Other cardinal sins committed by the game include not using the "WASD" keys for movement, although it should be possible to change this via Silkroad's options screen. Another control issue reaers its head in the form of the right mouse button being used to activate skills, contrary to most other MMOs. This can be frustrating to new players, who could find themselves "picking up" icons on their quickbar instead of activating their effects. Perhaps the most glaring issue though is that characters start out without a single skill or special ability to their names. This helps to create a poor first impression, with low-level combat lacking any kind of "wow factor".

However, the game's biggest problem rears its head before you even log in. I'm not talking about the inability to use capital letters in your password, but that the game's servers are nearly always full. Unlike other games, there's no queue to join before you can log in. Instead, an unsuccessful attempt sees you kicked back to your desktop, forcing you to reload the client in order to try again. There are 37 servers currently available in Silkroad Online and you'll be lucky if you're able to log into one of them. If you DO manage to log in, I wish you luck in being able to log back into the same server at a later date.

Oh look, the servers are full. Again.

Maybe the capacity issues are a result of players logging in to try out the update, but there's also another possibility. You see, one of the things sold through Silkroad's micropayment system is "Premium" access to the game. This includes - among other things - the ability to log into a server even when it's full. Given how bad the problem is with logging in, paying for Premium access is the only way to be able to reliably log into the game. In other words, if you're looking for a new free-to-play MMO, you'd be better off with Runes of Magic or Perfect World for the moment. At least you'll be able to log into those…