Review

AION 2 review

New MMORPG from the legendary NC Soft

I can’t just walk past without stirring some shi… ahem, sharing my opinion.

Somehow, all the news about Aion 2 completely passed me by, and I only found out it existed at Gamescom 2026. And honestly? I was pretty happy about it!

It’s the sequel to the much-loved Aion, which made quite a splash back in the day, from Korean MMO veteran NC Soft. I put a fair few hours into it after launch, and I really enjoyed it. It stuck with me. I even came back for a bit when Aion Classic launched a couple of years ago!

So, let’s look at what we got with the October 5 launch:

• A huge MMO, completely free-to-play!
• 400,000 concurrent players on Steam!
• A smooth launch, without insane queues and with stable servers!
• A great character creator and our favorite classes from the original Aion!
• A beautiful world where you can now fly in every zone!
• Loads of cool mounts and pets that are pretty easy to get!
• And two battle passes right out of the gate, for just $15! lol kek (not exactly a surprise, though; it is free-to-play)
• And plenty of other goodies!

You’d think: this is it! Finally, that tasty new MMO everyone who’s sick of the existing ones has been waiting for. But…

Instead, we got one hell of a wet fart😞

For context:

• I played for 20+ hours. As an Elyos, I confess. But the Asmo side was full on every server, sorry.
• I got my Cleric to the level cap of 45, with a couple more characters sitting at 20+
• I uninstalled the game on October 8, three days after launch 😂
• I am deliberately NOT going to discuss monetization or in-game purchases in this review

Right, let’s take it from the top!

Character creation.

Credit where it’s due! You can make a cute waifu, a really cute waifu, an ugly waifu, or even a waifu with a beard and a massive belly! Boob and butt sliders are included, too. Honestly, there are plenty of customization sliders to play with. Oh, and you can make male characters as well, but who cares about those?

The starting zone.

It’s not particularly pretty. Gloomy, I’d say. And tiny. Like, tiiiiny! You get the full tutorial on which buttons to press and how, they tell you you’re the chosen one, and you get your first pair of wings. And right there, in that very same zone, the first alarm bell went off: they told me that pressing Alt+1 makes your character run to the quest destination automatically. Hmm.

Quests and NPC interaction

You’d think: it’s the start of the game, it’s a tutorial, what do you expect? But it’s all far too rushed and crammed together. As if the whole thing’s motto is “No time to explain, shove a pineapple up your ass!” Meanwhile, world interaction and every quest still boil down to:

• Talk to an NPC
• Run to the quest marker
• Click the highlighted objects AND/OR kill everything that attacks you
• Run back
• Talk to an NPC

That’s all the game has to offer in terms of quests.

Leveling is an absolute joke.

In the finest MMO tradition, the real game starts at max level. In AION 2, that’s level 45. And you can reach it in, well, maybe not one evening, but definitely two. Honestly, I’d say 10–12 hours, tops.

The only decent source of XP in the game is the main story quest. All you have to do is run forward along the quest route (you can press Alt+1 and it’ll even do the running for you). It’ll take you through the main zones, keep handing you level-appropriate gear and new wings, and, as the cherry on top, give you a yellow “legendary” weapon at level 45. Awesome!

Why am I grumbling? Because usually, getting to the level cap is a whole adventure. Think back to the original AION: that adventure took a while. You had to fight, jerk o… ahem, grind mobs, gather resources, do some crafting, get yourself some gear, all that stuff. It was part of the experience. It gave you a whole bunch of memories, good and bad, and a chance to meet people in the game…

Content!

Everything in the game is fucking pointless before level 45! It’s just there. You can look at it. You can even touch it! But why the hell would you? Here’s an example:

Dungeons unlock at level 22. But there’s fuck all reason to do them, because claiming the rewards costs a currency that you’ll be farming as one of your endgame activities (more on that below). And what are those rewards? Well, you might get some blue gear that does FUCK ALL for you, and that you’ll throw away 20 minutes later because the main quest gives you something better. Or maybe you can extract a little skin from that piece of gear, but the chance isn’t 100%, so no guarantees there.

The boys and I spent almost all our currency in the level 22–30 dungeons because, well, we wanted cooler weapons. Better gear and stuff… And because it’s the FIRST FUCKING PLACE in 22 levels where you can actually do something with your friends!

The MMO part.

Until level 45, you’re playing an action RPG. Yes, there’ll be loads of little people running around the world with names floating over their heads, but don’t let them distract you! You won’t have to interact with them😂 At all!

As soon as my buddies and I left the starter-tutorial-noob zone at level 10, we formed a party so we could run around and level together. What we actually did was constantly wait for everyone else to finish their solo quests. Absolutely zero interaction. The entire story, which, let me remind you, is the only way to level up, is played solo. Great!

By the way, there’s no trading between characters. At all. None whatsoever. You can’t give your friend potions, scrolls, or gear you don’t need. Sorry.

Eventually, we reached the level 22 dungeon and happily jumped in with both feet.

Dungeons.

There are six in total. I’ve been to four (my gear score wasn’t high enough for the others). There’s an LFG tool, and it’ll throw together a party of whatever players and roles it finds in five seconds.

Every dungeon I’ve been to (“expeditions,” if we’re being fancy) is exactly the same: a corridor you run down to a miniboss, ignoring every mob along the way. Kill it, run to the second miniboss. Kill that one and run to the final boss. Kill that one too. That’s it.

Do the bosses have mechanics? Yeah, I guess. Except you couldn’t give less of a shit about them. Just stand there and smack away. Step out of the little yellow circles on the floor if you can be bothered.

Are the bosses interesting? No. You just stand there and spam your “rotation” (I’ll explain the quotation marks below). I played a healer and didn’t even bother pressing anything other than damage buttons. Well, okay, I had two healing buttons too, and I pressed them a couple of times per fight.

Combat.

It’s just… it’s… I have no words! But I’ll try to explain.

You have one ability that generates mana, usually just left-click spam. The others spend it. You’ve got those familiar AION skill chains: set a target on fire, for example, and then you can blast it with a fireball. There are stigmas, extra abilities you can pick up to three of. They hit hard and usually have long cooldowns. You can level up both your skills and your stigmas. At levels 8, 12, and 16, you unlock additional passive effects to choose from.

Now, AION 2 has this incredible thing called a “macro.” It lets you arrange your abilities into a sequence so they fire one after another. What’s so special about that? Well, you can put ALL your skills into it and just hold down the left mouse button. That’s it. That’s the entire combat system.

Let me say that again. You literally just hold down LMB, and your character fires off all your skills and skill chains. If something’s on cooldown, it gets skipped. Rinse and repeat. You stick a mana-generating ability somewhere in the middle. When I figured out how it worked, I was a little fucking stunned. From level 20 to 45, I ended up using nothing but my little left mouse button… the only things I occasionally pressed were heals. And only because I hadn’t put them in the macro😅

I’m sure there are exceptions on some classes. You might have a whopping THREE buttons to press! And that got me thinking: “How does this work in PvP and difficult dungeons? Is this really a PC MMORPG, or some mobile tapfest?” We’ll get to both questions in a moment 😂

High-level content and PvP.

Question numero uno! “How does this work in difficult dungeons and PvP?” Exactly the same way! I watched videos, watched streams, talked to people. You have a macro for your “combo” and a couple of extra abilities to press: a charge, a heal, some CC.

In PvE, you need to dodge the boss’s abilities at the right time (WITHOUT letting go of LMB!!!) and… That’s it! Once you hit the cap, you have access to one dungeon, which you need to grind to death for gear so you can raise your gear score enough to enter the next one. But there’s a catch here, too.

After you beat the final boss, it drops a chest containing the rewards for ALL three bosses you killed. Opening it costs 20–30 of a special currency, which caps at 560 and regenerates at a rate of 15 every three hours. Alternatively, you can buy special stones that give you around 10 points. You also get those stones from quests, the battle pass, and a few other bits and pieces. But you never have enough. Ever!

How do you like that system? Remind you of anything? Like the fucking energy systems in mobile games, perhaps…😉

Why is this currency so important? Because this is your main way to raise your gear score! And all the other content is locked behind that very same gear score! Although maybe that’s just how things work in modern MMOs. Don’t quote me on that.

“What about PvP, then?” you might ask. The original AION had that awesome rift system you could jump into from level 17 (or even earlier, I think)! Those rifts took you straight into the other faction’s territory and leveling zones, where you could entertain yourself by slaughtering unsuspecting players who were busy poking mobs. There was the Abyss with its multiple layers, there were sieges. There was Dredgion, for crying out loud!

Here’s the situation: first, you only get access at level 45 with a gear score of 1,000. Not a moment sooner! And let me remind you, yours is around 850 when you hit 45. Second, forget about any kind of “fair” PvP. Thank the gear score gap for turning you, with your measly 1,000 at best, into a walking sack of manure that explodes in half a second. Thank the separate passive skill tree that boosts PvP damage and PvP damage resistance, which everyone who’s been playing has already maxed out. Unlike you. And yes, the original AION had the same bullshit. Just on a smaller scale. A much smaller scale!

For PvP activities, there are some battlegrounds (I saw a payload escort mode, Overwatch/Marvel Rivals style) and, of course, the Abyss.

By the way, just like before, you won’t get anywhere without farming the Abyss. The points you earn there buy the crystals you need to upgrade your stigmas, along with various other goodies. So you will have to farm it.

The revelation.

Throughout my time with the game, I kept getting this growing feeling that I wasn’t playing an MMO from the legendary NC Soft, but some mobile game. A very, very mediocre one at that. I went digging and was completely, utterly, absolutely unsurprised to find that in Korea and Taiwan, AION 2 is available on PC… and mobile devices! Suddenly, everything fell into place! The one-button gameplay, the autorun, the insane leveling speed, the lack of group content beyond “pop into a dungeon for five minutes.”. Proofs.

The whole time I was playing AION 2, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen all this somewhere before. And sure as hell not in AION. Eventually, I remembered!

Tarisland came out in the summer of 2024. A rather notorious MMORPG, you might say. Cross-platform, PC and iOS/Android, pretty graphics, raids and dungeons, guilds, PvP, the whole lot. I even played it for a week before getting bored.

Well, there you go. AION 2 delivers exactly the same experience. It’s a mediocre mobile game being passed off as a fully fledged MMO.

The verdict.

Nothing in this game grabbed me except the character creator and the mounts and pets (they’re fun☺️).

Apart from those, I didn’t like a single thing! The whole game is so simple and so goddamn ONE-BUTTON that my ass reached dangerously high temperatures. It’s an utterly boring, monotonous piece of forgettable slop that treats its players like idiots who can’t think or even press more than three buttons.

I do not recommend THIS. I refuse to call THIS AION’s successor. I want to forget it. DON’T waste your time! Go play AION Classic instead.

Love to you all! ❤️

MultiplayerActionRPGMMORPG