Lineage 2 Essence Review

When I, the author of these lines, logged into Lineage 2 Essence, my first thought wasn’t “Wow, I’m back in the legendary MMORPG,” but rather “Where is everyone?” For a long time, there was almost no one around me, and because of that, the game made a very strange impression right from the start. You’re simply dropped into a world that’s supposed to feel vast and alive, but instead feels empty and lifeless.

And that probably best sums up my overall experience with Essence. On the surface, there’s a lot going on here: different races, classes, leveling, gear, avatars, buffs, scrolls, events, bosses, dungeons, PvP, and clans. But in practice, the game constantly gives the impression that, behind all its mechanics, it lacks a clear direction and has no desire to engage me as a player with anything other than an endless cycle of “kill more mobs.”

At the start, the game pretends to offer a choice. You’ve got dark elves, regular elves, orcs, dwarves, humans, and the new samurai. On the surface, it all sounds good, and the race and class system in Essence is actually designed so that different races have their own class trees and starting roles. But the problem is that none of this feels like an interesting choice; it feels more like a dry, technical setup before the grind. I chose a mage and realized right then that the game isn’t trying to engage you with the character itself, but simply offers you a choice of which class you’ll use to farm.

The character editor is so basic that it’s almost embarrassing to call it an editor. A floor, a couple of faces, a few hair options—that’s basically it. In 2026, this doesn’t just seem modest; it feels as though the game simply doesn’t care whether you want to form any kind of connection with your character. By comparison, in list best games for girls, customization and the ability to create "your own" character are often key selling points.

The first few hours of the game are probably the worst part, because that’s when it’s supposed to hook you, but instead it just bores you. At first, you’re dragged through the most formulaic tutorial imaginable. Go there, teleport here, press a skill, learn a skill, talk to an NPC, kill a target. It’s all so generic that I didn’t feel like I was starting a journey. It felt like I was going through the instructions for a very old and clunky interface.

And then they let you out into the world. The first thing I noticed was the near-total absence of people. Not in the sense that there’s zero online activity, but in the sense that the starting area is so empty, you literally can’t tell if this is a live MMORPG or if they just forgot to turn it off. Later, players showed up, especially in higher-level zones and in the chat, but the game’s launch is so dead that it ruins its own first impression.

The plot? Honestly, I just didn't see one here. There was no proper storytelling, no cinematic sequences, and no real sense that anything was happening in the world at all, aside from the endless slaughter of mobs. The quests follow the laziest template possible: go to a location, kill a bunch of enemies, come back, hear how great you are. Now go to the next location and kill another bunch of enemies there.

The game doesn't even try to disguise it. There's no sense of adventure, no drama, no context to give this routine any meaning. You just mow down another 10 mobs, then another 20, then another 10, and after a while a simple truth dawns on you: this is the game, and everything else is just window dressing.

At first, I thought the combat would get more interesting and polished over time, but in the end, what annoyed me the most was just how clunky it was, even for the simplest tasks. The targeting system is poorly designed. So poorly, in fact, that I had to set a separate keybinding for selecting the nearest target with the mouse; otherwise, battles turned into a struggle not with mobs, but with the controls. The key remapping also managed to drive me crazy: when the game forces you to press F1 and F2 where any normal person would want to assign 1, 2, 3, 4, it isn’t making your life harder—it’s just showing how little it cares about the player’s comfort.

Skills alone aren't enough to save the day. At the start, my mage had a bare minimum of active buttons, and the interface for learning them is designed as if it were created by people who had never played a video game in their lives. Click, scroll through, go back, select again, confirm again.

To be fair, the first few dozen levels go by just fine. As long as you’re getting your starting rewards, still figuring out the systems, and unlocking your first skills, there’s an illusion of progress. Up to around level 50–60, you could even call it tolerable. But then the game finally drops the mask. Lineage 2 Essence is just a grind. Not in the romanticized sense of the pleasant repetition found in MMORPGs, but in the most literal sense: mob after mob, location after location, level after level, without any sense that the structure of what’s happening is changing in any way.

And this isn’t one of those cases where monotony is offset by atmosphere or story. No, here you’re just looking at the bare bones of progression. Kill more and get stronger, then go back and kill even more. If that’s exactly what you like, then you’ll get a meditative high out of the game. I, however, saw nothing but a repetitive cycle of actions. Grinding can be different—in some games it’s meditative, in others it’s just exhausting. Monotony isn’t a death sentence if there’s atmosphere or meaning behind it.

Another reason why the game quickly becomes tedious is the overwhelming number of systems that, rather than enriching the experience, simply clutter it up. You’re given chests. Chests drop gear, scrolls, consumables, and various buffs. Overloaded systems and intrusive progression aren’t unique to Essence. There are scrolls for physical damage, for magical damage; there are weapon upgrades; there are sets; there are separate slots for items; there are gems; there are dolls; there are passive bonuses; there are some extra tabs for stats, elements, upgrades… and God knows what else.

And at some point, I stopped seeing it as an RPG system. It started to feel like a box full of random mechanics that someone had just dumped on the table and said, “Well, figure it out yourself.” It’s unclear where to get good gear and the resources needed to level up your character. Because of this, it’s hard to figure out how the local economy even works, and instead of interest, a sense of confusion quickly sets in.

The funny thing is that there actually seem to be players in the game. In the chat, some people were selling things, others were buying, and still others were organizing groups. So, in a technical sense, there is a social life. But the game itself explains its basic mechanics so poorly and does such a poor job of introducing newbies to the actual gameplay that it all feels like it’s happening behind a foggy glass. You can see that life is bustling somewhere out there, but the game doesn’t help you become part of it. And that creates a strange sensation: there’s an MMORPG, but there’s no sense of community.

I even ended up at one of the events. First I died, then I respawned, then everyone around me was doing something, then they seemed to have killed the boss, and finally, for some reason, everyone stayed behind to fight mobs, while I never really understood what exactly had happened, what I was supposed to take away from it, or where the fun was in all of that. And to me, that’s very telling. The mere presence of group content doesn’t automatically make a game interesting. If a casual player joins an activity and feels nothing but disorientation, it means the game isn’t doing its job. It doesn’t make you want to dive into it; it just exists on its own.

Another issue is performance. The more people I encountered, the more the game started to lag. Just when the world was supposed to feel more alive, it became technically less enjoyable. And the cities didn’t feel like lived-in places, but rather like strange, empty boxes. Huge buildings, lots of space, NPCs standing around, but zero atmosphere. It no longer looks like the great old MMORPG, but rather like an outdated game with empty locations and a weak atmosphere.

And despite all that, I understand why Essence has an audience. Essence does have an audience—and that’s a valid point. But player loyalty and game quality are two different things, and the most underrated games of the last few years show when the former truly aligns with the latter. Because there are people who don’t need a story, don’t need direction, and don’t need flashy presentation. What matters to them is this endless cycle of leveling up and farming. They need an endless ladder of buffs, passives, scrolls, upgrades, inserts, bonuses, and progression. And that’s exactly what Essence provides—and with automation, too.

The focus here isn't on adventure, but on endlessly leveling up your character. What matters most isn’t the atmosphere or emotions, but steady progress and the benefit gained from every action. And if you like that, you’ll probably be able to spend hundreds of hours here. But for me personally, the problem is that I saw nothing in it but a very old framework onto which a ton of mechanics have been slapped, in an attempt to convince players that this is what depth looks like.

Lineage 2 Essence isn’t the kind of MMORPG that draws you in with its world, story, or sense of immersion. It’s an MMORPG that first confuses you, then wears you down, and finally tries to convince you that all this endless grinding and clunky interface are what make the genre truly thrilling. RPGs can be many things—from meditative farming to vivid storytelling—and best RPGs for Low-End PCs and Laptops clearly demonstrate this entire spectrum. It might work for some people, but not for me.

When a game gives me a shoddy editor, a bare-bones start, repetitive quests, clunky targeting, awkward controls, a million poorly designed systems with no explanations, boring combat, and a world where I feel neither life nor meaning for far too long, I find it hard to call it a good MMORPG. To me, this isn’t a legend adapted for the modern age. It’s a very old, overloaded game that has absolutely no respect for the player’s time—a game that stays afloat not because it’s fun to play, but because its audience has grown accustomed to living in a never-ending grind. While developers are vying to promise innovation and player-centric design in the list of the most anticipated RPGs of 2026, Lineage 2 Essence takes a completely different approach.