I just got a beta key recently, and have spent a few hours playing it. I was initially pretty impressed by how much you could do. It really does seem like they give you a lot of tools to work with. However, my main gripe is they really make it difficult for you to progress. If you want to stake a claim, which seems like a pretty fundamental part of playing the game, you first have to make a flag, but in order to make the flag you first have to get a better pick ax, and in order to make that you first have to.... you see where I am going with this. At least they have a handy store you can access at the push of a button to buy material and skip all that. All this has led me walk away with a new found appreciation of Minecraft's simplicity and purity of design. There is definitely a lot of tedium in that game as well but it feels much snappier than Landmark. In Minecraft you can start from scratch and actually get things going much quicker, and there is a satisfaction in working your way up the "tech tree." All of this is probably shouldn't be a surprise considering this is attached to an MMO, but it still is a bit of a bummer. I can see a really cool game here, but as it stands there are too many hurdles to jump through to get to that game. That seems to be the way a lot of F2P games go these days. I'm curious to see if anyone else has had a better experience, maybe I'm missing something that would save a lot of time.

Also on a completely unrelated note, the running and jumping in the game is pretty awesome. There are lots of little animations for your character that make it almost feel like you are playing Super Mario 64 or something. So at least there is that.