Bright colors, soothing background music, loud sound effects, cute character designs, and cartoony hack-and-slash action arrives on Facebook today in 'Trials of Elsword' -- a self-professed "manga-styled" game that's meant to complement and promote Elsword Online, which is a South Korean MMO that had its North American debut by Kill3rCombo in March. MMOs, or massively multiplayer online games, are very popular in South Korea. They are often free-to-play and centered around magical action fantasy.

Since Trials of Elsword is one of many companion games making their way to Facebook, fans hoping for a real Facebook MMO are going to be disappointed. Also, as far as such games go, it's not fully fleshed out. It's more like the Puzzle Quest 2 Mage Trainer than Dragon Age Legends, which means that eventually, you're going to run out of content. But it's still of a ridiculous high quality for a Facebook game (woo-hoo, 3D!) and able to deliver a few hours of fun. To start, you pick one of three characters -- Elsword, Rena, and Aisha -- who are respectively, a swordsman, an archer, and a magician. When you're done with one character, the others will be locked. To play as the other two characters, simply invite two friends to the game. They don't even have to respond to your requests. Also, each character has special abilities based on their job class. For example, Elsword is a melee fighter, so he doesn't have any ranged attacks, but Rena can shoot arrows and Aisha shoots magic.
After you pick a character, you'll see two options -- Story Mode and Challenge Mode. Beating Story Mode with a different character each time, for three times total, will earn you an item for Elsword Online and unlock Challenge Mode. Challenge Mode is where you're given a minute to beat as many monsters as possible for a high score. This is where the social aspect of the game comes in, because you'll basically be competing for high scores with your other Facebook friends.
The game tells you that you can speed through or skip conversations by clicking the right mouse button, but you can press the space bar to do that too. You probably don't want to use the mouse while you're playing cause you'll end up toggling out of the game. And here's the last but most important tidbit that I want to share: this game requires the Unity Web Player to run, which is the thing that lets you view all the pretty graphics, and thus, might be too heavy-duty for your computer to handle. (Click here to see other web games that use the Unity engine.) If you like what you see here, head over to its Facebook fan page game guide (or the one on the official site here) which will explain how you can download the full game and redeem your free item.
Play 'Trials of Elsword' on Facebook Now >