AION 2 Review: Gorgeous Flight Combat, Grindy Pay-to-Win Baggage

AION 2 is NCSoft's big swing at turning a 20-year-old MMO brand into something built for 2026, and the pitch is genuinely cool: fly up, fight in mid-air, and drop back into a world that's dozens of times bigger than the original game. On paper it's one of the more ambitious MMORPG launches of the year. In practice, the player base that showed up on day one is split almost down the middle, and after digging through the most recent user reviews, it's easy to see why — there's real fun buried in here, but it's wrapped in some very familiar free-to-play friction.

Pros

• The aerial combat is the star of the show. Several reviewers singled out the flight-based fighting as something that actually feels different from the usual tab-target MMO grind, and it's the one thing almost nobody complains about.
• Character creation is deep — over 200 customization options gives you a real shot at making a character that doesn't look like everyone else's.
• For players coming off a much older MMO, more than one reviewer described AION 2 as a welcome, lighter change of pace — something to kill time in without the baggage of a 20-year-old game's systems.
• There's a lot of PvE content on paper, with solo, 5-player, and 10-player dungeon formats giving you options depending on how much group play you want.

Cons

• Pay-to-win comes up again and again. Multiple reviewers flagged the cash shop and premium currencies as giving paying players a real combat advantage, not just cosmetics.
• The soul-binding system drew one of the longest, most detailed complaints in the sample: gear can get locked to a class or character in a way that makes it unusable where you actually need it, which feels punishing in a game already asking for a big time investment.
• Bot activity is already a visible problem for some players, which is a bad look this early into launch.
• At least one reviewer with only an hour played said the game felt more like a single-player RPG with MMO dressing than genuine shared-world exploration — auto-move and a lack of monster XP left the moment-to-moment loop feeling thin.
• A reviewer with over 180 hours logged noted a promised class wasn't actually available at release, which stings for anyone who was specifically waiting on it.

Performance & PC

AION 2 is Windows-only and asks for a reasonably modern rig: the minimum spec calls for a Ryzen 5 2600 or Core i5-10500, 8GB of RAM, and a GTX 1050 Ti, while NCSoft recommends a Ryzen 7 3700X or Core i7-11700 with 16GB of RAM and an RTX 2070 for a smoother experience. Either way you'll want 100GB free. The good news from the reviews themselves is that performance isn't where the complaints are concentrated — none of the ten most recent reviews mentioned crashes, freezes, or stuttering, and there's no Steam Deck or Linux chatter to speak of yet. Whatever frustration players have with AION 2 right now, it's aimed at the economy and progression systems, not the engine.

How it compares

Aniimo is the closer comparison on paper — another free-to-play, massively multiplayer RPG currently working through its own early-access growing pains, and worth watching alongside AION 2 if you're curious how NCSoft's monetization choices stack up against a smaller studio's approach to the same formula.

RuneScape: Dragonwilds comes from Jagex, a studio that's spent decades managing a long-running MMO community, and it's a useful reminder that "built on an old brand's name" doesn't have to mean "burdened by old brand's baggage" — it's leaning into survival-RPG systems rather than aerial combat, but it's chasing a similar nostalgia-plus-reinvention angle.

Marvel Rivals is a different genre entirely, but it's the clearest example on the catalog of a free-to-play live-service game that largely avoided the pay-to-win criticism AION 2 is getting right now — worth keeping in mind as a benchmark for how a big IP relaunch can handle monetization without alienating its own player base this early.

Summary

AION 2 has the bones of something good — flight combat that feels fresh, a genuinely huge world, and enough character customization to keep people invested in how their avatar looks even when the systems underneath are frustrating them. But the reviews from people actually playing it right now paint a picture of a launch dragged down by bots, a cash shop that crosses the line into pay-to-win for a meaningful chunk of the player base, and a soul-binding system that punishes exactly the kind of long-term investment an MMO is supposed to reward. None of that is unfixable, and NCSoft has every incentive to patch the rough edges out over the coming months. Right now, though, it's hard to call this an easy recommendation at launch — give it some time to see how the economy and bot problems shake out before sinking serious hours into it.