Albion Online is an MMORPG packaged somewhat different than you might expect. This MMORPG is played from isometric perspective (top down) and is using very rudimentary graphics engine that somehow looks and feels good to play. It has all other components like every other MMO, but unlike most other MMOs Albion Online is played 100% as a Sandbox game. There is no story that will connect the dots, there is only you as a player and hundreds of thousands other players with freedom to do whatever the fuck you want, the game will allow everything you can possibly put in one game to do. I mean everything, like doing every day "mundane" tasks like gathering materials for crafting, crafting all sorts of items and weapons, become a market flipper, be a dungeon clearing beast, you can do PVP combat, you can do guild vs guild massive battles, you can just focus on your Island and build it up from scratch. It is a living breathing world with it's own economy. This game is huge, huge I tell you!
The world map is set up as a series of big maps connected by 5 regions each with one big city, in the center of the map there is one huge capital city. That is just a royal main land continent, you can also explore the outlands, 3 times larger newly discovered land filled with new opportunities and dangers. Zones are divided into four difficulties, green, yellow, red and black. Understanding the colors of the zones is the key factor of surviving in Albion Online. Green is a safe zone where nobody can gank you but you can only gather low grade materials, in yellow zone you can be killed by the pvp player but you keep your items, red and black zones are very dangerous because if you die there you lose all your gear, but you can also find the best materials and all sorts of dungeons with great loot. When you die in Red or Black zones everything is lost forever. The bastard that killed you now owns all the great gear you collected. You will learn that the hard way when you lose all your progress in one short trip where you shouldn't of gone.
Once you establish your character aka. you become rich, you can buy yourself an island. There you can build a whole village for yourself, buildings like houses, windmills, farms, blacksmiths, animal pens, etc. All those buildings will work for you, for example I can grow carrots on my islands and feed them to my horses, those horses mature and you can then saddle them up if you've gathered enough rough leather, then you can sell those horses on the market. That is just one example how this economy works. Of course every one of those buildings require materials to build which you will have to gather yourself or buy from the markets. Everything is sold by real players who play and farm those materials. Did I mention every building can be upgraded 8 times, each upgrade will increase crafting yields. You can also buy heavily contested lands in capital cities where you can earn silver by taxing players who use your buildings for crafting.
You can specialize your character for different weapon loads, for example you can be an archer and your equipped bow and leather armor will provide you with certain abilities you can use for that build, when you specialize even further you will be able to equip artifact bows and leather gear that will give you special abilities for PVP or PVE content, there are so many items with different abilities that you can use it is hard to even fathom. Skill tree is bonkers, there are many paths you can take, be a fisherman knight, necromancer tailor, hunter that hunts wild animals and sells their cubs on the markets, those cubs can grow into adults which you can mount up and ride(those are the most expensive mounts in the game btw, you can make a fortune by selling them), you can be a guild master and you can tax your people for membership and earn all the cash. Sky is the limit in this game, this is Sandbox in all it's glory.
When it comes to subscription model Albion Online is free to play, you can pay 10$ per month for extra goodies, you can also earn silver in game by doing everything I mentioned above and pay your subscription with in game money, free to play however will yield you less materials when you gather it making the game way more grindy than it should be. Albion Online gave me few months of fun, I always return to see what is new, but truth to be said the game population since it's free to play launch dwindled a lot, it is still very populated but very less than it used to be. You can now actually mine those titanium nodes that were heavily contested before. Overall this is a massive MMORPG that truly is what it says it is, a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (say that when you're drunk on homemade moonshine). It is not perfect but for what it is, it is pretty great. Score: 86/100!