Alicia Online

Summary
Alicia Online is a free-to-play 3D horse race game. Originally developed by Ntreev and released by a Korean publisher GameTree Alicia takes you into a magical world of horse racing, merging fantasy with horse riding allowing you to soar with your horse over beautiful and colourful maps. Experience fun and challenging races against other players in either of its 2 game modes and try your luck in the breeding system.

Game Design
The game is not an open world experience. Your 'home' is a small ranch where your horses can run around but all of the content is instanced into online lobbies.

Art Style
Alicia is leaning more to a cartoonish and stylized look. The horses look gorgeous and surprisingly realistic, despite their beautiful angelic wings. The landscapes and maps are beautifully colourful and pleasant to look at.

Gameplay
Alicia online offers players two types of online competitions; Magic Items & Speed Races. Magic Items can be easily described as "horse Mario Kart". You have a meter that, upon filling up, randomly selects a magical item you can then use to gain an advantage in the race. Speed Races are about your skill in sliding, boosting and using the maps shortcuts to your advantage. Both of the game modes offer a variant where you team up with 3 other players against 4 members of the opposing team. The game includes a short questline from the NPCs present on the main farm. The quests usually involve having to race on a specific map and collecting an item.

Controls
The control scheme is very simple - arrow keys are used to move, jump is on the z (or y depending on your keyboard) button, using items is on LControl and drifting is on LShift. While the lay out may sound a bit strange it feels very good and fun to use - of course this is fully customisable in the settings.

Riding Mechanics
The game isn't very realistic. Your horse has the ability to glide after double jumping as well as slide in tight corners. Controls feel very fluid and responsive and you never feel as though you were in control of a tank.

Breeding
This is an integral part of the game as it is the only way to obtain better horses for racing. Breeding works on an "RNG" (Random Number Generator) basis. There are 24 horse coats to choose from, though the team regularly adds new ones via community voting. The coats have varying rarity shown by golden stars. The higher the rarity, the more difficult the coat is to obtain from breeding. Horses can also be born with one of the 8 different mane styles and 6 different tail styles which cannot be changed or customized.

In game store
As Alicia Online is a revival of a discontinued online game the in game store requires no real money purchases. There are two currencies the shop uses - carrots, which are also used in breeding, and gem stones which can be obtained through daily quests and participating in carnivals during the online races. The shop has three main categories - Horse, Character & Items. Horse tab includes armour/equipment which increases your horse's stats as well as gives a bonus once a set is completed (this can be only purchased for 1, 7 or 30 days not permanently). The character tab has equipment for the character - these have no effect on the online races and are purely cosmetic. Finally the items tab includes care items for your horse - food, toys, brushes and ointments in case of an injury - as well as extra horse slots for your ranch, name change tokens for horses and pets, EXP increase elixirs, foal growth potions and more.

Ranch
Your ranch is a fully costumisable area where your horses and you spend time outside of racing lobbies. You can choose appearance of the main house, the barn, sky, jumps and decorations around the area. After completing the "main" questline the game has to offer you will be able to obtain a hatching device which can be placed in your ranch. During races you may sometimes obtain eggs, which vary in level from 1-4, putting them into this hatching device may result in a cute pet. The pets differ based on the map type (Meadow, desert, jungle, city and ice) as well as their level. These have no effect on the game and are purely cosmetic additions. If you coordinate your ranch into a specific style you will gain a bonus. Every 20 races you will obtain carrots based on the amount and style of the items on your ranch. Your ranch can also level up though this seems to have no effect.

Achievements
One really unique aspect of Alicia online are its achievement books. Found in the second tab of the character profile, they unlock depending on your character's level. Each book has a specific theme and is filled with challenges for you to complete. Once you successfully finish every task within a given book you are given a reward. The reward consists of a; hat and matching outfit and an altered version of the same hat and matching outfit. The achivement books have 4 levels - bronze, silver, gold and platinum. Keep in mind that these missions can only be completed in online races.

Training, Tutorials and NPC Challenges
Some extra content available in the game. Under the race tab there are 2 extra options, to the online races, Training and Tutorials. Tutorials are short missions that teach the player some basic controls and mechanics of speed and magic races alike. Training offers timed courses. These have you race against a ghost of your self to beat your "best" time. The second option are speed or magic item races versus NPCs of varying level of AI difficulty - 1 easiest to 5 hardest. Completeing these rewards players with carrots, the in game currency, in varying amounts depending on the chosen npc difficulty.

Engine
As a 2009 game, Alicia runs on an old engine making it incompatible with Windows 11, as of right now. There are also issues with the UI resolutions on big monitors.

Trivia
A similar gameplay is found in Wildshade, released in 2021.