Role-playing games have been common on Facebook from the beginning . However, these games are usually text-based and devoid of the classic RPG elements found in console games. Tetris Online Games is attempting to fill that void with a Facebook app entitled Lost Trails.

The game boasts all the parts to a quality RPG, but while Lost Trails allows for deep customization, the game-play feels flat. Due to this, the the customization begins to work against the game and becomes irritating.

Lost Trails’ story is introduced by letter from the king. It’s standard fantasy fare: there are monsters, and you must slay them. Set in a fantasy world, you are able to customize an avatar and tailor it to one of many classic fantasy RPG roles such as the fighter, ranger, wizard, and priest.

From here, the game takes a Tolkien storytelling route. The main activity in Lost Trails is to travel the world, enter various dungeons and defeat whatever boss lurks in the highest tower. When you try to reach the boss of a dungeon, you move up a tier in that dungeon with each battle you win. Losing one will send you back to the bottom and force you to start over.

Throughout your journey, you can spend 10 “Action Points” — the equivalent of energy — to engage random enemies, at which point a 2D animated battle takes place with you and your enemies trading blows until one dies. Your have no control within the battle, but if you win, you will receive experience, gold, and the occasional item. As with other RPGs, these items boost stats such as damage or defense, and specific items can only be used by specific classes, but in Lost Trails you can only wear four pieces of equipment at a time.

As you level up, however, you will be able to recruit new party members to your group. These party members can be real Facebook friends. Friends do not have to play to be part of your party — the game can choose a class for them at random. Unfortunately, if your friends do play Lost Trails, your game doesn’t reflect the character your friend has created in his or her game.

This is a significant disappointment. That kind or friend interaction within game would be fun and meaningful, and perhaps even reflect a MMOG-style play. As it stands, the only social mechanic with a reward is “visiting” a friend and earning some extra Action Points.

The customization system in Lost Trails is good. As you level up your party members, they gain skill points. Similar to talent trees in games such as World of Warcraft and Diablo (though significantly watered down), you can allot points to earn special abilities and bonuses to their characters. Furthermore, you can also change the battle formations of your party, placing weaker defense characters, such as casters, in the back.

So far so good, but combat in role-playing games needs to be fun. The more prep work needed for combat, the more fun it needs to be. Unfortunately, in Lost Trails, the attacks are bland, the pacing is slow and though you can skip straight to the results, it just isn’t gratifying. You eventually feel like you fight enemies merely to put more points into a mundane interface.

What should be present, in a good RPG, is a strategy element to the customization, rewarded by a tactical application of that strategy in battle. Some games get away without doing this, a recent example being Final Fantasy XIII, in which players can opt to have minimal, more or less automated, battles in favor of watching the story unfold. Lost Trails doesn’t offer either meaningful customization or beautiful visuals, so players are essentially playing just to add more numbers in a UI system.

Lost Trails currently has around 210,000 monthly active users, but its DAU is not doing so well, at only 16,799.  It seems many players may feel as we do — that Lost Trails has high quality customization, but an ultimately boring battle system and little gratification for spending time on the customization.