You can try all magic schools and you are able to play in first town. But at around lvl 5 or so you will already encounter locked areas and to acces those you need to be subscribed or buy crowns with real money. There is no other way. You can not buy crowns in-game from other players, the only options are using credit card or paypal.

I miss the option of buying at least crowns over e-gold or other payment options like that as mayority of games have them. There are pre-paid cards available for crown purchase but they can ONLY be bought in USA.

So basicaly you are free to make account and download the game and play for some time in order for you to get the taste of the game. But for anything else than that you have to pay.

Now, the game is AWSOME! That I will not denay. The grafic might not be the best, but spells look nice. It is a great + for the game that NPCs have voices and they sound great. The mini games are nice to play, fighting system is interesting, quests are nicely done, pets are cute, you can color your stuff and you even can have a house/castle. It is one of the best games out there, specialy if you liked harry potter books and movies. It feels uniqe.

I compliment the prices for subscriptions since the price is fair and not a rip off BUT they should seriously add different payment methods, basicaly that is the only thing that I have against it.

The chat is done great also and I must compliment them on their struggle to keep kids as safe as possible.

But again: do not say that the game is free to play since it is not! Again, the only free thing is Trial and thats that.