World of Warcraft Review

Good Points
Everything works the way you expect it to. Left-click to select, right-click to act. Drag-n-drop works too. And shiny icons show more information when you wave your mouse over them.

The HUD can be customized by writing lua scripts with some XML layout. I downloaded one of the more popular customization packages and ended up using it for most of the stress test.

Fun moments:
Running into Althea, leader of the Night Watch in Darkshire, and the first Gryphon ride, for example.

Bad Points
None that I can think of. Maybe the graphics didn't reach my expectations...

General Comments
World of Warcraft is a great game to play, in my opinion. Find out why by reading some of my experiences with this game below...



Graphics

If you've seen the Blizzard screenshots, you know that WoW is taking a non-realistic cartoony approach to the graphics. This art direction works. The game is fun to look at.



Gameplay

I had fun doing everything I tried. Pellets came often enough to keep me happy. There are no punishing failures in this game, no failed crafting combines that eat all the expensive ingredients. The death penalty is an annoyance, no more. And yet it was enough that my party doing the Van Cleef/Deepmines quest worked really hard not to have a party wipe deep in the instanced dungeon. (That experience was a blast, even though we never did finish the quest.)



I did human quests; the human stuff is much more fully developed than the other races' stuff. I wasn't interested in the highest-level contest Blizzard was running; I wanted to sample variety.



In a few words, WoW is playable, fun, pretty to look at, and has a reasonable stability. Based on my stress test experience, the only reason I might not buy this game is fear of addiction. :))



Blizzard is going to break MMORPG convention and ship a game with finished gameplay.



More details about this game at:

www.blizzard.com



Leesa