Norrath has been plunged into darkness, but life and honour cling tenaciously to the cliff's edge. Hope for renewal rests with the brave, the wise, and the adventurous ... That'll be our Chris then! Here's his review...

So my first MMORPG, I was about to embark on a whole new life, one that was fresh, exciting and full of adventure, so did this new life measure up favourably to the one I have now? Gather ye round and I shall tell thee all.

I had heard a lot about MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), about how they offer you a whole new gaming experience, and how your game characters life becomes more important than your own. Well it's sort of true, but I tell you if I had to put up with some of the things that my game character has to put up with then I would be a very unhappy game character. But let's leave the negative points for now and look at the positives.

For a start, for a MMORPG for the P.C. this is a very good solid first release, usually developer's employ a "release it first, fix it later" policy, but this has next to no bugs that I could see, which bodes well for the future. Also the amount to do in this game is staggering. There is an immense amount of quests, you could easily spend the first 20 hours of the game in the first city alone. As for the cities, there are two, one good and one evil, depending on the choices you make when creating your character you will start in either city.

The way the game is set up is also quite interesting, there is no player combat, so you don't fight against other live people, only against the monsters that the game creates. This means that you meet up with other people and form teams that then roam around completing quests and fighting monsters, if you don't like doing this then you may not like this game as if forces you into this way of playing by making the monster very hard, usually you will find it takes three or four people to fight the average monster.

There are plenty of races, all will be familiar to the seasoned Everquest player with the addition of one new race, the 'Ratonga'. However I found that there wasn't much difference in play between any of the races. For that matter whether you choose being Good or Bad, doesn't affect the play much and you get to change allegiances later, through the 'Betrayal Quest'.

Specific issues I had with this game were the fact that your character must be facing an opponent to be able to attack, this can be frustrating in the heat of battle when you expect your character to automatically turn to attack the next opponent a la 'Fable'. The inventory in this game is tiny, meaning that you often become frustrated because you have choose between what you can keep and what you need to get rid of and there is no overview map that you can access while playing. These are all minor gripes, but for a game this big, one would have expected them to be sorted out.

Apart from that, this game is immensely enjoyable and builds on the excellent first game to create something that MMORGP fans will lap up. The only major issue is that you may need to upgrade your computer in some way to play it! It's a monster of a game that needs a monster of a P.C.

Enjoy and happy hunting!