Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Review
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This is the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning experience that developer Mythic promised with its "war is everywhere" slogan. Choke points and bodychecking dominate these hotkey-smashing brawls thanks to collision detection and the proliferation of movement-controlling spellwork. Battles in WAR are not only highly entertaining but also enriching; PVP nets you more experience, money, and gear than any other activity in the game. And that's a good thing: The other methods of acquisition are nowhere near as fun.
Addicts unwilling to admit that WAR apes that MMO should at least concede that it mimics those MMOs -- as in, most every one post-EverQuest. It presents very little groundbreaking material, to the extent that it sometimes feels like Mythic included features solely to satisfy the requirements of some MMO litmus test. Crafting, that consistently unfulfilling timesink, is predictably worthless. Quest objectives could have been lifted from a parody of an MMO design document and at times seem to exist for the sake of existing. Character builds -- no matter how unique WAR's mastery trees may make them seem -- will be manipulated, calculated, and disseminated by mathemagician "theorycrafters" within a few weeks thanks to the prevailing view that MMOs ought to rely on calculus over creativity.