World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Review
-
Category: News ArchiveHits: 754
Northrend swaps madness for lyricism, spectacle for heart-wrenching, melancholy beauty. Its vast zones have been sculpted with infinite care around the non-linear flowering of the quest lines. They have tremendous variation and density of detail, stunning vistas everywhere you look, impressive architecture, and an eerie, haunting quality that will be familiar to anyone who's visited our own far North, be it Iceland, Siberia or the Canadian Rockies. Even the skies, lit with shifting veils of aurora, are enough to make your hair stand on end (assisted by the atmospheric musical score). It is classic fantasy.
All of this is delivered to you via a dramatic graphical upgrade. Increased draw-distance has a huge impact, making the pull of exploration even more irresistible. Lighting, shadowing and the quite magical effects have been brought bang up-to-date - visually, WOW has always been carried by its superlative art, but now that art has the frame it deserves. But it's Northrend's people and creatures that leave the strongest impression; they are strikingly imaginative and charismatic, and far more detailed in appearance and animation than anything in WOW before. They bring this perfect world to life.
Wrath of the Lich King takes the best-of-breed MMO and improves everything about it. It's a work of supreme confidence and quality that is twice as fun and ten times as beautiful as classic WOW, not to mention anything else in the genre. But above all else - in the breathtaking sweep of Northrend, in the assured, epic storytelling, in the constellation of brilliant quests - it is a grand adventure. Perhaps the grandest adventure in all gaming. In every sense, Azeroth is still the place to be.
