Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Review

[GameBanshee News]

The editors at 1UP are offering up a fairly enthusiastic review of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, giving the MMORPG an overall score of "B".

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.

[Kaer]

I think the last comment is pretty unfair. It doesn't matter if the game has randomized damage around a central point, if they have numbers right out there in the open to calculate or what have you, there will always be people who will try and likely succeed to do whatever they want to do calculation-wise to make those characters that much more strong. Stating that there should be something opposite implies completely random damage, continually consistent damage at all levels, or something equally inane which damages the RPG gameplay elements of the game.

A major 'meh' on the review overall. To be honest, I expected it to be compared immediately to WoW and Everquest, as well as Guild Wars, purely because the game was supposedly being built around the platform of not making the same mistakes many previous MMOs have taken them. I'd rather reserve judgement once I grab my own copy.