World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on December 2nd, 2008

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When it comes to world design the teams have Blizzard prove they know what they're doing, the zones tie in one with another majestically. What's even better is that if an area gets a little stale for your tastes you can visit another side of Northrend that will offer the same level of enemies but help keep things fresh. This is always a problem for any MMO, if you're kept questing in the same zone time and time again it's bound to lose that spark Stranglethorn Vale is case in point. One of the most serene and majestic of zones is Crystalsong Forest which is home to the floating city of Dalaran. It's in stark contrast to more expectant woodland and icy plans you'd expect from Northrend and even the accompanying music helps lift the zones impact. Dalaran is Wrath of the Lich King's equivalent of Shattrah city from the Burning Crusade and it allows you to portal to all the major cities throughout the game, so it's a great choice to call home.

For example, instead of telling you to kill 5 magmoth crushers, you are asked to test a special gun on them. Using the gun can have.well. sometimes unexpected results. In the end it's still the same old kill quest, but the twist livens it up.

Other than the usual, several quests require you to use items or perform other actions to complete them. You get to control a robot construct, wear various disguises, dive for fish, set buildings on fire, surf on a flaming harpoon and much more.

Of course not all innovations are created equal. There are some, like the painstakingly slow bombardment from a zeppelin quest, that only those who like to suffer would ever want to do twice. And then there are the ubiquitous excrement collection quests. Yes it's funny in a brown kind of way, but why must we collect so much dung in this game?

Indeed it is not only the Death Knight quests that stand out in Wrath of the Lich King. Both starting zones, Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord, contain some real gems and set players up perfectly for tougher areas that Northrend contains: shooting dragons out of the sky with harpoons, hunting turkeys with a trained hawk, dressing up in a full murloc suit for peace talks or flying to the top of Nexus on a massive dragon were just some of my favourite experiences along with the many scatological related ones. The humour, diversity and pure entertainment provide a great impetus to continue completing quests and indeed I am already looking forward to doing some of them again when I bring my Death Knight through the zones. There are so many improvements in the general gameplay in Northrend that I would say Outlands will become a ghost town or at least only have a population of Death Knights.

In fact, you'll find a great many of the initial quests eerily similar to your experiences in The Burning Crusade, with kill X of Y quests, pick up X of Y quests, and bombing runs against large groups of otherwise unreachable opponents.

It's not that these aren't fun or well balanced, it's more that they lack the furious extremes of Outland. While two years ago you were fighting hellboars on charred terrain while juddering devices of the Burning Legion fought overhead, a great many of your first hours in Northrend are spent killing the wildlife or scuffling with the locals. This is an expansion of exploration, and feels more like an expedition, not an adventure.

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