Age of Conan Re-review

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The problem is, you have to be involved in a big, hardcore PVP guild to take part. I managed to experience a siege, and they're violent, chaotic and cracking good fun. The game's combat mounts, giant mammoths and rhinos which charge ahead and do massive damage to everything in front of them, come into their own in this mode, and it quickly becomes apparent that despite the chaos, team strategy is required for victory.

For those who'll never be able to dedicate the time and energy required to PVP at that level, there are consolation prizes. There are PVP mini-games, a separate system of PVP XP and levels, and open-world PVP zones (even on PVE servers), while a system of bounties and notoriety gives a meta-game element to taking out fugitive "murderer" players. Despite this, things still regularly descend into ganking. With no concept of factions to create obvious allegiances, PVP servers can still be thoroughly unpleasant. Some players thrive on this kind of free-for-all - others will thank Crom for the existence of more placid PVE servers.

The final thing which players tend to do at max level in an MMO is to go right back to level 1. Many MMO developers will attest that the most common thing people do when they reach the top level in a game is to go back and level up an alt - obviously believing that the journey is more fun than the destination. Here, Age of Conan suffers from perhaps its biggest problem.

The game's realistic fantasy setting doesn't stop it from having its fair share of over the top spell effects. And lots of lightning.

Levelling up your first character in Age of Conan is fantastic. There's a huge variety of zones, a nicely-balanced difficulty curve, and a good sense of progression as you pick up abilities and improve your armour and weapons (some fans claim that the new importance of gear makes the game too much like WOW - my experience so far is that it simply makes Conan far more compelling and rewarding).

Levelling your second character is OK at best. You quickly discover that there are no alternate paths in Conan. The game has enough content to push a character to 80, and while within certain level ranges you'll be able to step off the path for a while, the reality is that you end up doing the same zones, the same quests and the same monsters, in the same order that you did last time. For this reason, levelling up a third character is terribly boring. Playing a fourth is unthinkable.

Far be it from us to suggest that Conan's castle is compensating for something - but you know what they say about bodybuilders...

Age of Conan, at the end of its first year, is a game which has progressed in massive leaps and bounds. It has a solid, gorgeous-looking engine, a visceral, connected combat system (although a reduction in the number of spells and abilities for each class would be very welcome - most have far too many confusingly named, peculiarly similar abilities in their arsenal) and enough content to pull you through the experience. PVP is too chaotic for my blood, but I'm not much of a PVP player to be fair - those of a more combative nature seem to revel in Conan's offering. The ever-expanding endgame has plenty to keep hardcore players occupied, even though they'll never be satisfied - which is just how things should be.