The Chronicles of Spellborn

Perhaps not. If Chronicles of Spellborn were another WOW clone, we'd have no illusions about its imminent crushing, but it's not. Let's consider some of the headlines. The first thing that strikes you is right on the character-creation screen - where, unusually, you get to select your armour and weapons from a pretty broad range of options. Unusually, you can pick from the same pools of armour and weapons no matter which class archetype you select - Rogue, Warrior or Mage.

This is because armour and weapons don't have statistics associated with them. They're entirely cosmetic - and while you gain access to elaborate and attractive items as you progress, the choice of armour to use rests entirely with your fashion sense. Instead, equipment has slots for Sigils (at present, only weapons and jewelry have these slots, but this will be extended to armour as well), add-ons that affect your character's statistics. These Sigils can be equipped to an item, and easily moved to another if you want to change your look.

Interior of a High House. Five of these Houses rule the world of Spellborn - you get to choose which to align yourself with as you play.

Another unusual aspect is the stats involved. Spellborn is missing an entire class of standard MMORPG statistics - specifically, anything to do with hit or dodge ratings. The game's dispensed with behind-the-scenes dice rolls entirely. Taking its cue from action games, it lets players and NPCs alike properly target their attacks instead. If you want to hit an enemy, you need to be targeting him properly; if you want to dodge an attack, you just dive out of the way. It turns combat into a fast-paced and exciting affair, where you need to keep moving around to avoid enemy attacks while positioning yourself to pummel foes. Many attacks (especially on the Rogue archetype, and its three sub-classes) are more powerful delivered to the back, so you spend a lot of time trying to get behind your enemies.

Where this really comes into its own is in the game's assortment of buffs and debuffs. Many attacks deliver an associated debuff - and many of those debuffs affect an enemy's movement speed, which prevents them from dodging or avoiding rear attacks quite so effectively. In player-versus-player combat this becomes crucial, since a target who's unable to move as fast as you is essentially a sitting duck.

The buff and debuff system has also allowed Spellborn to innovate in other ways. For a start, there's the game's atypical approach to healing. While one class does have a direct healing spell, every single class has access to healing of some kind - and it's often by means of a buff or debuff, such as one applied to an enemy which heals the attacker with each successful blow. The result is that groups don't necessarily need a "priest" class in their mix, as long as everyone knows what they're doing with the healing powers available to them. It's another factor that contributes to the pace, with most healing dependent on staying in the thick of battle.

This High House is by far the richest, and controls trade. Like something a rapper would build if he lived in Middle Earth.

It's also worth mentioning the game's AI. After a few hours of play you notice that Spellborn's foes don't behave like anything else you've seen in an MMORPG. For a start, they dodge and weave to avoid your attacks, which is understandable given the game's decision not to have any dice-roll based avoidance. And there are other, subtler things going on here too. We noticed this first when a wolf started running away even though we'd only hit it a couple of times. Suspecting a bug, we ran after it. We blundered through a bush after the wolf - only to discover ourselves surrounded by four more wolves, to whom the original target had deliberately led us. Clever girl.

Human targets are more intelligent still. They normally come in a group of varied classes - a mage with a handful of melee types, typically - and they adapt intelligently to your strategies as well as to the make-up of your own party. If you stand back and fling arrows and ranged attacks, the melee classes stand in front of the caster to shield him while he returns the favour. Charge in, and they deliberately target your own caster classes to reduce your group's damage output. Leading you away from whatever or whoever they're protecting, and towards more groups of enemies, is also on the cards.

To any fan of an action game, this won't sound revolutionary, but it's an eye-opener in an MMORPG. We've come to expect enemies to behave like demons in the original Doom - they run at you in a straight line and attack, occasionally firing off a special move. Enemies who circle around, try to move the battle to a more advantageous area or physically block your ranged attacks on their allies require a different level of situational awareness.

The final innovation is the Skill Deck. This is the beating heart of Spellborn's combat system, and after several hours, we're unsure whether it's a stroke of absolute genius or madness. It's a skill bar, much as you've seen in every other MMORPG, but it rotates. When you fire off a skill, the bar turns around and reveals the next set of skills to you, and continues doing so until it loops back to the first tier. As a result, the game becomes a delicate exercise in filling out the skills on these tiers so that you align their various abilities. If you want an attack to take advantage of a debuff, the debuff needs to be on a higher tier. Attacks which start a combo need to come before the other parts of the combo... Woe betide you if you manage to fill a tier entirely with skills that are on a cool-down when you rotate around to that face of the cylinder, because you'll stand around like a lemon while you wait for one of them to become available.

There are two playable races, but as with the armour, you choose solely on the basis of visuals - neither has any particular strength or weakness.

It actually sounds quite simple when we put it in those terms. It's not. Within a few levels, you've picked up a handful of skills and abilities, and the number of Skill Deck tiers available to you has expanded greatly, leaving you with a lot of juggling, experimentation, and trial-and-error to go through to get your Deck working just so. It's a bizarre kind of customisation, but an extremely interesting one - not least because we don't get the impression there'll be a single "best solution" that everyone copies from a Wiki site within a fortnight. Everyone's Skill Deck will be personalised and filled with combo chains that make sense.

Let's pull back for a moment and look at some of the more superficial stuff. Spellborn is promising to be a heavily quest-oriented game, with grinding really not on the menu - you level up through "Fame" rather than experience points, and Fame comes from completing quests, not killing wolves where nobody can see you. It also promises a hefty dose of PVP, with every zone outside of the starting area being a PVP free-for-all at present. Later, the team is thinking of creating factional PVP based on your alignment to the five Great Houses of Spellborn's world, but it's not likely to happen for launch.

The leaders of High Houses tend to wear very fancy armour, as you'd expect. Later in the game you'll be able to pick up some of that for yourself, too.

Graphics are mixed. Comments from the developer suggest the engine and the artwork has evolved rapidly in recent months, with entire zones overhauled on a regular basis, and it shows. Some zones are beautiful, with soft lighting and few hard lines in evidence - reminiscent of the art style of Fable more than anything else. We expect (with some measure of optimism, but the pace of improvement really is stunning) all the zones to be up to that standard by launch. We're less excited about the character designs. Character art in the game is exaggerated and cartoony, which is fine, but it's also very low-polygon and rough around the edges compared to the environments themselves. It's a shame, because the first encounter most people have with a game's visuals is the character-creation screen. Throwing a few more polygons (and a lot more options) at the characters would make a big difference here.