It started for me waiting on the top of a new zeppelin tower just outside Undercity, I was filled with excitement as the boat finally arrived after what felt like an eternity of waiting, and before I knew it I was in Howling Fjord. The first town you land in is fairly impressive with grand buildings and a totally new layout to the standard towns we have become accustomed to. In this first town you can pick up most of the professions at Grand master level. Then you go on to pick up all the quests, the starting zone was a bit disappointing it felt like more of the same and the feeling of your epic adventure slowly disappears. However it does return a short while later. The game has an increased feel of speed to it through howling fjord, you just seem to jump from 1 quest hub to the next rather than being stuck in 1 place for a long period of time. As you progress through the game you get to see more and more lore, and it’s not how it used to be. Now when the lore comes along, with it comes a cut scene or even just NPC’s talking, no more reading the text you can actually sit back and enjoy what is happening. Quests that lead to pieces of lore like this pop up all over the place and add a nice piece of variety to the game. Also adding to the variety are the increasing number of quests that don’t just involve go here collect this or go here kill him or her, obviously these quests are still there but they are mixed up a bit with some different quests that might involve you controlling something like a siege vehicle going down a hill and blowing up whatever you find to complete the quest. You can see that Blizzard have made a huge effort to bring in these kind of quests where ever possible and it does make a huge difference when levelling up, it brings back the feel of the epic adventure you were expecting as you don’t get bored doing repetitive quests over and over. There is one downside to the new content which is the lack of challenge in the quests, 2, 3 and even 5 man quests are doable 1 man, this is not the case with all of them but with most it is. Levelling up is still more fun than ever with brilliant scenery, more variety in quests and more skills with most classes making it overall less repetitive and more adventure like.

When you hit 80 you will probably start off doing heroics which are fun and can be very challenging while your gear is not very good, after gearing up from heroics people who want to raid will move onto the likes of 10 man Naxxramas or Malygos. Your first trip to these places will be enjoyable revisiting some older content and learning some new twists, but overall it is too easy even when stepped up to 25 man the difficulty does not really increase much. Still Blizzard have made some really enjoyable boss encounters in 5, 10 and 25 man situations but at the moment they have really lacked to add a real challenge in terms of end game content. Some will disagree with this as the new achievement system does have some difficult trials such as killing a boss in a certain time or completing the whole instance without anyone dying on a boss encounter. The rewards for doing such achievements can be things such as mount, tabards or even a title. As the rewards from this don’t really give anything new they just give your character some variety like a different coloured mount or a title not many people have, I think there will always be a lot of people who don’t want to bother to get the achievement as its not worth the effort until you get a new item or something that actually improves your character rather than differentiates it from others.

Overall Wrath of the Lich King is a fantastic game that recaptures the adventure in World of Warcraft the new zones are beautiful and diverse with a huge scale, the questing is more fun than ever with so much variation, the professions have stayed the same in what you can do with (as in blacksmiths still make armour and weapons and leatherworkers still make leather items etc) them but have been balanced so each crafting profession gets something useful such as jewel crafters getting stronger gems and blacksmiths getting extra gem slot, similar additions are available for every crafting profession. The lack of challenge is nothing to worry about either as Blizzard has new content planned for the not so distant future which promises to be more challenging.

This expansion does World of Warcraft justice and is a pleasure to play. I would recommend this game to anyone, mmorpg fan or not.