Mara

In 2003 Might and Magic's original developer New World Computing went bankrupt alongside its owner 3DO. Fortunate for gamers and long-time fans of the series Ubisoft bought the rights for Might and Magic and three years after 3DO's bankruptcy, Arkane Studios and Ubisoft released Dark Messiah, a very action oriented take on the series. Now two years after the initial release, how does the game hold up by today's standards?

Unlike the name suggests, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is not a RPG. The game offers few RPG elements including character development and even a couple choices but the game is still a fantasy themed shooter at heart. M&M has had several spin-off series over the years, the most famous being the turn-based strategy Heroes of Might and Magic but also some less known ones, and Dark Messiah could be counted as the newest addition to these spin-offs.

What really separates Dark Messiah from other Might and Magics is the Valve's Source engine it utilizes. Now four years after the release of Half-Life 2, both the engine and the graphics are starting to show their age and while still scaling quite well, Dark Messiah is a bigger system hog than most other Source games. Though Dark Messiah can still look very pretty, especially in combat.

Evil villain? Check. Love affair? Check. Nasty enemies swarming at you from every angle? Check. The story is the usual B-cIass fare we've learned to live with in most games. You are the apprentice of the powerful wizard Phenrig and soon after the short tutorial level, you are sent to help your master's wizard friend to obtain the Skull of Shadows. As your guide, a demonic spirit Xana is implemented into your head. Many players may find her optimistic and hot 'n dirty attitude irritating sooner or later. Thankfully, you'll have the option to get rid of her later in the game. Unsurprisingly, things don't go as planned and before you notice, you'll find yourself in a castle siege with mayhem everywhere. Read through the manual and you can guess the rest. After dozens of World War 2 and sci-fi shooters, fantasy-theme is strangely refreshing in the shooter genre.

We've seen direction and power attacks before but what really sets the combat in Dark Messiah apart from other games is the excellent use of Source physics engine. Thanks to it, melee combat is actually fun and rewarding, and the gory death animations are always a joy to watch. Also, the game brings back something that disappeared after the massive popularity of Gordon Freeman; you can actually see your body. And your legs aren't just visible - they also work. With a button press you can kick your enemies to fire, down the stairs and off ledges. All this may feel a bit overpowered at first but cranking up the difficulty does wonders. The melee combat in Dark Messiah is arguably the finest in any game.

The game has altogether four alternate endings. That's four times more than linear shooters usually have. But that's not the only place where the roleplaying elements kick in. Through the game, you can choose attributes from four different talent trees. You can either focus on being an assassin, wizard, warrior or archer, or divide your experience on two different trees. You could be a jack of all trades if you wanted, but fortunately unlike in Oblivion, it makes you a major weakling.

Both the score and sound effects are good, whereas voice acting is average at best. What is lost with the voice acting is gained back with the great ambient sounds making every area more or less creepy. All in all, the audio gets the job done without hurting the immersion.

Most of the major technical problems and bugs that haunted the release version have been fixed by now and it's been almost a year since the last patch so this is as good as it gets. There are still few crashes on some systems but they are not game breaking anymore.

While the singleplayer is developed by Arkane, the multiplayer side is Kuju's handiwork. You'll find the normal deathmatch and capture the flag game modes but only the crusade mode that resembles Battlefield's conquest mode is even mildly interesting. All the four singleplayer classes are in multiplayer too but the attributes are pre-determined. It can also be mildly annoying to join the game midway through the round when everyone already has a wide range of special attacks and you struggle to gain even few kills. The sometimes horrid performance in singleplayer gets even worse in multiplayer with several mages casting massive fireballs at the same time. Though if you have an up-to-date system with a DirectX10 card and a dual core processor, the performance won't be a problem in either.

The first playthrough takes a good 15 hours which is more than enough for a shooter. And with the four different play styles and endings, it's definitely worth playing through the game again. While the multiplayer is fun for only couple evenings at max, the fun singleplayer is easily worth the ten to twenty dollars the game currently costs.

Intelligent Systems Fire Emblem series has been around for nearly two decades dating all the way back to Famicom. Unfortunately it took 13 years before the series finally made its way to western markets. Over the several years it has been here, Fire Emblem has already gathered quite a large fan base, and now with the tenth installment (fourth in North America and Europe), can Intelligent keep the quality next to its predecessors or their other classics including Super Metroid?

Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn is a direct sequel to GameCube's Path of Radiance. While recommended, it's not necessary to have experience with it or any other Fire Emblem. Throughout the game, you will be often reminded what has happened in the past. Three years have passed since Path of Radiance's story ended with Daein loosing Mad King's War against Crimea. Now Begnion troops occupy Daein and try to maintain peace with an iron fist. You follow the story of Dawn Brigade, a group of Daein rebels fighting against the oppression. After that you quickly jump to Crimea to hastily see what's going on there, and then join the laguz fighting against the empire of Begnion. In each part you control a different group of characters, most seen in Path of Radiance - as a matter of fact all characters from the previous game make a comeback here, including a few dead ones. First the story feels very shallow and generic and regrettably it takes twenty hours before it finally starts to develop and twist. Of course you'll have to make it that far first.

If you've played Path of Radiance, the carbon copy gameplay won't have any surprises. Long-time fans may find it a good thing but for me the game feels out of place. What's the point of making a Wii game if you won't take advantage of the one strong point? You can use GameCube controller, CIassic or Wiimote sideways to play the game. In combat the system works well, but a click-and-drag system with the Wiimote pointer could have done wonders in the menus and point and click in battles should even be more fun. In the current state, it can sometimes take way too long to do the basic maintenance after every battle. Talking about menus, you may encounter strange stuttering in the inventory and shop screens once your team has grown larger and Wii's DVD drive does the best it can trying to keep up with the massive amount of items.

There are two human races in Fire Emblem, beorc and laguz. Beorc are the ordinary humans with warrior, mage, thief and archer cIasses. Laguz also known as the beast people don't wear armor, use weapons or cast spells, but rather shapeshift into animals. Unfortunately they can't stay in animal form forever and are completely useless in human form. Beorc have stronger nations and unsurprisingly find themselves superior to laguz bringing up the game ethics and philosophies. Laguz are divided to hawk, raven, dragon, wolf, tiger, heron (sort of angel) and cat tribes. Every cIass and tribe has their weaknesses and strong points and you'll have to keep a close look at the rock-paper-scissors system. Lance wins sword, sword wins axe and axe wins lance. The same method continues with magic as fire is superior to wind, wind to thunder and thunder to fire. That alone is enough for a newcomer to learn, but it's not all. Every turn you'll also have to think about terrain advantages, mounted and flying units, bows and counter-attacks. Fight against your weakness and you'll find yourself dead in no time. Even on the easiest difficulty, you can find yourself reloading after mistakes to keep characters alive as if someone dies, he is gone forever. Thankfully, an option to save in middle of battle has been added making the experience a lot more enjoyable.

Except for choosing the equipment and few special skills there isn't much character customization going on. Though you can rarely get the gears you want because except for gaining money at predetermined locations, there is no way to obtain cash as the game is completely linear automatically taking you from chapter to chapter. As your characters gain experience and level up, they gain attributes in predetermined order. Once beorc characters hit level 21, they gain a cIass upgrade and start again from the beginning. As a change from Path of Radiance, the level cap for laguz has been raised to 40 and all beorc cIasses have gained an additional cIass upgrade. When certain characters have fought enough together, you can set them to support each other gaining a small skill bonus whenever within the range.

Graphics have never been the high point of Intelligent Systems' games and neither is it the case now. Path of Radiance was no beauty queen and strangely the graphics haven't improved at all. Some of the higher level magic effects are joy to look at but otherwise the game doesn't come even close to the best looking GameCube games and are simply dated on Wii. Intelligent hasn't even tried to mask how the game started off as a GameCube project - on any field. At least the cutscenes are still gorgeous, but now with more powerful systems available, I wish the game was on one of them so the whole game could look as good.

Besides the cutscenes, the whole story is told through long conversations with static cardboard cut-outs. The dialogue is vast and usually sharp. Ironically all of the characters remind cardboard cut-outs as none of their personalities go further than their cIass. Ike is your ordinary hero, Laura is ordinary priest, Skrimir your ordinary young lion prince and Soren your ordinary tactician. And as strange as it may sound, the conversations have no real widescreen support even though rest of the game does. It wouldn't be such a big problem if you didn't spend hours upon hours reading the dialogue. Widescreen could have really helped the presentation as if there is more than three persons in a conversation, all of them won't fit the screen at the same time.

Voice acting is quite rare in the game and you won't find it outside cutscenes and narration between missions. And frankly with the usual JRPG teen heroes, I couldn't stop laughing when I heard some of the characters for the first time. Especially the (very) young archer Oscar and Silver Haired Maiden Micaiah are quite something to listen to. Fortunately all of them aren't quite that bad and cutscenes only pop up once in five hours.

If there is a field where JRPG's usually shine, it's the score. Unfortunately in Radiant Dawn the music is rather generic. Some of the tracks have a chance to rise over the grey mass but lack the kick to become memorable. And the same problem continues with sound effects. A massive explosion that covers most of the screen sounds like a puff and attacking an enemy resembles bug squishing. Though this emphasizes the powerful critical hits which become more and more rewarding with flashier animations the longer you advance.

Radiant Dawn is a fan service. Old players of the series are hungering for more of the same, while newcomers may find the unforgiving difficulty and overall stuck-in-the-past feeling major turn-offs. Everything from the dated graphics to Game Boy controls and bad voice acting screams last-gen. Nearly everything from the gameplay to presentation could just as well be on Nintendo DS, only thing missing would be the beautiful cutscenes. The game still has the magical strategy feeling but all the small annoying flaws do a good job of burying it. As long as you can get past the first twenty hours, you'll get another good twenty out of it. It is often said that only Nintendo knows how to develop for Wii. As a first party developer, the lack of effort from Intelligent Systems is a real shame. Even though it's not a Wii game, it's the best strategy title on the Wii. If you don't count Path of Radiance that is.

Ever since the first screenshots and gameplay videos, there has been plenty of hype surrounding World in Conflict and its graphics. But unlike many expected, Massive Entertainment developed a game that delivers on every front. From the graphics to gameplay, there isn't much that could have been done better.

The basic catch behind World in Conflict is the complete lack of the traditional resource gathering that has been around ever since Dune 2. Each player has a specified amount of reinforcement points for buying units and you'll rarely find yourself controlling more than several units at time. If a unit is destroyed, the points replenish and you are back in business in matter of seconds. This might sound too forgiving at first but after playing the multiplayer for a while, you'll notice how crucial every moment is. If an area is left unprotected, it won't take long before it's already under enemy's control and gaining it back is easier said than done. Some old time PC gamers may loathe streamlining but no one can deny that it doesn't work here. The idea isn't unique as we've seen it in Massive's previous Ground Control games but World in Conflict has the best version of the system.

Massive aims World in Conflict to be the Counter-Strike of strategy games, and anyone can jump in and control the small amount of units without anything else important to worry about. There isn't much strategy involved, but tactics, feint, maneuvering, reconnaissance, defense and all-out aggression - and more important than any of them, teamwork. No matter how good a single person is, he can't win games without the help of his teammates. As a result, the game is easily accessible but hard to master.

The singleplayer campaign starts with a cutscene of Russia invading Seattle in 1989. With US forces fighting against Soviet Union in Europe, there aren't many to stand in their way. Cold War turned hot is a nice change from the usual World War 2, scifi and fantasy settings seen in so many strategy titles and unlike in them, you aren't a supreme commander behind everything but just a simple First Lieutenant doing his best to survive under Colonel Sawyer's stout command. As just one of the many pawns of war, you might be given a support mission while the computer controlled players do the dirty work. Your goal is never fully exterminating the enemy but holding them back until you receive the next order. If you have men to spare, you can try your luck with the secondary objectives such as escorting civilians to safety from a nearby shelter or destroying the enemy artillery to help your cause. Although often the primary objective like controlling a bridge or destroying a certain target will keep you fully occupied.

Quarrel between the officers in middle of a battle and humanlike mistakes really add to the experience. Only thing eating the survival immersion is the lack of user avatar on the battlefield. While the other officers actually feel like they exist, your own group can be completely destroyed and you as the group leader still survive. There are plenty of characters in the campaign and some of them go through many stages of character development during the plot, and you'll find yourself becoming fond of characters you hated before, once more of their history and motives are revealed through well executed flashbacks and somewhat clichéd cutscenes. Though not the whole campaign takes place on American soil. You'll get the chance to fight on the side of a stereotypical French officer and NATO forces in France and Lapland.

Even with the few flaws, overall production quality really shines through with Alec Baldwin's top notch narration during loading screens and even after the next mission has loaded, you tend listen to everything he has to say. Even if some of the voices aren't as good as Baldwin's, they deliver whole way through the game. As a nice touch, you can hear your units speaking in their native language when you zoom in close to them. Doesn't sound like much with United States or Soviet Union but it does make a difference with the multinational NATO.

As great as the singleplayer campaign is, it only works as a tutorial for the fantastic multiplayer. It's easy to imagine Battlefield 2 as WiC's biggest influence with striking resemblance everywhere. It's hard to blame Massive though, as Massgate is one of the best multiplayer services I've used in years. Everything from the slick UI to rankings and clan support work really well. WiC also offers a crystal clear VOIP but headset is not a necessity as another thing familiar from Battlefield, there are easy to use commands for interacting with other players. Anyone can easily jump in or out in middle of the round without any hard feelings. It can be frustrating at times to find yourself on the less coordinated side as the real fun and enjoyment comes from teamwork.

Teams consist of maximum eight players and every player chooses one of the four cIasses: air, armor, support and infantry. Each cIass has their weakness and you have to spend your reinforcement points wisely with your team to gain the perfect balance. And unlike usually in strategy games, you can only control several units at time. Infantry is vulnerable to all kinds of fire in the open but can cause massive damage to any opponent. Station few anti-tank squads in nearby buildings and you already have considerable threat against enemy tank forces. Hiding in forests helps too but hide for too long and there isn't much left of your men after a napalm strike has scorched the ground. Air uses helicopters to deal with enemy tanks, but is extremely vulnerable to support's anti-air vehicles. Support also has repair and transport vehicles plus artillery to create mayhem. Anyone can buy units outside their specialty, but it's rarely worth it for the significant extra fee. There are times to use the option though: one infantry squad alone can be enough to protect your precious artillery from scouts.

Capture objectives, kill opponents and help teammates, and you'll gain tactical aid points, which are used to call in paratroopers, radar scans and most importantly, bombs. Everything from the airstrikes to tactical nuclear weapons is absolutely stunning to look at. Explosions are definitely the high point of the graphics as they have never looked this good and you will always come back for more of the goodness. Tactical nuke is a real cherry on the top from amazing effects to the calm afterwards. You can zoom in to see even the smallest details on your troops and then zoom out for the impressive draw distance. There is such an amount of detail that sometimes you'll forget that you are playing a RTS. Everything from the trees to Christmas decorations is fully destructible and after few carpet bombs and a nuke, you won't recognize the battlefield anymore. It's important to use the environment to your advantage as all units have realistic line of sight and even bomb craters play a small role.

There isn't much music in the game but the little there is sets the mood perfectly and will keep you entertained while you browse Massgate and wait for the map to load. Bombs and weapons sound superb with the nuke taking the trophy again. Flying over the nuclear area after the explosion will chill down your spine. Unfortunately everything feels slighty unsatisfying after the pure awesomeness of the nuclear bomb.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, Massive Entertainment combines two old formulas and makes them better than ever before. The memorable singleplayer campaign takes about 10 hours to finish and anyone with time on their hands can spend countless hours playing the multiplayer. It's easy to recommend World in Conflict to anyone - especially with the low price tag. There aren't many games that can change your opinion of a certain genre but this is definitely one of the few.

No More Heroes is the newest game from Suda-51 (Goichi) and Grasshopper studios, developers of Killer7, and offers the same kind of humour and art style as it's spiritual predecessor did.

You are Travis Touchdown, a stereotypical otaku living in the only motel of Santa Destroy, California. After winning a beam katana on Ebay, Travis starts a new life as a hitman and is soon the eleventh ranked assassin in the United States. Now as 11th ranked, he is a target for assassinations and decides to secure his position by going all the way up to number one.

The game is divided to two different gameplay aspects, Grand Theft Auto free-roaming and hack 'n slash ranking battles. The latter is where the game shines with unique characters, humor and great boss battles. Unfortunately the flipside isn't nearly as good.

Combat is simple and rewarding. A button is used to attack with your beam katana and B button to do beat attacks and wrestling moves. Once your opponent's health nears zero, the game slows down and gives you a chance to do a finishing move by swinging the Wiimote to the direction shown on the screen. And nothing is more rewarding than seeing the blood of your opponents spatter everywhere or hear the tingling of coins fill your pockets. Sadly the blood is only in the US version, we Euros have to settle for potato chips.

Between ranking battles you gain money by doing three different types of missions to gain access to the next ranking battle. After every ranking battle a new side-job opens up which contain lawn mowing, catching kitties, cleaning walls and collecting coconuts. After finishing a side-job for the first time, few new assassination jobs unlock plus a free mission now and then.

Free missions can be found all over the city but if something, they should have been left out of the game. The drill is the same in every free mission, only the amount of damage your opponents take change and to make it even more frustrating, you aren't allowed to take any damage, at all. Let your guards down for a short moment and next thing you know, someone jumps at you from back. Especially between ranks eleven and six, you tend to fail these missions all the time and there is no way to retry. You either have to find a new free mission somewhere else or go to the motel to save the game and go back, but the best thing you can do is stay away from them until you get one of the more powerful weapons in the game.

Assassination missions give a bit more variation but even they severely lack it. You pick up a mission at point A, go to point B where you swing your sabre for a minute or two, go back to point A and repeat until you have enough money for the next ranking battle. Fun the first time you do them but according to Suda, repetition is a hot word in the world of assassins. Again, the only thing that changes is the reward and the hardiness of the clone army that you are facing.

Baseball killing mission is extremely fun the first time you do it, actually is the whole way through the game but the trip from A to B eats your soul. Grasshopper wants to take everything to the extremes but they should have thought twice before making the town of Santa Destroy extremely bland. Minimal NPC interaction, pop-in and invisible walls everywhere and massive frame rate problems make Santa Destroy a worse place to be in than Silent Hill. It's easy to say that No More Heroes has the worst open world design on the Wii. Fortunately exploring is not essential but there are a couple things to do outdoors. You can collect Lovikov's balls for new fighting technigues or search trash cans for money and t-shirts.

When you play the game for the first time, you have two difficulty levels to choose from: sweet and mild. Once you've finished the game on either difficulty, you can start a new game with bitter difficulty and keep all of your items from the previous playthrough. On mild except for some of the boss battles, the game is fairly easy. If you are looking for real challenge, you should look somewhere else.

The first playthrough took good 13 hours for me and a masochist who wants to collect every t-shirt and Lovikov's ball in the game could probably play the game for couple hours longer. I see no good reason for a second playthrough because except for the extra difficulty, there is nothing new to gain. New unlockable weapons and clothes would do wonders.

Extremely fun and rewarding ranking battles make the game worth a purchase for every hardcore gamer but the huge overall lack of polish in the open world makes No More Heroes a problematic game choice for casuals.

It's been five years since Funcom started working on Age of Conan and now after many lengthy delays, AoC is finally out and ready to be judged by players and reviewers. Funcom's first MMO, Anarchy Online, had one of the worst launches in MMO history and subscriber numbers dropped faster than in any game before or after. Will Age of Conan face the same grim future as Anarchy Online or has Funcom learned their lesson?

If you are familiar with the work of Robert E. Howard or Schwarzenegger's spin-off movies, you'll know what to expect: blood and boobs. That alone doesn't sound very revolutionary but the fact that Age of Conan is the first MMO to have M rating gives it a new contrast. That plus a whole new real-time based combat system are the keys for a next generation MMORPG.

You will immediately be astonished by the amount of customization that can be done to your character, everything from tattoos to age and nose angle to bossom size can be changed with sliders. You won't find anything better from other MMOs or most singleplayer RPGs for that matter. Though don't expect to find any hairy green monsters from the character selection, you only have three human races to choose from as there's no pixies or orcs to be found in the low fantasy world of Hyboria. All of the three races have their real world counterparts: Stygians are the mysterious Egyptians, Aquilonians are the noble and civilized people of Rome and Cimmerians are the mighty northern barbarians.

As soon as you've created the character of your choice, you will be amazed by the quality of the graphics. Lush green jungles, fearsome Picts with the amount of small details closer to singleplayer titles than other MMOG's - the visuals easily top any of its competitors. Naturally this reflects to hefty system requirements, and if Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft ran well for you, there's no guarantees for the same in Age of Conan. 2 gigabytes of ram is almost a must, and the low settings are unacceptably choppy for low-end systems, while still looking ugly. Unfortunately some of the areas don't stand up as well as others. Especially in instances you can smell the scent of copy paste and lack of detail.

As polished as the newbie area of Tortage is, you already feel the lack of variation after creating your second character. Unlike in many MMOs, there is only one newbie area, and you have to go through the same process with every new character. At least after leaving the newbie area, players are sent to their homelands so it's recommended to create a character of different race each time.

The basic gameplay isn't much different in Age of Conan. Actually, the only real difference is the collision detection and lack of auto targeting in melee. What it basically means is that all of your melee attacks can hit multiple targets in front of you rather than only the one that you have targeted. This brings a small new tactical aspect to the game as you have to worry about positioning more. Also, the combos, which are executed by pressing the direction keys in the correct order, are a nice addition and unless you want to end up at the closest graveyard, you'll have to fully focus on playing the game. Though with casters there isn't anything as refreshing going on and spell casting works the same way as in every other MMO, with the addition of spell weaving at later levels. During spell weaving, caster's damage output is increased at the cost of stamina drain, and if you run out of stamina, the weaving stance quickly drains your health to zero.

Conversations and quests are mainly very well written and some of the quests are even quite funny. This should come as no surprise as Funcom is also behind the fantastic Longest Journey series. As an example, an underground gang has kidnapped Fabio's princess and the protagonist is paid to rescue her. After fighting your way through several gangs, komodos and crocodiles in the sewers, you'll find out that the princess is just a cute little puppy. Rescuing a puppy doesn't exactly fit the picture of my evil necromancer.

Quests are mainly the usual kill X number of baddies and collect X number of goodies, which we've used to live with ever since EverQuest, although the possibility to actually converse with alternate lines is a nice and fresh change from the normal accept/decline-option in MMOs to a more singleplayer feeling. Sadly, the quest sources suddenly dry up near late thirties and you spend half of the time searching for working quests. Sooner or later you'll have to become acquainted with Mr. Grind. Fortunately Grind is a lot more forgiving than his brothers in other MMOs. The amount of experience points you gain is a lot more considerable than in most other games, though with the maximum level of 80, there are quite a few levels to grind. Luckily there are few quests that can be repeated as many times as you want - boring, yes, but effective.

Even as beautiful as some of the areas are, all of them feel more or less artificial with mountains bordering every region and predetermined passages to other areas. Talking to a guide will immediately teleport you to some distant land, making the world feel a lot smaller than it actually is and a major part of the immersion vanishes on the way. Fully instanced world comes with other problems too. Rather than adjusting the spawn rates to fit the number of players currently in the region, Funcom divides all players on different carbon copies of the same area, making you unable to see or team up with most of the people on the server. There are often dozen copies of the same area running at the same time and if one instance doesn't have enough players, the server bluntly closes it down kicking everyone in the instance out of the game. Getting disconnected three times in a row, just to wait three minutes in a queue after every incident, artificial walls and bugs don't exactly help the immersion either.

Servers are divided to three main types, PvE, PvP and Culture-PvP. Player versus Environment and Player versus Player servers also have roleplaying variants. PvE is your normal carebear server, where players can't attack other players outside PvP specific areas. PvP on the other hand, is pure free-for-all gankfest. And it's not going anywhere for a while, as the number of players stuck between levels 50-80 is growing all the time. Whine even a bit about the raping, or anything else for that matter, and you are lucky to get even one friendly reply. Not exactly the kind of community you'd expect from a Mature rated game. Culture PvP is the strange middle ground, where you can only attack players of different culture. I wonder if Funcom gave the idea much thought before implementing it, as Stygians are mostly mages while Aquilonians and Cimmerians don't have mages at all. Just think what it would be like if Horde had no mages and Alliance wouldn't have anything else.

Fortunately the servers itself have been very stable and during the month of playing, I haven't experienced almost any lag at all and the servers have only been down for patch maintenances. Ignoring the bugs, this is the stablest MMO launch to date next to Lord of the Rings Online.

It won't take long before you find out that Age of Conan has effectively no death penalty. If you die, you end up at the closest respawn point with a very minor debuff. And if you happen to go back to the same place, like you usually do to finish the quest, you can click your gravestone to get rid of the debuff. If another player happens to kill you, there is absolutely nothing to lose, no item repairs, no XP loss and not even a debuff, you won't even lose your active buffs. Although anything more than a strong debuff might be too cruel after getting ganked three times in a row.

During the very first weeks of early access and launch, most bosses dropped no loot at all, so there was no good reason at all to kill them. Funcom has fixed some of that, but still the majority of boss drops are worse than item rewards from ten levels lower quests; my necromancer had the same robe from level 15 to 45. That was until I found out that most of the robe bonuses had no real affect, as there are also some very interesting character development issues. For example bumping your run speed skill doesn't seem to have any real affect on your running speed and as long as your casting concentration is higher than zero, your spells won't be interrupted so spending more than one point on concentration is currently a waste of points. In addition, some feats don't work properly, and increasing base stats has no real effect on the inflicted damage meaning that two barbarians of the same level are nearly identical in terms of damage.

And that's not all, there are even more problems with the basic mechanics. Does it sound right that female characters swing their weapons about a quarter slower than male? That means female characters make about quarter less damage over time than males. Sprinting works like in any other game, or at least it should; you sprint until you run out of stamina and repeat once your stamina has regenerated. Unfortunately stamina regeneration is not percentage-based, whereas stamina usage is, so the higher your level is, the less you can sprint, because at lower level your stamina regenerates to full a lot faster than at higher level.

There are also some minor problems with the user interface and especially the group part. If a party member ventures more than 50 meters far from rest of the group, he completely disappears from the map and there are some silly occasions in dungeons when the group tries to find the lost herd. Depending on whether you are an old-school RPG fan or want as user friendly experience as possible, the fully fledged GPS system will either be a pro or con for you. The same can be said about customizabilty of the UI, or the lack of it. Some might want every help possible while others prefer everyone to have the same tools at hand.

The bugs alone wouldn't be a problem but when half of the promised content is nowhere to be seen, there is quite something to complain about. Where did drunken brawling go? Or most of the end-game content? Especially guild cities don't currently seem to have any real purpose and that was one of the biggest selling points of the game. And unlike the game box claims, there's no real support for DirectX10, as it was left out just before the release to be added later this year through a patch.

As far as the in-game customer support goes, Funcom appears to be caught off-guard by the popularity of the game and there are basic level problems with the in-game support tools that don't exactly help the issue. Petition response times are often counted in days, and you have to stay online for a response to be possible; if a GM happens to get to your problem at 4 AM while you are sleeping, you get a reply stating that as you weren't online the GM couldn't help you. Your petition is then closed and you get a suggestion to re-petition the issue - back to the end of the queue. There is also no phone support for billing or account problems, so if you can't log in, your best bet is to send an email and pray.

Good audio can save a lot and Age of Conan is definitely not lacking on that field. Fantastic music, great sound effects and good voice acting in the newbie area – audiovisual side is definitely the strong point of Age of Conan.

There is definitely a good ground to build on here but in its current state, Age of Conan is not worth the purchase or the monthly fee. The game sure is fun until level 40 or so but I have better things to do with my time and money than wait for the next patch that will hopefully fix all the problems. For now I'm canceling my subscription and hoping for a better tomorrow. I can't wait to see what the game looks like in a year.