UK Release Date: 13-11-2008
Platforms: PC / Mac
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Price: £24.99

For those who have played World of Warcraft for the past four years, the release of the latest expansion pack offers a raft of new features to keep its 13 million fans (yes, it’s the most played game on the planet) happy.

Players have a whole new continent to explore in the form of Northrend, a mostly frozen wasteland that makes Outland, contin­ent of the previous expans­ion, seem tiny in comparison. In that expansion, players of both factions only had one entry point to the new continent, which led to fierce competition for monsters and resources, not to mention server crashes. Blizzard have learnt from their mistakes: in Northrend, players are offered two entry zones, so you can get quests done without waiting around.

And quests are certainly a high point, with developers putting real thought into offering previously unseen elements. The standard ‘kill 20 of X’ or ‘collect 10 of Y’ type missions are still there, but interspersed with some weird and wonderful tasks for players to complete. Fans of the franchise will be pleased to hear that that old favourite subject, bombing runs – popular in the last expansion – plays a strong role in many of the zones, but with players having full control of their mounts or vehicles.

WotLK sees a return to the artwork of the initial release version of WoW. Gone is the high fantasy of The Burning Crusade, replaced by sumptuous gothic artwork, which in my opinion has always been the developers’ strong point. Having fallen a bit out of love with the game throughout the last expansion, within minutes of entering Northrend I found myself enthralled once more by a world created in such stunn­ingly minute detail.

For me, the standout of the whole expansion has been the introduction of the Death Knight hero class, the first new character class introduced to the game since its initial release. Death Knights are new in every way, operating around a unique combat mechanic involving runes and runic power and poss­essing their own starting area and quests (which allow you to gain all the talent points you would have normally acquired with a non-hero class).

To begin with, Death Knights are bad to the bone, the loyal servants of the Lich King, Arthas, and your first few quests are a heady mix of slaughter and torture, culmin­ating in riding a giant undead dragon over an army and burning them all to death.

Blizzard have always had the impossible task of trying to please a hugely diverse player base and to this end they have made leaps and bounds in WotLK. If you can’t muster 25 people to run a raid at level 80, then that’s okay: the same dungeon can be run with 10 people.For the first time almost everyone will be able to see 100 per cent of the content on offer, which is a huge improvement.

Previously, you reached maximum level and could conceivably grow bored waiting for new content, and to address this Blizzard have introduced the Achievement System, where players can complete cert­ain tasks, such as exploring every zone in the game, to gain new titles for their characters and even, in some cases, new mounts. There are also a whole host of new factions with which to gain favour in Northrend, and the way you gain reput­ation has been vastly improved.

For years, players have complained that more hasn’t been made of open air Player vs Player (PvP) combat, and in answer to this WotLK includes Lake Wintergrasp, a dedicated PvP zone where the factions can battle it out using impressive siege weapons against each other and even buildings. Seeing really is believing here – superlatives are not enough!

2008 was meant to be the year that World of Warcraft failed. Many saw portents of doom in the release of Games Workshop’s Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and EA’s Age of Conan, but Blizzard remained confident that it could offer something to retain its player base and has succeeded admirably. The genius behind this is synthesis – watching these two rivals closely, borrowing concepts and adding them to an overall model that works.

Wrath of the Lich King is a stunning addition to the Warcraft Universe.