Much of the World…….of warcraft have loaded up the latest expansion from Blizzard Entertainment. The Wrath of the Lich King!!! With a new class that would redefine the amount of skulls one person should ever be wearing in a MMO Fantasy. The Death Knight made it’s debut. I had a chance to sit down with the expansion and got to take the Death Knight for a little more then a test drive. This will be a combo review not only for the game itself but for the beloved….um I mean evil ….. rr just skulltastic Death Knight Class.

Let’s start with the gameplay. I’m not going to go in depth on the whole game of WoW I’ll just tell you some of the neat stuff that has been added. With the Death Knight in particular it has added new types of gameplay. First it’s how the Death Knight actually starts off. If you already have a level 55 Character you get to start a Death Knight. Not at level 1 mind you at Level 55. This was a sigh of relief for myself in particular. I’ve done the 70 grind and while it’s much easier sense the patches the 55 Starting level sure doesn’t hurt. It seemed more of a encouragement to try out the new class.

Well try I did. I don’t want to breakdown the story to much but let me tell you a couple of things that truly make this game great. First it starts with a couple of new elements of gameplay. One of my Favorites was GTH (Grand Theft Horsing?) Essentially you get to steal a horse. This becomes really fun as you ride it through lots of people that would love to stop you. Another interesting quest I came upon has you utilizing the Cannons from a ship to totally destroy troops. Also totally fun and bad ass!!! There is another really rad quest that I just don’t want to spoil little to say it’s about the most fun I had in a while with WoW. A new concept that they did this time around was the addition of quest actually effecting the environment. In the opening Death Knight area there are a couple of quest that effected the area. What made things just a little bit cooler was the addition of having a whole group there with you while it’s happening. This adds a great feeling of MMO. As for the Death Knight for themselves they have some really cool moves. Don’t expect to get the class down right away it actually takes just a little bit to get acclimated.

The selling point for me was the Body Explosion move they have. Essentially you turn a dead body into a grenade and it does damage to surrounding baddies which is quite a fun addition especially when you’re tanking a bunch of people. A brief in how the Death Knight works is you have diseases. That’s where you major damage comes from. As the diseases are wearing down your target you then have option of doing strike type moves that have different effects based on the amount of diseases that are on the target. It seems that the Death Knight will make a great addition to a Raid Party. I already ran an Instance with 4 Death Knights and my Paly. To say the least it was a lot of chaos but just really neat seeing all the moves put together especially the pull that the Death Knight has. Picture a purple hand coming out and plucking someone and pulling them to the Death Knight.

Onward to Graphics! This is one of the best parts of the game in my opinion. One of my major complaints with WoW was the graphics. I really enjoy the cartoon style that WoW has but I felt there could be a bit more detail in things. The first thing that I noticed was how the game ran. It runs so much smoother then I’ve ever seen. I was getting 90fps that was on launch day which was pretty impressive. The draw distance has also been completely enhanced; you see a lot further then before. If that wasn’t cool enough the particle effects are just great. The fire effects look really neat along with the smoke effects that accompany them. Something that I also have to give props to is the new UI that WoW has. Everything seems to be really streamlined and easier on the eyes. I found myself looking through my stats and finding them much easier to read.

The Environments in Northrend are so incredible. I heard this time around they focused a lot on the environments and it really shows. From the simple starting area all the way out in the Forests are really impressive stuff. The lighting effects and shadows effects are really great as well. What gets me is how nice the game looks on almost every platform. The fact that you can run WoW on most low-end computers is really impressive. I myself have everything bumped up to max and it seriously looks enhanced and it still runs great.

The Sound is pretty much the same that it has been. The Great Music is still there that adds such a great effect to WoW. The SFX are pretty standard, nothing terribly new in that department. They do the job really well.

Overall this expansion is fantastic. If you have been away from WoW for a while (like I was), trust me when I say a lot has changed. Between the recent additions from the calendar and achievements this game has really done a much needed overhaul to reward not only casual players but the hardcore ones as well. Blizzard keeps up the great work and I’ll be waiting for Starcraft II.

This Review is sponsored by Game Crazy – Carmel Mountain

Check out screens of the game here below: