World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

All WOW's races exist in a moral grey area - the Horde, even the frankly unpleasant Undead, are just misunderstood - so this is the first opportunity there's ever been to go over to the actual dark side. It's a heady experience. You're given quests asking you to steal horses, torture soldiers for information with red-hot pokers, turn an entire navy's cannons against them in a bloody massacre, and kill civilians 10 levels below you who, in any case, are too terrified of you to fight back. If you don't exercise self-control, you will find yourself cackling uncontrollably at your keyboard.

Because this is the only place you can start a Death Knight, you'll be doing all this in the company of many other players, all running amok, lending the whole enterprise a glorious sense of unhinged blood lust, of being part of an evil undead army on the rampage. This brilliant device turns the most serious threat to immersion in the new hero class into the exact opposite. Blizzard has even acknowledged that the first thing most players will want to do is duel each other, by creating a quest which rewards you for doing just that.

There's superb characterisation and an uncommonly light touch throughout the writing and quest design. There are very large helpings of crowd-pleasing and showboating, too, as the WOW team falls over itself to showcase Wrath of the Lich King's new visual effects, physics and interactions. The entire zone is instanced several times over, allowing Blizzard to take you through several stages of set-pieces.

The possibilities for the latter have been exploded by the expansion's new technology, which brings up new controls and skill-sets for anything you mount (a stolen horse, a cannon, a skeletal drake), and generally allows for much more flexible rules and quasi-arcade playing styles. Blizzard stops at nothing for spectacle in the Death Knight intro, inviting dangerous amounts of slowdown in places through the sheer abandon with which it's stretching the technical limits of the game. Even in beta, though, it may stutter, but it doesn't break.

By the end of the intro your level-57 Death Knight will be decked out in armour as fancy-looking as a level-70 hardcore raider's - shedding that for Outland "greens" will have to be done through gritted teeth. And, inevitably and slightly regretfully, you will have left the Scourge behind and switched sides. We won't reveal how this happens, except to note that the ground-shaking climax really makes sense of the hero-class concept, and is the best realisation yet of Blizzard's ambition to put the player "on the ground" in a Warcraft RTS, a tenet that's been central to WOW since work began on it some ten years ago.

Some of the Death Knight intro is too easy, and in a couple of places - where it wanders furthest from traditional MMORPG play, into the realms of blockbuster twitch gaming - it's frustratingly difficult. There will undoubtedly be tuning between now and release, but in any case, a smooth and rewarding challenge is hardly the point of this zone. The point is context, sheer entertainment, and grand storytelling done the MMO way - en masse, not in a single-player bubble. On those grounds, it's a roaring success.