Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Disastrous"

Being reasonably new to the world of mmo's but a veteran with 25 years of tabletop AD&D experience I was highly anticipating being able to finally play the game online. Having previously played the masterpiece that is World of Warcraft I assumed that the developer's of this game would have similarly created a seamless virtual world which would bring to life the D&D games of my youth. Never have I been more wrong!
The game start promisingly enough and the character creation screen is both graphically impressive and rather fun, but from that point onwards it's all downhill. In fact from thereon in the game plays like a lesson in how not to make a mmo.
Your character enters a world that looks completely flat and lifeless and interacting with the game's npc's is a joyless experience that harks back to the drop down menu rpg's of the very early 90's. The graphics are simply awful. Characters seem to float about the screen as though they are apart from the world rather than a part of it and combat is reduced to a confused mess of trying to work out which of the blur of monsters you are currently targetting. Quest's are both dull and contrived and the opportunities for solo questing seem limited at best. Simply put, if you want to see a great implementation of AD&D then the Baldurs gate series does a vastly superior job. Stormreach squanders the opportunity to bring the D&D world to life in an online environment, and this is doubly disappointing due to the fact that the idea of a persistent online D&D world is something that an awful lot of gamers have dreamed of since the late eighties.
To be honest this game may have hidden depths of which I am unaware as I despairingly gave up after a few hours play, but the fact is that D&D has already been brought to life in the most fantastic manner - it's called the World of Warcraft, and I'd much rather be spending time enoying the genius of Azeroth than wasing my time with this nonsense.