Age Of Conan. A review

As I start to write this review. Age of Conan is currently downloading another 1.2 GB of updates.
I have been playing the game for most of the weekend, first impressions are that it’s beautiful to look at, the new types of characters are fun to play and it has a good solo content.
The game itself is huge and I’m not talking about the in game world. The physical size on the disk is 25+ GB. It took over an hour to load on my PC before it started to download updates. The updates consisted of an initial 100MB download (not to bad) followed by another 600+MB download. All in all it took around 2 hours before I was able to start playing the game. The only good news is that the downloader is direct and so I was getting full speed during the updates.
Character creation is very detailed, you can change almost every aspect of your chosen character and the selection screen is very cool to look at. Although after you have done it once, you do find yourself just clicking the defaults when creating a new character.
The first part of the game is very linear. You always start in the same location with the same quests to complete. It means that you can zoom through the quests, but I would like to see two or three different starting areas.
The game is split into day and night modes for the first 20 levels. Day is for all of the normal quests alongside other players. Night is for solo game play following a single quest line based in the starting town, this culminates with a couple of nice blue items for your character. After level 20 you move into the main game world and the day and night modes end.
The main world is stunning to look at I would compare it to Oblivion IV. The world is split up into multiple instances unlike WOW. This means that the game loads each area as you enter it, its quick to do so, but it does get annoying have to wait for an area to load. The area instances themselves are fairly large, I would say they are around the same size as the areas in WOW. Within those areas there are instance dungeons that you can play in either normal or epic mode.
So what’s the game play like? I hear you ask. Well overall it’s not too bad. Combat is the biggest change that WOW players will notice. The game designers would have you believe that combat is more intense and enjoyable. From my point of view, all they have really done is stop your character auto hitting the enemy. Yes you do have the ability with the new combat system to attack from various directions, but you end up using combo moves to fight and this is just like clicking on the attack icons in WOW. The blood and gore is quite nice to watch though and the new characters do have some cool killer moves.
Equipment is much the same as WOW, you have a bag to store the loot you pickup from your kills. Items that you pick up are graded the same as WOW, grey being crap up to orange for elite. You can equip your character with various armour and weapon types depending on your class.
Trade seems very basic. This is probably because my characters are low levels at the moment. There are trade posts in the game that are supposed to give you an auction house equivalent and a bank to store items. I can’t seem to get this to work for my characters and so all of the items I pickup go straight to vendor.
Crafting is non-existent until level 40. You can gather items at lower levels and trade them, but as I can’t seem to access the AH I am just selling everything to the vendor.
So, is the game a WOW beater? No I don’t think so. It’s good and I like it but I don’t think that it offers enough to challenge WOW’s dominance. I can see myself playing through to level 40 to get my mount, but after that, I just don’t know. Some of the reviews I’ve read suggest that the game really gets going from level 50 onwards, so maybe I’ll stick with it until then, unless of course they make a habit of 1.2 GB updates!