World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade

"Burning Crusade is characterized as much by what's new as by what's not: As lovely as Terrokar Forest looks, familiarity is anathema to an alien world...and the illusion breaks just a little when you enter a town and realize the inn, tower, and tavern are just rubber stamps of the ones in old Azeroth, or when you encounter yet another old-world wolf among the warp stalkers, strange moths, and other new creatures. But despite this and all the other things BC didn't add, but could have -- no new classes, no "hero classes," no fourth talent trees, no guild halls or player housing zones -- Blizzard's savant still feels more complete than any other MMO out there."

"It is very much an expansion pack, after all; there are no significant new gameplay modes added to the early game, and the basic mechanics of how quests, combat, crafting and trading work are all exactly the same as previously, with few tweaks to a formula which has already proved to be hugely successful. If that formula left you cold before, it's unlikely that The Burning Crusade will change your mind, and the small tweaks on offer still don't fix fundamentally dull pieces of game design like the lengthy travel time between quest objectives. On the other hand, there is no denying that The Burning Crusade is a triumph of design - in so much that it is everything which made World of Warcraft popular, fun and exciting, distilled down and refined by the developers after years of experience. The two new races represent the most polished and enjoyable way to enter the world of Azeroth - or, indeed, to enter the world of MMOGs in general - which makes The Burning Crusade's low-level content into an extremely welcome addition to an already excellent RPG."

"The new locations, characters, items, and monsters are nothing short of awesome. The voice acting is perfect, the sound effects spot-on, and the score at times both ominous and uplifting. Quest dialog is well-written and does a wonderful job of pulling players into the ever-shifting story of the war. Put simply, everything just feels right. But one can never forget that The Burning Crusade is, first and foremost, an expansion pack and is geared towards those players already quite familiar with Azeroth. So long as you are, there's very little reason for you to not broaden your in-game horizons."

"The new PvP rules, introduced into the current game in a recent patch, will enable less-avid players to build up significant rewards over time, and the quicker five-person instances that are introduced from Hellfire Peninsula onward will also reduce the need for military-precision planning and encourage more-regular ad hoc questing. Yet while becoming more inclusive for Blizzard's army of casual players, the serious challenge posed by the new 25-person raid content, the heroic difficulty settings, and the long, complex path to Mount Hyjal should keep focused players busy for a long time to come."

"The Burning Crusade is a superb example of exactly what an expansion pack for any game should be."