It's solid- like an uninteresting, understimulating rock that literally brings nothing new to the table.
Here, you have your classic case of two sides of players vying for dominance. Sound familiar? I thought so.
In order to be a part of this battle, you choose a class and race and gender. In terms of classes, the usual suspects certainly apply-mages, priests, warriors, archers, rogues by another names-all the classic stuff you'd expect, though they're certainly tweaked to mesh with the fabulous Warhammer universe (of which I am an avid fan).
Regardless, some might say that this it's quite alright to stick to expectation, and maybe they're right, because the races do seem to add a different vibe to things (I can't think of another race in an MMO that's as interesting as Chaos [not that I played them during my time]).
But herein lays one problem. The races of Destruction are so interesting, that population imbalances arose, to such a grievous extent that the run of the mill dwarves, elves, and humans just couldn't keep up. And in a game that stakes its claim on player-versus-player combat, one sided battles aren't exactly the best thing.
What's more, open world PVP never really seems to happen as much as it should. It's set up to, sure, but most of the time, you'll be fighting in an arena-esque local, which is fine for a nice team deathmatch with very little strategy-but there's still got to be something bigger than that out there, and, to my mind, there wasn't (at least, not on a consistent basis).
Of course, the combat isn't terribly special, think World of Warcraft and throw in a few less interesting animations and you've got the idea.
The main problem though, that I have with this game-and any other adventure-fantasy MMO-is the endlessly needful quests, and the sheer BOREDOM that derive from there. There's no voice-overs for general text, and no real personality to many of the quests (barring the hilarious Greenskin area), so there isn't really any good feeling besides "ho-hum, another kill/fetch/defend/escort quest to do".
The highly touted public quests aren't much better either, I must confess.
Sure, they happen on the fly, and you need others to complete them, but they roll-over and restart every 2 minutes, and at that rate, you can never feel like you've accomplished anything real by killing that Giant, because, you'll be saying "Oh, look, there's the Giant, back again… and again…and again"
Now, I guess my problem is that I'm a fan of realism to some extent… a fan of in-world progress-In other words, I want to feel like I made a difference in the game and for my money, and you never feel that here.
I will say though, that a very welcome re-addition to the genre was a return of experience points and item drops for player-kills. That'll help stave off the boring quest-grind awhile, but make no mistake, you'll be wrung through the gears anyway out of necessity.
Finally, I'd like to bring up a major issue with the game as well, and that's the lack of customization.
In character creation you have only a few faces, a few skin tones, a small number of hairstyles, scars, accessories-it's all nice, but it's also all limited. There's just not enough choice, and coupling this with the fact that so many items look the same for their respective level ranges, and you can see why not even a custom armour-colour feature (with the option of only a handful of colours) can save this character-creation mess.
In the end, WAR is decent, but it's not striking. I do feel as though it fails on more levels than it succeeds on, but I use the term 'fail' when I should say, 'renders passably', because the game does nothing horribly, but, passably. If you're a gamer like me though, you expected a lot more than you got from this, and passably certainly won't foot a 15$ a month bill, that gives you a world in which you feel un-influential, unimportant, and wholly un-unique.
I never thought such a phrase would make sense, but it does here:
Warhammer Online has a certain style, but it has no soul…
…Or rather, no spirit of its own, that draws you in and makes you feel like you're treading new ground- because you're not.
In WAR, you're on the same old path, only with a new coat of paint, and while WAR is a solid effort it really shines a light on how stale the MMO genre is getting, as the innovations here are few and far between.