An awesome expansion, and worthy of the Warcraft name.
The graphics are what you should all be expecting by now. That beign said, they did receive some touch up here and there. The textures are more noticable and they implemented shadows. The shadows are nice, but far from necesary in a game like this. The problem witht the shadows are that they're poorly optimized. I turned them on to high from being off altogether and they cut my framerate in half. Now, onto performance. Wrath of the Lich King runs smoothly on just about any computer. It was even running fine on my eight year old Dell. My new computer, a laptop with Windows Vista, 3GB RAM, 260GB HD, Nvidia 256mb 8600 GT Mobile, and a 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor runs it on mostly high settings with shadows off at 60 frames per second.
The music is great as always. Blizzard is known for their fantastic soundtracks, and they didn't skimp out here. It's as epic as ever, with a sense of folk thrown in to enhance the feeling of the lonely north. It's realy great, anyone who was a fan of previous music in the series should like this just as much.
The game-play is where Wold of Warcraft has always shined above the rest. Blizzard still retainded that classic game-play and made some beneficial changes surrounding it. The game is still easy like Burning Crusade, possibly even easier, but it doesn't matter as much here because there's so much more to do. There's a bunch of new factions with rewards that are very worthwhile, a ton of new dungeons that despite their lack of difficulty are still fun to run through and quite creative, heroic versions of those dungeons, 10 and 25 man raids, heroic versions of those raids, and lots of PvP. For PvP there's a new battleground where you essentially play attack and defend, which is a lot of fun. There's also at least one new arena that I'm aware of but I ahven't had the chance to play on it yet. Then there's the addition of Wintergrasp, a world PvP area of attack and defend that not only loads you with honor, but awesome rewards as well like mammoths and leveling weapons. Not to mention your side gets an experince bonus if you're in control of Wintergrasp. Blizzard also added in the new spells and talent trees, and despite all the whining I think they're pretty cool. There's the new hero class, Death Knight, that anyone who has a level 55 character can create. I can safely say that they are over powered. avng said that they're a ton of fun to play, extaordinarily easy to level, and their storyline that you get to play through is very well done. There's the new profession, inscription, which is cool but somewhat useless at the moment. Blizzard also implemented an achievement system, which is almost exactly like the Xbox 360 achievements except certain achievements give you rewards like tabards, titles, and mounts. They also greatly improved the storytelling this time around and make you truly feel like you're a part of it. This where another new feature, phasing, comes in. It makes the world around you change depending on whcih quests you've completed and so on. So what you do really affects the game world. Blizzard loaded this expansion with so much new content, no one in their right mind can complain.
What a fantastic expansion pack, it's truly amazing. If you already play WoW you probably already own this. If you don't, I suspect there's nothing I can say to get you to play. This is a great expansion, anyone who was doubting or suspicious can rest assured.