The Warhammer Gold: Age of Reckoning is one that was spawned from table top miniature combat. Wargame fans the world over delight in the rich fantasy world of dwarves, elves, orcs, goblins and the forces of Chaos.

Many hours were spent painting armies of finely detailed 25mm lead alloy figures to fight them over equally detailed terrain. The Warhammer Gold  World was always going to be a natural for transitioning onto the PC gaming platform, however intial forays were restricted to standard wargame and strategy games. The release of Warhammer Gold: Age of Reckoning marks the first move to online gaming.

It's worth noting that this game has had a lot of build up. It has been years in development by EA Mythic, and it has been eagerly anticipated by Warhammer and MMO fans alike. It is fair to say that a lot of this has been driven by players seeking an alternative to Blizzard's hugely successful World of Warcraft. In doing this review we are aware that there are fundamental differences between the games, but it is necessary to compare where similarities do exist - if only to add to the debate on whether this is the "WoW-killer" that fans claim it to be.

This review has been completed on the standard retail copy. This contains two installation DVDs, the manual and the initial one month's free subscription. The manual is pretty basic, containing only the barest of information on the races and gameplay. The Warhammer franchise is well known for its wonderful artwork and colourful documentation, and we have to say the black and white offering (although pretty standard in the industry) is not up to the quality we would have expected from the franchise. Those who splashed out the extra coin for the Collector's Edition won't be complaining about the beautiful art book and graphic novel included in that box, though.

Installation for our copy of the game was a nightmare, and an inexcusable nightmare at that. The long load time (during which the progress bar appears not to move at all) had us looking at the task manager to see if in fact it was working, and the very business-like load screen was nothing compared to the absence of an executable file at the end of it. Yes, you got it, the only file that looked anything like an executable was the patch file, and unfortunately this crashed. A trawl through the internet revealed that this was not an uncommon problem, and after a new version of the patch executable together with a 200MB update we were finally into the game. The absence of a robust game loader is inexcusable. We understand this is a problem affecting only Australasian copies of the game; regardless, it's a right royal screw up.