Role-playing or first-person shooter? And is it any good? Time to find out.
Zy Nicholson

You can always recognise High Fantasy when every other word is "Dark" and every name bears Mid-Sentence Capital Letters denoting Legendary Importance. With its magic-based combat and fantasy setting, some of you might even hope for a little RPG influence to creep into the proceedings. But tarry ye awhiles, pointy-hatted polyhedral-pushers, for thou wouldst be mistaken.

Surprisingly, WoT plays like a first-person shooter: explore 3D environments, battle the odd monster and solve a host of switch, key and block puzzles to progress. There's no skill development or experience and your spells are really just collectable magical talismans (weapons) with a certain number of charges (er, ammo). There are also two very different games here, depending on whether you're able to enjoy multiplayer or you're stuck with the solo adventure.

Only the graphics, based on tweaks to the Unreal engine, seem to have benefited from WoT's lengthy development: ironically, time itself has been the unkindest critic of the game's original design concept. While other FPS games have been busy introducing crouching, crawling, object manipulation, stealth manoeuvres and AI allies as new benchmarks, WoT eschews such sophistication. You run, you jump. While others have explored engine cut-scenes and cinematic narrative, WoT is a slog to the end-of-level FMV reward.

We honestly don't know if it does service to the novels of Robert Jordan on which it's based, but WoT is turgid, hackneyed, clichéd, Middle Earth fantasy gubbins with spittle-draining pseudo-Celtic naming conventions. Its saving grace is that it disguises its Orcs by calling them "Trollocs", and the admittedly immature humour of hearing earnest-voiced actors attempting to deliver the word in all seriousness is possibly the only reason for sitting through any five minutes of its stilted, self-indulgent FMV.