It's crucial that you approach Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures in the right mindset. Come with the weighty expectations of a traditional MMORPG, coloured by the genre's current giants, and you are likely to be disappointed because, in developer Funcom's own words, this is an online action RPG first and an MMO second. Semantics, you might think - and you wouldn't be wrong - but important semantics nonetheless if you're to get the most out of this alternative, evolved and fresh tangent of the genre.

Age of Conan isn't a huge departure from convention but rather a retelling of the same story, with a few chapters moved around to bring Funcom's own brand of action-orientated, story-driven gameplay into focus. Parallels are most easily drawn to Guild Wars, with its different MMO structure and heavy use of 'instancing' - that is, areas unique to a player or group of players. However, Guild Wars can more easily afford any downfalls with its free-to-play pricing model cushioning the blows. Has Age of Conan done enough to earn its £10 per month premium and to prevent itself from becoming just an overpriced substitute?

I was impressed during my play-through of the first twenty levels for our Age of Conan preview - the slick, populated and polished tutorial area known as Tortage couldn't have been a better introduction to the game. Everything felt right, with a speedy levelling curve, more than enough quests to get stuck into and plenty of opportunity to learn the ins and outs of your chosen class. Venturing out into the wider Hyborian landscape, however, sees you trading the on-the-rails polish of Tortage for a more expansive, MMO-like experience - though not one without a few unfortunate downsides.

The lack of voice-acted quest cut scenes was the first thing to hit home, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't detract from the experience, at least initially. This is partly because the voice acting was so potent throughout Tortage, but also because it leaves the game feeling a little loose and lacking the narrative clout so core to the game's initial appeal. It also makes it tempting to simply mash the 'default answer' key to skip through the oodles of quest text you'll encounter, which would be a shame given that the majority of the writing is often entertaining, even poignant at times.

This omission is soon offset by the advantages that an open world brings, though. After leaving Tortage at around level 20, you are swiftly bundled off to your respective homeland. As an Aquilonian, I soon found myself in the game's main city and home of King Conan himself, Tarantia, which is a sprawling, Greek-inspired metropolis with paved streets and prestigious buildings. The other two areas, the Stygian port town of Khemi and the rugged Cimmerian hideout Conarch Village, are easy to access from the get-go, so there's immediately a strong sense of scale and a great deal of exploring to do, as well as plenty of quests to embark upon.

Each area has its own distinct theme, perhaps best illustrated by the large quest hubs. Khopshef Province, following on from Khemi, is a wonderfully barren, Egyptian-inspired Stygian desert, populated with bands of roaming mercenaries and aggressive beasts. This area, as with the many others, is large and beautifully detailed, with palm tree-lined oases littered between sand dunes and rocky crags. The visuals are truly striking and I often found myself stopping to take a look around upon reaching a particularly high vantage point. The music too is a real treat, with some beautiful orchestral pieces punctuating your journey through the various areas with rolling drumbeats and subtle yet rousing vocals.

As you might expect, all this aesthetic grandeur comes at a cost, and that cost is the aforementioned heavy use of instancing. Everywhere you go in Age of Conan is instanced, from all the main cities and quest areas down to the humblest of inns. This is where the "massive" in "MMO" comes into question, with the lack of a truly open, seamless world to explore. Each instance of an area has a finite cap of players and when this is reached a new version is created. This ultimately leaves the world of Hyboria - in all its glory - feeling more than a little fragmented. All the interaction is still there - you have the chance to meet plenty of interesting player characters on your travels, friend and foe alike - but it's all on a much smaller scale. I can't help but feel this hinders the feeling of community that a single, open world brings - especially with the lack of a central meeting point (the capital city of Tarantia being the ideal candidate). And there's always the chance that, on a free-for-all PvP server at least, someone can kill you, stroll to the nearest resurrection point and port out into a different version of the same area never to be seen again, depriving you of any chance of vengeance.

Of course, instancing has its advantages, not least when dealing with a game world this large and graphically impressive. It keeps the integrity of the story and characters in line, prevents overcrowding and helps retain immersion somewhat. This pervasive use of instancing will likely make or break the game for many but personally I don't have a problem with it; once you look past the strange PvP-related intricacies and get used to grouping up with people before entering an area, it's really not all that bad. It even has its good points one you learn to take advantage of the system.

Your progression through Age of Conan, whilst reasonable, isn't as well orchestrated as that of its most dominant competitors. This is particularly noticeable in the latter half of the game as you approach the level 80 cap, where quests come in leaps and bounds, often leaving your quest log dry while you simply kill mobs repeatedly in order to gain experience and progress to the next level. This wouldn't be quite as blatant if it wasn't for the ultra polished levelling curve seen in the first 40 levels of the game, but it's obvious that the higher you get, the more sparse the content becomes. This onus on grinding to level up also tends to benefit certain classes more than others, particularly those that are more suited to killing large groups of mobs with area of effect attacks.

This problem is alleviated in most MMORPGs by a recreational crafting or profession system, which although present in Age of Conan isn't a particularly worthwhile distraction, mainly because it feels a little tagged on. Every player can pick up every gathering profession, allowing them to collect the various resources such as wood, stone and leather on their travels. For me, this goes against one of the primary points of profession systems. Typically, by forcing players to focus on one or two areas, you encourage player interaction, the forging of relationships and ultimately a player-led economy. You could argue that as players are forced into two, and only two, crafting professions (weaponsmith, alchemist, etc.) this will still be the case, but I can't help but think that the vast supply of raw materials flooding each server will undermine this somewhat. Much of the gathering you carry out is in specific, resource rich instances that are set aside from the main quest areas. Again, these feel tagged on and incoherent with respect to the rest of the game, and are often bogged down by guilds that are hungry for resources. All in all there's little joy to be had here, with many improvements needed to make professions more than just a time-sink.

The twelve classes are one of the major attractions to Age of Conan. There's the usual selection of tanks, melee, ranged and magic-based classes, but also some hybrid-style classes such as the Herald of Xotli, a shape shifting melee mage that wields two-handed weapons, and the Bear Shaman, which is both a support healer and a melee damage dealer. Each class plays differently and all bring something useful to the table in a group situation. As you might expect, there are a few imbalances that need ironing out and some classes are considerably more powerful than others. Each class boasts two unique 'feat' trees in addition to a further archetype-specific tree. These trees serve the purpose of allowing you to differentiate yourself from other players of the same class, and they do have a substantial effect on your playing style.

They are let down by a number of shortcomings, though, particularly the feat descriptions themselves, which are, in general, incredibly poor and uninformative. As you plough your hard earned feat points (one per level-up, levels 10 and up) into a particular feat it would be nice to know exactly what the return will be on your investment! This is often not the case though, mainly due to sloppy, over complicated descriptions and the lack of any standardised numerical information. This fluffy, imprecise approach to tooltips also spreads to many of the skills and abilities; Age of Conan fares particularly badly in this regard when compared to other titles in the genre. This all comes back to wanting to develop your character in a way that suits you, which - considering this is something so core to an RPG - isn't as easy as you'd like, resulting in the need for much trial and error. This is compounded by some feats either being incredibly weak (possibly due to bugs), or worse, simply not working at all. I'd like to think this gripe only applied to just one or two classes, but it seems to be a game-wide issue and one that's going to take some time to amend.

Character development takes a further hit with the Skill Points system. These are gained in their hundreds as you progress and you can spend them in a whole host of interesting sounding ways, such as increased health or stamina regeneration, as well as archetype-specific skills such as the Rogue's improved hiding. Again these are a little hit and miss, with some working badly and some simply not at all. Equally, items - usually the driving force of character development - provide little in the way of motivation; at level 40 I found myself still wearing gear from twenty levels prior. The usable loot that did drop was nothing to shout about either, providing minimal benefit to my character's damage output and defences. Hopefully this is Funcom's way of helping enforce a level playing field for PvP combat, with stats and items only having a minimal impact on the way you perform, leaving more room for player skill and ability to excel. I'm not convinced this is the best way to approach itemisation in an MMORPG though, and if this is the route they want to take then they're going to have to work really hard to provide other meaningful incentives to keep people playing.

The combat, or 'Real Combat', system on the other hand does a lot right. This is just as well too, given that it's one of the game's major selling points. The multidirectional attacking system in conjunction with your adversaries' attempts at defence becomes a compelling mini-game in its own right, turning every encounter into a deadly to-ing and fro-ing of blades and magic. The way that each and every attack (and some direct heals) can hit multiple targets in a frontward cone is another refreshing feature, reducing the need to select a target for every action and attack you make. This is further augmented by the combo system, where you initiate a particular combo on your action bar then proceed to attack in the various directions indicated on screen. These combinations get more complicated as they increase in rank (some taking up to a total of five key presses) and result in a more powerful attack than normal - usually with added buffs, debuffs or effects. Getting the killing blow with a combo sees your character perform a delightfully gory, weapon-specific fatality move, spraying varying amounts of blood at your screen in the process. Conan would have been proud.

This Real Combat feels incredibly involving, far more so than any other MMO's equivalent system. Tapping the attack keys and seeing your character swing realistically in the various directions and making contact with several enemies at once is quite fulfilling. This is particularly important, as Age of Conan is, after all, a very combat intensive game. Minute to minute gameplay is almost entirely devoted to bashing (or exploding) your way through hordes of enemies. Group situations are fast and furious, with melee and casters alike running into the fray and laying waste to those that oppose them; battle shouts of allies ringing in your ears and the blood-gurgling screams of decapitated opponents echoing all around is Age of Conan at its very best.

Perhaps the only downside to the combat system is that it seems more suited to the physical damage orientated classes. Casters don't utilise the combo system at all, playing instead much like a magic class in any other MMORPG. This issue isn't something unique to combat either, applying to the game as a whole. Robert E. Howard's comics tend to summon images of burly, longhaired wild men going toe-to-toe in a bloody fight to the death - much like the many melee classes in the game do so well. It's evident that much effort has gone into making the caster classes equally barbaric to counter this and, at least aesthetically, they've succeeded. The way in which they play, however, feels like a step back in some respects, and I'm not entirely sure why they didn't produce an alternative combo system for magic users. This disparity also brings up issues of game balance; casters rely only on their mana to do damage; allowing them to use the game's other resource of stamina, which melee classes rely on for performing combos, for sprinting alone. Coupling this with the number of instant cast or low cast time spells, and the fact that many melee combos take a substantial amount of time to perform, and casters do seem to have a fundamental advantage in player vs. player situations.

An online game, particularly one with MMO elements, is often a product of exactly how hard a developer works post release. One thing you can't accuse Funcom of is apathy; they're definitely not sitting back and counting the notes as millions flock to hand over a monthly subscription. The rate at which the game is being patched is quite astonishing, and perhaps necessarily so given the amount of issues - big and small- still plaguing the game. As a result, I've tried to avoid mentioning smaller issues entirely, and instead focus on the overriding issues affecting the game. Sadly I could go on; the social functions of the game are lacklustre to say the least, player sieges remain a myth - rendering guild cities useless in the process - and the lack of the much-lauded DirectX10 support at release is embarrassing.

Funcom has done something quite dangerous by consciously releasing a less than feature complete offering into the market. Unfortunately, it's this incompleteness and the sheer number of deep-rooted problems that ultimately defines your Hyborian Adventure. Forced to give a game as ever-changing as this one a static score (and believe me, I am forced- raging Barbarians haven't got squat on our editor…) Age of Conan is a 7 - albeit a strong one. Age of Conan is a diamond in the rough for sure, but in the rough it is. You'll be drawn in by the fresh approach to combat and the often wonderful presentation, but it won't be long until the cracks begin to show and your stay in Hyboria is cut short with dissatisfaction.

Reviewed by Martin Oddy for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).