This is a difficult one. Just how do you break into a genre that is currently led by one unstoppable game whose popularity seems to know no bounds, while simultaneously bringing to life the singular fantasy world that is guaranteed to be known and loved by millions of people worldwide? Well you don't - not without making a certain few sacrifices, which is why there's plenty in The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar for dedicated fan boys to complain about in their Internet blogs, as they chain turbines to their ankles and drag them through the streets so their companions can throw turnips at them. Needless to say, liberties have been taken, but the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien's works lives on.

Depending on your love for either the Lord of the Rings books or the Peter Jackson movies, you'll likely approach LOTR Online with a degree of pessimism - there's a lot that developers Turbine could have got wrong. However, the simple fact is that they got a considerable amount of the game right and they've made great use of the rich source material.

Yes, changes have been made - you'll see Hobbits wandering around the place out of the confines of the safety of the Shire, stabbing Orcs in their shins, and you might also be disappointed that you won't be joining the Fellowship on their journey to save Middle-Earth from the ever-looming threat of Sauron. But that goes without saying - it was never going to be possible for the game to allow thousands of people to participate in the main crux of the LOTR story; it'd also have made for a rather limited game. So, the biggest grievance the fans of Tolkien's epic are going to have is with the inclusion of an entirely new story, written especially for this game.

It's a story that toys with the idea that as Frodo and his Hobbit companions get underway from the Shire on the first leg of their journey, Sauron sends the leader of the Ring Wraiths, the Witch-King, to his former Kingdom of Angmar, with the intention of causing all sorts of havoc for the Kingdom of Men by sending his forces to the south, while Sauron sends his armies to the north, thus trapping and defeating the only real threat to the Dark Lord. Caught in the middle are the lands of Eriador, where the entirety of this game takes place. It's not 100% Tolkien, but most importantly it's doesn't feel tacked on either. This is a story that works well as something you can believe could have happened within Tolkien's epic and incredibly well-realised world of Middle-Earth.

It's not as though Turbine have been callous with these changes either, as most of Tolkien's world has been recreated in loving detail, reproduced with a quality that only obsessive fans could achieve. The game takes its influences directly from the books rather than the movies, so Turbine have had a fair bit of work cut out in recreating every location and all of its inhabitants from scratch - and it's a credit to them that they've done such a remarkable job. Middle-Earth has been beautifully reproduced; the graphics powering the game render the world in quite amazing detail, yet the game doesn't demand a huge, system-hungry PC for it to run at an acceptable frame rate. Fogging is practically non-existent; viewing distances can stretch for miles, showing every tree, building and rock between you and the horizon - and as far as I could tell there were very little graphical glitches to worry about, and certainly none that stuck out as being significant. The animations do need work though, as they do tend to look very stiff.

Visual qualities aside, it's the use of the source material that's more important than how it's been represented, so it's a good thing that this is the area that Turbine seem to have the most fun with. Although you will only get the chance to explore Eriador - as at this moment in time the rest of Middle-Earth remains inaccessible - it's a land full of familiar locations to visit, with the likes of the Shire, Bree and Rivendell created in all their glory. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the books or the movies will find plenty of recognisable places to see on their journey. As to how the source material alters the gameplay, well, this is a game that does try - and largely succeeds - to fit within the lore of the books, so while there are many things that will be instantly familiar to anyone who's played an MMO game before, there are some slight and noticeable differences.

Central to one of these is just how story-driven the game is. It's something of a drastic change to the core of what MMO games do, where simply dumping you into a huge, open-ended world that you can explore as you wish has always been a genre hallmark. With The Lord of the Rings Online there's a genuine attempt to draw you into the game-world through special story-led quests, and get a taster of these when you first start out with your character. Rather than immediately throwing you into Middle-Earth to find your own way, each of the four races (Men, Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits) all have their own quests that you must complete alone. These differ for each race; one race's see you attempting to find shelter in the Shire as you try and avoid the unwanted attention of a Ring Wraith, while another's finds you helping a Ranger rescue a couple of Hobbits from a group of bandits.

These types of quests are far more story-led than many of the others you'll come to experience throughout the rest of the game, as they contain interactions between the non-playable characters, who exchange dialogue with you and each another - there are even scripted sequences that play out like cut scenes, fleshing out the story that lead you to the quest. You'll find more of these quests as you venture outward; there are many instanced zones in which you or a group can partake in some story that unfolds before you. The result from all this interaction is a greater sense of importance to your presence in the game; you aren't just someone standing on the sidelines killing giant spiders for the sole purpose of collecting loot - there's a sense of feeling part of something far greater.

Turbine have also changed the templates to familiar playable classes to create their own not entirely unique but certainly different classes, in order to fit in with the LOTR universe. So, the Burglar takes on the same job as the rogue, the sneaky backstabbing type who cloaks as he attacks but can use his debuffing abilities against enemy NPCs to aid his Fellowship (which is what this game calls groups). Meanwhile, the Captain takes on the role as the all rounder, the guy who can be as effective at dishing out damage alone as he can in a Fellowship - he also gets a pet flag-carrying soldier to help him out, who grants special bonuses to other players' abilities. There's the ranged expert, the Hunter, while the Guardian becomes the damage dealer, the Lore-Master is the spell caster who also has his own pets, while the Champion takes over the role of paladin. Finally, the Minstrel - the healer - can just as easily defeat opponents through the power of song as he can keep his allies alive. These aren't great departures from the norm, but even with the experience that playing other MMOs may have granted, you won't instinctively master these classes simply because they feel faintly familiar. The job of levelling up your class does remain the same though, with a level-based system taking you all the way up to level 50 - actually grinding your way through the ranks is surprisingly quite easy.

While LOTR Online does tend to borrow more than its fair share of ideas from World of Warcraft, there is a reason for it, and one that goes beyond simply picking the best bits from the current number one game in the hope of the same success. All the elements that are similar to WoW are in there to make the experience of LOTR Online as enjoyable and satisfying as possible, all having a purpose rather than just reusing ideas for the sake of it. In fact, it really would be disingenuous of anyone to claim that Turbine have blatantly copied their closest rival, because they've made a real effort to improve on the ideas that WoW pioneered. There are number of things that many who've played WoW will be familiar with though, be it the way the interface is presented or the accumulation of rested experience points that allow double the experience and charge up after you log out.

Most of the actions you can take in the game are uncannily similar to those you'll have used in WoW, while even the quest and character screens look and work in much the same way as they do in Blizzard's epic; but there are noticeable differences too. Most are slight, but are a definite improvement. Take abilities as an example; as you might expect, you buy these from class trainers, you purchase whichever spells you have yet to learn and return once you've levelled up some more and can buy the next lot. The difference here is that aside from those abilities you are yet to buy, all of your spells level up with you, so you won't find yourself constantly backtracking to the nearest town every time you level up to buy the next set. It also means you can easily save up enough money to buy more important items for your character. This is a subtle difference, but having spent an inordinate amount of gold coin in WoW on my own characters, I can tell you now that it's a very welcome one.

Another nice change to the formula comes with the way in which the game handles the 'grind'. Quests can be the largely unspectacular 'kill this, collect that' variety that you've partaken in many times before, and there is an awful lot of wandering about between quest givers, who tend to send you all over the place. However, where LOTR Online gets one over on WoW is with the inclusion of 'Deeds'. These are a means of awarding you for certain actions you perform throughout the game, be it the slaying of numerous creatures, the discovery of landmarks or the completion of a certain number of quests. As you unlock them, you gain Titles that you can present after your name to proclaim your achievements - so if you defeat thirty spiders you can become 'Spider-Foe', or kill thirty bandits and you gain 'Watcher of the Roads' and so forth. There are literally dozens of these titles to unlock, although many of these will remain unknown until they're earned.

While titles may not be enough for some players to excuse the constant grinding, deeds also unlock Traits, abilities that can buff your stats, or on some occasions give you brand new skills. As with titles, traits can vary depending on the type of deed you have achieved, but most if not all prove useful in some shape or form. You can have fifteen of these traits activated at any one time, meaning that there's some degree of personal character customisation available to you. With such added incentive in place, there's a real draw to unlocking these deeds and reaping from their rewards - grinding still exists, but at least here it doesn't feel quite as pointless as it does in so many other MMO games.

The art of crafting also comes into play, as you'd expect, with a number of different professions for you to choose from - yet another feature that'll be familiar to any WoW player. You get a profession, gather the resources from resource nodes that appear randomly around the world, put all the ingredients together and make a nice shiny new item. It's unremarkable in its infancy, with simplistic recipes to learn, but it does get more complicated as your skills improve, with more elaborate items to be built as you gradually climb the skills ladder. As you increase in rank, you unlock more potent recipes while also being able to add special items into ingredients to heighten the stats of the items you craft. This is the area you'll make the most money out of, with player-to-player trading forming a large part of the economy of the game.

For all the ideas it borrows from its rivals, LOTR Online does a bit of a u-turn when it comes to Player versus Player combat; friendly duelling is about as close to real PvP as you'll get in the initial stages of the game. The dark forces of Sauron do appear and they are playable, but not in the same way as the other four races; while games like World of Warcraft give you the choice to play as one of two warring sides, a similar option is not available to you in LOTR Online until later on, when you can opt to participate in a special side game called Monster Play. Through scrying pools found in most major towns and settlements, you get the choice to join Sauron's forces as one of a number of different beasties - anything from Orcs to giant spiders. These pre-made level 50 characters play in the same way as your main characters, only the focus with Monster Play is put entirely upon combat, with special raids against castles and other targets being the order of the day. As you complete quests you gain special points that can then be cashed in to buy new abilities, change your appearance or just used on other temporary abilities for your main character once you exit Monster Play.

This works well enough as an alternative to forced PvP and there's scope for some huge battles, with the promise of fully-fledged PvP combat with the other races once people start hitting the high levels. It won't quite be to everyone's liking though, as it's missing that random PvP nature that made the cross faction fights in WoW so appealing. It's also somewhat sparse at the moment, with only a few players actually dipping in to have a go, which is something of a problem, given how the quests require full raid groups to be in any way effective. Time will tell whether or not it's a feature that'll live up to its potential or sink without a trace due to lack of interest. The same is true for the rest of the game; it's difficult to predict whether or not LOTR Online will have the long term appeal to keep people playing long after they hit level 50 - this has always been something of a problem for MMO games, preventing interest from waning after the user base has done everything they can with the game.

It's not as though Turbine are oblivious to the possible problems caused by the end game content though; they've built this game for the long haul, with mention being made of the inclusion of other regions of Middle-Earth through expansions, with Gondor, Rohan and Mordor all hinted at being included at some point down the road. There will also be smaller additions made at no extra cost, introducing new dungeons, creatures and quests throughout the game's lifespan, so those that do stick with it will have plenty to do.

For a game that could have been a disastrous use of one of the greatest fantasy worlds ever written, it's nice to see how much of a triumph The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar actually is. Its ideas may be borrowed, but they've been vastly improved upon, showing just how adept Turbine are at understanding what it was that made World of Warcraft the success it has become, while also improving on some of the gameplay that even WoW has yet to tackle. It's a game that lovingly recreates its source material with a passion than fans of Tolkien's works will be very pleased with, but most importantly it's a game that's easily accessible and fun to play, which was always the one thing that made WoW triumph over all those that had come before it. The dedicated World of Warcraft masses may find it difficult to abandon their chosen game for something new, but those escaping its clutches to find a new place to call home, or anyone simply seeking to explore the genre, will easily find LOTR Online a more than worthy successor, a game that is perhaps the closest rival Blizzard has had for the past three years.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).