Hey, you! Got a spare life? Perhaps you're the kind of person with too much money on your hands, who has absolutely no qualms about shelling out an extraordinary amount of cash on monthly subscription charges. If so, allow me to introduce you to 2007, the year of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, where your choices range from epic sci-fi actioners to the more traditional fantasy yarns, with even a bit of sea based pirating thrown in for good measure. It's great - so long as you have a spare life and far too much money.

If however you're the kind of person with only enough time and money to invest in one MMORPG this year then you have something of an unenviable task ahead of you, sifting through those games with the simple urge to muscle Blizzard off their money mountain for their own slice of the action, as opposed to those genuinely aimed at providing long term fans of the genre with something new.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes nestles comfortably with the latter group, as a game that's out to do its own thing regardless of what it is others may be revered for. However, it's not about to escape the influx of inevitable comparisons with the current market leader, because although Vanguard caters to a different crowd, commonalities with World of Warcraft are inevitable, although this is as far away from WoW's forgiving simplicity as any MMORPG can be. You see, Vanguard is more ambitious than the current generation of MMORPGs, with a world, class and race system so vast that it's easy to lose your first couple of hours deciding who to play as. It even boasts a character creation tool that allows for far more customisation to characters than many other recent games have allowed; it's perhaps only a small feature, but one that does allow for a greater amount of freedom when creating an avatar. The options open to you in these early stages offer a great deal of variety; there are nineteen playable races, most of which come with their own starting areas, and fifteen classes, so there's no shortage of new things to try out and experiement with.

The first tentative steps you take into the world of Telon can be a bit hit and miss though, with some races clearly having starting areas that have benefited from more care and attention to detail than others. One race may have you starting off as a ruthless soldier working for a tyrant emperor, killing innocent villagers before setting off on your own personal journey for redemption, while others will have you collecting pelts from rat people for the local toothless old simpleton farmers. The general style of questing does remain familiar for most however, with the usual array of collecting, killing and exploring all very much the order of the day.

Initially while the game does allow you to quest and level up relatively easy by yourself, something you fast come to realise about Vanguard is that it's very much a multiplayer game that takes the act of grouping with others very seriously. Solo gamers hoping to stand as much of a chance as those who group up may find themselves at odds with the number of quests that demand more than just one player's singular talents. The problem here is that some of the quests aren't easily identifiable as quests that require groups, something that can lead to some frustration as you blindly wander into them alone, only to come face to face with one of the game's most unforgiving features - corpse running.

Being developed by Sigil, a team comprising of some of those responsible for the first Everquest (which was the WoW of its day), Vanguard's corpse running system seems to hearken back to the bad old days when such mild things as dying ended up causing you more problems than whatever incident lead to your demise. Here death costs you. When you die you lose experience points, quite a hefty amount for that matter, while whatever items you may have had under your position that you haven't bound to yourself will be left at your corpse. Return and reclaim your body and you'll regain these items and a portion of the lost experience, however, this may require you to run through the very same enemies that originally killed you and have since respawned in greater number.

The alternative is to resurrect at an alter, an option that may be more convenient but gives you none of the lost experience and adds extra costs on top of whatever repair bills you may have. Whether an attempt to distinguish itself from World of Warcraft or a genuine belief that such a costly system was better, Sigil's approach to death is an archaic one that really could have done with taking a cue from Blizzard. It's okay to punish people for death, but don't kick them in the teeth for it! With such penalties in place, Vanguard limits the need for people to take risks and as a consequence those craving more of a challenge against higher level opposition or simply wishing to explore beyond the safety of towns and settlements are left with very little incentive to do so.

Another backwards step in design is the refusal by Sigil to implement instanced off dungeons. Instances, for those unaware, are quite an ingenious little feature that allow dungeons to load separately for each group who enters them, so there's none of the trouble of fighting over loot with several other groups all after the same thing. The lack of instances in Vanguard only highlights how tedious dungeon runs were back in the old days, where you had to sit and wait for bosses to spawn before your group could have another go at killing them. Although Sigil like to proclaim how the game has no barriers or zoned off areas, I'd have quite happily accepted sitting through a few minutes of loading screens if it meant preventing the tedium that instead ensues.

Not all of the features are throwbacks to the dark ages though; Vanguard does sport a few new things of its own that actually go a long way to raising its profile over a number of other MMORPGs. Take its crafting system for example - it's massive in the range of items it allows you to make and a little more involved than simply combining a couple of items together and clicking 'assemble'. There are multiple resources that need to be harvested, plus tools and other components that have to be gathered before you wade in. The actual task of crafting forces you to progressively build up items by spending points, which are limited and when depleted will immediately fail your production and force you to begin again. There are a number of other considerations to take into account too; spending more points on certain crafting methods can enhance the quality of a product but also runs the risk of damaging it, which will cost you additional points for repairs. As a viable method of trade, crafting doesn't just allow you to build items and objects you can sell to other players - there are also numerous crafting quests for you to complete that can grant you money rewards equal or even greater than that of standard quests, meaning that its quite possible for you to amass a fortune without needlessly grinding the same enemies over and over again. Add in later options to build even bigger and more impressive items that can range from player houses to controllable ships, and there's plenty enough reason to stick with crafting through to the end.

Another new feature is that of diplomacy; the act of engaging NPCs in conversations that can often unravel information vital to certain quests or provide a means to get you familiar with the lore of the game. Here diplomacy takes the form of a card game, your objective being to utilise a variety of different numbered cards each with different emotional responses and play them against your opponent with the goal of getting the score slider down to zero first. It's surprisingly quite challenging and a nice deviation from the other aspects of the game.

There are other nice touches too. The combat isn't a giant leap forward from what you're used to, but it does have a few nice tricks up its sleeve. It's far more reactionary than most systems, with some spells and abilities only becoming selectable once an enemy or ally triggers them; not only are such spells more devastating in their effect, but they only stay active for a very short period of time, meaning you have to be quick to make use of them. It's a nice feature that requires you be on your toes during combat, rather than simply hammering the same keys repeatedly.

The ability to gain mounts early on is also a nice plus point, coming across as almost a slap in the face of World of Warcraft, a game that seems to take great pleasure in forcing its player to wait before they can get a mount. Vanguard is more lenient, offering mounts as early as level 11, with progressively faster mounts becoming available later on. It's a particularly useful feature, as travelling through Telon on foot can be daunting, thanks in part to the colossal scale of the world. There are two massive continents separated by an ocean and numerous smaller islands in-between, all of it accessible and none of it zoned off for the sake of convenience. Sigil take every opportunity to show off their game world's grand scale, with vast mountain ranges and cities that really are the size of cities. Admittedly there are some areas bereft of anything interesting, but you don't have to wander far to discover something new, or something that may leave you in awe.

It looks great as well; adopting a more serious tone than WoW's cartoonish style, it certainly benefits from a lot more detail, but with such scale and detail comes the inevitable technical problems. Most notably the game can't really handle cities that well, with frame rates dropping below tolerable levels once you enter them. The outdoor areas fare only slightly better, with some noticeable slowdown and pop-up that's not quite as serious as it is in the built up areas, but still a little off putting.

It's nothing however compared with the bugs and glitches. Yes, it's an MMORPG and these games are notorious for being released buggy - it's unfortunately the nature of the genre - but although some are acceptable, others are game shattering. I've had the game crash a couple of times during load up and been unable to attack NPCs because the game decided it couldn't recognise them as an attackable target, yet didn't apply such thinking for my opponent who could still attack me - and even had one instance where I couldn't loot the items back from my corpse. There are many more besides - NPCs walking backwards, NPCs becoming invisible, creatures getting stuck in the environment and so on. There are times where you'll likely not notice some of the smaller glitches and there are occasions where you get the distinct impression you're forking out money for a Beta that should have spent an extra month in development to weed out the bugs that occasionally hamper your play. Anyone still unsure as to whether they should invest in Vanguard may want to consider waiting a few weeks until such problems have been dealt with.

Despite some bugs, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes still remains instantly accessible for those with some patience, and you will need a great deal of patience, because although WoW showed everyone how fun MMORPGs can be once you design them to be accessible to all, Vanguard is a game geared towards the hardcore players who crave more of a challenge. It isn't going to top Blizzard's behemoth, and neither will anyone leaving WoW in search of new adventure feel particularly comfortable in Vanguard's unforgiving world, but it is a deep and challenging, if somewhat backwards, online game that'll offer more than enough new thrills for the MMORPG traditionalists.

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