Recently, my social life has been eaten up with the fantastic Guild Wars. I've been afraid of online (or more specifically, MMO-style) games for two main reasons: the first is the monthly subscription fee, and the second is how much I'd feel I'd have to play it once I was forking out a tenner month on a game I'd already paid £30 for.

Guild Wars is free. Or as close as dammit: I picked up a copy of the game from Play.com for a measly £17, and it comes with no subscription fee whatsoever. And for this much content and gameplay, thats the cheapest game I've ever seen.

I've started the game through a second time after realising that I couldn't redo the parts of the tutorial I'd missed the first time round. I foolishly thought the tutorial map was the game. Cue jaw dropping to the floor when I first saw the world map proper... Anyway, this time round I'm playing with a Fire Elementalist/Necromancer, which is proving rather successful. I can drain or curse enemies, then rain lava down from the heavens; battering and singing them senseless. Awesome.

Thc combination of a primary and secondary profession (or rather, the direct consequence of your choice for these) and the existence of loads of skills for each profession means there is a massive number of combinations, styles and combos your characters can use when kicking some wandering monster ass.

Thats him, over to the right there. Shame he's got the campest dance moves to grace your screen since the LucasArts intro to the Rogue Leader games...

There's a GameSpot Live video review knocking around the net somewhere which pretty much gets it spot on. Technically, its brilliant. No crashes, bugs or glitches as of yet, although I did have to sit through a Healer henchman failing to damage an opponent and healing herself continually whilst getting hit, resulting in a rather boring stalemate after my character had carked it. Updates stream down either before or even during game play too, and we're assured that additional content is going to made available soon, and will still be free.

Guild Wars: thank you ArenaNet/NCSoft.

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