From 1UP: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Reviews

A war story: While waiting around in the Blackbramble Hollow war camp for a player-versus-player scenario (structured instances where teams compete over an objective) to queue up, my party and I received a message: "The lord of Mandred’s Hold is under attack!" Typically, this autonotification just means that an ignorant enemy player wandered too close to the keep’s A.I. defenders -- a fly in the zapper, to swipe my friend’s apt analogy. With nothing urgent to take care of and the keep only a few seconds to the south, my crew and I decided to do a little police action of the area and scrape up any remaining assailants.

Unfortunately for us, the lone fly turned out to be a hornet’s nest. A full Destruction war party had organized and decided to wrest the keep (and the valuable trainers and merchants within) from Order’s control. We ran back to camp to rally supporters and purchase some equalizers: cannons and oil cauldrons to fend off the surging puddle of red names. For a while, it worked. Our Hellblazer cannons, positioned on predetermined emplacement points on the keep walls, scattered their healers and casters while the oil finished off anyone foolish enough to approach the keep door. But the enemy quickly regrouped and slapped down some of their own siege engines, which demolished our relatively unsupported war machine. With our weapons crumbled and the keep door buckling, we started planning our tactical withdrawal...until a full Order war band charged around the side of the keep, split the enemy force in half, and caused a rout on par with something straight out of the Total War series.

This is the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning experience that developer Mythic promised with its "war is everywhere" slogan. Choke points and bodychecking dominate these hotkey-smashing brawls thanks to collision detection and the proliferation of movement-controlling spellwork. Battles in WAR are not only highly entertaining but also enriching; PVP nets you more experience, money, and gear than any other activity in the game. And that’s a good thing: The other methods of acquisition are nowhere near as fun.
 
Addicts unwilling to admit that WAR apes that MMO should at least concede that it mimics those MMOs -- as in, most every one post-EverQuest. It presents very little groundbreaking material, to the extent that it sometimes feels like Mythic included features solely to satisfy the requirements of some MMO litmus test. Crafting, that consistently unfulfilling timesink, is predictably worthless. Quest objectives could have been lifted from a parody of an MMO design document and at times seem to exist for the sake of existing. Character builds -- no matter how unique WAR’s mastery trees may make them seem -- will be manipulated, calculated, and disseminated by mathemagician "theorycrafters" within a few weeks thanks to the prevailing view that MMOs ought to rely on calculus over creativity.

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