The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar - updated hands-on

There's a real sense of wonderment to some of the environments you see. The Iron Hills (the starting area for dwarves and elves) are a bit like Dun Morogh, gigantic rolling hills of snow and ice but with a very stone-borne feel to them. Unlike WOW, Turbine has gone for a somewhat realistic feeling (as realistic as you can get with dwarves and elves), thus everything has a very immediate "Wow!" factor to it - and not the Blizzard-made one, either.

Instead of easing you in with wolf-killing and kobold problems, Angmar forces you into a sense of being part of something really epic. Quests lead you over hill and over dale, ranging from simple goblin bashing to eventually chasing down a dwarf-betrayer. The game pulls you in by making every quest have a meaning - an actual reason for it being there, as opposed to the random nature of WOW quests.

As Turbine man Jeff Anderson indicates: "We want to make sure that the game is a terrific Tolkien experience... We want to put people in critical moments in time."

Kicking off with a bang, a newbie character begins by joining Gimli in a mine in Thorin's Halls, murdering cave monsters and trying to stop an old dwarf from wasting his time cracking open a wall. All this, only to see it shatter in front of him, and watch in horror as a bloody great troll sends him tumbling across the floor, dead. As your life flashes before your eyes, big-and-beardy Gandalf jumps in to save the day, cracking a hole in the top of the cave and turning the bastard to stone.

Actual levelling is done in much the same style of WOW, with the usual state of killing things and doing quests rewarding you with experience. Predominantly, quests require you to get to a certain goal, for example, making it to the end of an dungeon alive to view Angmar 's equivalent of a cut-scene - usually a chunk of storyline unfolding in front of you. To mix things up, Turbine has given players something a little different, using Xbox 360-ish achievements to keep you playing. As a champion for example, you can get stat upgrades by using certain attacks more.