First of all, just for form's sake, I'm running OS X 10.5.7 on a machine with a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 gigs of RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT. WAR is set to run 1344x840 windowed, "Fastest Framerate" -- I opted for best performance, not knowing ahead of time what the optimal settings might be. I imagine that my experience is probably the most common.

Where to begin? Well, the controls are the typical WASD/mouse scheme, no surprises there. Yes, your special attacks are accessible via an action bar or mapped to number keys. Your health and mana bar are where you'd expect them to be, as is the mini map and chat window. The only noticeable difference is where the experience bar is located; across the top of the screen, rather than the bottom. This is kind of a weird place for it to be, given that everything else is standard.

What about actual gameplay? You find the person with a quest, and you return to them to complete the quest. Only this time there isn't an exclamation point above their head; it's a book. When accepting the quest, the book changes color, and it disappears when you've completed the quest. The only thing that's different about it, and it's something that bothered me a lot, is in the layout of the quest text.

There is very little difference between the lore text and the summary text, and both are ugly, as is the window graphic. It's just as easy to skip right past the lore and go straight to what the game requires of you as it is with WoW, but I had even less interest in what the characters were saying than I do with WoW. There is an overall blandness to WAR that sits in direct opposition to the way the game is marketed.

This is at the heart of my dissatisfaction with Warhammer Online. For all that it boasts an epic battle between Order and Chaos, almost nothing of that comes through. You still start out at the bottom of the heap, a lowly footsoldier in this neverending conflict -- and that's a problem too, when you think about it -- and your abilities don't seem any more or less powerful than anything in any other MMO. Maybe players who are well familiar with the WAR universe might find something here to be excited about, but to an outsider like me, accustomed to the vibrancy and humor of World of Warcraft, it can't help but suffer by comparison.