Age of Conan, Funcom’s second foray into massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs), promised to redefine the genre and change how we think about questing, combat, player-versus-player, and every other staple convention we take for granted. Sadly, we’re still waiting for that game.

Age of Conan’s main point of difference – and most successful achievement – is its adherence to Robert E Howard’s wonderful world of sword and sorcery. Unlike World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons, or Lord of the Rings, Howard’s Hyboria is full of dark sorcery, blood and gore, political betrayal, and sexual overtones.

No-one’s particularly good in Howard’s view – they’re just varying grades of evil – and from the moment you wash up on the beach at the city of Tortage, you’ll know you’re in a harsh, brutal world. The writing and art direction superbly capture Conan’s world, and the sumptuous visuals make the high system requirements worthwhile.

But sadly, many of Age of Conan’s promising qualities either haven’t eventuated, or are under-developed. The dialogue, for example, is well-written and flavoured, but the dialogue trees are simply long-winded ways to get to ‘accept’ or ‘decline’.

Furthermore, while the opening 20 levels in Tortage feature an excellent set of single-player quests, most of the quests are the usual kill 10 rats or pick 30 mushrooms, which is at odds with the attempt at the aforementioned immersive conversation. Combat, a genuinely new feature that allows you to target your opponents’ constantly changing weak spots, is perhaps its most interesting feature and eases the repetitive grind of killing the same enemies over and over.

Funcom seems ignorant of the importance of a flexible and functional user interface in an MMORPG. Icons come and go as they please, tooltips are absent or don’t provide enough information, and there are few in-game customisation options. Given that there are some excellent systems out there already – Eve Online and City of Heroes, for example – this is an almost unforgivable oversight.

Hard-core players will perhaps be the most disappointed with the current state of the game. Promising features such as player-built cities and extensive player-versus-player mechanics are lacking or just not particularly fun, and high-level end-game content is thin.

Funcom has said that fixing this is top of the to-do list, but we can only faith have that it will be implemented well. There’s a pervasive attitude that MMOs can’t really be reviewed, as they are constantly being refined.

However, Funcom has chosen to start taking money off players, which makes a review pertinent, particularly given the requisite time investment. As it stands now, while the game is promising and Funcom is patching like mad to correct the issues we’ve pointed out, it’s essentially a paid beta test. And with Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King about to hit, Funcom has its work cut out.