Northrend feels like coming home – or at least as much as an ice-locked land of constant war governed by a genocidal undead megalomaniac can feel homey. While the last WoW expansion, The Burning Crusade, was a jolly old romp through strange new lands, it was a detour from Warcraft's usual world – a long holiday to another planet. Lich King's new continent, so far, has been much more familiar fantasy.

On paper, snowy desolation and yet more towering forests doesn't sound anywhere near as much fun as the floating asteroids and mushroom trees that prettified the skyline of The Burning Crusade's Outland. In practice though, Northrend is a blank template that seems to have forced WoW's designers to try harder. When the backdrop isn't as spectacular, the details need to be sharper. Even in just the space of the first of Lich King's ten new player levels, there's been a lot of detail. Something as simple as a burning stretch of woodland turns out to be as mesmerising as purple space-rock, a towering elevator climbing a sheer cliff face as epic a sight as crystalline forest. So far, it's been a far better chunk o'WoW for exploring – its zones a bit less linear, and feeling more crafted than generated.

There has, though, been a lot of muttering amongst players that reaching Northrend lacks the sense of event getting to Outland involved. The latter had you leaping bravely through an enormous magic portal, on the other side of which was an ever-raging battle involving the biggest beasties the game had to offer. This time, it's a long boat-ride, fetching up a tranquil harbour. There's no instant pop of adrenaline and spectacle, but there is a real, thrilling sense of voyage, and that you've arrived somewhere you can explore rather than simply being presented with a ready-made set-piece.

While it's quickly apparent from watching server chat that Lich King will ultimately fall into the same raiding and statistic-centric rhythms as the first two chunks of WoW, its early levels definitely seem like an attempt to restore the role-playing element that's lately felt a little lacking. The vast bulk of the quests remain, unsurprisingly and faintly depressingly, the same old collect/kill x of x fare that's WoW's always been built upon, but what it tries very hard to do is place such grinds into interesting circumstances. One of the first quests, if you fetch up in Howling Fjord rather than the other, busier starting zone of Borean Tundra, is to kill 10 giant barbarians. Great. Was it really worth coming all this way? Only when you get to the barbarians, they're actually an infinite army forever charging the gates of the coastal fortress you're in and not just a bunch of blokes standing around in a field. The mechanisms are the same as always, but the context is so much livelier.

So far, the balance of standard, grindy quests to high-concept ones is about 50-50. Every quest chain that starts off miserably dull seems to ultimately evolve into something silly or epic – whether it's mind-controlling a hawk, dressing up as a rocket-jumping robot scarecrow, creeping through an army of ghost giants or triumphantly riding home atop an enormous, flaming harpoon. WoW's basic structure doesn't allow for that many types of interaction with the world, but Blizzard seems to have sussed that canny scripting and art design can mask its limitations. A few custom graphics and animation means a quest is no longer something you just do for the experience points, but something you excitedly tell your guildmates about. Lately, WoW seemed stuck on an inevitable spiral towards hardcore raiding and PvP – which certainly appeals to the loudest and most obsessed portion of its playerbase, but leaves anyone who was there for the simple pleasure of adventuring absolutely cold. Whether it can keep its reawakened passion for solo and small group-friendly hi-jinks going for ten levels remains to be seen, but levels 70-72 have certainly harkened back to WoW's more laid-back, eager to entertain early days.

The dungeons, so far, have been a lot less interesting. The Nexus and Utegard Keep, both open to level 70 players from the off, are at least short, eminently do-able in under an hour. They're not especially exciting though, both being straight runs of elite mobs and area of effect-heavy bosses rather than holding any surprises. The dreary Keep's hugely reminiscent of The Burning Crusade's first Instance, Hellfire Ramparts, which creates an uncomfortable atmosphere of nothing having really changed. While it's tight and slick compared to the labyrinthine rambles of some earlier dungeons, it still comes off as deeply mediocre against the inventive joys of Northrend's great outdoors.

The Nexus is much more visually interesting, a sort of frosty dreamland inhabited by ethereal versions of familiar WoW beasties. It culminates (or kicks off, depending on how you choose to run it) with a dragon fight , but there's a lot wending your way up long staircases and through small corridors en route. The best may well be yet to come, these being re-introductory affairs for rusty players as much as new challenges for old hands, but so far the Dungeons have been perfunctory point 'n' loot grabs rather than real adventures.

The loot, perhaps the element WoW's enormous, baying hordes are most interested in Lich King for, is certainly there at least. Anyone who shied away from The Burning Crusade's endgame raids or PvP will quickly find themselves clad in equipment laden with buffs beyond their wildest statistical dreams. Unlike TBC though, folk bearing high-tier gear haven't had their hard-earned impossi-armour immediately invalidated by some ugly crap that fell out of the nearest Worg. Again, it's that that feeling that Lich King feels like a natural continuance of WoW to date, whereas TBC was something of a jarring, immediate shift.

That's just the first couple of levels, the first couple of zones – the road to level 80 could be packed with similarly goofy/spectacular suprises, or it could fall into the rinse and repeat limbo-state that WoW's historically so prone to. There's one other ace up Lich King's sleeve, of course – the much-anticipated new Death Knight class. We'll have a chat about this gothy Darth Vader character in the next review diary.

Features

Master the necromantic powers of the Death Knight - World of Warcraft's first Hero class.
Quest to level 80, gaining potent new abilities and talents along the way.
Learn the craft of spell augmentation with the new Inscription profession.
Brave the harsh new continent of Northrend, the icy domain of the Lich King.
Engage in epic siege warfare, deploying mighty siege engines to lay waste to destructible buildings in your path.
Transform your hero's look with new character-customization options, including new hairstyles and dances.
Explore perilous new dungeons filled with some of the deadliest creatures -- and greatest treasures -- on Azeroth.
And much, much more...

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