The Secret World is great. It's got a lot of traditional MMO elements, but has a plot with good voice acting that can draw you in. It's atmospheric and fun to play.

Recently dropped it's subscription, although you can still pay for added in-game bonuses. Staying without paying doesn't detract from playing though, so it's all good.

Buy it, play it, enjoy it.

An interesting world, and interesting quests. The character development is intricate, and allows you to play all roles without having to re-roll. My only gripes come from the game engine, its simple not the best one to be using for a mmo and results in some bugs and random lagg

Yes, there are a lot of them. The game starts in Maine, in HP Lovecraft's Maine because there is a strong undertone of evil magic at work, of horrors from the ocean and some of them you will have to contend with. The game later moves on to other areas – Egypt, Transylvania.

There are three secret societies in the game that you can join (have to join one actually, as you start your first toon) – The Illuminati, kind of the technologic Underground with a corporate feel to it, the Templars, with the “fight against evil demons” theme predominant and the Dragon, somewhat Eastern flavoured, kind of anarchistic and rather inscrutable as to what their real goals are.

The graphics of this game are gorgeous. Really, really well done. Alas, I've had problems with the DirectX 11 version of it crashing my video driver repeatedly, but the DirectX 9 version works just fine. My Geforce 570 video card sure gets a workout and all the fans in the computer start spinning up like crazy after a while as both GPU and CPU are heating up to near boiling point. The voice acting of some of the NPC characters is just .. Astonishing. Hysterically funny in some cases … I've heard a fellow player actually state that he peed himself laughing at the NPC characters video clips in the Innismouth Academy. However, that stuff is probably only funny to people who have actually been to a university. Regardless … Great stuff.

Gameplay .. Two aspects I'm going to comment on. There are some 500+ abilities in this game; as you advance in experience playing and solving quests you can acquire these, all and any of them. It's going to take you a while – the starter abilities cost 1 AP (ability point) but some of the higher level ones cost 50AP. Three realms each of magic, ranged combat and melee combat are separated in several sub-branches each. Finding abilities that supplement and reinforce each other is not easy for the raw beginner in this game. Starting up a search engine and looking for TSW decks (sets of abilities to choose and equip) will help here. That leads directly to the second aspect of gameplay – similar to Guildwars you only have a limited number of abilities equipped at any one time – 7 active and 7 passive abilities. You can equip two weapons simultaneously (no penalty, in fact you are seriously disadvantaged with only one) and the active abilities have to relate to these. You can change equipment and abilities at your leasure – except of course not in combat because that would get you killed really fast. However, this is kind of limiting, very very limiting if you're used to a game like Funcom's previous game Anarchy Online where you could have dozens of pertinent skills on your toolbars all at once. Surviving combat is often hard considering what's available to you by the time you enter a certain area. You need to team up – but I've found the TSW society for new players to be not very social, to be not overly helpful. So the game can get frustrating while you're starting out.