Guild Wars: Eye of the North Critic Reviews

A solid add-on with a cliché-ish but consistent storyline for hardcore Guild Wars gamers. GW:EN will serve as a worthy ending to the original plot and act as a nice bridge to Guild Wars 2.

With its challenging dungeons and fun side-missions, Eye of the North comes just in time for those burnt out on Guild Wars' current PvP and PvE scene.

Although Prophecies players will benefit the most from playing the expansion, plenty of challenges await other gamers, including deep multilevel Dungeons providing near Master Quest level difficulties.

If you've been milling about in Pre Searing for months with that measly level 10 exploiting yourself as a gate monkey, may I suggest you level up and meet me in Far Shiverpeaks. It's a party over here of the highest caliber.

The game still is linear in the path you take through it, but GWEN is terrific fun. You will need to learn squad management skills a bit better, but you are driven to do so by the flow of the story. Great graphics, great sound, great adventure – GWEN is a first-rate expansion.

Certainly the Eye of the North ended far too quickly for my tastes, and even though I'm a casual PVPer, I would have liked to have seen more PVP content. But on the plus side the expansion did answer some long burning questions about what happened to key characters from the first chapter, as well as continues to offer extended fun in the form of dungeon crawls and mini-games.

At the heart of it all, just a damn fine, playable game, overblessed with the 'one more go' factor and a joyful sense of reward vs. effort put in.

In short, not bad for a game where you still can't jump. And you don't need to. So there.

Eye of the North is largely more of the same. In this case, that's a terrific thing.

To some gamers, there will be no there there. Guild Wars will be the Oakland of MMOs.

GWEN adds more of the same -- unlike Factions and Nightfall, which introduced new gameplay mechanics like the NPC heroes, the only new mechanic is the Hall of Monuments. And that doesn't even impact gameplay in any way.

Its PvE content that's designed to be played for hours on end doesn't provide as many rewards for dedicated play compared to other games of this type. The core gameplay, which remains unchanged for Eye of the North, is still a lot of fun.

Curious newcomers will want to sink their teeth into one of Guild Wars’ other three campaigns first, but if you’re looking to get a bit more out of the Guild Wars experience and want to prep yourself for its coming sequel, Eye of the North is a great interim solution.

It’s easy to pick apart the game, and in the end that may be a bit unfair – it certainly does what it sets out to do and that is to add solid additional PvE content to the Guild Wars world for already established players, and if that’s what you’re looking for, then Eye of the North fits the bill; just don’t look for it to reinvent the wheel.

Lacks the depth of previous standalone expansions.

Your enjoyment of Eye of the North will depend largely on your own personal desire to collect trinkets and doo-dads while following a reasonably interesting story.

Offering new items, skills and other general stuff for level 20 Guild Wars players certainly justifies the lessened price tag, but I'm not sure that the overall quality of the adventures here can really be said to make this one of the more interesting outings into the Guild Wars universe. They're just not interesting enough.

Many of the elements that would be considered shortcomings in another games' PvE content are exactly what Guild Wars's veteran player base enjoys. In this sense, Eye of the North is a success.

Eye of the North is mainly for those players who have exhausted Guild Wars' three chapters and just need more content.

It comes off as a hasty advertisement for Guild Wars 2.