Parents' Guide to World of Warcraft: The Battle for Azeroth

Clear your schedule, and get the snacks and comfy chair ready: You're gonna be here a while, even if you're going to go through some dark gameplay. No matter which side you take, there's a lot to do in World of Warcraft: The Battle for Azeroth, and once you get over the shock of the intro cutscene (no spoilers!), you'll find your work's cut out for you. If you're Horde, you start in Zandalar, ancestral home of the trolls; if you're Alliance, you start in the seafaring kingdom of Kul Tiras. Both are amazing places, full of mystifying voodoo magic and rollicking piratey fun (respectively) and both are a blast to explore. You're given a magical stone called The Heart of Azeroth and are told to power it up by completing missions. Why do you want to do this? Because the stronger it is, the better your new Azerite-powered gear becomes, and the more skills it grants you. Though not tremendously different from previous gear systems (socketing, artifacts, etc.), the Azerite system plays well into the expansion's overall narrative, and its skill-choosing interface makes unlocking new skills fun and satisfying.

Even more fun and satisfying are the story-rich quests. There's some real cleverness at work in the longer quests and in the weird random adventures you encounter just by exploring. Beyond that, the visuals of places like the seafaring city of Tiragarde Sound and the spooky ruins of Zuldar are awesome. Add to that some really beautiful musical themes and you've got an experience you'll want to wring every minute from. (Power levelers beware; speeding through every area means you're missing a lot of good stuff.) For players tough enough to brave new dungeons, the spooky halls of Waycrest Manor and the plague-ridden expanses of the Underrot (among others) offer spectacular scenery and cool new rewards. And though critics could argue World of Warcraft: The Battle for Azeroth's simple cartoony graphics and repetitive old-school "collect and kill" missions reveal the game's age, role-playing game lovers will find it holds its own with any other massively multiplayer online game, and proves Blizzard still has plenty of entertaining tricks up its sleeve.