Age of Conan - Preview @ Games Radar

Conan uses a different approach, assigning attacks to the five keys surrounding your WASD movement controls. There's no targeting, instead you aim, launch an attack and, well, hit what you hit. Initially - as we discovered before  - this feels messy and a little chaotic. Further muddying the waters is the fact that, in MMOs, there's just not enough bandwidth between your PC and the server running the show to allow for full animation. So 'hits' aren't necessarily animated blow by blow, and you could be battering a still-standing foe who's already been offed by a previous attack, but just hasn't run through its 'dying' animation yet.

It's easy to forget, though, that until now even Age of Conan's level of "interactive combat" in an MMO has been impossible. As a test of concept, Conan's system really works. There's likely to be further games that take on and develop the approach, and probably do it better - like developer Funcom's own Secret World MMO, or, as the GamesRadar team feverishly hopes, Blizzard's inevitable Diablo III. But what we've got here already is a game that's bravely standing out from the crowd and achieving something exciting and new.