I downloaded the Age of Conan free trial a while back and played a character through level 18 (which doesn’t take very long). This is a game I’ve always wanted to try, but never got around to it until now.

What's good about it:

• You start out in an instance, so there are no annoying noob vultures hovering around at the starting area.
• Adventuring "at night." These are essentially solo quest instances for solo adventuring. Awesome!
• Melee combat is kind of fun - you can adapt your swings to your opponent's defenses to do more damage. It's a little more interactive than your typical auto-swing combat system.
• The quests seem a little more "deep" than WoW or WAR, which could just be my imagination. Still, you don't really need to read or listen to the quest text.
• Nobody is playing it, so there is little competition for quest resources.

What's bad about it:

• The loading time when you start up the game is horrible. You have to wait for it to verify the game files EVERY TIME you launch it. Yuck.
• All the different character classes have the exact same starting point, which makes it tortuously repetitive to try different alt characters. (This might be a limitation imposed by the free trial.)
• It's basically the same as any other MMO. Ie., Same gameplay, just different intellectual property.
• It's basically the same as any other MMO. Ie., It's a huge time sink because it takes forever to run places and kill things, etc. Success in this game is still directly tied to the amount of time you can play.
• Nobody is playing it. :) FunCom could give up and shut down the servers at any moment.
• UPDATE:  I forgot to mention that every second or third time I run it, it wants to verify the resource database which is a process that takes a good 5 minutes.  You really need to just leave this game running on a dedicated computer.

Beware that it takes forever to download the trial… somewhere around 8GB of data is required to play.  It took me about 3 days to get the thing up and running.

UPDATE:  The trial is designed to run out of content around level 20, just so you know.  At that point you’ll need to upgrade unless you want to wander around Tortage Island with nothing to do.