Runes of Magic is a free to play fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) from Frogster Interactive, which is now in its third iteration, having been originally launched in 2009.

Most online games require some form of subscription; Runes of Magic does not, which makes it the ideal game for novices to dip their toe into the world of MMORPG. If you’re thinking that there is no such thing as a free meal, for once you would be wrong. Whilst it is true that, should you want, you can spend real money in the game's shops, you can also get the stuff free within the game - it just depends how impatient you are. Whack out the credit card for an instant upgrade or put a bit of work getting it.

Although the game comes with only two races, human and elf, there is the possibility to combine two classes, out of the eight, into your character allowing many more combinations. The cap level has also been increased to sixty.

For a game which is effectively free it holds many possible combinations, obviously there is the general quest, this time to help the young King Callaway to fight against the six different factions which are threatening to tear his realm apart. Add to this the hundreds of side quests and you have literally hundreds of hours of free play. The game contains in excess of two thousand four hundred possible quests.

Chapter Three adds a new kingdom, but this has been designed for more experienced players, but then by the time you have played through chapters one and two you should be ready to be transported after a quick chat with a dragon.

Playing a game like this is fun enough as a solo venture, you can even own a house, but gather some friends together and create a guild and you can have your very own castle, which comes with its own advantages - including siege warfare against another guild's castle. Sometimes you just don’t have a choice against some of the more impressive monsters except to call for help with some boss challenges allowing up to thirty six players to simultaneously attack.

If that all seems a bit complicated, as well as the individual quest the game supports player-versus-player mode for those times when you just feel like killing something without having to engage in any complex storyline.

Frogster, not happy to rest on its laurels, add regular updates -and I don’t just mean patches - which means the game is fairly limitless.

Graphically there is little to distinguish the game from many of its pay to play rivals and is pretty much what you would expect from a modern online game. Game play is fairly intuitive and once through the initial training missions you should be ready to lose sleep and time immersed in a new world.

Okay, so there will be a lot of people who compare this to World of Warcraft, and in some ways it is, but the game also has its own feel and, more importantly, it's completely free.

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Charles Packer