Beautiful...
It's funny, because I could write an entire review on this game without talking about gameplay, graphics, audio, story, or any of that stuff. Because really, what is the gameplay? Well, it's pretty fun, especially when you get into groups of 5, or even larger groups of up to 40 if you want to raid an opposing faction's towns, but in the end, it isn't the gameplay that keeps you playing. It's something more, something that can't really be described in words. It's the people. It's the lush and seemingly endless environments to explore. It's the free updates from Blizzard that add hundreds of hours of new content every couple of months.
The game is basically designed to let you play as long as you want. Hey, that new Final Fantasy comes out, well chances are if you play it 10 hours a day you'll beat it in a week. Hey look, a new Grand Theft Auto, a new Mario, a new Zelda... but then after a few weeks, they're done, and you move on to another game because it's just rare for most console games to last for a hundred of more hours. But with WoW, you can play 50 hours a week, and still be playing it a year or two later. There's no limit to the amount of time you can play. Get bored with one character, well just hop onto another character. Log in at any time of the day and there will literally be tens of thousands of others logged on at the same time.
This review is very strange - it's not divided up into categories, with me talking about the gameplay, and then moving on to the graphics, and then the story, but really it's because these things are irrelevant to the WoW experience. The game is simply designed to keep you having fun for a long time. So should you buy WoW, well that really depends on how much time you have. If you're always pressed for time, lucky to get even an hour or two in on the latest Zelda even though it just released that day, chances are WoW won't be the right game for you. But if you notice yourself with alot of free time, playing games or watching TV or whatever, but are looking for some longterm commitment that you can really sink your teeth into, well I think WoW could be what you're looking for. It'll take a while to meet the right group of people and find where you fit in, heck my first year with the game I think I averaged about 50 minutes a day, but once you find the right group of people and the right stuff that you like to do, you'll find yourself logging in for hours just to chat or kill stuff or to just plain have fun.
Anyways, whether or not you should play WoW depends alot on your lifestyle, but just known that it's a very deep game that's got a ton of meat on its bones. I myself have put over 2,000 hours into the game over the past 2 and a half years, and I cherish every moment of it.
Great fun.