WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos

The Good
WCIII goes a bit further into "roleplaying game" territory than any of its predecessors did. In Starcraft, you had "character" units, true, but they weren't much more than standard units colored differently, and with unique character portraits. Warcraft III goes hogwild, here, making Hero units VERY different from standard units, complete with colored patterned underlighting effects that make your heroes stand out no matter WHERE they are! In the single-player game, heroes play an important role in the plot; in multiplayer, they're basically very powerful, very expensive units. As if that wasn't enough, they've also added "creeps" -- random monsters that are neutral to all players, and wander around attacking or being attacked by you. Some have treasure and magic items that can improve your heroes... in a lot of ways, it felt a bit like Diablo Meets Warcraft... The scenery is fantastic. The look of the game has been enriched in every way.

The Bad
1. No ships? No oil? Nope. This element of the game was dropped completely.

1. Upkeep. Depending on the size of your force, you get "taxed" -- a medium sized army means each peon is docked three gold before he even gets it to the town hall, and with a major force, he's docked even more. What the heck was THIS all about?

2. Any player now has a maximum food outlay of 90. This puts a SHARP limit on how many troops you can have, and what type. This is, I suppose, something that's supposed to make you play smarter, instead of depending on "zerg swarms" and "tank rushes"... but, well, hell, I LIKED tank rushes...
   
   The Bottom Line
   If you're a diehard RTS gamer, in the Age Of Empires and Total Annihilation vein, you will hate this game. Don't buy it. If you're an adventure/RPG gamer, you won't like this game. Too much RTS in it. ...but if you're the kind of person who can appreciate a delicate mix of the two, it's really quite good...

The Good
This is by far the best completely 3D game I've ever played, and the first that actually takes full advantage of the 3D terrain. Revisiting the world of Warcraft in a completely 3D environment was a blast.

Warcraft III combines elements of classic RTS strategies and an RPG system to create a whole new experience with RTS', as they did with Warcraft and again with Starcraft. Way to go, Blizzard.

The single player campaign is really good, especially compared to the usual boring storylines that go along with RTS game that only serve as a length tutorial.

The Bad
The game COULD have been great, if it weren't for a number of flaws that seem completely unecessary. First, there's the upkeep. Everyone hates the upkeep. It's unbalanced and makes little sense.

The idea behind the upkeep is, once you reach 40 food consumption, for every ten gold you retrieve, four of it is lost. It's some sort of tax. And when you get to a higher number, you lose 60% of your gold to it! This makes a little bit of sense - the larger your armies, the greater you have to spend to keep'em happy, or something along those lines.

The second horrible thing is the food limit. Starcraft had a pop limit, which was disappointing to most people, but it was a high number; 200, so only rarely did you reach that in your battles. Warcraft III has an attrocious ninety food limit. NINETY. Very few take up one food, most take up two or three, many four, and if I remember correctly, some even five.

The bad, bad food limit combined with the upkeep leaves you with a small army that costs 60% of your income. Your must take this small army and charge the enemy, which, if you're lucky, will destroy some of its defenses, but if the enemy has half a brain, it's going to be able to out defend your pitiful army. So you must regroup and attack. Only problem is, that pitiful army took all your money. And then the enemy attacks. And you're screwed because you can't afford to do anything about it.

The game is very, very unbalanced this way. But, to be fair, you're expected to use your heroes to do most of the strategic fighting, and it usually works because of the spells they have. But it still makes for some unexciting small shortlived frustrating battles.

Another bad thing about the game is the differences between Warcraft II and III. Of course, Warcraft III is a huge step up in the genre, but it loses most of it's "Warcraft" feel. The Human's "elven archer" has been replaced by a gun toting Irishman. There are no ships (none that you can build, that is) and the oil resource has been removed completely. The Orcs no longer look humerously primitive, they look more like the Humans, only..."Orcish".

Warcraft III's story takes place after the unpublished game, Warcraft Adventures, and there is far too many refrerences to the game. If Blizzard hadn't been so proud, and released the game, Warcraft III would probably be much more enjoyable, and we would have another great Warcraft game to play.

There is also no spawn version to install, and the only multiplayer option is a network or battle.net.

The Bottom Line
The single player campaign is a lot of fun, but the mulitplayer is lacking and there are far too many annoyances to make this game worthwhile.

The Good
The story is really awesome and you can play it without having to play the earlier games first. Each campaign tells a different story and there is a lot of variety in the missions. Even to this date Warcraft 3 still has the best story in a RTS-game ever.

It has some pretty good voice-acting and animation. There is a nice balance between story in cutscenes and story in gameplay/dialog, but what amazed me the most was the voice acting. They got some really good actors for this because I believed every word they said.

The controls are just perfect for a strategy game on the PC. If you need to get some soldiers from A to B in a hurry, you don't have to go through a menu and wait for the soldiers to start moving, it is just two or three clicks and they are on their way.

The soundtrack is pretty damn sweet. The credits song actually got me to watch the whole thing. This is much better than just some black and white animation made in Windows Movie Maker!

The Bad
The first few missions of every campaign are boring and if you are like me and you need to delete games from your PC on a regular basis you will see those levels a lot.

The difficulty curve is rather annoying, some missions are incredibly easy, but the one after can be unbelievably hard. That got on my nerves quite a lot because you don't notice that until you are already thirty minutes in and about to die.

The fights are really small because you can only have like fifty units on the field and this includes your peons. Personally, I prefer my RTS fights to be a little more chaotic, but to the game's credit this does make for a more tactical approach.

The Bottom Line
This is one of the best RTS games out there and if you are a fan of the Warcraft games (especially the MMORPG) or strategy games in general you might want to check this out. People who are more interested in action and chaos will most likely get bored during the first few missions and find the later ones to be too difficult, so my advice to them is to stick with other games.

Do I like this game myself?, yes, yes I do, but only every once in two years when I completely forgot what the story was about.