WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos

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 The Human's "elven archer" has been replaced by a gun toting Irishman.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
Let me get straight to the point......without the custom game included in multiplayer, this game would truly blow. The thought of creating your own mini game for everyone to play on battlenet gives you lots of options. There are so many different custom games you can choose from, that by the time you get sick of one, a new one is added to the list. These mini games range from hero arenas, (where you pick a character and go around killing everyone else), to tower defense (where you constantly build towers to defeat hordes of monsters running across a wide range area). This feature was also included in "Starcraft",also made by blizzard, but is clearly more addictive and entertaining.

The heroes for each race are a nice addition to the single and multiplayer.

This game's graphics are the best I've seen in 3rd person rpg's

The Bad
Don't be fooled by the regular gameplay offered in WC3. It personally scared me away from playing this game. It is by all means disappointing that you have such a reduced limit of units. To me the whole idea is that you have a large army to rape all of your enemies (not literally). By the time you build up your army It seems like you only have 5 piece of crap units that scratch their ass every time you tell them to do something. I dont know why blizzard ruined what was so fun in games like "Starcraft".

Overall, the single player is fun, but i still have some complaints. The story line is predictable and rather stupid (maybe I dont appreciate the story as much, because I have'nt played WC1 or WC2); the cinematics are detailed and realistic, but were a little boring to watch; and even though each mission is unique, it gets very repetitive and the game forces you to work with races that you might find boring.....cough, cough {humans}

Don't let the gameplay of this game distract you from the real fun

The Bottom Line
Dissatisfying to 3rd person rpg fans, but contains addictive multiplayer fun.

The Good
Since this is Blizzard's first 3D game, the graphics are not at all bad, but large battles can be slow sometimes. The heroes are definately a good addition to this game, since they can become quite powerful if you know how to play with them. The units are really balanced and unlike most other strategy games (such as C&C), the units of different races not only differ in colour, and names, but also looks and abilities, making each race have truly unique units. Not only are the units different, each race also has different abilities. For example, most of the Night Elves' buildings can move around and they can see better in the dark, while the undead can only build on blight (similar to the zerg creep in Starcraft). Excellent singleplayer gameplay and has the most incredible cut-scenes I have ever seen, even better than Diablo II's cut-scenes. As with most other Blizzard games, clicking on a single unit for a couple of times makes them say something funny, and since there are so many different units, you can listen to a lot of these comments. WC3 also features a great map editing application. With it, you can do just about everything, from creating your own heroes to the ability to detect key strokes from within the game. Also, now 12 players can be in the same battle for multiplayer, so you can have even more intense battles.

The Bad
This game is just too similar to Starcraft and probably not as good. Mobile buildings, the presence of blight, and how the Undead Ghouls look suspiciously like Zerg Zerglings all looks too much like Starcraft. In fact there are even Starcraft units hidden in the game! Another thing I dislike about this game is how strong the defense towers are. There are many people on the internet who doesn't do anything else but build towers, hundreds of them. Since the food limit is 90 now (so that your strategy now becomes a key to winning), you can only send a few units in to destroy the towers, but most units die without even reaching the towers while catapults could easily be taken down by aerial units within the mass of towers.

The Bottom Line
If you have not played Starcraft yet, buy that instead of Warcraft 3. However, if you are a fan of Blizzard's games or just strategy games in general, then you should buy this. If you figure out how to (and have the time to actually do it) make maps using the map editor, you could make complete different games with it (puzzle, RPG, etc).