WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

The Good
I'm not the first person to write a review for this game, other reviewers have pointed out the quality of the music, interface & graphics and I agree with them. Even today the cartoonish graphics are a joy to watch; notice the Christmas lights on Orc buildings during winter missions. Also, compare a Grunt from Warcraft II with a rifle infantry soldier from Red Alert (which appeared one year after Warcraft II) and you'll realize how well Warcraft's graphics have aged. Moreover the voices of the units (especially the Orcs) are great, Zog Zog & Swobuh!

Warcraft keeps things basic; there are only three types of resources and a limited number of units, but you'll really know their different strengths and weaknesses. No unit will ever become obsolete or replaced by another unit. Units do get upgraded. The units are balanced, there is no super unit with which you can easily win a mission. Footmen can easily destroy a Catapult, Catapults take out Guard Towers, Guard Towers are a great defense against Dragons and Dragons kill Footmen. So your army will need to consist of almost all available units in order to win. By the way some of the units have great magical spells like raise dead and the spell that turns an enemy soldier into a sheep or pig.

And oh yeah, the mission editor is easy to use (but why did it require Win 3.1 when the game ran in DOS).

The Bad

• Both sides are almost identical, so once you've completed the Orc campaign, the human campaign isn't that much fun to play (playing with the Orcs is more fun anyway).
• Units do not always respond to your commands and there are some pathfinding problems. Especially getting your naval units somewhere involves a lot of mouse-clicking.
• In the campaigns, your computer opponents always seems to start with a lot of gold and a well fortified base. In the final missions this enables the computer to send wave after wave of dragons / gryphons when your just getting started, frustrating.
• Mouse scrolling goes to fast.
• Bad A.I. An easy way to win the game is to wait until your computer opponent has mined all the gold from the mines near his base. It then keeps sending unprotected peony (easy kills) to mines near your base until it runs out of gold. Also your units perform a lot better on the battlefield when you control manually.

**The Bottom Line**
An RTS game from the dawn of the genre that's still fun the play despite the approximately 3.5 million RTS games released after it. Really addictive. Although I've often told myself "I've had it up to here with this game", I always enjoyed playing it when I came back to it after a couple of weeks.

The Good
I remember playing the Command and Conquer demo and thinking what a bother it was. Shortly afterwards I tried the Warcraft 2 demo and was pleasantly surprised at how much different it was (in a good way.) The SVGA graphics were fantastic and very smooth. The interface was great, especially for its time. The buildings and units were instantly identifiable. However, it wasn't until I got a hold of the full version that everything came together into one incredible gaming experience.

I think my favorite part about the game was that it did not try to overcomplicate matters like later RTSs. There were relatively few units and buildings, but you knew just how they were supposed to be used. And is there really a need for balancing 15 different resources? The comic responces of annoyed units did not hurt matters either.

The Bad
The AI wasn't all that great. It was extremely common to see enemy peons/pesants making unescorted beelines to your fortified mines once their resources ran out. It was also very easy to lead the AI's units into ambushes. The computer was pretty good at doing humanly impossible things like having 10 wizards start shooting fireballs simultaneously though.

Some people might not like the cartoonish graphics, but I didn't mind at all.

The Bottom Line
The game that did for the RTS genre what Doom did for first-person shooters. If you consider yourself any kind of an RTS gamer, you have no excuse for not having this masterpiece in your collection.

The Good
Warcraft 2, along with Command & Conquer and This Means War, was part of the second wave of RTS games to assault PC gamers senses. The graphics are quite cartoony, and nicely detailed, without ever looking brilliant. Each character has a nice little face picture on the side panel, where you can issue commands like move, attack and unit specific commands like cast spell or harvest timber. The storyline is quite nice, involving the humans running from their home nation after the story in Warcraft 1, and sailing across the seas. Unfortunately for them, the Orcs follow. War ensues, and it is your job to pick one of the sides and try to win. The action is all in real time, with resource gathering, structure and unit building and attacking all needing to be taken care of. The units are a wide range, with most having melee weapons only, but the magicians and axe throwers/archers having range attacks. There are also a few token air units for each side which don't do a hell of a lot, and some sea units which help make the game more varied. While the two sides have different units, they are all fairly equal, like the axe thrower vs. the archer, or the ogre vs. the knight.

The Bad
In terms of gameplay, Warcraft 2 is a little flatter than Command & Conquer, while still being good. Whereas in C&C the strategies seem to be quite varied, in Warcraft 2 it is mostly a case of learning how the computer acts which can be done within the first 5 or so missions, and then repeating the same strategy to counter it. All in all, the game is definately worth getting, but if you can get C&C instead you'll probably find yourself playing that more.

The Bottom Line
Warcraft 2 is one of the most influential RTS titles of all time and has won numerous awards. The learning curve is excellent, but the slightly dodgy AI can put more experienced gamers off.