Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
|
RATINGS |
| GAMEPLAY: |
9 |
| GRAPHICS |
9
|
| AUDIO |
9
|
| VALUE |
10 |
| LEARNING CURVE |
7 |
| OVERALL |
9 |
The 3rd installment in Blizzard’s extremely
popular Warcraft series is set 13 years after the “Beyond the Dark Portal”
expansion pack. There have been lots of changes in the Warcraft world as you
will see in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos.
One of the most important of these changes is the addition
of 2 new races, the Undead Scourge and the Night Elves, along with classic Orcs
and Humans. . Each race is unique and is most
successful through particular types of strategy and tactics. Each race has
it’s own unique set of units and the units of one race no longer have an
identical counterpart on the opposite team as they did in earlier Warcraft games
and many other strategy games.
Unlike in previous Blizzard games, you can only have a
maximum of 90 units. This makes each unit more valuable and makes
micromanagement a lot more important for winning than in past Warcraft and
Starcraft games. Blizzard has also introduced “upkeep” to the world of
strategy games. Upkeep is like tax that you need to pay for having units. Unit
tax penalizes your economy after you make more than 40 units and even more after
70 units. Unit tax works by reducing the amount of gold you get trip. For
example, When you have less than 40 units, each trip your villager makes to the
mine gets you 10 gold. After 40 units, the villager still extracts 10 gold but
you only get to keep 7 of that. After 70 units, you only get 4 gold/trip.
The story in Warcraft III contains Blizzard’s
high-quality cinematics and many in-game cinematics. The story is a grim one of
revenge, betrayal and conquest and is told through 32 missions with 7-9 missions
per race. The first 2 missions of the campaign are tutorials and are meant to
introduce to movement, building and fighting. It also introduces you to the Hero
unit. A hero is a very strong unit that is connected with the story. A hero can
gain hit points and new spells as they grow in level. Heroes can also collect
items such as tomes and potions to gain attack and defence skills adding some
RPG to the game.
Warcraft III has pretty good multiplayer options. Warcraft
III supports up to 12 players at once. Warcraft III comes with free Battle.net
service and all you need to do is to log on and press the “Play Game” button
and the computer will hook you up with someone with similar win/loss stats. You
can also play easily with your friends. The game tracks when your friends are
online and weather they’re playing against someone else or chatting. Other
than the campaign, the game comes with more than 40 single scenarios so it has a
great replay value. The game also comes with a full editor that’s extremely
flexible and easier to use than any previous Blizzard editors.
Warcraft III has the same interface found in earlier
Blizzard titles which I found a bit disappointing. You’ll need to memorize
lots of hotkeys to be successful in any scenario. Many of the units also have
special abilities and though some units have an auto activating option, many of
them have to be individually started and that can create problem and confusion
on the battlefield. Also, you can only select 12 units at once and that can be a
problem while you’re attacking the enemy. I would like the interface a lot
more if you could select lots of units all at once (like in Age of Empires 2).
Other than the interface, I like everything else about
Warcraft. It’s a great game and can get you addicted no matter which genre you
like best. With a great a campaign, very good multiplayer options, and more than
40 single scenarios, it’s sure to keep you busy for quite a long time.
