Blizzard Does It Again!
Written: Jul 21 '03 (Updated Jul 21 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Nice graphics, intriguing story.
Cons: Performance suffers in favor of details you won't notice.
The Bottom Line: An excellent RTS with very few flaws. Buy it. Now.
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| the_ranger's Full Review: WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos |
REVIEWER'S NOTE: You might want to go grab a beer or something, because this is not a short review.
Blizzard: to gamers, the very name stirs up thoughts of quality games with unusually nice cinematics.
With smash hit after smash hit, Blizzard has truly made a name for itself since the release of their first game, WarCraft. WarCraft pitted the noble Human race against that of the evil Orcs, a savage people from another plane of existence who came to the Human land of Azeroth through a magical portal. In this Real-Time-Strategy game, players chose one of the two races to play as, and in each mission would construct a base, build units, research new weapons and magic, and assault the enemy town.
WarCraft was THE definitive Real-Time-Strategy game until the release of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness, a game that blew the first away. New SVGA graphics and CD audio brought the battle of Orcs and Humans to a new level, along with the Elves, Trolls and other races brought into play as the struggle escalated. Still, though, there were only two sides to play: the Alliance of Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and other races, or the Horde of Orcs, Trolls, Ogres and other scum.
Blizzard made other games, including StarCraft, the semi-sequel to WarCraft II. It had even better graphics and gameplay, and introduced play with three races instead of two. Still, the game was limited to a set of 2D sprites and landscapes.
But now, Blizzard has upped the ante with a new game: WarCraft III. WarCraft III features no less than four playable races, and perhaps more importantly, has introduced true three-dimensionality to the series.
At the end of WarCraft II, the victorious Human Alliance drove the evil Horde back through the portal to their own world, and subsequently destroyed the portal after an attack of their own through it (in the expansion pack "Beyond the Dark Portal").
The surviving Orcs in Azeroth have been rounded up and placed in what basically amount to concentration camps. Things look just fine for the battle-weary men of the Alliance armies, and it seems like things might just be working out.
Fate, though, has other plans.
A single Orc chieftain has somehow managed to organize the surviving Orcs. Not only that, but he has managed to haul their green butts across the Great Sea, and hundreds of miles of ocean away from Azeroth, they have landed on the coast of the land of the Night Elves.
The Humans might be inclined to pursue them, except that they suddenly encounter difficulties of their own: a mysterious Undead race has started scrambling out of graveyards and rising from battlefields. All manner of rotting corpses and grinning skeletal warriors are assaulting the armies of the Alliance, and it seems that they are just the messengers of a far greater evil that's coming with intent to stay: the Demons of Chaos.
Hence the name, "WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos".
The game features four independent campaigns, in this order: Human, Undead, Orc, and Night Elf. Nothing forces the player to play through them in this order, but the story unfolds in chronological order this way. Unless you're a massive Pulp Fiction fan, you don't want to view a climactic ending and then play the beginning next.
The Human army has a good mix of strength and magic. It has foot soldiers in armor with swords, knights in shining armor, and dwarves with muskets, among other units.
The Undead are a very different and interesting race to play as. They actually use the corpses of enemies as a resource to drive their war machine.
The Orcs are similar to the Humans, except that their army relies more on brute force than magic and ranged attacks.
The Night Elves are more or less the opposite of the Orcs: physically weak, but sneaky, with lots of long-range combat ability.
As stated above, the biggest change in this game from the previous WarCraft games is the 3D gameplay. The world is fully three-dimensional, and all units and structures are rendered in three dimensions. While this looks very nice, it's also a massive drag on system resources, and even a Pentium 4 with 512 megabytes of RAM will deliver poor framerates when the fur really starts flying.
And start flying it will indeed: in addition to great-looking 3D units, the game features spells that flash, blood that squirts, and explosions that will rock your speakers. A good battle in this game may just remind you of the epic battles in the new Lord of the Rings movies, though on a significantly smaller scale. While the clanging of swords on armor, the shouts of orders, and the screaming of the wounded may be familiar, WarCraft differs from both the LotR movies and from the previous games in the series in that the numbers of units in-play are much smaller.
This was a necessary change to accomodate the improvements in graphic quality. While the game looks great, a lot of the detail is virtually invisible except during cutscenes in which the camera zooms in very close to the characters in play. Most of the time, the view is too high to see the small details, and it is unfortunate that the framerates (and numbers of units) had to suffer so much to allow these almost useless details.
Still, if you've got a decent machine (ignore the requirements on the box, you need a minimum of 1GHz to enjoy this puppy properly) you won't have too much trouble during the single-player campaigns. The multiplayer gaming is where everything short of the NASA supercomputer will begin to choke, but I'll get back to multiplayer later.
Sound is up to Blizzard's usual high standard. As in previous games, the mission briefings have high-quality (if a bit overacted) voice recordings to tell you why you're kicking butt in a particular location, and why X group of people needs their collective butt kicked in the first place. The battle sounds are great, and the 3D support is a nice touch: if you move the overhead camera away from the battle, you can hear what direction it's in, relative to your viewpoint.
The units also respond to your clicking with, "Yes, m'lord?", "What?", etc., and also will begin to say amusing things if you click on them over and over. Eventually, of course, they'll start to loop, but the number of responses for each unit is impressive. They each also have serparate affirmative responses to such commands as "Attack that unit" or "Go over there" or other orders you might choose to give. In many RTS games, your units give the same set of responses regardless of whether the order is "Kill him" or "Go mine that resource". In WarCraft III, a unit order to patrol an area might say, "Right away, sir!" whereas the same unit ordered to attack might say, "Advance! Kill 'em all!" It's a nice touch.
The interface is completely mouse driven. It is probably possible to finish this game without ever touching your keyboard, though the keyboard shortcuts do make certain things a lot more convenient. Rather than clicking on a unit you want to use, clicking on "Move", and then clicking where you want it to go, you can click on the unit, hit the M key, and then click where you want it to go. This really saves time during combat. Also, by selecting a group of units and pressing Control-1, or any numerical key, you can instantly select that group again by hitting the corresponding numerical key. Again, this makes things more convenient when dealing with squads of soldiers. As far as I know, there is no joystick support.
The multiplayer is not as good as that of many other games. The pleasure of WarCraft III truly lies in its singeplayer campaigns, which is unfortunate, because that means that it will be forgotten much sooner than, say, StarCraft, a game still being purchased and played widely five years after its release. The massive overflow of units in big multiplayer battles causes even the most powerful of home PCs to drag down to single-digit framerates. Also, there does not seem to be nearly as much user-made content available for WarCraft III. The most likely reason for this is that the map/mission editor included with WarCraft III is not nearly as user-friendly as that included with previous games in the series. Multiplayer also seems to get fairly repetitive after a while, as it lacks the interesting objective-based missions of singleplayer play and usually is just "Wipe out the other town and don't let yours get wiped out".
Despite the performance issues and the multiplayer flaws, WarCraft III is still an incredibly fun game that lives up to the hype and is a good addition to the series. I heartily recommend it to every RTS fan.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
the_ranger
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Reviews written: 25
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
The Ranger is a Canadian writer currently working as a deli clerk. Ouch.
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