War Writ Wrong
Written: Feb 12 '04 (Updated Feb 13 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great graphics, Neat gameplay ideas
Cons: Poor AI, terrible execution, boring cinematics
The Bottom Line: Despite some great ideas, the play is frustrating enough to make it not worth the effort unless you are strictly looking for online multiplayer action
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| Pyanfar's Full Review: WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos |
WarCraft III does a great deal to advance both the concept of Real-Time Strategy ("RTS") games and the WarCraft series of games. Unfortunately, the structure of the game does not encourage you to do more than build, upgrade, and conquer, taking the "S" out of "RTS".
First, the good points:
Graphics
The graphics in this game are gorgeous. You want to reach out and touch the little people and monsters, and sometimes it's fun just to watch the waterfalls animate. The color palette is less realistic and more vivid, with comic-book bright hues. And the animatics (animated cinematic sequences that play like a movie) match the beauty of Diablo II, with even better animation. In the graphics department, Blizzard have outdone themselves. When you're not having to take care of business at your base, it's actually fun to zoom in on the action.
Sounds are not particularly important: they're there, they're kind of positionally placed, but after a while they get old--you'll hear the same "bash" sound a lot. One fun thing, though: click on every character, again and again, and you'll start getting some pretty funny phrases out of them, including one rifleman who riffs on Sean Connery from The Untouchables.
Concepts
The gameplay formula seems to be a winning one: half strategy, half roleplaying, this takes a typical Blizzard RTS game like StarCraft or WarCraft and turns it on its ear by giving you characters that not only interact through the various chapters' cinematics, but whom you get to control. Taking a page from Age of Mythology (Microsoft), your people are led by a main "Hero" character, who in turn is aided by some supplemental characters that come and go and flesh out the between-level storylines.
Roleplaying the Hero
Just like Blizzard's Diablo series of Role-Playing Games ("RPGs"), your heroes have health and mana, and can carry a limited number of items that can heal, restore their mana, or grant them extra abilities. Neat! Now you have one character who can customize his skills, rally the troops, and help you feel more directly immersed in the game, instead of just playing a faceless god hovering over the world map. The hero casts spells: healing units, gaining power, or causing horrible magical disasters to enemy units on the battlefield. Each of these skills can level up as your hero progresses through the game. And if he dies, your hero will be resurrected after a time - no having to reload just because you had a turn of bad luck.
New Blood
The final good point is that the new races of characters are interesting. You have Undead and "Night Elves" (think "gothic Elrond-people", those of you not familiar with the Drow elves in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons). WarCraft's storyline is shaped so that you will work your way through both of these races, getting a chance to try your hand on all sides of the battlefield before your game is done.
Then, the bad points:
Smarts versus Cheating
Now for the problem: the game mechanics. While the point-and-click interface works well and it's easy to issue commands quickly using mouse and keyboard, the missions I've played don't seem to show any true A.I. Enemies just hurl themselves at you and the winner is the one with the most firepower: no careful deployment of archers here, knights there.
Worse yet, the A.I. behind the scenes seems to be above the law. You have to build your town, make soldiers, etc. But your opponent doesn't do the same thing: enemies appear out of nowhere and with no relation to the base from which they should have been spawned. They attack when you do one action, but save, restart and prepare for the attack, and it'll never come. Why? Because the troops don't exist until the program decides to throw them at you: build X number of archers and you're safe. Build X + 1 and a random spawn of bad guys will appear on the spot to slaughter them. You don't really feel like you're facing an enemy who has to build a base and make decisions, so much as you're playing through a "choose your own adventure" scenario: once X archers are built, spend your money on something else, but don't go above X! One wrong choice and it's off to reload.
Brains versus Brawn
Most of your choices involve bashing your way through: on one early mission in the human campaign, your sterling hero turns against his allies and it's your job to help him lead men through a village, slaughtering all the peasants and burning their houses. Hurrah. Some enemies might show up to relive the monotony, but it doesn't help when they don't have much in the smarts department - they'll keep doing what they're doing until they notice you, then throw themselves at you en masse.
The game's system seems to punish you for thinking outside of the Build/Wait/Attack formula. Games like Dune 2000 let you beat an enemy in a variety of ways, but in WarCraft III the victory goes to the one with the most firepower. He who dies with the most toys clearly broke with tradition. I like the idea of being able to try things differently, but eventually I lost interest in WarCraft III because all I was doing was walking lock-step through a pattern.
I used to be apathetic, but now I just don't care...
With WarCraft III's storyline, you are treated to game-engine-driven cinematic sequences, in-game cinematics that interrupt play, and then the lavish animatics I mentioned earlier that join major segments of the story together. Unfortunately, there is too much of this, and the filler begins to interrupt the gameplay. It's one thing to sit through a sequence, then start your mission: a single scene gives you a setting and context. It's quite another to wait--again and again--for the story to get to the point. Or have the mission change--again--mid-stream just as you thought you'd accomplished your goals. WarCraft III is the first game ever in which I started skipping the between-mission scenes. I started talking out loud to the machine and saying, "Yeah yeah, I get the idea I'm way ahead of you." The core plot was good, but predictable, borrowing heavily from Michael Moorcock, Dragonlance, and any number of fantasy sagas.
WarCraft III had some great ideas, but the system Blizzard used to implement it stifles the concept of "Strategy". There are great graphics, and if you can find an online game with real humans (who don't cheat), you'll probably have an enjoyable time. But don't count on the Single Player Campaign--the reason I buy a game--to be worthy of your efforts. Much as I am convinced Microsoft's strategy games cheat like crazy, I found Age of Mythology to offer me more in gameplay, despite the graphics and story not being as rich as WarCraft III.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
Pyanfar
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Location: Frankfort, KY
Reviews written: 168
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