Le Premier: Review : Warcraft III Reign of Chaos & Frozen Throne + DoTA

Hey everybody! Tonight I am going to review the awesome game Warcraft III : Reign Of Chaos and the Frozen Throne expansion pack! I am also going to add DoTA reiew, since DoTA is a map created for Warcraft III. Ok, and also I want to explain RTS is Real Time Strategy and RPG is Role Playing Game and AI is Artificial Intelligence. I've been playing this game for years, but I thought that it would be an awesome idea to review this game.

So Warcraft III has been sold since forever, it is a totally awesome and there are millions of players all over the world. Ok, so now a little bit of history. Warcraft III is a Blizzard game, Blizzard Entertainment Inc. is an American video game company that has crafted many real time strategy games. The company was formed by a bunch of university graduates just a year after they've graduated. Now back to the game review.

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos is not the same game that was originally presented to us a couple years ago. It has since undergone both small and rather large changes to become the final product that it is today. The important thing to know is that Warcraft III is a strategy game. Some of the little bits that have been changed are some light role-playing elements that really manage to help the single player game along by connecting you to the main characters that play a part in the story. In multiplayer mode we can make the heroes play with other player's heroes, make teams, and have battles. The kicker is that in order for them to be of any use at all, you have to get them out into battle to gain experience points. It's a nifty way to do things and turns to a bunch of fun and frustration depending on which end of the stick you're standing. The heroes you'll find in the single player campaigns all represent a type of hero that you'll find in multiplayer. You'll get to learn their awesome set of spells for when you finally get to jump into multiplayer and test out your skills against other players.

There are also additional little quests. But really they turn out to be added objectives. They are done in a more RPGish manner where they're a little random and off the storyline, but basically are just added objectives that you find in other RTSs as well. The main difference is that some of these are optional quests designed mainly to give you a little more to do in a map and to help your hero level up a little more before the real battle begins.

The campaigns make good use of the quests, both optional and mandatory, to build up the believable world of Warcraft. There are different type of characters / species, Humans, Orcs, Undead, and Night Elves. The characters and situations created in the game are totally believable, in a mature enough story that could keep anyone and everyone interested. I have to say though that some of what happened during the game and some of the characters seemed to have some weird mirror world thing going on with those in Starcraft (I'll make a review of this game soon!). Regardless, it works well. Throughout the game the story will progress in the action and in the cutscenes, both rendered and real time. I actually liked the little interludes in the game that progressed the story, although I can understand how some people might think they go on too long and break up the action (I gotta say sometimes I get bored watching so I skip the scenes). But then sometimes they intrigue me enough that they managed to ground me not only in the conflict but in the fact that it takes place in this funny little brightly colored 3D world, which almost ended up making the pre-rendered cutscenes seem a little out of place.

The cut scenes are actually not that bad. They're beautiful and you'll find yourself watching them repeatedly to take in all of the little details. I've said it before and I'll say it again, when you have little rewards like this to look forward to on a job well done, it's easier to keep plugging away at the enemy until you get that reward you so richly deserve at the end of each campaign.

The campaigns themselves are laid out well. You'll move from controlling the Humans to the Undead to the Orcs and finally the Night Elves on your way to saving the world. Not all is as you might expect when you load up the game. There'll be enough plot twists to keep you guessing, even if you guess right most of the time, and enough moral ambiguity on each of the race's parts to make you wonder sometimes which one of the races are the bad guys. Sure the Undead seem like a good culprit, but really I think they're just misunderstood.

The levels will be fairly familiar to anyone that played WarCraft II or even Starcraft. Most of the levels will involve you razing at least one outpost while protecting your own. Inside of this major set, you'll have some side objectives to disguise the fact that you're trying to destroy the enemy towns such as gathering 15,000 lumber when Night Elf Tree of Life (the main Night Elf building) is worth 3,000 lumber. Of course you're going to go raze the entire town when you find it, it's just too hard to resist. There are a few of these types of missions like this, which add a little more spice to the immortal RTS equation. You'll also get levels where you'll run through a dungeon killing enemies and saving friendly units that will bolster your ranks as you go. You'll have to find keys and open doors and all of that jazz as well. As you can see, there's not a ton here in terms of main objectives that will be completely new to any RTS buffs out there. But it's done well enough that you either won't notice or won't care.

Of course, much of that credit could also be given to the excellent unit and race design. Each of the races have been tuned and tweaked and created with an awesome spec. Each of the races has clear advantages and disadvantages from each other. Take the Orcs. Even their small units pack a punch, but they take more food units to keep around so your army will be smaller. Or the Night Elves that have excellent ranged attacks, but little to no melee attacks leaving them open for a serious ass kicking if enemies get in close.

The races are all pretty unique from each other in both look and function. The graphics throughout the entire title are truly amazing and really need to be lauded. The races and individual units, from the actual model to the interesting portraits that are almost caricatures of the units, are really alive with personality. My favorite, as usual, is the sickest of them, the Undead. All of them have style in droves however and you'll surely find yourself zooming in on several occasions to get a better look.

While the looks and feels of each may be unique from each other, they aren't necessarily unique from past games. Blizzard veterans will probably recognize a few gameplay mechanics borrowed from the venerable Starcraft upon playing, such as the Blight, which is the same as the Creep the Zerg used. Night Elf buildings can get up and move around to save themselves. Undead buildings come into being much like the Protoss buildings did so you only need one unit to summon them all. Sure it all comes together a little differently, but is the same in theory.

The balancing issues in terms of spells and unit strength are things that will be adjusted for years to come if Starcraft is any example, but they've got a damn good start and have instituted some great checks and balances between the races if you know where to find them. For an easy example, some people may feel overwhelmed by the onslaught of an Undead horde of raised skeletons. But there are plenty of magicks that can unsummon them if you know where to find them. Balance of force is key here for victory. I can't wait to see some of the crazy strategies that will undoubtedly begin surfacing in the coming weeks. There's already quite a few.

Which brings me to the AI strategies. When you play against AI, it means you play against computers as if you're playing against human players. But sometimes they are really easy to predict since they will always follow their programming the more you play the easier it would be to defeat them. But occasionally, I've been surprised by flank attacks against my army and into my bases by flying units and Zeppelin transports. I also have noticed that units can pick out targets of importance a little better than I'm used to although for some reason, my heroes seem to be down on the line of importance to them. But my healers and spell casters certainly find themselves bleeding or dead during the course of a big battle.

Strangely enough, multiplayer, as fun as I have found it so far, is also where I hold some of my objection. I know that the idea behind this game was to keep things a little more personal. Keep the number of units on the field down to a minimum. Keep things under control and the managing of huge forces from bogging play down. But I like huge numbers of forces. Sure, you're forced into more personal battles where you care more about each unit than you might have in Starcraft where many matches ended up in the hands of an onslaught of Guardians or Carriers. I always loved that part of the game though. There was something about bringing that many units to bear and seeing them falling on your base that was exciting. The lower unit cap now means a huge number of defensive buildings are necessary however if you want to run through the countryside to take care of some of the neutral creeps that are out and about to give your hero some levels up before coming up against the enemy. And while having neutral units on the field is a cool thought, it also means that rushing is almost out of the question, which is another strategy that I was fond of both using myself and defending against. The early stress of deciding which way you want to go with your army was always interesting.

But even with those things I consider flaws, I had a bunch of fun other people, friends, family, strangers you meet in a cyber cafe and kicking their butt at it. One quick note to those used to older Blizzard RTSs. Of course Warcraft III is an old game, it came out years ago and now basically almost every cyber cafe in the whole world has it. Even here in Malaysia I went to a cyber cafe the other day, they had over 100 gaming computers and almost everyone of them was either playing Warcraft III DoTA or Counter Strike.

The final kicker of course, is the world editor, which will add a ton of replayablity. I hate to keep bringing past games into the equation, but if you played Starcraft at all, then you know the amount of solid extra missions that fans created for the hell of it that were a ton of fun. The editor itself will take a little time to get used to simply because 3D is a little more complicated than 2D, but it's a powerful little tool that gives you access to everything, even camera control for in-game cutscenes of your own.

Ok then to sum it all up Warcraft III is a finely tuned game and an amazing example of real time strategy game. I've been playing this game since I was in middle school and now in my junior year of college I still love playing this game. The delays to the game may have been a bit hard to bear at times, but I think that almost everyone will be happy to see the results the extra hours brought to bear. Of course with better computer specs the game will load faster and there will be no lag and of course the most important part of this game is that it takes only 1GB of harddisk and it's not a heavy game, almost any VGA chip would do. There's nothing less than a sterling real-time strategy game here that fans of fantasy and fiction will enjoy. Now have fun playing!!

Here's some pics of the game and some videos

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos Screenshots Image of 42 ( Games > Strategy ) Pics, Screens, Photos