hen Blizzard Entertainment last visited the Warcraft world, life seemed pretty simple: There were humans. There were orcs. They fought, built stuff to make their fighting more effective and then
fought some more. But in the new Warcraft III game, things are more complicated. The dead are rising to attack the living. The orcs, warned by a prophet that doom is at hand, have set sail for a distant land which is populated by a mysterious race of elves. Meanwhile, the humans stubbornly continue to hang on in the face of increasingly terrifying odds.
On Blizzard's multiplayer network, Warcraft III players can choose the two familiar races—humans or orcs—or the two new races, undead and night-elves. In the single-player campaign, players try each race in turn as part of a progressing storyline. Each race has its own
special strengths, skills and spells, but the basic game is always the same: collect resources, construct specialized buildings that allow for specialized troops or abilities, research upgrades and spells, build an army of mobile units and accomplish a goal. In the campaign, that goal varies from level to level: Defeat a specific enemy, fetch or find an object, reach a guarded area or just survive for a given period of time.
A friendly intro scenario is available to walk newbies through the game system, but anyone conversant with Warcraft II or Blizzard's other real-time gaming franchise, Starcraft, will find much of Warcraft III familiar. The new game even eliminates Warcraft II's oil-collection and ship-building aspects, making the game even more like Starcraft. But in one of the biggest and most critical modifications to the game, resource collection now varies depending on how many mobile units a player has built: a large "army" requires "upkeep" that automatically consumes players' resources as they're gathered. This tends to make Warcraft III a leaner, more management-heavy game than its predecessors. Another significant difference is the addition of "heroes," unique super-units that gain experience and levels throughout the game, collect power-boosting items and can generally be resurrected if they die. This adds yet another familiar flavor to Warcraft III: It's a bit like Blizzard's third famous franchise, Diablo.
An improved engine ups the gaming ante
Ultimately, how individual users feel about Warcraft III may depend on their aesthetic reaction to the new top-down, polygon-based graphics. The animation detail is amazing, and the 3-D images are well-crafted, and full of surprising touches—heroes change in appearance as they gain powerups, and individual units do amusing things when idle. But the individual units' polished, shiny, flat-planed look can be hard to interpret visually, and their weightless quality makes them look comical and unrealistic as they bounce around.
Warcraft III does make a variety of much-appreciated improvements to the basic Warcraft/Starcraft mechanic. Unit-group management is easier. One handy button instantly locates idle workers who are free for new tasks. An auto-cast function lets players predetermine what individual spellcasters will do in battle, which cuts down on annoying micromanagement. An auto-repair function similarly means less tedious worker management. The upkeep system rewards players for keeping their fighting forces small and efficient, which discourages the irritating creature-wave tactics that are typical in online multiplayer games. And of course, more races means more skills and more variety.
At the same time, the game contains the usual Warcraft/Starcraft frustrations. Every level requires players to trudge through the same repetitive activities: building camps, re-learning each skill anew, gathering the same resources, chipping through massive waves of enemies. Even the vagaries of the storyline can only spice up this process so much.
Still, for the casual player (if there is such a thing—Blizzard's games are notoriously addictive), Warcraft III holds a lot of rewards, from the many humorous touches (most units say weird, silly or in-jokey things if a player clicks on them repeatedly) to an involving storyline rife with dramatic touches to a series of increasingly challenging missions. The scenario-end cutscenes are gorgeous, and the units and races themselves are fascinating and wildly creative. Meanwhile, hard-core addicts may love or hate the game's new look, but they'll likely appreciate all the new tools that help them juggle more things at once. Warcraft III is an improvement on a classic rather than a huge gaming breakthrough in its own right, but it's still a welcome addition to the Blizzard stable, and a guaranteed attention-grabber (and time-sucker) for real-time strategy fans.
Really, my biggest ongoing problem with both Warcraft and Starcraft comes from the technology-tree-climbing issues. While I love the complex balancing act involved in choosing what to develop and when, I still hate developing the exact same skills eight or nine times per story chapter. "How could you have forgotten how to make iron weapons? That last scenario took place an hour ago!"
— Tasha
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