Rating: 
Summary: Great fun but where's the innovation?
Review: Summary:
I have never played Warcraft. I did, however, play Blizzard's StarCraft. At first glance WC3's graphics completely blew StarCraft out of the water. At second glance it's nothing more than the same flat (albeit the 3D world and characters) environment. I thought it was great to be able to zoom in and out but after a while it didn't do much for me. Instead I wish Blizzard had implemented a full 3D environment to allow for panning around the units. The graphics too were not up to the hype. All too often it reminded me of Age of Empires II. But in the end I concluded it was not so much about the graphics and the innovation but its engaging story.Gameplay:
If you've play StarCraft then you've played WarCraft III. I would suggest getting another title. However you are into the storyline then do yourself a favor and get this. The story is intriguing and pushes you to get to the next level to see what will happen next. Blizzard did a great job of pulling together the story elements by giving the play a glimpse into each of race and how they will all serve their purpose in the game. Sound:
The music and and voice work is, in tradition to Blizzard attention to detail and pride in their work, spectacular. Overall:
This title is a great addition to your strategy game collection. For those who are entering the realm of strategy gaming I would highly recommend a cheaper (and still a great game StarCraft).
Rating: 
Summary: A Dramatic Next Step for Blizzard
Review: I've played Blizzard games for almost 10 years--beginning with the first Warcraft way back as an undergrad when my friends and I would get a case of beer for every 1-2 people, hook up our computers in the house and play for an entire weekend. The game was incredibly challenging, but like the rest of the real-time strategy games from Blizzard since then, after a while the game turned into a contest of who could move their mouse the fastest, crank out as many units as possible, and win a war of attrition. Warcraft 3 combines the incredibly addictive and challenging features of the first 2 Warcrafts and Starcraft with the hero development of Diablo I & II, stunning new graphics that fully exploit the power of DirectX 8.1, and new gameplay features to produce what will be the next generation of real time strategy games. In Warcraft III, you must still be fast, anticipate (or engage in) the "rush", and build units quickly, but the Upkeep restriction that taxes your productive capacity as your army gets bigger requires you to think about strategic moves two and three steps ahead. Additionally, you must fight "neutral" races and creatures for new gold mines and can also fight them for mercenaries for hire, level-ups and enhancements for your hero. There is an incredible complexity to the possible strategies while a simplicity in execution that the old versions of WC and SC didn't provide. The AI of the creatures means that you don't have to continually re-focus your forces on the enemy when one gets killed, but you still have to be in charge of every battle. Battle.net for WC3 is dramatically improved, and you don't have to spend an hour just finding people to play with (if you don't have a group already set up) because Battle.net does it for you. Blizzard has mutated from a "game shop" to an "entertainment" company--the one-player campaigns are as much fun as playing against human opponents and more fun than watching a video. And, the night elves KICK [tush]!!!
Rating: 
Summary: oh please, I never thought blizzard would let me down...
Review: The hype was incredible, the game looked great, and there were 5 million copies sold even before the game officially was relesed. I have to say it was quite excieting to wait till midnight to go to a frys electronics store that was staying open just to sell warcraft 3 and pick up my copy, which I payed the cutting price of ($$$). I of course knew in my heart that it would be worth the price, as the game was supposed to be the greatest thing since television. I got home and immediatly installed it and played it till about 5:00am. when I woke up the next morning is when it hit me that I had wasted my money. Let me tell you why.
First off, I thought they called it a stratagy game for a reason, but apperently too many little brats complained about how over-complex starcraft is, which remains to be the only real stratagy game out there. In warcraft 3, there is only one way to win, and that is to simply get a huge army( about 2 or 3 dozen guys due to the unit cap)and attack. And if you want better chances of winning the battle, you have to go around with your hero and kill the "creeps" or non-player hostile creatures so you can level it up and gain spells. sound fun yet? wait! theres more! enough about the gameplay, now on to coordinating your troops. Well, actually not much to do accept tell them to attack, as the only thing that you might have to do which is put melee units in front of ranged ones is done for you with the handy formation command. Now on to the units. In starcraft, there is an enourmous diversity between units. Each unit has their own strengths and weaknesses, different uses and best of all multiple ways to use them. For example, zerglings are very effective against dragoons, seige tanks, and buildings, but are quite vunerable to marines, lurkers, and zealots. Every unit is good for one thing but bad at another. Its up to you to choose how to use them. Some neat things about starcraft are you can ambush guys with lurkers, drop seige tanks or lurkers behind an enemies base to sabatoge their workers, attack with cloaked guys where they dont have detection, attack a vunerable base when enemy troops are away, therefore damaging or destroying a few buildings and escaping before they return, and many more things. Nothing of this sort exists in warcraft 3. Two reasons you cant do a hit and run in warcraft 3: one is that if they have a hero, it starts with a scroll of town portal to instantly teleport it and any nearby units(usually an entire attack squad) to any friendly town. So not only do you not have to march back to your base, you dont have to do so no matter who on your team is being attacked. The second reason is that blizzard made the units have so many hit points and do so little damage, therefore negating the possibility that you could do any damage before running to safety, and causing the battles to take about 2 minutes. I would say the average unit hp and damage would be about 700 and 20. Blizzard also did away with air drop-offs. If you are really determined however, you might consider sacrificing your huge army of 2 dozen guys that took about 5 minutes to build to kill the two or so dragons guarding a goblin merchant in the middle of nowhere so you can buy one zeplin to transport about 5 guys to an enemy base. WOW! Devestating! Now to the resorces. You can only have 5 workers on one mine at a time therefore saving you the tedious task of building a lot of workers if you want a lot of money. So basicly, if you want to get more money faster then your enemy, you have to go capture more mines. Whenever you build a unit in warcraft 3, you always end up watching your money and as soon as you have enough you start building one unit, wait some more then hit the button again when you have enough. Blizzard did this to make the focus of the game on the stratagy rather then town magament, but by doing this they also made it worthless to ambush enemy workers, as you can replace them so fast. Not that you could ambush them anyway, as they take at least 20 seconds to kill, which is plenty of time to bring protection. By far however, the most painful fact of all is that when factoring in cost, build time, and strength, every unit is exactly the same. Now I know what blizzard meant when they said it would be well balanced. There is no unit diversity, no special unit skills that would be worth talking about, nothing like seige tanks, lurkers, dark templars, carriers, or reavers. No stim packs, no nukes, no nothing. Every race has a few melee units, a few ranged units, a few flying, and 1 seige. All strikingly similar. all the game mounts up to be is a simple chop chop back and forth battle system. No stratagy whatsoever. Stay away from this game. -Zuriah
Rating:
Summary: Lots of action... but
Review: I'm a big Civilization,Empire Earth and AOE 1&2 fan, and used to play C&C, WarCraft 1&2 to the death as well. Firstly, make no mistake, this is a great action-packed RTS game, and one that will be played online for a long time to come I'm sure. The graphics are great (with AMD Athlon 1 GHz and a GeForce4 Ti4200, my old Voodoo 3 3000 had a bit of a hard time keeping up, but it was still adequate), sound is excellent and the atmosphere makes you feel like you're in 'The Lord of the Rings'. There is a lot of variety in the four totally different clans that you can choose from (human, orc, night elf and undead) and replay value is huge with all the custom maps included. As an avid strategy gamer there's a few things for me about the game that I think is important to realise for people wanting to buy it. The first is that the strategy element in the game is really not that big. I would say less than 50% of AOE2.
Economy and infrastructure plays a much smaller part than in some other RTS games. Infrastructure creation to be able to support a consistently powerfull army later on does not really exist, since within 5 - 10 minutes the battles already start, and after that your economy is like 10 - 20% of time spent what you're doing. Usually you can just build, group and attack, and if you can do it quickly enough it doesn't really matter what you build. So if you're after fast-paced action almost from the word GO with minimal need for resource planning and infrastructure creation, this is for you. If you like empire building of the Civilization or AOE type, you will like this for its action element for a while, but will probably not lose as much sleep as you did for the former titles, especially if you're not into online playing. If you lost sleep over these titles (as I did) you might want to check out Age of Mythology (due out 10 Oct.) and Empire Earth. To conclude I must say I'm glad I got this, since it is a lot of fun and I will play it online a bit. However, in terms of longevity to satisfy my empire building need, it will be dropped as soon as a new match for AOE2 comes out.
Rating:
Summary: amazing game!
Review: This is the most fun game I have ever played. very addicting! Never bought the other warcraft games, so I'm new to this. This game deserves 10 stars
Rating:
Summary: I can't believe people like this thing
Review: Briefly: Pros: great graphics, interesting building concepts for the different races. Cons: terrible gameplay. Most of the time, you're not racing to outbuild the other guy, you're racing against how much gold you have. Also, troop limits of 90?? What the heck is with that? Probably a performance limitation, since when I got to 90 and had more than 2 other computer players things would bog down on my Duron 700/GF2. Now, if they came out with these graphics using the Cossacks game engine, we have had a winner. :-)
Rating: 
Summary: A shift in the right direction
Review: I play a lot of RTS type games, and this one, though much like the other blizzard games, shows evolution in to a hybrid of RTS and Roleplay-type-games like Diablo II type [stuff]. I hate Diablo II, so the blends of that weren't impressing me, but this wasn't that bad, in comparison to the RTS games from Westwood. The Campaign mode was definitely the most boring and drawn out I've ever played, and I'm not quite fond of the forced unit counts and upkeep%'s, they should have an option to disable them in skirmishes as it can really slow a game down. Unlike other games, it's not just build up and rush - it's build up, get another mine spot asap, then rush, as with upkeep you'll not be able to keep a lot of your money, unless of course you send like 15 units. Heroes are a good addition, but the several weird potions and scrolls you can pick up are kind of annoying, and Diablo II-like. I really can't stand anything to do with the craze that came from Dungeons and Dragons and Pokemon and such--it's just dorky. As for Audio/Video/Controls: Audio is very good, in the movies you may turn up the speakers a bit because sometimes the actors have such low voices you can't hear them, but that's the only problem; Video is nice, a little choppy and rough around the edges, but much better than WarCraft II and StarCraft; the controls are good, but it will take you a while, if you're new, to gain complete control over your squads by just pressing a button. Over-all it's an average game, like WarCraft II and StarCraft, but with the addition of Hero units and Upkeep%'s.
Rating:
Summary: *GRUNT* WHAT THIS WORLD COMING TOO?! *ZUG-ZUG*
Review: *GRUNT*
*SNARL*
*GRU-GRU..*
WHAT IS IT WITH STUPID NOSE RING IN ORC NOSE! DEVELOPERS BECOME STUPIDER EVERY DAY! PUT NOSE RING IN ORC NOSE, ORC NO ABLE TALK RIGHT. ORC HAVE NOSE RING SINCE WAR TWO AND NO THING BE GETTIN' SMARTER THEN. BUT NOW ORC ALSO HAVE LONG HAIR!! ORC IS NOT FROM HEAVY METAL BAND!! DEVELOPERS THINK WARCRAFT IS COMEDY!! IT NO COMEDY ME SAY!! IT FULL OF BALD HEADS AND BLOOD!!
*ZUG-ZUG*
NOT ONLY ORC LOOK STUPID! HUMAN LOOK STUPIDER!! DEVELOPERS NO HAVE FUN UNLESS HUMANS LOOK LIKE ORC!! THEY GIVES HUMANS BIG CHINS AND BIG BEARDS! HUMANS STEAL ORC UGLINESS!! NOW ORCS MORE LIKELY TO GET GIRLS THAN HUMANS!
*LOKDI!!*
SPEAKING GIRLS, NIGHT ELVES LET GIRLS RUN ROUND NAKED ON BATTLEFIELDS! HUMANS NOT MUCH BETTER!! THEY BE HAVING SORCERESSES INSTEAD OF SORCERORS, AND THEY HAVE INAPPRROPRIATE (DID ME SPELL RIGHT?) PARTS!! TOLKIEN NO HAVE WOMAN RUNNING AROUND ON BATTLEFIELD SEDUCING MEN, WARCRAFT SHOULD NO HAVE THAT TOO. WARCRAFT BE WAR WITH MEN! NOT PUNY NAKED GIRLS! PUNY GIRLS SHOULD BE BACK HOME WASHING DISHES!!
*GGGRRRR...*
Overall, Warcraft three worth getting, SO PEOPLE CAN SEE HOW BADLY FANTASY TREATED NOWADAYS!! ORC AM NOT HAPPY WITH SILLY CHARACTERS, WOMEN RULING WORLD, AND STUPID DEVELOPERS WHO ONLY CARE ABOUT MONEY! ORC WANTS TO FIND NEW AUTHOR, LIKE MIEKEL MORCOK, TO WRITE ORC STORIES. MAYBE ORC CAN EVEN GET SOME WORK DONE AROUND HERE INSTEAD OF BEING BEATEN UP BY GIRLS. *SIGH*, ORC WANT TO GO BACK TO OLD DAYS.
Rating:
Summary: So darn addictive!
Review: This is actually something that was bought for me by a friend who wanted to hook me up to his LAN games. I have since learned that his whole reason for it was to play Mongolians to my Great Wall of China. How come every time I put up a good barricade his troops have to go and knock it down?
I find myself frustratingly hooked to this game right now, desperate to beat his troops into submission. So far, I have had no luck. I suck at this game.
During single player mode I find that this game has amazing pretender FMV sequences that are comparable to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, but the real time graphics are far from impressive, adequate, but not impressive. There is a great deal of stuff going on in this game though, and that's what makes this fun. It's the strategy. Trying to build your defense, and offense evenly, do I train a bunch of troopers, or hold out and train bigger, badder monsters? What are my opponents doing? Will they notice if I send a peasant to steal gold out of their mines? If I conquer their mine, will they retaliate? I can't pull myself away! Help! I can't turn this game off!
The only real problem with this game is that I have to upgrade my computer in order for it to run properly. Right now I have some serious lag issues, and the larger my army, and better my defenses the slower the game runs. I'm more of a console gamer, but this game may finally force me to upgrade the motherboard.
Rating:
Summary: Nothing new under the sun...
Review: I enjoyed Warcraft 2 immensely, as well as Blizzard's other hot product, Starcraft and its sequels. However, by the time I'd finished the expansion packs for those games, the RTS formula which Blizzard had pioneered had become more than a little bit stale. When a friend tried to introduce me to the Command and Conquer series, I simply wasn't able to build up much enthusiasm, and never completed the title. Now along comes Warcraft 3, which promises a lot of 'revolutionary' developments to tthe RTS genre. Unfortunately, those promises were 100 percent untrue -- what we have here is exactly the same build, group, and rush formula that has worked so well for Blizzard in the past, with a cosmetic facelift and the addition of elite units. The much touted 'hero's don't add much to the game, since one already had the opportunity to upgrade units in previous titles in the series. Why bother? About four hours into the game, playing began to feel less like fun, and more like work. Grinding work. Seriously boring work. Like doing tax accounts, or digging a ditch. No fun. No challenge. No surprises. Just work. Apparently, I'm one of the lucky ones, inasmuch as gameplay itself was bug-free (other than some odd graphical artifacts, probably the result of Blizzard's inexperience with their new graphic engine). The Blizzard boards are chock-full of people who can't get this title to run at all, or who aren't able to get the online component (the only potentially redeeming feature) to operate. Despite the long development time, there are some problematic bugs, and a number of design flaws and imbalance issues. One is tempted to ask 'with all that development time, what the hell was Blizzard doing?' Sadly, the answer is 'marketing.' Like a stale television sitcom which copies every successful sitcom of the past, Blizzard's WarCraft 3 is re-hashed, re-packaged, re-gurgitated re-run, through and through. The packaging is nice, don't get me wrong -- the new graphics are charming, if not in any way groundbreaking. In fact nothing about this game breaks new ground. The hero units come across as a feeble attempt to cash in on the current resurgence of the Role-Playing genre -- a task which other titles like Bethesda's Morrowind or BioWare's Neverwinter Nights accomplish with *much* more commitment, innovation, and success. I notice that this title has received a number of high reviews...I can only assume that they are from 10 year olds with short memories, or absolute newbies who've never played an RTS before. If you've never played an RTS, you'll likely enjoy Warcraft 3 a lot, and I reccomend it highly. However, that's only about 3 people in the whole country who might be interested in this game in the first place. If you loved the originals and are simply looking for more scenarios...well, I'd still reccomend waiting until this one hits the bargain bins, rather than spending the cash now. For everyone else -- the vast majority of us -- WC3 can only be chalked up as a serious dissapointment, in the hopes that Blizzard learns that innovation is not a bad thing, that ideas, even good ones, can be overused, and that they should trust their fans a bit more to enjoy new challenges, rather than the same old takss over and over and over and over and over and over and... As for me, I couldn't bring myself to finish the game. I play for fun challenges, thanks, not to feel like I'm back in high-school, grinding out homework. I'm afraid WC3 isn't worth my valuable time.
|
