review: warcraft iii
by sumir on 07/19/2002 21:20:28 -0700
I
promised myself that I would not buy
Warcraft III: Reign of
Chaos. Why? Well, because (a) I was afraid of getting hooked
on something, (b) I was waiting for Unreal Tournament 2003, and (c) I am
starting to dislike most games that are hyped too much. Well, what do I
do? The four-day weekend over July 4, I go and buy the Collector's
Edition - yeah, I dished out even MORE money for it. So now that I
spent $75... ALL FOR THE GOOD OF THIS WEBSITE (keep saying it and you'll believe
it, keep saying it and you'll believe it...), I might as well review it, yeah?
Warcraft II was an amazing game. It is right up there in my Top 10 games of all time. Some others, like Adam, will swear by Starcraft, but I never got into it for one very important reason - I hate power gamers online. I rarely played Warcraft II online and maybe that's why I loved it so much more. Warcraft III is a superb game and a worthy successor to such a rich legacy. I bow before Blizzard, the company I have bought the most legal games from, for they 0wN my soul.
Warcraft
III started off being drastically different than anything in the RTS
(real-time strategy) arena - Blizzard was leaning towards making it more
role-playing than RTS. Well, as the development went on, the game shed its
RPG pretenses - as it stands now, unveiled, it is definitely an RTS with some
roots in role-playing. Those RPG roots lie with the hero units, the most
critical difference between this game and any other RTS out there.
Hero units are, quite obviously, ultra-powerful soldiers that each race commands. Each race has 3 different types of hero units; they can level up when they gain enough experience by killing creeps (neutral monsters scattered throughout the map) and as they level up, they gain new abilities. Heroes also serve as protagonists for the single-player campaign mode.
The other major difference between this game and its predecessors is the smaller size. This is very much unlike, say, Starcraft, where you command huge armadas of warships and units. There is a food cap of 90 "points" in Warcraft III. Each unit you train costs a certain amount of food "points" - your builder units (peons, wisps, peasants, acolytes) cost 1. Orc Grunts, for example, cost 3; Night Elf Ballistae cost 4, etc. You build farms (or equivalents) to support unit food requirements, but the overriding cap of 90 "points" keeps your army sizes in check. This is the difference that many will cite to as the hotspot for debate between fans... I personally consider it just perfect. If you have heroes, you SHOULD keep the armies small so that the heroes actually make a difference. And they do. If you lose a hero in Warcraft III, you CAN recover him or her, but it's going to cost your military campaign valuable time and money.
With
the smaller size comes fewer buildings. Remember in Warcraft II
when you had two "panels" worth of buildings? Well, there's half that many
buildings now. It's all very streamlined and I don't miss the extra
buildings at all. Oh... and there's no naval units (thank GOD!). And
there are day/night cycles that effect gameplay (humans and orcs slowly
regenerate during the day; night elves blend into the shadows during the night).
And, finally, rounding out the changes are the two new races. Yes, the humans and orcs return, and joining them are the undead and night elves. All represent different ways of playing the game (the humans and orcs, while not the same, are fundamentally similar in game style). The undead, for example, can start constructing a building and use the Acolyte (basic construction unit) to do something else, much like Starcraft's Protoss. The night elf workers don't have to leave the resource areas and journey back to buildings to deposit them. In short, yes, the races are all very different and that's well-and-alive in the latest Blizzard offering. Holy grail of RTS's... rha rha!
Visually, the game is beautifully-done in a cartoon style. The backdrop is absolutely amazing, with lush greenery and sparkling waterfalls or dust-ridden canyons or frigid, icy plains or a dozen other landscapes. The cut scenes are eye-droppingly gorgeous. Each single hair on King Terenas' beard was individually-rendered; that's how much work Blizzard put in the cut scenes. The only noticeable shortcoming in the art and animation is that the lip movements don't match character speech when the in-game engine is used for level transitions.