This is a PC real-time strategy game from the famed Blizzard Entertainment that was released in July 2002. It is the third installment in the Warcraft series, and has similar gameplay to both its predecessors and the immensely popular Starcraft. Players control an army of one of Warcraft III's four Tolkien-inspired races from a top-down 3-D perspective, gathering resources, building bases, and leading attacks on enemy warriors in a game that will awe RTS-diehards and neophytes alike. Get ready to get medieval.
The game's basic concept is
identical to that of
Warcraft II. Players utilize specialized worker units to collect resources and construct buildings that collectively form a
base. Each
structure costs an amount of
gold and
wood to produce, soldiers and other units also require
food that is procured from farms. Certain structures either train troops,
research new technologies, act as defenses, or peform a
combination of the three. After amassing a
sufficient number of
soldiers and spellcasters, a player will attack the base of the opponent in the hopes of destroying it. By carefully balancing
offense and
defense and expanding their resource-gathering operations to areas outside their main base, players can deny their enemy the gold
necessary for gaining more troops and defenses and
secure victory. In
Warcraft III, however,
combat is more complicated. One now has the
option of commanding heroes,
uber-tough special units that can turn the
tide of a
battle with a well-placed
spell or special attack. Each
race has three unique types of these special units, and it's possible to
summon one of each type per game. A
hero receives
experience points after killing enemies and can level up
RPG-style, gaining new spells and abilities. Defeated
neutral creatures known as "creeps" sometimes drop
treasure that can be added to a hero's six-slot
inventory. These can be either
passive stat-increasing items like
armor, or
consumable scrolls and
potions which have from one to three uses. If they are killed, heroes can be resurrected at a special
altar reminiscent of
Sacrifice. In single-player, each
campaign revolves around one or two heroes whose inventories and experience levels carry over from mission to mission. These powerful characters add a new
dimension to gameplay that hasn't been present in any of
Blizzard's other
RTS titles.
Warcraft III features an engaging single-player campaign composed of about nine missions for each race that follows a continually unfolding story in a similar manner to that of Starcraft. I found myself wanting to beat the missions in order to discover the plot twist the next cutscene would reveal, a rare experience in RTS games. Players first command the humans, who seek to find the cause of a plague called the Scourge that turns its victims into the undead. They next control the undead, who are spreading the plague to pave the way for a demonic invasion. The second-to-last campaign is fought by the orcs, who search for their race's destiny under the leadership of their warchief Thrall. Finally, the night elves struggle to prevent the invasion of the Burning Legion, an unholy army that sent the undead to pacify the realm before their arrival. Newcomers to real-time strategy will find the single-player campaign challenging, but never frustrating on the Normal difficulty level, making it a perfect introduction to the genre.
Online multiplayer is facilitated through Blizzard's free Battle.net service. A random matchmaking function pairs players of similar skill (based on win-loss ratios) for one-on-one or team games whose result is recorded on Blizzard's ladder page. Players gain experience points and levels by winning multiplayer games, and the top 20 players for each of the four Realms, which represent gamers in the East U.S., West U.S., Europe, and Asia, are displayed on the official web site.
As in the other Warcraft games, players collect wood and gold to finance their army's exploits. This time around, however, I was annoyed to find that I also had to pay a tax called "upkeep". This is an amount of gold deducted from one's treasury to keep the troops properly equipped, and increases with the army's size. In multiplayer this prevents players from rushing by limiting the number of troops they can sustain toward the beginning of a battle, but it didn't seem to serve any purpose in single-player. At times I could neither expand my base nor train new troops, and had to wait for long periods before building anything was possible. Although upkeep adds some realism to Warcraft III, it should have been scrapped in single-player for the sake of improved gameplay. In a related problem, mines collapse when they run out of gold, and they contain far too little. In one four-player game in which I took part, the strain of upkeep and continued base expansion resulted in the map's entire gold supply being drained in less than an hour. We were forced to call the match a draw. Denying resources to an opponent is a viable strategy, but games shouldn't end prematurely because the map design can't support longer games. Hopefully, this issue will be addressed by a patch or map creators within the game's community.
Minor complaints aside, Warcraft III is great for any fan of real-time strategy and a good introduction for newcomers to the genre. Gameplay is an improvement upon that of Warcraft II and is enriched by Blizzard's sense of humor, which is evident in each unit's speech responses and little easter eggs (click on a sheep or pig twenty-five times and see what happens). The well-designed single-player campaigns are just a prelude to the competitive multiplayer scene on Battle.net, which promises to become as popular as Starcraft's. Whether you're an RTS aficionado or a newbie, Warcraft III is a must-purchase.