My first review of a game ever, so excuse me if there are things that I’ve missed… ;)

Anyway, let’s kick off… Warcraft 3 is a Real Time strategy game (RTS). Which basically means you have to gain recources (gold and lumber in this case) and try to beat your opponent. Luckily, there is more than that. It’s not the quantity that makes the difference (you can build only 90 units in WC3) but the strategy and the levelling.You’ll need to research lots of abilities and powers before your troops become really dangerous (tougher armor, more power to their attacks, etc..). Also, the four races (undead, humans, nightelves and orcs) provide more than enough diversity to satisfy all your tactical needs.

Warcraft 3 provides a lot of options concerning graphical settings, people with a high end system can enjoy a high res. Nifty looking game while the people in low res.. well it still looks pretty fancy in low res. if you ask me but I certainly wouldn’t recommend a system with lower specs than a P/AMD 500Mhz, 256 ram, geforce… The graphics are very nice, I guess that’s why you won’t see lots of CGI-movies (except for the campaign intro’s) but more of the in-game stuff, which lets you get more involved in the game. The option to change your view on the map (use the wheelmouse to scroll deeper into the map) is pretty nice too. However, I don’t think many will use it except for the “whow, nifty!”-factor.

The tutorial (here called “the prologue”) is pretty short and provides enough information about “how playing the game”, even to the “die hard RTS’ers” I would recommend playing this because it is a part of the storyline. The campaign itself is very interesting to play but not too difficult (on normal mode that is, hard mode really is not “another piece of cake”). It kept me locked behind my computer for several long hours. Next to that you can play some skirmish matches against the computer for a little training before you jump off to the online multiplayer slaughtering, which I really recommend because Blizzard gave the online gaming some nice extra’s, making the game last more.... And if you’re bored with playing, which I doubt very much, you can also create your own maps with the included Map-editor, which has been used by the Blizzard-team themselves.

To be honest I never played Warcraft 1 or 2 but Warcraft 3 did give me a déjà vu feeling, perhaps because the gameplay is very Starcraftish. Always bet on the winning horse is of course the motto. Yet, some things are VERY similar, like the undead who can only build on undead land: blight, much like the Zerg in starcraft. But next to that, the game has a lot of new things to keep you busy for a while.

I have searched hard for cons for this game, maybe the biggest con is that a TNT2 isn’t good enough. Someone I know tested it on a resolution of 1024*768 and it stinked. Another one is the copy protection which was a bitch during the install: I actually had to use a copy of the game to get it running, afterwards the original ran without a fuss… Very odd, some other people had it too I read on some forums. It took me a while to figure it out, but I managed to install it and I’m not regretting it ;)

My pc : Duron 700 MHZ
512 MB Ram
GF3 ti 200
Win2K