WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos

The Good
Not to much. The units were well drawn and the animations were excellent. Also the voices were well done and the maps were varied but the good stuff but...

The Bad
The races, though different, all felt the same to me. Every unit felt like it was mirrored from another race with a couple different magic spells that ultimately did the same thing.

On top of that all the units seemed like mobile structures. How can 3 guys with swords take out a heavily fortifed tower when being shot at by 3 other towers at the same time. Base defences are supposed to DEFEND bases. Not act as temporary brakes on an attack.

People tended to do the same thing every game too. It was a sudden rush of a ton of units every game. No matter the map. That's not very much fun because it's just whoever can rush the fastest that wins the game. There are no tactics, just swarming.

What is the point of being able to rotate the camera? You can't do anything with the rotation and it recenters automatically. Plus you are stuck at the same perspective and zoom levels. The game had so much potential but it wastes it at every chance it gets.

The Bottom Line
Meets the quality of the last 3 [Blizzard]Craft games, being a boring and repetitive reincarnation of the same game just this time with fancy looking graphics.

The Good
Let me get straight to the point......without the custom game included in multiplayer, this game would truly blow. The thought of creating your own mini game for everyone to play on battlenet gives you lots of options. There are so many different custom games you can choose from, that by the time you get sick of one, a new one is added to the list. These mini games range from hero arenas, (where you pick a character and go around killing everyone else), to tower defense (where you constantly build towers to defeat hordes of monsters running across a wide range area). This feature was also included in "Starcraft",also made by blizzard, but is clearly more addictive and entertaining.

The heroes for each race are a nice addition to the single and multiplayer.

This game's graphics are the best I've seen in 3rd person rpg's

The Bad
Don't be fooled by the regular gameplay offered in WC3. It personally scared me away from playing this game. It is by all means disappointing that you have such a reduced limit of units. To me the whole idea is that you have a large army to rape all of your enemies (not literally). By the time you build up your army It seems like you only have 5 piece of crap units that scratch their ass every time you tell them to do something. I dont know why blizzard ruined what was so fun in games like "Starcraft".

Overall, the single player is fun, but i still have some complaints. The story line is predictable and rather stupid (maybe I dont appreciate the story as much, because I have'nt played WC1 or WC2); the cinematics are detailed and realistic, but were a little boring to watch; and even though each mission is unique, it gets very repetitive and the game forces you to work with races that you might find boring.....cough, cough {humans}

Don't let the gameplay of this game distract you from the real fun

The Bottom Line
Dissatisfying to 3rd person rpg fans, but contains addictive multiplayer fun.

The Good
Since this is Blizzard's first 3D game, the graphics are not at all bad, but large battles can be slow sometimes. The heroes are definately a good addition to this game, since they can become quite powerful if you know how to play with them. The units are really balanced and unlike most other strategy games (such as C&C), the units of different races not only differ in colour, and names, but also looks and abilities, making each race have truly unique units. Not only are the units different, each race also has different abilities. For example, most of the Night Elves' buildings can move around and they can see better in the dark, while the undead can only build on blight (similar to the zerg creep in Starcraft). Excellent singleplayer gameplay and has the most incredible cut-scenes I have ever seen, even better than Diablo II's cut-scenes. As with most other Blizzard games, clicking on a single unit for a couple of times makes them say something funny, and since there are so many different units, you can listen to a lot of these comments. WC3 also features a great map editing application. With it, you can do just about everything, from creating your own heroes to the ability to detect key strokes from within the game. Also, now 12 players can be in the same battle for multiplayer, so you can have even more intense battles.

The Bad
This game is just too similar to Starcraft and probably not as good. Mobile buildings, the presence of blight, and how the Undead Ghouls look suspiciously like Zerg Zerglings all looks too much like Starcraft. In fact there are even Starcraft units hidden in the game! Another thing I dislike about this game is how strong the defense towers are. There are many people on the internet who doesn't do anything else but build towers, hundreds of them. Since the food limit is 90 now (so that your strategy now becomes a key to winning), you can only send a few units in to destroy the towers, but most units die without even reaching the towers while catapults could easily be taken down by aerial units within the mass of towers.

The Bottom Line
If you have not played Starcraft yet, buy that instead of Warcraft 3. However, if you are a fan of Blizzard's games or just strategy games in general, then you should buy this. If you figure out how to (and have the time to actually do it) make maps using the map editor, you could make complete different games with it (puzzle, RPG, etc).