WarCraft: Orcs & Humans

The Good
Seeing as it is the original in the chain of X-Craft like games, it is generally good. Creative theme and original battle system.

The Bad
It was a bit slow and predictable. The levels got repetitive after a while.

The Bottom Line
If you have never played Warcraft, I highly suggest it. You manage units on a battlefield in order to accomplish a mission given to you at the beginning of each level. You train and upgrade your units at the expense of your available natural resources (Wood, gold and food) and build buildings with different fuctions in the same manner.

The Good
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans introduced what is now considered, the "Blizzard RTS". The game features the battle between the Orcs and the Humans as they fight for control over the world. Right off the bat the menu for the game looks great and the music... is pretty nice considering this is 1994, this is dos, and most people lacked soundcards or even external speakers. You get the choice on either playing the Human or Orc campaign right away, both are pretty close to the same, although slight differences are noticeable. Warcraft was quite complex for its time and quite difficult. The graphics look great, even better then Command And Conquer, the smash RTS released just two years later, and the game has this really classic feeling like you are playing something that was from your childhood, even if it was not.

The Bad
To say Warcraft is a bad game would not be accurate, it's not a terribly bad game, it just suffers from one of the worst issues an RTS can have, it's slooooowwwww....

By slow I mean you click a unit, you click move on the sidebar, you click the ground, then he starts CREEPING forward at around a quarter a mile an hour. The units in this game could NOT in any way move any slower! Another thing I did not like that much is the unique road system, where you had to build roads and construct building next to them, although this was neat and made bases look professional, it slowed base construction and made it difficult to set up secondary bases near enemy bases for confusion and quick assaults. My final complaint is the lack of using the left mouse button for orders, although some mouses back then lacked it, it would have been a nice thing as it adds to the slow feeling having to click your unit, click move, and clicking the ground instead of pressing the right mouse button, come on Blizzard, Command and Conquer did it 2 years after you guys. Well I guess I can not really complain about it, it was added in Warcraft 2 and this was before it was a common RTS feature.

The Bottom Line
A great classic RTS with some faults, but it's still worth playing... If you have patience.

The Good
Well, it's a decent game but nothing more. It was refreshing change from Dune II (simply because no other adequate RTS was released during that time) and the music/sound effects are OK.

The Bad
The game is slow - either badly programmed or simply meant to be slow. The enemy is stupid and the entire experience is lacking.

The Bottom Line
You should probably play this just to get an idea how much better the second game is.