WarCraft II: Battle Chest

The Good
Even if you don't like this game, you have to admit it was an instant classic. Technically, it was no great achievement, but artistically it is almost unrivalled. Even now people marvel at Warcraft 2's (or just "War2" as it is known in many circles) incredible longevity. It predates the commercial release of Windows 95, but still has a fanbase larger than many games that have come and gone since.

This longevity is largely due to the fact that War2 was one of the first games to embrace Kali, a program that acted as an IPX emulator and allowed you to play games from a hosted server. Kali was the start of online gaming, more or less. Before long, War2 had a large group of players, many cash tournaments hosted, and several online leagues started. The online RTS gaming that people take for granted these days was such a joy back then that how could War2 miss? War2 was played fanatically for many years, but the release of Battle.net and Starcraft made people wonder why they were charged a subscription fee to play War2 on Kali while you could play Starcraft on Battle.net for free. I can imagine that Blizzard support received more than a few e-mails about the subject: "hey, is there any way I can play War2 on Battle.net?" I think this was the reason War2 Battle.net Edition was made in the first place. When you think about it, it had nothing new to add. A tired, 4-year-old engine, the same Human/Orc campaigns, the only changes were a few tweaks and a couple updated maps. War2BNE owes its existance to Battle.net.

When War2BNE was released, it effectively killed Kali. Kali was great, but it required money so you could play. Battle.net offered the same services, but for free. Soon War2 players were abandoning Kali in droves. Kali still exists -- with a handfull of die-hard gamers stubbornly continuing to play there -- but it has reached its proverbial nadir.

The updates made in War2BNE are mostly for the better. The "lumber bug" was fixed, double-clicking a unit selects all units of that type on the screen (well, up to nine of them, that is), and the music was resampled. It also addresses many balance issues in the maps. Most of War2's maps were inherantly unfair -- key symptoms include one player receiving less gold at his starting mine than the others, some people having hardly any room to build on, or only being able to build your Town Hall on a spot where it can get hit from the sea or is miles away from a gold mine. War2BNE corrects all but the most intricate of inbalances in these maps. An annoying strategy in classic War2 on high resources was the "rax first" tactic -- not building a Town Hall at all but just making a barracks, a farm, and a grunt/footman with your starting lumber and gold, and then attacking your enemy with the grunt -- is no longer viable, since you must build a Town Hall before you can build anything else. When you build your starting Town Hall, you no longer have to wait ages for it be completed, it will build as quickly as a farm.

And of course, the nostalgia value is overwhelming. The cute, cartoonish graphics and comical sound effects (an ogre farting and blaming it on his second head) almost completely eclipse any real faults with this game. Even in 2004, War2's great gameplay still shines through.

The Bad
Considering all the tweaks and fixes made in War2BNE, it is a bit Faustian that the game's most fundamental problems are still unfixed. In a 1vs1 game, humans are at a massive disadvantage against the orcs, who reign supreme due to their cheap blacksmith upgrades and lethal bloodlust spell. Bloodlust makes a single ogre do the damage of three, and there is nothing that the humans have to counter this.

Unit balance is also a bit lopsided. Archers are completely useless, and never get used. In a standard game over Battle.net, you see nothing except armies of knights and bloodlusted ogres (or maybe just bloodlusted ogres, since humans are too weak to be viable).

Pathfinding is as terrible as ever. Sending units off to distant corners of the map will result in many getting lost, confused, or killed by enemies. Sending large numbers of peasants to harvest gold and lumber means that many will bump into each other and get stuck. And since you can only select 9 units at a time, managing of troops on the fly is a nightmare.

For someone new to this game I suggest that you don't waste too much time playing the single player campaigns. They are long, they are boring, they teach you bad playing habits. They blow. Battle.net is the only reason you should own this game. And that's a struggle in itself.

Battle.net is a pretty good multiplayer gaming service, I've played on quite a few and Battle.net is streamlined and easy to use. Too bad the community is awful. The majority of players on the War2 server are either nasty, stupid, mean-spirited, or a combination of all three. But since it isn't the game's fault, and it is no different from most other online gaming services, I won't belabor it. Just keep in mind that you need a pretty thick skin if you want to play on Battle.net.

Far more serious is the problem of hacking. To put it in a nutshell, cheating is rampant in multiplayer games. Blizzard said that they had tried to make War2 difficult to reverse-engineer, but that hasn't stopped cheats and hacks from popping up like daisies after the rain. Some of the most common ones are the Resource Hack (gives you an unlimited lumber, gold and oil), the Map Hack (reveals the whole map at the start of the game), the DC Hack (causes the enemy(s) to disconnect at the start of a game), and the notorious Prelust Hack (all units have bloodlust cast on them as soon as they are created). It really isn't fun when you lose to someone of an inferior skill because they cheated. Blizzard has promised several times to release patches to stop the hacking, but nothing has come of it.

War2BNE didn't quite start a massive resurrection of the game (had it been released a year earlier, before Starcraft, it might have), and in most cases has been pensioned off to life in store bargain bins. Despite this, it still has quite an active fanbase on Battle.net...100-200 people playing at any one time. Sadly, it is pretty hard to find games there, especially decent ones. All anyone seems to play is Big Game Hunters (unlimited gold and lumber), Chop Chop (no need to defend against ground units) and other lame custom maps. Garden of War is the only "old skool" map that seems to be played with any regularity, but 99% of maps that shipped with the game are never touched.

(on a side note unrelated to this review, I recently heard from the grapevine that Blizzard has been considering removing War2 from Battle.net in order to make room for World of Warcraft. I'm hoping that this is just idle gossip, but only time will tell...)

The Bottom Line
I think Blizzard intended this to merely be an update of an old game, a "warts and all" showcase of classic gaming. But I wish some major gameplay changes had been implemented. Many people I know own DOS Warcraft: Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal, play them happily, and have no reason to fork out another ten bucks (and considering how inflated the Australian dollar is, that's dirt cheap) or so for BNE. It's important to understand that the long due overhaul this game needs was not done.

The Good
Warcraft II is clearly one of the most enduring real time strategy games ever. The nice thing about this game is that it contains both the original game (Warcraft II:Tides of Darkness) and it's expansion (Warcraft II:Beyond the Dark Portal) on one convenient disc. The price is very attractive for the amount of content. The game has been updated from the initial release with support for the Windows OS, resampled sound, battle.net support, the ability to hotkey units as well as structures, and a number of other features that make a good game better. The game lets you choose your race and the campaigns progress along a storyline that is quite well written. There are also lots of scenarios to keep you busy. Then there is the battle.net support for multiplayer that ensures that the game will never old. Beating the computer is one thing, beating another human is where the true strategy comes into play. The AI by the way has been slightly improved so it reacts more logically to what is going on in the game. The graphics are colorful and complement the game nicely. The artwork and attention to detail are simply amazing. The cutscenes are fairly good even by today's standards. The voice acting in the game are top notch. The responses given when a unit is highlighted are hilarious. The best part is the more you click on them the more angry they get. Nice touch.

The Bad
There is not a lot to dislike in this game. One of the things I have noticed is that some of the sound effects seem to be just a bit scratchy at times though by far the majority of the time it sounds just fine.

The Bottom Line
One of the best classic real-time strategy games that still gets a lot of play time on Battle.net.

The Good
| What Little Good Can You Get |
Probably the strongest point in this game is the music which is simply amazing. A little on the drawback that it is using midi format (on the contrary to Command & Conquer that used wave files, even if mono), which may make it sound a little not-wanted on certain sound cards. It perfectly creates the atmosphere of a battle between Humans and Orcs, each side has four unique themes that vary during gameplay (that's actually much less track you could find in Command & Conquer), and frankly, they don't get boring at all. They fit the building schemes, planning attacks, or fortifying defenses situation quite formidably. Aside that, there are few shorter themes such as victory or defeat themes for each sides and briefing (I think there was a music during briefings, can't quite remember). Quite like the music, sounds are well tunes and usually funny (especially if you keep clicking and by doing that, annoying the current unit to extract certain displeased answers), and it all kinda seems to fit the so-called epic atmosphere. Sort of make you like the game if you can place yourself on the stand of Lord of the Rings fans, but otherwise, it doesn't all quite satisfy as the real-time strategy.

| 2 Become 1 |
Two for a price of one, or perhaps less, this Battle.net Edition was never actually released as standalone (you get both Tides of Darkness and add-on Beyond the Dark Portal games on one disc), and it's a neat touch, especially since these are not DOS version but Windows 9x and hence you can experience ancient battle of this once amazing RTS (bah, don't remind me, I could never actually find much amazing things about this one, and that wasn't just 'cos I was a huge fan of C&C franchise, but because Blizzard never made any serious games, so you can't get serious while playing them... must've been the art tactic) from pre-dawn times. Needless to say, this game will run almost flawless on your Windowses as it is a port of rather old game with nothing enhanced but perhaps sounds, but can't even vouch for that with certainty. But if you're a multiplayer maniac like I'm not, you may appreciate that Blizzard made a Battle.net Edition out of their WarCraft II saga.

The Bad
| Serious Joke |
The 8-bit graphic in this game was really amazing, but looked too perfect, thus creating the atmosphere of a cartoon and not of a battlefield. More like a blank paper with lots of neatly pictured trees, units, and structures. Proportion of pretty much everything is fully off-the-scale and looks ridiculous. Perhaps if only units would be visible on empty terrains, but this way, couple of orcs or humans would together be as large as some castle, not to mention that all units were larger than trees, and that normally meant that everyone with ranged weapon can neatly shot over the forest (not through, but over it, and score a perfect hit). The balance of units was completely ridiculous making both sides fully equal on every corner. Each unit from one side would correspond to the unit of another, thus Orc Grunts could be upgraded just as Human Knights, Troll Axethrowers could throw axes as far as Elven Archers could fire arrows, Orc Catapults could fire as far as Human Ballistas, reconnaissance flying units, ships, it's all too equal (Command & Conquer had that made much better making Nod and GDI only too different in firepower balance and thus you were forced to come up with alternate strategies and knew you might have a chance of winning even if you don't have clearly more units). Westwood corrected that from their Dune II which was the first to come, but Blizzard obviously didn't learn anything from their first RTS game, WarCraft I, and just repeated the same mistake with enhanced graphic (or whatever you can call it, enhanced unto crap). The story is presented in a pretty lame way thus only interacting with you through the mission briefings, sometimes giving you certain hero units at your disposal where you don't have to go base against base (that was later enhanced in add-on so that you have more hero units and control them more often, which was pretty much the only upgrade to WarCraft II worthwhile). Cinematic, although very old, were quite amazing, I won't dispute that. However, there's so little of them (a typical Blizzard's method), so that aside from opening cinematic all others are like 10 seconds in length with a little longer ending ones, perhaps up to 30 seconds or a minute. But hey, they managed to squeeze all that on a single CD-ROM so I guess they achieved some money saving for themselves. Blizzard has yet to learn on their real-time strategy field, but hand on the heart, they definitely rule in action role-playing games and their storytelling and variety of pretty much anything in there is amazing. The only decent WarCraft they probably made is the one they haven't released due to seemingly looking old as they stated. Bah, oldness doesn't mean much if the game is great. WarCraft I still beats all its successors.

The Bottom Line
| A Deal of a Notime |
You get a fine deal of two games in one package and above all that, it's for Windows platform. If you missed it back in 1995 while it was (I dunno why, but) popular, this is your chance of meeting the world of warcraft that undoubtedly meant a lot to lots of players out there. But if you're expecting some serious game out of it, don't be too shocked when you run it. As much as it tends towards something good, it's not that worthwhile, and battles last far too long, of course, not as long as those in StarCraft, Blizzard just doesn't want to make anything simple and enjoying. Anyway, if you're more into gameplay than into anything else, this might be a good one to try, with a few bugs in the graphic every now and then, but not too much to bother you. Until Blizzard starts getting more serious, like it was with Diablo franchise, it will always seem like a Disney to me, a bunch of cartoony characters with hectic personalities and no story to lead anyone ahead. This game is a fun to try, for the sake of nostalgy to see how feeble-minded once players were, but other than that, it's a no-no.