WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

The Good
I remember playing the Command and Conquer demo and thinking what a bother it was. Shortly afterwards I tried the Warcraft 2 demo and was pleasantly surprised at how much different it was (in a good way.) The SVGA graphics were fantastic and very smooth. The interface was great, especially for its time. The buildings and units were instantly identifiable. However, it wasn't until I got a hold of the full version that everything came together into one incredible gaming experience.

I think my favorite part about the game was that it did not try to overcomplicate matters like later RTSs. There were relatively few units and buildings, but you knew just how they were supposed to be used. And is there really a need for balancing 15 different resources? The comic responces of annoyed units did not hurt matters either.

The Bad
The AI wasn't all that great. It was extremely common to see enemy peons/pesants making unescorted beelines to your fortified mines once their resources ran out. It was also very easy to lead the AI's units into ambushes. The computer was pretty good at doing humanly impossible things like having 10 wizards start shooting fireballs simultaneously though.

Some people might not like the cartoonish graphics, but I didn't mind at all.

The Bottom Line
The game that did for the RTS genre what Doom did for first-person shooters. If you consider yourself any kind of an RTS gamer, you have no excuse for not having this masterpiece in your collection.