WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

The Good
I like to refer to Warcraft as the rough draft of this game. It has nice playability, and it don't take no genius to play it. You can assault your enemies by land, sea and air with missile or melee weapons. It even comes with a map editor so you can build your own scenarios! Warcraft II is definitely the second best strategy game ever made (the first best being Starcraft).

The Bad
Nothing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this game.

The Bottom Line
If you've never heard of this game, you must be SSSSSSLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWW. PC gamer rated it the fourth best game ever. You can't lose with this game. By that of course, I mean you can't lose by BUYING it, not that you'll win every single scenario. (sorry to disappoint you on that one)

The Good
I'm not the first person to write a review for this game, other reviewers have pointed out the quality of the music, interface & graphics and I agree with them. Even today the cartoonish graphics are a joy to watch; notice the Christmas lights on Orc buildings during winter missions. Also, compare a Grunt from Warcraft II with a rifle infantry soldier from Red Alert (which appeared one year after Warcraft II) and you'll realize how well Warcraft's graphics have aged. Moreover the voices of the units (especially the Orcs) are great, Zog Zog & Swobuh!

Warcraft keeps things basic; there are only three types of resources and a limited number of units, but you'll really know their different strengths and weaknesses. No unit will ever become obsolete or replaced by another unit. Units do get upgraded. The units are balanced, there is no super unit with which you can easily win a mission. Footmen can easily destroy a Catapult, Catapults take out Guard Towers, Guard Towers are a great defense against Dragons and Dragons kill Footmen. So your army will need to consist of almost all available units in order to win. By the way some of the units have great magical spells like raise dead and the spell that turns an enemy soldier into a sheep or pig.

And oh yeah, the mission editor is easy to use (but why did it require Win 3.1 when the game ran in DOS).

The Bad

• Both sides are almost identical, so once you've completed the Orc campaign, the human campaign isn't that much fun to play (playing with the Orcs is more fun anyway).
• Units do not always respond to your commands and there are some pathfinding problems. Especially getting your naval units somewhere involves a lot of mouse-clicking.
• In the campaigns, your computer opponents always seems to start with a lot of gold and a well fortified base. In the final missions this enables the computer to send wave after wave of dragons / gryphons when your just getting started, frustrating.
• Mouse scrolling goes to fast.
• Bad A.I. An easy way to win the game is to wait until your computer opponent has mined all the gold from the mines near his base. It then keeps sending unprotected peony (easy kills) to mines near your base until it runs out of gold. Also your units perform a lot better on the battlefield when you control manually.

**The Bottom Line**
An RTS game from the dawn of the genre that's still fun the play despite the approximately 3.5 million RTS games released after it. Really addictive. Although I've often told myself "I've had it up to here with this game", I always enjoyed playing it when I came back to it after a couple of weeks.

The Good
What can i say that hasn't been said yet about this splendorous game? When i first saw the majestic demo i never expected what i was going to face, the RTS game i have spent most hours with. The story is grand, epic, very heroic and with a bit of tolkienesque modified feel. There are a lot of inclusions that make the game a great advance from Warcraft 1, new engine that made possible the battle by air and water, and a difficulty level more adjusted to common players not familiarized with that kind of games.

The Bad
As said by everyone, the AI sucked, you always knew the next step the enemy was going to take, your units sometimes are a bit dumb too, you could have a lone footman being attacked to death just at few steps from a bunch of soldiers of yours and they stay in their places as if nothing was happening until you order them to do so. Also the map editor was limited, you couldn't give the map any special victory conditions rather than defeating all the enemies on the map.

The Bottom Line
Great game to begin with real-time strategy genre. And a classic nowadays!