Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness

"A game that has been the founder of an entire genre....."

Good day, my name is Gyarados Scotty and this is my review of the classic Real-Time Strategy game, WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness. This second game of the WarCraft saga plays a sequel to the original WarCraft, the founding father of the real-time strategy genre. I first saw this game in 1998 and despite its oldness, I was quite entertained by it and played almost all of the time for months. Now I will discuss this classic Blizzard masterpiece!

-What the Game is Basically About-
Okay, I'm going to try to make this as understandable as possible. First of all, there are two kinds of characters, or shall I say units. They are, in less confusing terms, workers and warriors. As their names suggest, workers work, warriors fight. The objective of the game is to use your workers to gather various resources, which are used to build buildings and the buildings are used to produce various warriors. The purpose of the warriors are to attack, and hopefully destroy the enemies base, before they can use theirs to destroy yours. I am quite aware that it seems confusing, but two or three hours at it and you will understand. But you probably won't do very well. =P

-Visually Related Aspect-
The looks of this game are spectacular, simply spectacular. The maps have hundreds of different types of land pieces, each one slightly different in looks than the others. You'll be impressed. The game sprites for the units and buildings are all original and designed perfectly. The frames run smoothly and are blended nicely for an excellent look. Even the death sequences look nice, but they can be slightly gory.

-Audio Related Aspect-
Wow! This game has hundreds of different sound effects, all excellent. The units all have at least 5 responses for when they are clicked on and two or three when they are annoyed, which are quite funny, by the way. The music is high above average, yet not quite at par with the sound effects. They are quite complexly composed and have excellent beat. From the death scream of an ogre, to the annoyed whine of the peasant.

-Gameplay and Control-
Holy crap, this is good! The campaign levels are plentiful and increasingly fun. You have outstanding control over everything you control, at all times, making the control nearly perfect. That is a lot of control, don't you think?

-Challenge and Difficulty-
The campaign levels are fun, but increasingly difficult. After a few times of trying, you will be able to beat them. If you ever try Battle.net, the competition will overwhelm you. If you ever face someone good, you are in for a scare about how bad you are. I know I have experienced it.

-Replayability and Length-
I still play it. I still have fun. You will also. The length of this game is probably infinite since after you experience the multiplayer aspect, you will be addicted. The campaign levels however, will only take about ten hours to beat, but you can still to them over quite a few times and still have fun.

-Good Points-
- Graphics and the Sound
- Multiplayer capabilities

-Bad Points-
- Short Campaign
- Only two races

In conclusion, I encourage you to at least try this excellent game. Every aspect of it is almost perfect, therefore I feel it well-deserves a full ten out of ten. Hopefully, you will give this game a try, if you haven't already.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 10/03/00, Updated 10/03/00