"WCII made RTS what it is today"

It’s hard to review a game like WarCraft II. The game that made the RTS genre what it is today, from what has become a dynamo in computer gaming, Blizzard, attracted a lot of attention, and still has a large fanbase.

WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness picks up where WarCraft left off, having assumed that the humans lost in the story of the first game. The story is nothing particularly special, told as a history in between battles, with pretty humdrum characters and a generic plotline. The scrolling text and simple FMV are utterly forgettable.

Of course, what you remember is not the story. The gameplay is pure and simple, with simple technology trees requiring little to no memorization (contrast this with Homeworld, Total Annihilation, or Starcraft) and a swift interface make this a pulse-poundingly quick game to play, with most of the emphasis on tactics, rather than rock-paper-scissors unit choice. Rather, the choice for each job is clear-cut, with costs for units generally being well-scaled to their effectiveness.

Playing the game against the computer, after the first tutorial stages, can require almost constant attention, both on defense and on consistently maintaining an offense, just to be able to wear down the opponents enough to do some serious damage. Expect to spend a couple hours on the later stages, wearing down the walls standing in your way.

The online play is quite nice, too, with fairly stable and reliable servers, access to a still-large pool of players, and the reasonably-civil battle.net community. (Well, civil for online gamers, anyway.) The game can reasonably be played on a 56K modem, online, as well, since it’s not too reliant on a low ping, like many later games.

The game IS aging, and it shows, in the graphics, which are nothing at all to write home about, and the FMVs, which look worse than the in-engine graphics of many modern games. However, this does have the flip side of making the game accessible to just about anyone with a Pentium or a PowerPC, and some people who don’t, while the engine itself still shines when compared to recent competition. Plus, this year’s games don’t generally sell for $10.

I would emphatically recommend WarCraft II to any real-time strategy fan. Plus, it’s worth a look for anyone who enjoys good computer games, especially for the price it’s going for now.

Final Rating: 10/10 - The quintessential RTS, with only minor, negligible flaws.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 11/25/01, Updated 11/25/01