Warcraft: Orcs & Humans

"The battle between orcs and humans begins..."

With this game Blizzard created, together with Westwood (in fact I should say Westwood together with Blizzard, because Westwood was the creator of the genre with Dune II), anyway, they both settled the pillars of the real time strategy genre, and then they became the absolute gods of it. But while Dune II and later Command & Conquer were flawless and magnificent strategy games, this first WarCraft had one big flaw that kept it from being a match for those two.

The main goal in this and in any other real time strategy game is to build structures that will let you train and maintain military units to annihilate your enemy. But unlike Dune II for example, where you only had to gather ore, in WarCraft we will need food, gold, and wood, making everything a little bit more difficult but at the same time more varied and nice, because it is a pleasure to see your peasants mining gold or returning with wood.

As this was one of the first strategy games ever, the gameplay, while not bad, it is a little annoying sometimes, for example we can’t make a group of more than four units (or maybe a little more I can’t remember very well, but they weren’t much), so if you have an army of more than fifty units, moving them around the map can be a real pain.
The differences between Orcs and Humans are basically non-existent, each single unit has its counterpart in the other band.

Unlike Dune II and Command & Conquer though, here some units have real special abilities, mages for example can summon elementals, then they have common offensive magic (thunders, fireballs), etc; then we can upgrade our units equipment, make them more powerful, more resistant etc.

But the big problem with WarCraft is that it is a very stupid game, in every stage you will be constantly besieged by enemies that will keep coming like morons again and again, one time and another, like brainless sheep's. It is a real pity because this stupid flaw is so annoying that ruins the whole playing experience, and were it not for that WarCraft has everything to be better those two Westwood games, it is a much more varied (there are more maps, better voices and graphics, nicer characters...) and attractive game. I don’t know, maybe you don’t care about that, but I couldn’t play properly because of that. If you play with friends this problem is history, and probably the most entertaining way to play this first WarCraft is with a friend.

With all this a great strategy game, and most important it started one of the best game series of all time.

”My lack of vocabulary and grammatical errors (if there’s any) are because I’m not from an English speaking country, sorry about that.”

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/15/03