Warlords Battlecry III

"Big changes to a great series, do they hold up?"

Ohk, so a while ago an ad in PCGamer caught my eye. It was for a game called Warlords: Battlecry, a game would would have RPG aspects in a RTS game. I found it interested and picked it up. It blew me away. The RPG part of the game was clearly defined and made the game what it was. A few years later, WBC2 hit the shelves, and i enjoyed the Risk style "Conquer the world" type campaign and new additions.

Now I've finished enduring a 24 day wait for my copy of WBC3 after there was a production delay. The first change from WBC2 hit me almost suddenly. The barbarian class was removed. Shame seeing as how my favorite combo was the Minotaur barbarian.

There are more races now. 4 new ones, at the expense of humans. Knights and the Empire replace Humans, and Plaguelords, The Swarm and Ssrathi replace them. All the new races are pretty cool. Empire is the new well-rounded race. Knights have strong cavalry, Plaguelords rely on poisoning and plaguing, the Swarm.....swarms and Ssrathi are a lizard race. Also, all old races receive a new unit. Minotaurs get axe throwers, Dwarves get Khaziri guards, etc. Other units have been given a serious kick in the pants. The Minotaur King has been beefed considerably, doing 100 damage, at level 1, with no upgrades. A minotaur king I had at my retinue at level 1 killed a level 7 hero in two hits while taking little damage. Also, units can gain more levels and become fairly powerful. A high level unit is extremely tough to beat, and only high level heroes can take them without taking too much damage.

There are new classes, with the aforementioned barbarians removed. Chieftains, Daemonslayers and Dragonslayers, among others, are added. Daemon and Dragonslayers are self explanatory, they receive a skill to do extra damage against daemons or dragons. Chieftains are a barbarian centered class.

Another thing I've noticed is how much more different hero leveling is now. Your hero can now level mid battle, healing him completely, or afterwards. This can change things because you can get spells mid battle or increase your fighting, etc. However, there is less tweaking than before. Your only options in raising stats is dexterity, strength, intelligence or charisma. You can no longer raise magery, combat, speed, health or any of the others individually. It makes things easier, although it takes out what some of us like to do, tweak every single aspect of our character. Also, heroes are weaker. They can no longer become death on legs doing laps around a large map killing titans and generals in a few hits. Now they are as I like them, just a really really strong unit.

The campaign is a mix of WBC2's risk style conquest, and WBC1's story focused mode. Now you travel around some of Etheria and all of a new continent, Keshen, trying to find out what came through a portal and ripped an outpost of High Elves to shreds. You travel to different cities to buy mercenary armies to help, buy/sell items, do side-quests or advance the plot.

Speaking of items, there are a lot of new items here. New sets, new item effects an this leads to a plethora of new items. One such new effect raises the xp of a certain army type when produced. I found a pair of boots that gave +40xp to all griffons at production, enabling me to create a formidable force fairly quickly.

Another thing scattered around maps are neutral monster dens. Neutral buildings that randomly produce monsters. One will produce gnolls, a tough fighting ground unit with assassinate, another can produce different types of undead, etc. These make things very intense as you'll be harassed by units that can assassinate and whatnot. Once destroyed, the dens will produce a high level monster that will drop an item. Trust me, fighting a lvl 11 gnoll isn't fun. You'll want to create a swarm of monsters when you want to assault a den.

Graphics are fairly unchanged, which means it will run on most low-end systems fairly well. Sound is great, although the voices miss the quirkiness of Warcraft.

Re-playability here is fairly high. With 16 distinct army races, 16 distinct hero races and over 20 classes, there are quite a few combinations too keep random encounters interesting, and a few game modes to keep things fun. Assassination, Battle of the Titans, Pitched Battles, etc are all back from WBC2, with no new entries, sadly enough.

Overall, whether this sequel is an improvement is in the eye of the player, some aspects they may like, some they may hate, but in my eye, this game is worthy of the Battlecry name.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/26/04