WarCraft 2 Battle.net Edition

Review

After gaining a toehold in the human lands in Warcraft I, the Orcs are massing for an attack across the sea, against the mainland of Lordaeron. While the human’s rally to take back the land they’ve lost, the Orcs prepare to crush their ancestral enemy. You can command either the Orcs or humans in scenarios that advance the plot, in custom games against the computer or against up to seven other people on a network.

Warcraft II is a real-time strategy game in a fantasy setting. You first must build a town to provide support for your army, food for your peasants, and a place to develop technology (weapons). The real-time nature of the game makes it extremely addictive, as there’s really no good stopping point in a turn-based game – you really can’t stop until the game is over. The sound is integral to the game too. Aside from the stirring war music in the background, you really do need the feedback of the units – if you stop hearing your peasants chop wood, for instance, you know you’ll need to direct them to a new stand of trees. And if you keep selecting a unit, they give progressively funnier responses. We’re particularly fond of the goblin’s “Kaboom!”

Warcraft II is not your ordinary sequel – there have been so many additions and improvements that it almost feels like a different game. The original Warcraft’s art was a blocky suggestion of a unit, but the new version has depictions that are much more detailed – you can see the plate mail on the footmen, the peon’s axes, and the rows of crops planted on a farm. There’s also the odd critter milling about, which really doesn’t do much but get in your way – at least they make satisfying squeals when you slaughter them.

You’ll also notice new army types, and naval and air units, too. As humans, you get paladins who can exorcise the living dead, and your mages can now turn Orcs into sheep – hmm, maybe that’s where all the critters came from. Oil is a new resource to be managed – it fuels battleships, destroyers, transports, and submarines. Air units include bizarre flying contraptions devised by gnomish inventors and gryphon riders.

On the flip side, Orcs control Ogre-mages who can incite bloodlust in your troops, and Dark Knights who sap the life-force (health points) out of opponents. On the sea, Orcs command juggernauts and sea turtles, and in the air… oooh, dragons! And of course, all these troops have their own support buildings. At first, the sheer number of different troops to command (and counter) seems overwhelming. But as you play through the scenarios, you learn which strategies are effective against each unit.

Blizzard didn’t just add a bunch of new units into the game – gameplay has improved, too. You no longer have to make roads for your buildings. Your units can patrol their vicinity in a loop, which means you can spread yourself a little thinner. The behavior of moving a unit from point A to point B is changed; a unit will actually try to go in a straight line, rather than hug the edge of the nearest building. This means that in going long distances, your units may get stuck, but in the short run, they get there faster. You can now give “auto-commands” to your armies by command-clicking them. This will make peasants mine, footmen attack, or just move pieces to the unoccupied territory.

This means that the command-clicking to move the mini-map in the original Warcraft no longer works, though you can set Warcraft II to accept that method. Unfortunately, this doesn’t extend to the map. In the new version, just touching the sides of the map will scroll it (instead of click and hold). For the most part, this is the desired behavior. However, when casting spells in a battle situation (i.e. very quickly), the map will sometimes scroll at the most inopportune time.

But this is just picking nits. We loved Warcraft II so much we could have gone on for pages extolling its virtues. Simply put, Warcraft II belongs to every gamer’s Mac. – Kathy Tafel

Good news: Engaging game entertains for hours. A smart installer tells you just what you need. Special features such as speech recognition and 3D sound are only in the Mac version.

Bad news: You will be groggy from staying up until 4 a.m. Casting spells is hard with an autoscrolling map.

Rating:4/4

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the wasteland, along comes Beyond the Dark Portal. Set in the Orcish homeland, this expansion pack for Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness adds 24 new single-player scenarios and nearly 50 multi-player scenarios, all for a bargain-basement price.

Be prepared: The new solo scenarios are hard with a capital H-A-R-D. Even the most jaded orc or human will be challenged by the new levels, which thankfully dispense with the tutorial nature which made the early portion of Tides of Darkness somewhat tedious. In Beyond the Dark Portal, you start off with almost all of the technologies at your disposal, and you’d best be prepared to use them (strangely–and this is my only complaint about the expansion pack–you don’t get everything right away, and some vital units are inexplicably unavailable in the early scenarios).

Apart from a new environment to represent the Orcish world, nothing has been added to the game. But there are some minor changes that affect gameplay, and require some new strategies to ensure success. The most notable change is the newfound emphasis on heroes special units whose survival is necessary. Many of these heroes appear in the circle of power missions found in Tides of Darkness, but others just fight alongside your troops with superior strength and endurance. They can be an excellent aid, but their death means failure.

The new custom maps are a diverse lot. For the most part, there is less emphasis on resource gathering than in the multi-player maps included with Tides of Darkness. This change has the benefit of making games less of a race-for-the-resources duel, allowing players more breathing room and time to plan strategies, as well as lessening the effectiveness of a brute-force attack at the onset of a game. Also included are a couple of strange maps for quick games: one with a football theme and one with a chess theme.

Fans of Warcraft II are split along two fronts: there are the single-players and then there are the multi-players. But whichever side of the fence you lean toward, this is a must-have. More challenging and more diverse than its namesake, Beyond the Dark Portal proves once and for all that you can never have too much of a good thing. –Ron Dulin/SpotMedia Communications

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