Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition

The Short


Pros
- One of the first Real Time Strategy games, and paved the way for an entire genre
- Host of missions, maps, and units
- Two playable races with (some) unique abilities
- 3D movies to play between scenarios
- Full voice acting, including all the units
- Fight on water, air, and land
- Cartoonish, pixelated graphics still look good to this day
- Fantastic music, both the DOS version and the revamped Battle.net edition
- Solidified what would later become one of the most popular game universes ever

Cons
- Race differences are mostly cosmetic, with a few slight changes in spells and abilities but not much else
- Could only select a limited number of units at a time. On the DOS version you couldn't assign hotkey groups
- Siege units friendly fired more often than not
- Some later levels had balance issues
- Expansion opened up a lot of mythology but its overarching story was dull
- That aforementioned voice acting is so bad it's actually sort of good

Before Starcraft, there was Warcraft.

The Long

[Note: this is a review of Warcraft II: Battle.net edition, the re-vamped rerelease that has the expansion Beyond the Dark Portal and enhanced music and online play. I have played both this and the old DOS versions, though, but consider the differences so negligible it doesn't merit twin reviews]

Warcraft II has another (vaguely) interesting story behind it. I was actually given this game as a birthday gift from a friend when I was eleven, and my parents wouldn't even let me open the box. They deemed it "too violent" and made me give it back, and I ended up getting Age of Empires and I think Heroes of Might and Magic II instead. Anyway, in order to play this game as a child I had to sneak over to my friend's house and play it on his computer, which I did quite a bit. So even now, as an adult, I get a sort of weird, guilty feeling when I play it on my own computer, like I'm doing something wrong.

So I booted it up again for this review, the last time I had played it around 2007, and you know what? This game holds up pretty good. It still has a lot of flaws, but unlike some other games of this era, Warcraft II has withstood the test of time and can still provide a fun, if at time frustrating, RTS experience.

On with the review! And keep in mind that, like with all my retro reviews, I'm reviewing the game as I experience it now, not as I experienced it then, but still with a hearty amount of rose-tinted glasses going on.

Building a mighty orc/troll/ogre army

Warcraft II set a framework that will be very familiar to anyone who has played RTS games in recent years. You start with a main hall and a batch of peons or peasants, which you send off to harvest wood or mine gold. You then uses these resources to build more buildings, which in turn build military units and unlock further structures. You have to manage your workers, your military, and your buildings in order to murder everybody else off the face of the earth.

Something worth noting about the single player is the mission variety: there is a lot of different types of missions. Whether it's rescuing captured units and taking them back safe, racing to harvest a set number of resources, raiding a camp and claiming it as your own, or delivering a captain to a certain location; Warcraft II kept the variety up. Which is worth noting, as some games that are released now don't do as good a job with mission variety as Warcraft II did. But it also did well at keeping these different objections tied into the core gameplay: You'll still be building a base and micromanaging units. Good stuff.

The story is presented by read-text between missions (for the orcs, that voice that reads it is the best voice ever and can make anything you read hilarious if you use it) and a few cutscenes. There is no story stuff presented in missions, at least not dialogue or text. You can play as either humans or orcs, and whichever you choose changes both the missions you play as well as the ending outcome dramatically. I suppose the "canon" ending is the humans winning, but the orc ending was way better anyway.

To battle!

The graphics and voice acting are top notch, and you can see from the screenshots that even though this is obviously an old game, the vivid art design sticks out. I still think this game looks really good, with the pixelated units and animations awesome, and the buildings still having a great deal of detail. The environments also look pretty good, too. The voice acting, while goofy for the story bits, is also charming for the units. Each unit has their own voice (standard now, not so much then) and it started the whole Blizzard "click on a unit a lot of times and they say funny things" fad.

The music is amazing. I think most games around the early era of RTS (Age of Empires, Age of Empires II, Starcraft, C&C: Red Alert, C&C: Tiberian Sun) had some really killer soundtracks. That's sort of gone away since then, with it just being generic background noise, which is too bad. One of my biggest disappointments with booting up Warcraft III was the fact that the totally kicking Human theme wasn't there anymore. It was so good. 

Seriously, this song was a big part of my childhood. So good. Also, it's the re-vamped version; the original was the same but more "midi" sounding

The game did have its flaws though, ones that are only more noticeable now that the genre has evolved (though not by much, which shows you a lot about how much Warcraft II pioneered). You could only select nine units at a time, and since you'd often use more than that it could be a major pain. In the original DOS version you couldn't even assign them a number hotkey, which was extremely obnoxious, but they fixed that in the Battle.net edition. Pathfinding for units (how they determined to go where you ordered) was pretty dang awful, with them frequently getting stuck on stuff. There was no unit building queue (that was invented in Starcraft) so you could only have one unit being built at a time, or one tech researched at a time. Any units that did splash damage also did friendly fire, meaning if you built a squad of dragons they'd love to blow each other up. 

The two races weren't particularly unique, either, especially on a basic level. Up until you get to Paladins/Ogre Magi, you are essentially fighting with the exact same units. Sure, the trolls and elves have a different "unique" upgrade, but it isn't nearly enough to make a difference. Aside from Paladins and Ogre Magi having healing vs bloodlust (protip: bloodlust is WAY better) and the Magi and Death Knights having maybe two different spells from each other (blizzard and death and decay are the exact same spell), there wasn't any real differentiation between the two groups besides aesthetics. I understand this maybe helped with balancing, but it still is a bit lame. Again, this was the norm at the time (and was also completely changed when Command and Conquer and Starcraft rolled around) but is still annoying.

Things could get bloody. Which is why my mom didn't let me keep the game. 

Despite a few issues (the nine unit control limit being the biggest issue in this day and age), this game still holds up really well. Taking the battle to both land, air, and sea (and introducing the third resource oil, only to have the whole third resource thing totally axed from all future Blizzard RTS titles) provided different, unique fronts to wage war (they took water out of Warcraft III! What the heck?). The game is still both a lot of fun and quite difficult, with creating the ideal army and then micromanaging the hell out of them both strenuous and exciting. To this day, I'd say it's worth playing.

The Battle.net edition of the game is exactly the same except it has slightly up-rezed graphics, an improved musical score (less DOS sounding, more Windows sounding), works on Windows 95 and future machines, and had online matchmaking through Battle.net. That being said, nobody is playing this game competitively anymore, but if you have some friends on a LAN you could get them all together for some awesome, ogre vs knight stomping fun. 

One of the best openings of any game. That VO is so...bad. But the music kicks butt!

I was actually worried going into this, because I was afraid Warcraft II would suck after all these years (and the dramatic shift the universe has taken with World of Warcraft) and I'd have to give it a bad score. But I was pleasantly surprised: Warcraft II is still an extremely solid and very fun RTS. Even without online competitive multiplayer (which is the biggest draw for this genre these days), the massive single player with its fun missions more than makes up for it. Whether you've played this game years ago or never delved into the world of Azeroth, Warcraft II is worth picking up and giving a spin.

You'll probably have to shell out $15-$20 for the Battle.net Edition, which is certainly worth it. I don't think you can buy it off Blizzard's store anymore, which sucks. But it's certainly worth the purchase (and it makes me glad my disc copy still works). 

Overall? Four out of five stars. Even after all these years, Warcraft II is still a fantastic game.