Warcraft II: Gold Edition

THE BAD:
----

SUMMARY:
This is the classic. The classic game in which you can be the Horde- a disgusting race of creatures that have conquered everything in their realm, and the Humans- the 18th century humans. Humans have Castles, Knights, Footman, Wizards, Elven archers, and the lowly peasant. Use peasants to build you farms to sustain your army, build castles, watch towers, and buildings that upgrade your units. The invading Horde consists of Orcs, Ogres, Trolls, Death Knights (Equivalent to Wizards), Spires (Equivalent to a Human Castle), and the Hordes working class, Peons. They build pig farms, places to upgrade your units, and everything else. The Hordes mighiest wizards, headed by Gul'dan, opened a rift in space to the Humans world. You progress through levels completing some objective that cripples the enemy like destroying key oil rigs, outposts, and eventually the enemies main base and if you are the Humans, the rift to destroy. Overall, very fun game, especially with the fact on almost any level you can create a real horde of hundreds of troops (there is a limit, though). Also there is a map editor that is fun to play around with.

THE BAD:
Extremily dated now, sevearly limited compared to Warcraft III.

SUMMARY:
Starting the review off then - this game is the definative stratergy game. There's no question, but after all of these years, why?

Its simple, Warcraft II is pure stratagy gaming - resoucrce and base building, then creating an army and beating up the enemy, all wrapped up in a great storyline. And its the storyline I'll go into:

Ten years before (in the setting of Warcraft I), the orcish hoard overran the small Kingdom of Azeroth. Now, they seek to axpand their empire overseas. And the humans living there have to hurry to meet them, and to drive the hoard not only out of their lands, but of Azeroth and their entire planet. The war is on.

As you might've expected, the sides in warcraft comprise of the Orcs and the Humans, whilst their buildings and units are differently named and look different form each other, the two sides are virtually identicle, the only changes coming with the spells of the different sides, and the abilities of one fo their elite troops.

There's a large and varied campaign for each - either conquering the land as the orcs, or striking back as the humans.

As I said before, its pure stratagy so the game is reletivly straightforward - use your peasants/peons to harvest Gold and Wood and create a city, and in turn, a large army, spanning land, sea and air. With this force, you must attack the other enemies base and wipe them out - unless they get to you first.

It comes with an amazingly simple map editor - allowing you to create powerful scenarios with little to no fuss whatsoever, its amazing what you can do with such a simple tool, and its great fun.

The game is dated, it has to be said, but really, when you add up all of the points above - storyline, gameplay and fantastic extras, it really doesn't matter at all. Warcraft II is one of the most groundbreaking titles ever, and is a must for fans of the stratergy genre.

THE BAD:
cartoonish graphics and basically the same as warcraft

SUMMARY:
get the game if you never played warcraft in your life

THE BAD:
outdated graphics and sound, 2D sprites

SUMMARY:
A classic but it needs to be put out to pasture