In spite of these occasionally obvious inspirations though, the restrictions and specialties of each race are well supported by the game world mythology.

For the serious strategist, it offers a fine blend of complexity and efficiency.

For the novice, it offers friendly tutorials and a personalized learning curve.

For the high-end PC player, it offers a long and challenging campaign that makes decent use of its 3D environments with graphics and audio.

However, WarCraft III offers the most for fans of Blizzards earlier real-time strategy games.

Anyone who truly loved the original title, WarCraft II, or StarCraft is almost certain to feel the same way about WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos.

The fondly remembered WarCraft: Orcs Humans was Blizzards first self-published game and its first serious PC release.

While the original WarCraft was rich and engaging, it was not revolutionary.

In 1994, it was Westwood that led the way in real-time strategy gaming on the home computer.

Blizzards first effort only brought refinements to the fledgling genre.

For the most part, WarCraft did a lot of things that most other RTS games did, but it did them in its own confident, charismatic style.

Thats the one, subtle element Blizzard seemed to perfect in the original WarCraft: charm.

This hard-to-define element of personality carried through to WarCraft II, and then into the innovative StarCraft, which pit three equally powerful but very different factions against one another.

Like its mid-1990s predecessors, WarCraft III offers relatively straightforward gameplay that strays little from convention.

Yet also like those earlier titles, it does so with finesse thats hard to resist.

With both the presentation and the play itself polished to near perfection, any gamer who has battled through any real-time strategy game in the previous few years should soon feel right at home in the world of Lordaeron and Kalimdor.

Similar to the first two WarCraft games and unlike StarCraft in this regard, Reign of Chaos does more to refine than to revolutionize the RTS genre.

The addition of heroes and sub-quests is well done and adds to the single-player fun, but not in any truly innovative way.

As the basics of resource management and unit development remain central, familiar concerns of reconnaissance, defense, and calculated conquest move the player forward through most missions.

As in earlier Blizzard games, however, missions are strung together on a rich, engrossing storyline to make the player feel like an integral part of an epic legend with sweeping, universal consequences.

Though they seem to be well balanced in any combination of ally and enemy, the races are quite different and playing as all four of them through the single-player campaigns encourages a wide variety of techniques and warfare styles.

Once again, however, WarCraft III recombines aspects of earlier games at least as much as it introduces new concepts.

The orcs and humans look and act very much like their ancestors from earlier WarCraft games, though they are a little more distinct from one another here.

The night elves seem the freshest of the four, though their movable bases and invisibility powers pay homage to StarCrafts humans.

Warcraft 3 World Editor No-Cd Crack