Warcraft 3 is an excellent example of how to improve the real time strategy genre. It implements many new features, possesses a compelling storyline and has strong, captivating gameplay. I'll now detail the reasons I enjoyed Warcraft 3 and why I feel it's a worthy purchase for real time strategy gamers and those who are new and/or wanting to become acquainted with the genre.

At first glance Warcraft 3 may seem like every other RTS game out there. Build a base, defend it, make massive hordes of damage dealing units them wipe the enemy from the map. This is not the case with WC3. This game's units are far beyond such trivialities. Many of the units posess abilities which can drastically affect how you need to react when defending. Units with spells can turn the tide of a battle. The undead's necromancer can raise skeletal warriors from fallen allies and enemies. The Humans' sorceress can cast slow on an enemy and reduce its movement and attack speed. The Night Elves' druid of the talon can cast faerie fire to reduce armor of an enemy unit and make it visible. The Orcs' shaman can cast bloodlust to improve the attack speed and movement of friendly units. What's more, these are only a few of the spells available to the four units mentioned and there are more units than this which posess unique abilities. Nearly every unit in the game has some unique quality. You can learn to do a lot tactically with your units and there's a lot of room for growth as a player.

Above I've listed the four different races in the game. Each race's units has some similarities. They each have melee and ranged combat units, flying units and worker units. That is where the similarities end. Each race has very diverse strengths and weaknesses. The orcs for instance can make grunts as their standard melee unit. They cost more but are much harder to kill than a little footman from the humans. But, the humans will be able to mass produce footmen and may be able to take down a horde of grunts in numbers.

Each race has three hero units they can command. Each one can level up as they are invovled in battles. Gaining levels makes the hero unit stronger and allows them to purchase an ability or upgrade an existing one. Each hero unit has four abilities they can utlize in combat. Some are for healing, some are for attack. Others may endow a bonus to all units within the hero's party. Furthermore, heroes can wield magical items in battle which will improve their statistics. Strength will grant a hero extra hit points and improve the regeneration of those points, agility will improve the attack speed of a hero's weapon and intelligence will improve mana regeneration and total mana. Every hero also has a primary statistic which will increase the damage of their attacks.

Switching between units in the heat of a huge battle and using their special abilities used to be a pain. With Warcraft 3 many combat critical spells can be auto cast by your units. They'll use their mana to weaken powerful enemies. You can disable their ability to auto cast some spells if you don't want them to waste this mana. Also you can now tab between sub-groups of the same unit type to let you quickly choose what unit/spell you want to cast. This is great as if you pick a group of sorceresses to cast polymorph (turns an enemy into a sheep) they won't ALL cast it, only one will. This is a great innovation.

The maps in Warcraft 3 encompass many terrain types. They may involve fighting on grassland, snow, woodlands and others types. On each map you'll not only find nice places to build your base but you'll also find monsters known as 'creeps' in the WC3 world. These units are neutral but are mostly hostile to other units. The game's day-night transitions mean that at night time the creeps may be asleep and you can walk right past them without noticing. When killed, these units may drop the aforementioned treasures your heroes may wield.

The Warcraft 3 single player campaign is quite fun and will keep you challenged if you're experienced or novice. Hardcore RTS gamers may not be as challenged but the game offers a 'hard' mode for that type of player. The story is quite fun and features beautifully rendered 3d full motion videos to highlight key storyline events. The profile feature means multiple players can enjoy the game by going into their profile and replaying missions they've completed (sort of like autosave) and try them again, if they like, at a harder difficulty level.

The game may deter some players due to its system requirements but as I write this the system required to play the game is somewhat outdated. The graphics configuration ensures if you fall near the system requirements you can enjoy the game at a lower graphics level. I played at medium graphics and loved the way it looked.

I cannot possibly list all the reasons I enjoy Warcraft 3 but I've given it my best shot. You can click here to read some customer reviews at Amazon.com. Many players have given it two thumbs up reviews and I agree with that. I give Warcraft 3 a 9/10 because even though it came out around the time my computer was in its prime it still wasn't quite fast enough to play at full graphics. The game can crawl during huge battles if your system is equal to mine (Athlon XP 1800+, 256mb SDRAM, 64mb GeForce 2) but this was only noticable on the final mission in the game because it has such a stunning amount of units involved. Also, as always, blizzard has provided amazing multiplayer support via their battle.net service!

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