Introduction
Warcraft 3: Reign Of Chaos is a high fantasy real-time strategy computer videogame developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment released in July, 2002. This game takes place after the events of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, and Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness, the game was set in the Warcraft fictional universe and it's the first 3D game of the series.
The principal plot about this title is all about The Burning Legion trying to conquer the fictional world of Azeroth with the help of the undead army led by the fallen Paladin Arthas Menethil, but the Humans Alliance, Night Elves and Orcs Hordes combined Efforts in order to stop them from corrupting the World Tree.
Gameplay
Overall: The game starts in a map where the size and the terrain varies, going from rivers to mountains. Initially the mini map displayed on the bottom left corner will be dark but as we go through it the map will be revealed and now we will can see that area just clicking it in the mini map, however if we aren't close to the area we won't be able to see which enemy units or creeps will be there.
There are three main resources of this game: Lumber, food and gold and for each game we will be start with a certain amount of them in order to slowly progress.
The lumber can be obtained with the basic worker commanding him to cut trees, we can set an unlimited amount of workers, however the trees will fall after a certain amount of work and time (pretty realistic uh).
The gold can be obtained through gold mines, we need to build the main building of the race close to the mine and select up to 5 basic workers in order to gather gold from the mine and take it to the main building previously mentioned.
For the food it's a bit different because we increase the number of food training units, but in order to increase that limit of units we can have we need to build a special building for that.
Now, the gold and lumber can be used to create more building, upgrades that we need in order to be more powerful, summon units and heroes, basically is all you need for everything, but the main use of the food as I mentioned before is limiting the number of units we can have, reaching up to 120 food limit and every unit can cost between 1-5 (the heroes cost more).
The buildings are the base of all this game because every building has its own function that will allow us to advance, although they are different depending on the race we choose, for example:
Human Alliance buildings
Night Elves buildings
Orcs Horde buildings
Undead Army buildings
As I say before every building has its own function, these are all of them:
Main building: The most important building of all, and it's used to train basic workers and gather reaourc. There are 2 tier upgrades for this building.
Production: Primarily used to train units in order to attack the enemies or defend the base. There are different buildings with different tier for make different types of units based on our strategy.
Altar: Used for summon heroes in order to help us to conquer the battle.
Food supply: The special building that I mentioned before, it help us to increase the limit or the units we can have.
Tower: The towers are commonly for defend the base of the enemies, there are 2 tier upgrades for it and different types of towers for every race.
Goldmine: Around the map we can found goldmine that can we use for gather gold.
Shop: Used for buying items.
Upgrades: Used for upgrading weaponry, gunpowder and armor.
Lumber return: An optional place to drop the lumber and contains upgrade to make our building more durable and resistant (Humans)
In the bottom part of the map the game displays an interface that show us the mini map, the information of the unit we selected and the actions we can do with this unit. For selecting a unit we left click it and depending of the unit we can make him to attack, build, gather resources, do special skills, learn/upgrade skills (heroes), etc. For the normal actions we just right click the place we want to go or the thing we want to do/attack, and for building some units have special "skills" showed in the squares on the right bottom corner of the screen, just press them and we should be able to build. In the up part of the screen we will have a small bar with the in-game options and the amount of resources we have.
While we are searching on the map we will encounter will numerous hostile creeps that will attack us, killing those creeps will give us items and xp for our hero. Other things that we can found in the map are special shops for more items, a building that will allow us to summon mercenaries to help us and if we are lucky, the enemy's base.
Heroes are special units that stand out of the rest. Those heroes are able to equip items in order to be more powerful and gain xp when killing an enemy unit for leveling up and unlocking spells. The heroes have a maximum level of 10 and every time the hero level up it gains a skill point used for unlocking-upgrading spells. At level 6 the hero can learn an ultimate skill. The heroes can use shops and carry items.
The game ends when you destroy the enemy's base or they destroy your base, so be careful about your decisions and be strategic in order to get the victory!
Campaigns: The game is divided into four different campaigns with chapters that we will be unlocking after completing the previous chapters, every campaign is different depending of the race that we are playing but the structure is similar in every one. The game starts introducing us everything we need to know about that race we are playing like the units and heroes and after some levels the building system will be available and while we are fighting agains enemy forces we will need to create more building in order to defeat the enemies. Every campaign have one or two heroes that we will control and level up while the story goes on.
Human Alliance heroes
Night Elves heroes
Orcs Horde heroes
Undead Army heroes
There are 2 types of quests: Main Quests and Optional Quests. Main Quest are those that we will need to complete in order to advance through the game and these will be unlocked progressing in the map. Unlikely the main quests, the optional quests can be unlocked while we are discovering new areas and these can help us with the main objectives giving us items, books in order to level up our character or his stats, etc.
Single player: Whenever we feel bored about the story or want to take a break we can at anytime go and play a custom battle... Yes, that's right, a custom battle where we can choose to be one of the 4 races and battle against up to 12 more players depending of the map. We can adjust the difficulty of the cpu, we can choose between a large amount of maps or even choose the color we want to have.
When it comes to the multiplayer the things change completely because we can not only play against other players in the classic battle mode, there are a ton, A TON of minigames created by the community that makes this game a lot more fun to enjoy not only alone, but with friends and a random internet dude.
Graphics
The 3D works so well on this game, I mean, every character model for me is really well done, you feel that you are playing in a totally different way every time you try a different race not only for the differences between the gameplay of each one, but the graphics deserves a really good recognition for making that feeling more stronger; Canyons, Mountains, Cliffs, Waterfalls, Forests, etc. Can be found in different maps that the game haves and is so cool to know that we have a large amount of options allowing us to selecting which ambient we want while we are having fun playing the game. The game have a Day/Night system and not only that, the gameplay is affected by the time of the map and it's just crazy the way that they think of those details. Sometimes while we are playing the story there will be short cinematics that yes, they aren't a super thing but still are really good and depending of the moment it can add a good factor of suspense and emotion to the player.
The models for every hero, unit, map, buildings and so on for me it's just a 10/10, such an awesome atmosphere.
Soundtracks/Sounds
When it comes to a battle in videogames is undeniable that one of the most important things are what we can hear and well, Warcraft 3 did a really good work on that. One of the things that I really like of this game are that when you click on an unit not only you can see how its face look, you can even listen to random quotes that they will say, every one with different voices and I really had fun listening all of them. In story mode there will be cutscenes and it's just phenomenal how the voice for every character fits well (I really don't know about the other languages, but in the Spanish version I really like the voices).
Popularity
Talking about sales Warcraft 3 did it really well selling around 1 million units in just the first month after the release, and that gave them the title of the fastest selling pc game video game in history by that time and even it was the third best selling computer game in 2002.
The critics of this game were just crazy as good as his rating, even today the people seems to still like the game after 18 years, it never gets old.
League of Legends, Dota, Plants vs Zombies, Tower defense games, it's just incredible how Warcraft 3 served as inspiration for so many games.
Even today there is a player base in this game and after the announcement of Warcraft 3: Reforged the people just remembered how good was this game and wanted to play the game once again like to bring back those memories of when they was kids.
Personal experience
When I was a kid whenever I had the opportunity I went to a cyber only to play 3 games: Counter Strike, Gta and of course, Warcraft 3. I have so many memories with this game, not only when I was a kid, but when the years passed I still was having fun playing the different minigames that the community created, making me being in front of the screen for hours. Trying to complete this game with side quest and exploring the whole map was a pain, seriously, it takes hours and hours to do it in the four campaigns, but at the time I was discovering new things and having fun, I was stressed but still having fun lol. I enjoyed the history, the final battle was just mind-blowing and like the late game battles really hard, had me thinking about what to do in order to finally complete the game.
Conclusion
Just play it, seriously, GO AND PLAY IT RIGHT NOW I BEG YOU. I'm joking.... Years and years and still one of the best game for most of the people including me.
10/10
Thanks~.
