WarCraft: Orcs & Humans

Description of WarCraft: Orcs & Humans

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans marked the beginning of Blizzard Entertainment’s now legendary gaming franchise. After Westwood’s Dune II, avid strategy gamers were waiting for a new game. Warcraft filled that spot immediately. The first Warcraft was well received with its great ambiance, sounds and interface, impressive cut scenes (a Blizzard characteristic) and a 2 player mode (through a modem or null-modem). Released at a similar time to Westwood’s Command & Conquer, the two franchises would spend much of the late 1990’s competing. For those preferring fantasy settings over a modern military setting, Warcraft was obviously the preferred choice. Set in the kingdom of Azeroth, the single player game revolves around commanding either a force of orcs or humans through a multi-mission campaign to rule the kingdom. The game features familiar real-time-strategy-game elements, including base building, and resource harvesting in order to build a force large enough to conquer the enemy and claim victory. However, all this must be carefully balanced with base defence as the enemy attacks are relentless, especially in later missions of the campaign. To add variety, there are also occasional missions where a limited number of troops are used to conquer an objective or rescue a character. At times these can be slightly frustrating, but they are thankfully few and far between. On the downside, the single player mode is quite short, with each campaign only having 12 missions. The graphics are missing some colours, army management is a bit simple compared to Dune II and the control method is slightly cumbersome. Blizzard would address most of these issues in the sequel, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness but despite the minor downsides the original game is still a must-play though for all the Warcraft fans!

Review By Richard

External links

• Mod DB

• WSGF