The juggernaut that is World of Warcraft had to start somewhere, and while Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness wasn't that start, it is the first of the Warcraft titles to make the 1001 list.
A real-time strategy title in the vein of Command & Conquer but swapping out humans for humans and orcs, tiberium for gold and wood, and full motion video cutscenes with in-game one-liners that do eventually get a bit old but at least lend to the almost cartoony charm on display.
It may sound like a reskin of a more familiar game, but saying that doesn't really give it a chance to show itself off, so I'm going to dive right into another game I've never played, absolutely blind as usual.
Wish me luck.
Fun Times
Warcraft II doesn't bother with a tutorial, but it does ease you in very gently to the two campaign modes, one for the humans and their Alliance, and another for the Orcs and their Horde. I got started with the humans and was tasked with setting up an outpost to deal with the potential threat of invasion.
As far as plots go, that's nothing major, certainly not to open a story with, but I found it rather thematic, both in terms of teaching me the ropes and simply getting the point across that before war, there is everyday life. Before training troops in an outpost, there is setting up a few farms to feed them.
Your units comprise of peasant busy-bodies who you'll commission to build things for you (though 'commission' is the wrong word - you're really just bossing them around), and fighters to defend those peasants from the enemy and engage in whatever forward-thinking offensive strategies you might have. For now, though, that's not my goal. I just need four farms and a set of barracks.
Setting up a farm is a simple task, achieved by clicking on a peasant, telling him to build a farm and then telling him where to build it. Setting up four of them with limited funds and resources teaches you that peasants are good for a few more things too.
The two main resources in Warcraft II are gold and wood, and both need to be mined and harvested by peasants, who will take varying amounts of time to get their job done and then return to your town hall to deliver the goods. Again, it's a simple task - click on a peasant and tell him where to go and what to do - but now you're down a peasant who is stuck on autopilot until you tell him to do something else. The Alliance cannot run on the back of one peasant, and so you'll be juggling your resources to train more peasants, putting them each to different tasks, switching them as necessary... all while your troops watch, motionless.
Outpost built, the mission was complete and the second allows us to explore the more attack-oriented aspects of the game. Find and rescue captured elves, returning them back to our base alive and kicking.
The map is different - they all are; it's not like we're in a massive open world here - but the story progresses on. It's largely there for training purposes at this point, but still, flimsy story is better than none. Probably.
Anyway, we got our first taste of blood by, again, simple means. Select units, point at what you want them to destroy then wait for the numbers to be crunched and the animations to be played out until one of you is left standing. Hopefully you. There's strength in numbers here, so gang up on your targets like a pride of lions singling out an ageing wildebeest.
Frustrations
It was at this point that Warcraft II started to show its age a little. You can't select too many units at once, so my forces were moved in squads. I could have streamlined the process, or left behind troops that I no longer needed, but that little hindrance cast the tiniest bit of doubt in my mind that this game might not last too long for me.
And yet I kept playing.
Further Fun Times
I kept playing. On and on and on. I was building oil platforms in the middle of the seas to gather the third resource of the game, but I was so invested that I just kept playing.
I got annoyed at not being able to build things because of a lack of peasants, and then because of a lack of food (though I never saw a tracker for the hunger levels of my units, you just seem to need farms to justify having a ton of other buildings, I suppose), and the game, in general, felt a little slow overall, but I kept playing it.
The Orcs dared to sail into my territory, so I developed a mighty navy and blew everything up before my oil tankers slowly built the four oil platforms I needed to complete the mission objective. Singular objective, you'll note. Only had to build some oil platforms, but came out with a navy ready to stomp Orcs into submission.
Maybe that's why I stuck around for another lengthy mission after that, where I was tasked with obliterating an entire Orc base from the map, but would need to develop transport ships, load them with troops, sail them safely across the channel into enemy waters before beaching them, chucking the soldiers out and smashing through the enemy heartlands.
That. Sounds. Awesome.
It meant slowly building up resources, slowly training peasants, slowing unlocking the required buildings, and even building some that I ended up not using at all, but the option was there so I tried it out.
Eventually, after the scouting had been done, the map revealed and the troops ready, I sailed...
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| Is this the main Orc camp? |
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| This looks like the main Orc camp... |
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| That was the main Orc camp... |
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| Excellent - not ranked as a Peasant for once |
Alright, the first landing party wasn't big enough to get the job done, but the second definitely was, and I had a great time clicking, pointing and clicking again, then waiting for fires to get bigger before exploding and flashing up the victory window. Huzzah.
Final Word
I had gotten through Act 1 of however many there are without wanting to quit, which either means I quite like where this game is going or Act 1 is considerably shorter than the Act 1 found in other games.
Joking aside, I had to tear myself away from Warcraft II, not because it's the greatest RTS ever - it's not - but because I found it so addicting. I keep mentioning that it is slow because you are playing the waiting game until it's your moment to strike. You're waiting for troops to be trained, which means waiting for gold to be mined, which can go quicker if you spend some gold to get more peasants, but that'll mean more farms are needed which will mean it'll take longer to get those troops trained...
So long as there are the necessary resources, your barracks can be training troops, your shipyard building ships, your peasants building the next waste of resources that sound fancy but who knows what they even do yet... Everything can be going on at once but you're still waiting for it. Everything goes on at once because you can see your peasants going out to get those resources, chopping away at the trees and then walking the wood back home, and so there's always something going on to keep your attention.
It didn't really come up in the first few missions I played, but those resources are limited, especially wood, and forests can serve as defensive measures from your enemy, as they can't be moved into. Being sure where you send your peasants can mean keeping your base protected for longer, but send those peasants out too far from a town hall or a specialised building that accepts a given resource and then you're back to waiting for those peasants to walk all the way to work, spend a while working, then walk all the way home to deliver the goods.
Warcraft II can be a micro-management affair then, but with its bright colours and voiced characters, it stands out from other RTS games that require that level of detail to be put into your affairs. While you might want your peasants to sound a little cheerier at the very least, those audio cues will serve you well when you're off doing something in another part of the map.
I've yet to get far enough into the game to unlock the likes of spellcasters and hero characters but when that time comes, I'm sure I'll be as engrossed as I already am - and that they'll be as slow to train as everything else...
It is definitely worth playing, and the differences between the two forces' units are largely cosmetic, so it's well balanced for multiplayer games too. I look forward to seeing where the story goes, and how the Orc campaign differs as well.
I might not have said that for an RTS title since I was a kid playing C&C... How time flies.
Fun Facts
The title was such a success and easy enough to make content for that hundreds of extra levels have been created and released in various expansions, all without Blizzard Entertainment even having to make them themselves, merely giving the go-ahead to other developers to do so.
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, developed by Blizzard Entertainment, first released in 1995.
Version played: MS-DOS, 1995, via emulation.